Human Events:

Five Rights the Left Doesn’t Want You to Have
by Jason Rantz
Posted 07/05/2010 ET

The far left in this country—politicians, talking heads, celebrities, faux-journalists—love to claim conservatives are stamping out American freedoms. Indeed, you still hear lefties claim President George W. Bush shredded the Constitution to spy on American citizens without warrants. You frequently hear concerns that Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are practicing judicial activism and ignoring the law of the land. And you always hear complaints that talkers Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are using “hate” speech to incite violence against non-believers.

The left loves the Constitution and freedom—but they only love it when they have the rights and can pick and choose who else gets to enjoy them. The far left in this country, at any opportunity they can, stomp on our freedoms, or simply ignore them, for what they perceive to be the greater good: political correctness, social justice, environmental activism, diversity. They seek to quash our freedoms, while utilizing them for their own purposes.

Here are five rights that the far left in America doesn’t want conservatives to have:

1. Free Speech Rights: The left loves to whine and complain about how evil Republicans are, but they sure don’t want anyone to talk back. On many issues, the left openly tries to prevent the right from speaking out. You need not look beyond what’s going on at our nation’s colleges to see how the left operates.

Often times, college campuses are overrun with Marxist professors and uninformed students who will try to stop invited conservative speakers to even open their mouth and utter a single sentence, without being interrupted, shouted down, or, in some cases, have the entire meeting be taken over by “protests.”

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the nutty pro-illegal immigration activist students prevented former Rep. Tom Tancredo from giving a speech. According to ABC News, “Tancredo didn't make it through his talk. In fact, he left campus early after protesters interrupted his speech and broke a window.” Over at University of California at Irvine, the Muslim Student Union repeatedly interrupted a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, leading to eleven arrests. Think these are rare occurrences of over-zealous students so passionate about issues they can’t control themselves? Think again. There is a systematic effort across college campuses whereby liberal student groups repeatedly try to shut down anyone from speaking on campus that they disagree with.

2. The Right to Bear Arms: The left really hates guns—especially when law-abiding citizens own them. The far left thinks people who use guns are mostly redneck, oftentimes violent, and supremely ignorant of what it takes to create a happy society. If they had their way, all guns would be banned and violence would forever cease to exist in our great country. Why, look at Chicago where a ban on handguns was on the books for nearly 30 years. They’ve had no problems—except for the rampant killings by criminals with access to guns. Other than that, the ban has worked great!

What the left doesn’t seem to get—beyond their inability to understand the 2nd Amendment—is that banning gun ownership will not stop violence. Legitimate gun owners who are law-abiding citizens don’t go out shooting people because of a drug bust gone bad, or because the gangbanger down the street looked at their girlfriend funny. Law-abiding citizens use guns for sport and for protection against the bad guys who know how to score a gun illegally and use it against the saps who have local leaders making it too difficult to legally own a weapon.

3. Voting Rights: The left would love other liberals to vote—they may not even mind if you vote a few times so long as ACORN was in on the voter registration action. What they absolutely hate, however, is when conservatives vote because they keep voting in Republicans who will prevent them from passing whatever legislation they want.
During the November elections last year, the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia made headlines for their voter intimidation tactics. Two members in paramilitary garb, holding weapons, shouted racial epithets towards potential white voters. The Justice Department under the Liberal-in-Chief dropped the charges against those involved. Please imagine what would have happened if a WASP in a camouflaged-polo shirt tried to scare away black voters. Obama would have made an example of them.

In Port Chester, N.Y., voters were allowed to vote six times so that the heavily Hispanic population would be able to elect Hispanic candidates to office. Indeed, according to the Associated Press, “Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats.… Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.” So in an effort to punish white candidates with a voting base that cares enough to show up to the polls, under the Obama Administration voters would be able to vote multiple times to guarantee that a non-white, presumably liberal candidate, would get elected. Again, please imagine what would have happened if in, say, Detroit, the Justice Department helped make it so more white Republicans would be able to represent the city.

4. Freedom of Press: The left really hates that Fox News has an audience; they loathe the existence of HUMAN EVENTS and writers like me. They actually have the nerve to call out Fox News as being “unfair” and “unbalanced” because the station’s analysts lean right. How often does MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann rant about how evil and dishonest Fox News is, all while hosting a show where he seldom, if ever, has a guest on who disagrees with him? How often did the New York Times shill for Air America radio networks, in a bid to gain them more listeners? Free press is good, so long as liberals can control the message (this is why Obama Administration officials tend to do more interviews with friendly news agencies—they’re guaranteed not to be asked tough questions and are better able to control what news gets out).

5. The Rights of States. How often are our states shunned for trying to protect themselves against elements that are destroying their economy, their sense of safety or their sense of pride? We have Arizona under assault from the federal government because they have the gall to protect themselves from citizens entering their state illegally.

I’m hardly a state’s rights fanatic because I believe there are reasonable restrictions on what a state can or cannot do, and there is certainly a role for the federal government in overseeing some of what a state does (if my hippie state of Washington tries to ban guns or limit my speech because of some twisted state’s rights argument, I want the federal government stepping in). But, to always take the side of the federal government, the way liberals do, solely to hold on to power—power that would be kept away from conservatives who tend to overwhelmingly advocate for those rights—is petty. I know Senators Chuck Schumer or Patty Murray would love as much power as they can hold on to—because, after all, they know best—it’s just not the way the system works.