When someone calls my office and wants to sue somebody for libel or slander, assuming they manage to get through my phalanx of people devoted to keeping me insulated from time burglars, the first thing I say to them is, “You probably have no case.”  I don’t wait to hear the facts.  I don’t need to know their evidence.  I know that statistically speaking, it just is not going to have merit.  Yet threatening defamation suits is a growing tactic in the war on the new media.

Defamation cases generally fail.  And by “generally,” I mean almost all of them.  I’ve never lost a libel case I’ve defended.  Why are defamation cases so bad?  Defamation is a unique tort because it involves publishing false and unprivileged negative information about someone.  With the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees – you know, the ones that frustrate and irritate the left to no end when those of us on the right avail ourselves of them – defamation takes on  whole new dimension you do not find in regular torts like negligence.  There’s a tension between the right to speak and the right not to be lied about, and the courts generally err on the side of free speech.  This is especially true in the context of political debates.  (more…)

Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris has declared May 20th “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” in defense of Matt Stone and Trey Parker. All freedom-loving Americans should get behind this. While initially I thought it was an ironic joke that South Park was censoring everything related to Mohammed in their last episode, obviously we have seen over the last few days that against the creators’ will, Comedy Central cowered in the face of a thinly veiled Muslim threat.

In fact, submission, the definition of Islam, is the apt word to describe Comedy Central’s cowardice.

The bottom line is that the First Amendment guarantees free speech including criticism of all peoples. We are an equal-opportunity offense country. To censor ourselves to avoid upsetting a certain group (in a cartoon no less) is un-American.

It is especially egregious because it represents dhimmitude. We are sacrificing our law and our heritage to Sharia. The law of our land is the Constitution and beyond that the natural law granted to us by our divine creator.

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Return with us now to those glorious days of yesteryear, when honest reporters were just starting to turn into “journalists,” and CBS’s 60 Minutes was the top-rated program in the nation for a reason: it played fair.

Exhibit A is this remarkable piece that Morley Safer did in the mid-late 1980s about “The Loony Left” in Britain — a chilling and prescient look at how the hard left was busily injecting political divisiveness into the minds of young children all over the country, hollowing out British culture and institutions in the name of “anti-racism,” and turning Britain into the sad, dilapidated, disunited and likely doomed Orwellian society it has become today.  Perhaps there won’t, after all, “always be an England.”

It’s a classic example of leftist tactics, and in retrospect turned out to be a last warning of the fate that was soon about to overtake a country that had been waging a low-level civil war between Fabian Socialists and free-market capitalists since the days of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw — a losing battle only briefly won by Margaret Thatcher, and now likely lost for at least another generation as Shaw’s famous “Fabian Window” is at last out and proud: (more…)