Kagan: ‘Disappear’ Free Speech If The Government Deems It Offensive

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, May 11, 2010

President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is perfect in every way – perfect that is if you think the role of the highest judicial body in the United States is to ban free speech, indefinitely detain Americans without trial, resurrect command and control socialism, while urinating on everything the Constitution stands for.

We already discovered Kagan’s penchant for treating Americans as guilty until proven innocent, or in fact just plain guilty without even the chance to be proven innocent, when she was quoted as saying, “That someone suspected of helping finance Al Qaeda should be subject to battlefield law — indefinite detention without a trial — even if he were captured in a place like the Philippines rather than a physical battle zone.”

So under that definition, if you send money to a charity later linked with some nebulous terrorist group then you are financing Al-Qaeda and could be thrown in Gitmo or some other CIA black site never to be seen again. And this is the woman being forwarded to sit on a body that is supposed to safeguard civil liberties? That would be like hiring Charles Manson to coach the high school basketball team.

But it gets worse. Now we learn that Kagan thinks certain expressions of free speech should be ‘disappeared’ if the government deems them to be offensive. On the surface that’s any opinion on racial, sexuality or gender issues, but since criticizing Obama is now deemed racist, where will it all end?

In a 1993 University of Chicago Law review article, Kagan wrote, “I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.” (emphasis mine).

“In a 1996 paper, “Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine,” Kagan argued it may be proper to suppress speech because it is offensive to society or to the government,” reports World Net Daily.

Kagan also argued as recently as September that corporations shouldn’t be allowed to engage in free speech, and that the government can censor things like newspaper editorials, as well as the political opinions of radio talk show hosts or television reporters.

Chief Justice John Roberts blasted Kagan’s argument at the time, reports Newsmax.

“The government urges us in this case to uphold a direct prohibition on political speech. It asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet, and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern,” he wrote.

Kagan’s standpoint on free speech, that it is subject to regulation and definition by the government, has no place in America, completely violates the fundamental premise of the First Amendment, that even unpopular speech should be protected, and would be better suited for countries like Iran, Zimbabwe or North Korea.

Little surprise therefore when we learn that in her undergraduate thesis at Princeton, Kagan lamented the decline of socialism in the U.S. as “sad” for those who still hope to “change America.”

If Kagan is approved she is going to find an eager ally in White House information czar Cass Sunstein, who in a January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” called for the government to tax and outright censor political viewpoints it deemed unsavory.