[C]onservative broadcaster Pete Santilli accused a 15-year-old Oregon girl who cried at a town meeting of “prostitution” on Wednesday. Earlier this week, Judge Steven Grasty’s granddaughter, Ashlie Presley, choked up at a Burns town meeting while explaining that Ammon Bundy’s armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge had put the community in fear…. “I should not have to be scared in my own hometown,” Presley said. “I know that all of my friends have been scared and have come to me to know what to do.”…. While broadcasting from the refuge on Wednesday, Santilli said that Grasty had turned his granddaughter into a “prostitute.”…. “That judge was prostituting his granddaughter for political purposes,” he opined. “I’m going to call it for what it is. If it were my granddaughter, I would not treat her like a prostitute like he did.”…. According to Santilli, opponents of Bundy’s militants were a “bunch of effing communists” because they had allowed the girl to express her fear in public.
Full disclosure: I hold Pete Santilli and those like him in the same esteem I reserve for social diseases and mass murderers. There’s little he has to say that can be held to be of ANY redeeming value whatsoever. When your idea of civil discourse consists of calling those who dare think differently than you “prostitutes” or “communists,” you’ve divorced yourself from any right to civil discourse with or courtesy from other human beings. If you believe that calling a 15-year-old girl a prostitute for having the temerity to speak her mind and voice an opinion you (for reasons that make sense only to a sociopath) find objectionable is appropriate, you’ve pretty much forfeited any claim to humanity.
Santilli represents everything wrong with the current state of public discourse. He represents a segment of the population that revels in ignorance, fear-mongering, hatred, and demonizing others. There’s a strong strain of intolerance extant in America today, represented by voices like Santilli, who couldn’t undertake a reasoned, dispassionate debate if Ann Coulter showed up with a pair of knee pads and a bottle of Wild Turkey.
It’s very likely that Santilli isn’t man enough to understand, much less recognize, this truth about America, but the freedom and liberty he claims to revere don’t come with permission to intimidate and harass those with whom he disagrees. I’m not certain what part of FREEDOM of speech he finds so difficult to understand, but Ms. Presly has the same right to speak her mind as Santilli has to spew the poisonous verbal vomit he’s turned into a career.
This is America- you know, home of the 1st Amendment, which guarantees the freedom of speech and expression. To tyrants like Santilli, those freedoms apply only to Real Americans ©, which he defines as those who look, think, and believe as he does. Those not “enlightened” enough to share his dark, evil views and his willingness to crush those who dare disagree are to his way of thinking worthy only of being destroyed utterly. He decries “tyranny,” which appears to mean any system that doesn’t meet with his express approval.
Freedom of speech and expression means recognizing that some times things can get ugly. Free speech can be, and very often is, ugly and abhorrent speech. Ms. Presley’s speech, abhorrent as it may be to Santilli, is protected under the 1st Amendment. Of course, so is Santilli’s vile, hate-fueled verbal vomit…but hate speech need not be met with mute acquiescence. In fact, I believe Americans who value freedom and liberty have an obligation to speak out against those who, like Santilli, would act to intimidate others into silence.
It’s interesting that even as Santilli claims to stand for the protection of freedom and liberty, he makes it clear he’d deny those things to Grasty and Presley. His version of freedom and liberty appear to apply only to Conservative White Christians; others need not apply and must accept their status as second-class and less worthy of Constitutional protection. Perhaps Santilli is simply too far gone, too consumed by hatred and ignorance, to understand what American democracy is about. Our system was designed by the Founding Fathers to foster debate and disagreement. They wanted to spur arguments over the scope, nature, and responsibility of governnment. They wanted the American people to have a voice, and to be able to use it freely without fear of reprisal or persecution.
Perhaps Santilli’s black and hardened soul has rendered him unable to feel compassion or to exercise anything even faintly redolent of tolerance. Perhaps he’s simply unable to recognize that threats, intimidation, and vile insults of a 15-year-old don’t make him a Real American © they simply make him an angry impotent old man screaming into the void.
Pete Santilli’s America is an ugly, reactionary places ruled by fear, hatred, homophobia, and the spirit of exclusion. It’s not an America I recognize or acknowledge. The America I live in is a cacophonous, often tempestupous mess. Americans argue and disagree, but we respect each other’s right to express ourselves and hold what opinions we will. Regardless of what side of the fence we find ourselves on, ALL of us who believe in the American experiment have a stake if refuting voices like Pete Santilli.
Hatred and exclusion can’t win if we make it clear that we’ll have no part of it.
