NPR Opposes Free Speech

Of course, that's really not a news headline because it's not news.  Liberals in their many manifestations, including NPR have never really been for free speech, they've just not been as openly opposed.  

I take that back, they have been opposed for a while in academia.  In the rest of the culture the Left has finally found it's voice and reached a large enough mass willing to ban free speech that they have come out of the closet.  

View From the Porch

So, I'm driving to the range yesterday while listening to NPR, as one does, and The Diane Rehm Show is discussing the Garland, Texas incident. There's a guest or two fighting a valiant rear-guard action for the First Amendment, trying to explain to the hostess that it even protects people's right to be icky and Republican.
Then they opened the lines for callers and I very nearly drove into the ditch, yelling at the radio and gnawing on the steering wheel in impotent frustration:

"Welcome back, I'm Indira Lakshmanan, sitting in for Diane Rehm. We're talking about the Texas attack, ISIS, and the limits of free speech. I'm gonna read a post that we got here, an email from Jean, who says that if someone published cartoons of women, LGBTs, blacks, or a dozen other protected groups, wouldn't they be prosecuted as hate speech? And why does offense of anti-Islamic speech get a pass in the name of free speech?"

Jean you ignorant slut, do you know what they call it when people publish "cartoons of women, LGBTs, blacks, or a dozen other protected groups"? They call it the internet....
Seriously, yesterday's Diane Rehm Show was the scariest thing I've heard on the radio since I listened to Mystery Theater on a battery operated boom box sleeping out in a friend's treehouse when I was twelve. It used to be that if there was one thing you could at least count on liberals for, it was a vigorous defense of free speech; it's a cause that has found the ACLU in bed with the NRA on at least one occasion I can think of. This new turn is... chilling.

As I said above, dearheart, this is not a new turn. This is a deeply held belief but perhaps a new willingness to openly admit it. Jonah Goldberg has it absolutely right when he wrote Liberal Fascism. "It is my argument that American Liberalism is a totalitarian political religion." Under Barack Obama it has found the courage of its convictions.

Can books burning be far behind?