Progressive America is increasingly trying to shut down opposing views, PoliGazette’s Jason argues.

Efforts by the Obama campaign and its supporters to stifle critics using mob tactics and even the power of the state are beginning to raise serious concerns about what the stature of free speech would be under an Obama administration.  Even for those of us generally sympathetic to Obama’s campaign, this is a matter for dread.  Even if Obama himself is not directly involved in efforts for ideological repression, the kind of people who would be empowered in an Obama administration are increasingly showing exposing their draconian plans for stifling dissent.

On top of the intrinsic seriousness of anyone aspiring to the President who shows a willingness to coercively shut down political dissent, concerns about tolerance for freedom of political speech and expression among liberals and leftists come with a context.  Even after a lengthy string of judicial defeats for the commissars of political correctness, many college and university campuses continue to impose speech codes that prohibit students and even some faculty from questioning their diktats.  Student governments target conservative student groups for the elimination of funding, students that participate in such conservative groups are threatened with poor grades and even expulsion from school, and faculty who dare to dissent from the left-leaning consensus on campus must fear retaliation from behind the closed doors of rank and tenure committees.

In the online political forums, the situation is little better.  The leftist blogosphere the exercises an increasingly dominant role in Democratic Party politics is rigid in its insistence that no conservative voices shall be tolerated among the elite media outlets.   And in a sphere where the exchange of links is the soil that sustains the very existence of a blog, blacklists are becoming a common tool for the imposition of ideological litmus tests that prohibit criticism or dissent.

On top of everything else, ideological liberals and leftists continue to quietly plan for the return of the “fairness doctrine”, a deceptively misnamed to make it financially impossible for political conservatives to maintain their sole bastion of political expression in talk radio.  Some versions even target not only conservative talk radio for shut down, but conservative internet sites as well. An imposed wall of silence among the left-leaning media (more than 90% of reporters support Democrats, and that media hegemony appears to be intesifying) and blogosphere prevents open discussion and examination of these plans.

The net consequence of the various campaigns to stifle non-leftist speech is quite simply a systematic effort to create a completely unaccountable and unassailable single-party state.  Leftist forums eagerly look forward to the possibility not only of an Obama White House, but also an unchecked Democratic Congress with a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate.  Such confluence of absolute control over both the executive and legislative branches would quickly overcome any lingering resistence from the judicial branch to their desire to silence their critics completely.  Given the blatant intolerance among the left for even the most mild political criticism and dissent, the impact on core political freedoms could be grave — the First Amendment could become a dead letter under the combined heavy hands of an elite media that refuses to give fair or equal time to conservative dissenters and a punitive government that uses regulation and intimidation to shut down any alternative outlets.  Denied access to critical information, the American public would be powerless to even detect corruption and abuses of power among the leftist hegemony that would rule from Washington and media headquarters in New York, let alone build a movement of resistence.

Pravda is being reborn in America.