Off The Editor’s Desk – 5-17-2017
The Wisconsin connection: “The Left’s War on Free Speech”
We are continuing with the piece written by Kimberley Strassel, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal about “The Left’s War on Free Speech” and are reprinting it with permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.
“Another intimidation tactic is for prosecutors to abuse their awesome powers in order to hound and frighten political opponents. The most terrifying example of this was the John Doe probe in Wisconsin. Democratic prosecutors in Milwaukee launched a bogus criminal campaign finance investigation into some 30 conservative groups that supported the public sector union reforms championed by Governor Scott Walker. Wisconsin’s John Doe law gave these prosecutors the right to conduct this investigation in secret to subject their individual targets to gag orders. Prosecutors secretly looked through these individuals’ financial records, bank accounts, and emails.
“Prosecutors also conducted predawn raids on some of their targets’ homes. In one horrifying instance, the target of such a raid was on an out-of-town trip with his wife, and their teenage son was home alone. Law enforcement came into the house, and sequestered the boy, refusing to allow him to call a lawyer or even his grandparents, who lived down the road. They hauled items out of the house, and as they left they told the boy that he was subject to the gag order—that if he told anyone what had happened to him, he could go to jail.
“But it ultimately took a lawsuit and the Wisconsin Supreme Court to shut down the probe. In its ruling, the Court made clear its view that the probe’s purpose had been intimidation. The prosecutors had been sending the message: if you dare speak, we will turn your lives into a living hell and potentially put you in prison.
“More recently we have seen this tactic in the joint action of 17 state attorney general, who launched a probe into Exxon and some 100 different groups that have worked with Exxon over the years. The implicit prosecutorial threat: get on board with our climate change agenda or we might bring racketeering charges against you.
“A third intimidation tactic is for activist groups to use blackmail against corporations and non-profits in order to silence them. One subject of such attacks was the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that works to promote free-market policies at the state level. It is largely funded by corporate donations. Because it is so successful, it has long been despised by left-wing activist groups.
“Left-wing activists branded ALEC a racist and threatened to run ad campaigns against its corporate donors, branding them as racists too—unless they stopped funding ALEC. In a coordinated action, Democratic U. S. Senator Dick Durbin sent letters to a thousand organizations across the country, demanding to know if they supported ALEC and suggested they’d get hauled in front of Congress if they did. ALEC lost nearly half of its donors in the space of a few months.
“We’ve also seen this tactic employed against private individuals. One such person was Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot, who Barack Obama’s reelection campaign singled out in 2012, following a VanderSloot donation to Mitt Romney. The campaign publicly branded him a disreputable person, painting a target on his back. Not long after that, VanderSloot was audited by the IRS and visited by other federal agencies.
“What is to be done? For starters, we need to be aware that this is happening, and it is not random. The intimidation game is real. It is the work of left-wing groups and politicians, it is coordinated, and it is well honed. Many of the targets of intimidation who I interviewed for my recent book weren’t aware of what was happening to them and that allowed the intimidation to go on for too long. Awareness is key.
“We need to think hard about ways to limit the powers of the administrative state, to stop rogue agents at the IRS and other agencies from tramping on free speech right. We can make great progress simply by cutting the size of federal and state bureaucracies.”
Thanks for reading! ~Carlton