21st Century Book Burners

      21st Century Book Burners
The other day I received an e-mail which included a link to a YouTube™ video that was titled “Burning Down the House.”  I pasted in the link and watched the video which had to do with how liberals in Congress caused the current financial crisis by mandating loans to individuals at subprime rates who really had no chance of repaying the loans.  It was a well-documented, compelling video.  But the quality, or even the correctness, of the video is not the point of this blog.

I thought the argument made by the video was sufficiently informative and so I forwarded it along to a number of friends.  However, before they had a chance to see the video, YouTube™ had taken it down.  Why?  Because if you are a member of YouTube™, which is owned by Google™, you can complain that a video is “offensive” and if enough others complain, the video is flagged.  The intent is to stop pornography and videos that violate patent rights from being put on YouTube™, but the left has now organized to issue complaints against any conservative video as being “offensive.”  The result is that any pro-life or pro-free market video or any video calling for victory in the war on terrorism or even promoting a conservative movie is “flagged” as being offensive.  Apparently, once a number of complaints are received a video is automatically taken down.  The appeal process to get it back up is lengthy enough to make timely videos such as “Burning Down the House” unavailable when they could have had an impact.

I was shocked when I read about this in a piece written by Matthew Sheffield in the October 2, 2008 issue of The Washington Times.  But I should not have been.
We live in the age of book burners.  The liberals already control the mainstream media—CBS, ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Time, US News, and nearly all of the major newspapers.  The far-left teachers’ union controls public classrooms.  They write the history textbooks.  They want to use the power of government to force conservative ideas off the air through re-implementation of the ironically called “Fairness Doctrine.”  

Liberals must have absolutely no confidence whatsoever in their ideas or in the American people to make free choices wisely.  What intellectual bankruptcy!  When their ideas do not prevail, they use the power of government or organize into bands of electronic vandals to censor conservative ideas.  They shout down and throw pies at conservative speakers on campus.  They steal conservative alternative campus newspapers.  They blacklist conservative actors and actresses.

Apparently their ideas are so weak and flimsy that they can’t even stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny or analysis by conservative critics on the radio, in Hollywood, over YouTube™, at FOX News or in any other public square.  How sad for anyone that their confidence in their own ideas is so low that they cannot allow them to be questioned.  Instead the power of government, theft, blacklisting, and vandalism are their only recourse.

Liberalism was once a voice for freedom of speech, but that voice has apparently been silenced.  Is intellectual honesty dead among liberals in America?