Eric Alterman: Conservative Class Warfare Against Free Speech

[highplainsdem]

From the Center for American Progress:

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/03/ta033111.html

Think Again: Conservative Class Warfare Against Free Speech
By Eric Alterman | March 31, 2011

-snip-

Cronon was right about ALEC. His naiveté arises in his argument that he never belonged to any political party and he thought letting people know of ALEC’s role in the drafting of the kinds of laws now sweeping conservative-dominated state legislatures across America was a purely educational endeavor that wouldn’t draw the ire of those seeking to dominate politics through this avenue.

The Republican Party of Wisconsin’s ostensible basis for demanding Cronon’s emails derives from the explicit prohibition against individuals using state email addresses for partisan political purposes, specifically: “University employees may not use these resources to support the nomination of any person for political office or to influence a vote in any election or referendum.”

-snip-

All of this is true, but what Cronon apparently fails to understand is that they are also irrelevant. Context, history, and open and free conversation about intellectual matters are themselves enemies of contemporary conservatism. And making these issues explicit in his blog post, politically intended or not, is a kind of mortal blow to the fiction these conservatives are so insistent upon presenting as exclusively driven by current events.

-snip-

Meanwhile, the virus is spreading. Just this week, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a right-wing research group in Michigan, has now made an even more widely drawn public records request to the labor studies departments at three public universities in the state asking labor studies faculty members for any emails mentioning “Scott Walker,” “Madison,” “Wisconsin,” or “Rachel Maddow.” The group is funded, according to Mother Jones, by “the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation (the Wal-Mart Waltons), and foundations tied to two of Michigan's best-known and wealthiest conservative political families: the DeVos family of Amway fame and the Prince family of Blackwater fame.”

-snip-

Emphasis added.

Alterman ends this piece by stating that "the new front in the conservative class war is free speech."

[highplainsdem]

1. kick

[highplainsdem]

2. again

[snot]

3. Impt.! K&R'd.

[loudsue]

4. I'm wondering: wouldn't that sword cut both ways? Are there any

conservative state employees who have mentioned those very same topics in their e-mails, and would that not, similarly, be cause for dismissal?