Will the last journalist who believes in the First Amendment turn out the lights.

This would probably be more of a headline if the Obama administration hadn’t actually locked up the producer of a movie about Mohammed. One of the many First Amendment political norms shattered under Obama.

So it’s a matter of apple, tree, as Robert Spencer on Jihad Watch notes.

President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team leader for US-owned media outlets wants to redefine freedom of speech and make “hate speech” a crime.

Richard Stengel is the Biden transition “Team Lead” for the US Agency for Global Media, the US government media empire that includes Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

“Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?” Stengel wrote.

“It’s a fair question. Yes, the First Amendment protects the ‘thought that we hate,’ but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw.”…

This is, if anything, behind the curve.

Remember, the New York Times has run multiple pieces arguing that hurtful speech shouldn’t be protected because it causes physical damage through stress. The ACLU is working to ban a book about the impact of transgender identity politics on girls, and Big Tech is engaging in widespread censorship of Republicans.

Even FOX News won’t air remarks about election fraud from the White House.

Stengel, if anything, sounds practically liberal, repeating Obama admin pieties about Koran burning, when his peers have moved on to wholesale speech controls. He’s fighting the battles of 2012 while his party is treating political dissent as proof of treason and foreign allegiance. 

The same YouTube that fought to keep the Innocence video up over White House press now casually censors anything and everything. 

Stengel is picking up where he left off in 2012. Unfortunately eight years later, things are much worse.