Americans like to comfort themselves with the thought that serious censorship “can’t happen here”. Many Americans are willing to accept incremental threats to free speech - obscenity, profanity, campaign finance restrictions - on the assumption that there will be some bright line protecting the “important” parts of speech and that, no matter how offensive, we’ll all want to protect them.

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Think free speech can’t come under serious assault in the USA? Hopefully not, but it has in the past and the Montana Sedition Project is dedicated to preventing it happening again by keeping the memory of one time it did.

76 men and three women convicted of sedition in Montana in 1918 and 1919 served a collective total of 65 years in prison for criticizing the President and his war policies during and even after World War I and even criticizing wartime regulations and “the flag”.

One man was sentenced to 7 - 20 years for saying the wartime food regulations were a “big joke.”

The language these people were convicted for was often harsh and crude. Some were contemptuous or disrespectful of the government or scornful of its war effort. Many spoke without thinking or under the influence of alcohol. But their words posed no danger to the government or its war effort. Yet they received swift justice. punishment.

Justice was not swift. The victims of this law were pardoned in 2006.

Only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed, it is most vital to justice.
– William Allen White

Just days after dealing with the technical details of the spam attack that nearly crippled this server, we’re facing another kind of backlash - people using it as an excuse for censhorship.

Apparently one of the spam created pages was a link to an Amazon affiliate page selling the work of a “couture jewelry designer” who boasts Oprah Winfrey among her clients and has a blog on Barack Obama’s website where she claims to be a supporter of “civil liberties”.  Now, she’s threatened legal action if I use her name on this website, so I won’t.  I’ll just say this:

Barack Obama supporter and Oprah Winfrey jeweler has threatened to try to shut down this website.

For what it’s worth though, all three of them are public figures, which makes it pretty hard for her to make the case that my use of her name, like theirs, isn’t constitutionally protected speech that no court would touch.

I responded to her email and let her know that any suit would merit a countersuit and, as it would be a meritless nuisance, a request for monetary sanctions against any lawyer who filed it.

So, if you vote, write-in Mary Carey for President because Obama supporters are a bunch of would be censors.