Category: free speech

We were there — among hundreds of thousands in Washington

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I got home a short time ago from the 912 March in Washington. Ann and I went, along with my daughter, on a bus from Hagerstown. Eight buses went from the Hagerstown area, and that’s a little sample of what was happening from all over the country.

You’ll hear widely varying estimates of the number of people there. I’ve been on a lot of demonstrations in Washington (because I used to be a leftist), starting with a civil rights march in 1958 and continuing with other civil rights demonstrations, and then peace marches (until I came to my senses in 1967).  I could hardly believe how large today’s march was. The original meeting place, Freedom Plaza at 14th and Pennsylvania, filled up so fast that the march to the Capitol had to start much earlier than planned to make room. Pennsylvania Avenue was packed, and it took hours to get all the people into the Capitol area. No, that’s wrong, because not everybody fit into those huge grounds in front of the Capitol and there were always people on the Mall and on the sidewalks blocks away.

I was at the famous 1963 civil rights march, where Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech. That was estimated to be 200,000 to 300,000 people. In my opinion this one was bigger. I don’t think there were a million people, as some have claimed, but there were at least 350,000 and possibly many more. That is huge.

It was also the politest demonstration I’ve ever been to. Nobody was angry. I mean, they were angry at the government, but nobody seemed to have the kind of chip-on-the-shoulder anger that so many leftists have. It was good-humored. Also — and this was astounding — there was no trash on the ground. None. Unlike the Obama inauguration, unlike Woodstock, unlike even an ordinary crowd standing around, this event was as clean at the end as at the start.

Maybe that’s because there were no journalists strewing trash, or almost none. There was a Fox truck and a CNN truck and that’s all the TV we saw. When Ann and I went to a counterdemonstration to an ANSWER peace march in 2007, the streets were lined with trucks from every media outlet we’d ever heard of, and some we hadn’t. We were interviewed by Australian and German reporters. And that was a march of about 5,000 on ANSWER’s side and about 15,000 on ours. I know some people were interviewed today because I read some reports, but there was nothing like the coverage that peace marches routinely get.

I’ve just heard a few reports that lead me to believe some reporters accidentally went to Mars instead of the Capitol. One said there were Confederate flags in evidence, and Ku Klux Klan type signs. We spent a lot of time walking around looking at people and their signs, and we commented that there were no confederate flags. And I don’t even know what is meant by Ku Klux Klan type signs. Maybe the one that said “I’m not a racist — I hate Pelosi and Reid too.”

That was typical of the signs — original, and often funny. There were no mass-produced signs, and not more than a few of any one type. Here are some we saw:

      Spread my work ethic, not my paycheck.

     Chicago gangsters go home.

     Give me liberty, not debt.

     Thank God for Glenn Beck.

     Right wing extremist: Jefferson, Adams, Madison, me.

     Capitalism delivers what socialism can only promise.

     Read the bills or get off the Hill.

     Constitution: read, learn, live it.

Lots of signs about czars — 44 czars; Czar wars; Czars czuk; You’ll be czarry; and more.

Lots of signs about ACORN — ACORN: bringing brothels to your community; Congress investigate ACORN; shut ACORN down–cancer on our republic; and more.

I kept calling my husband at home to see what the media were saying. He didn’t go because he doesn’t walk well. He’s a bit crippled from his 5-1/2 years as a guest of the North Vietnamese government during the Vietnam war. But he also didn’t go because he was so moved by the idea of all these Americans coming together to oppose socialism and big government that he was afraid he would cry. He was thrilled to hear the reports from Fox during the afternoon.

Now I’m going to look for more reports. I hope some of them are true.

Addendum, 9/14:  After looking at aerial photos I have to update my estimate. I think there were a million people there, maybe more.  It is harder to estimate this than the usual demonstrations on the Mall. The Mall is a plain rectangle and you can just photograph from above and count, or count a small area and multiply. The west side of the Capitol has a lot of trees and you can’t see what’s under them unless you’re on the ground. The area is far from rectangular and is not continuous. And the crowd was spread far and wide beyond the west lawn.

Note from Ann:  On Judy’s point about how clean the Tea Party demonstrators left Washington, see Gateway Pundit’s photo essay on clean conservatives vs. filthy liberals here.

Robert Spencer on 9/11: “free people still live”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Writing at Jihad Watch in the early hours of the morning, Spencer addresses the truth.

The global jihad is not over. There have now been over 14,000 deadly attacks carried out since that fateful September 11 in 2001 by believers in Muhammad’s dictum that “Islam must dominate, and not be dominated.”

Yet as a society we are farther away than ever from recognizing how exactly to combat this foe. The “war on terror,” as restricted and misleading a concept as that was, is over. Yet the global jihad, and the stealth jihad in the West, is advancing on virtually all fronts. The President of the United States doesn’t appear to be overly fond of freedom of speech, even as the Organization of the Islamic Conference continues to war against that freedom. There is still no honest discussion in the mainstream media about what exactly we are facing. Self-censorship and fear abound in government, law enforcement, media, and elsewhere.

There is only one irreducible truth that gives cause for hope on this day, and that is that free people still live.

And tomorrow, on 9/12,  Judy and I look with great excitement and anticipation to being surrounded by thousands of our fellow freedom-loving Americans in Washington, DC.

Watch Glenn Beck tonight and every night!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The same Leftist agitators (following the Alinsky/Cloward-Piven strategies*) we discuss on these pages are going after cable news anchor Glenn Beck because he is showing how the Obama White House is grabbing power, driving the country to the Left and further into a command and control government run from Washington— directly from an elitist White House.  

They have organized a boycott of advertisers on Beck’s show, see this article at the Los Angeles Times today.  Note how the White House is directly behind trying to silence Beck’s free speech.

One of those companies pledging to not advertise on Beck is Wal-Mart.  We just told you that Wal-Mart has gone over to the Open Borders side on the illegal alien issue as well.

Spread the word that Wal-Mart is not a friend of average patriotic freedom-loving American citizens.

To better grasp this concept of big business now in bed with top-down government and the advocates of socialism (communism?) see this enlightening post Judy wrote back in June about “corporate fascism.”   For many of us it takes some reorienting of our thinking to grasp that the radical Left and big business are in bed together.  Make that a threesome with the unions.

* All of our posts on Alinsky/Cloward-Piven are located in our appropriately named category—community destablilization.

Janet Levy: When it comes to Islam it is one-way free speech

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update July 21st:   Steve Emerson tell us what happened at the conference here.

 

Writing today at American Thinker, our friend Janet Levy points out the increasingly frightening attempts to thwart the speech of those warning against the spread of Shariah law while giving free rein to all those who wish to destabilize America.  She begins with the conference we mentioned here on Friday—the Chicago ‘Fall of Capitalism and Rise of Islam’ conference that went ahead with apparently no problems over the weekend.

On July 19th, a conference entitled “The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam” took place as scheduled at the Hilton Hotel in Oak Lawn, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. There, in the heartland of a post 9/11America, Hizb-ut Tahrir, an international organization outlawed as a terrorist group in several European and Middle East countries, sponsored sessions focusing on strategies to end free enterprise and replace it with Shari’ah law.

Gagging those of us who speak against Shariah law.

It is remarkable enough that a conference of this nature by a group that advocates the overthrow of the U.S. government actually took place in an American city. Perhaps even more disturbing is the growing number of cancellations of events and conferences that feature the opposite point of view with material and speakers that seek to educate the public about the threat of radical Islam. Increasingly, our country’s prized right to freedom of speech seems to operate in only one direction, providing plenty of opportunities for our enemies to speak openly against us, yet, placing a gag over any discussion about the radical Islam threat.

Levy then goes on to list many cases, some we are personally familiar with, in which attempts were made (directly by Muslims or their lackies) to silence our point of view.  She mentions the New English Review conference which I attended, the CPAC snub of Geert Wilders (a speech Judy and I attended), Grover Norquist’s role in blocking conservatives discussion of Shariah law, and the Muslim/Somali mess in Nashville (here is just one of many posts on Nashville) which we have covered extensively.  Read the article where she lists many more cases of attempts to silence critics of Islam.

Levy wraps up her list with this:

It is unconscionable in 2009 that an acceptable forum in America today is a conference entitled, “The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam,” with a goal of strategizing the demise of the bedrock of our democracy – the free enterprise system – and the replacement of our constitution with a theo-political-legal system that subjugates women, murders homosexuals, confers non-person status on non-Muslims, permits slavery and kills apostates. At the same time, attempts to discuss Islamic doctrine and educate the American public about this very threat are increasingly verboten. In many recent instances, accurate speech is being deemed inflammatory due to fear of retaliation by those who want to silence critics of Islam who engage in legitimate discussion of a serious threat to our nation.