Transcend the Individual

The travail visited on Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage has broad societal implications for our own freedoms, from the liberty of the law-abiding to travel, to commercial freedom to buy and sell legal goods and services as one pleases, to that most essential freedom of all- speech. In each case, no violent act has ever been deliberately inspired by the right-wing orator, yet each is set upon and treated extraordinarily as a criminal. If a leftist were so mistreated for merely speaking his mind, he would become a cause celebre of the rest of the media and of so-called rights activist groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, but because these men champion conservative causes, these advocates of open discourse for everyone but the right are silent. Limbaugh and Savage are the canaries in the mineshaft of our eroding liberty, our right to speak and even think freely dying- being killed- before our eyes. The left is imposing censorship without the US government having to actively silence anyone, yet speech is chilled as those fearing the same outcomes begin to edit even their own thought process and political correctness emerges the victor over our liberal traditions (in the best sense of Jeffersonian liberality) and our Constitutional guarantee of free speech.