The conservative Weekly Standard's 23 August issue may have led with "The Case For Censorship," whose author called for outright government censorship of American mass media, but at least one conservative journalist has blasted the article, an accompanying symposium, and the magazine itself, for joining if not mounting a very unconservative attack on the First Amendment.
The lead article and symposium were inspired in part by "Appeal to Hollywood," a call for Hollywood to act on its own to clean up "moral pollution of popular culture," as journalist/author David Horowitz says. He also says that for conservatives to join in such a blatant bid for censorship is tantamount to intellectual suicide.
"The federal government and the Congress have already put the entertainment industry on the block and slated it for investigation and legislation (soon to be followed, if precedent is a guide, by class action lawsuits)," he writes in his column for Salon, an online magazine.
"It is a consciously designed parallel to the assault on tobacco and gun manufacturers," Horowitz continues. "If one focuses on the fact that entertainment products are ideas, images and fantasies, the mere linking of these three industries should send shivers up the national spine."
He says products people find repulsive like cigarettes, guns, and bad Hollywood pictures won't be produced any longer if enough people find them repulsive on their own. "That's the remedy the old-fashioned way. Conservatives, more than anyone else, should know (and believe) this. What is truly obscene is that a magazine calling itself conservative would even argue 'The Case for Censorship.' Just because liberals do it doesn't make it right."
Horowitz's essay is called "With Conservatives Like These, Who Needs Liberals?" He warned conservatives against the "growing and disturbing" trend on left and right to weaken "the bulwarks that protect our First Amendment freedoms."
"The Case For Censorship" was written by political scientist David Lowenthal. He says the mass media are now the nation's prime force of education with a pernicious influence overwhelming schools, synagogues, and churches, "immers(ing) us" in violence and sexual depravity, and "surround(ing) us by images of hateful human types so memorable as to cause a psychological insecurity that is dangerous." Lowenthal said that only government has any chance to stop it.
"The choice is clear: either a rigorous censorship of the mass media ... or an accelerating descent into barbarism and the destruction, sooner or later of free society itself."
Horowitz writes that the only thing more distressing than that is the lack of Weekly Standard commentators to be horrified by it. "What is going on here? What happened to the conservative attitude that government can't tie its shoelaces without putting entire populations in danger How is it that a government unable to hand out money to poor people without destroying families and communities in the process can be entrusted with the infinitely more complex task of deciding what is -- and what is not - morally healthy for 270 million diverse people to hear and see? How could any self-respecting conservative not be repelled by a social prescription like Lowenthal's that overlooks this little problem of social engineering?"
The accompanying symposium included former Education Secretary William Bennett, National Interest publisher Irving Kristol, attorney and American Spectator publisher Terry Eastland, and government professor Jeremy Rabkin. Horowitz says that, among the, only Rabkin seemed to appreciate just who would really be ready to step in as the national nannies.
"(T)he censors who would implement Lowenthal's proposal would inevitably be drawn from the class of political missionaries whose passion in life is to tell the rest of us how to live," Horowitz writes. Rabkin said those censors would be the ideologues - "mostly of the crazy left, perhaps also of the religious right, but certainly ideologues..(it is) a recipe for a very nasty sort of politics and sure to be self-defeating."
