“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression. For if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
— Revolutionary activist Thomas Paine
“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not fearful men, not descended from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular.”
— US broadcast journalist, Edward Murrow
“McCarthy and his team were able to sow fear, paranoia, and a rigid adherence not to democracy or free speech but to intolerance of dissent and the questioning of the received truths that sustained America’s engagement with the rest of the world.”
— Journalist John Wight
Assassinating the messengers to void their message is a very common tactic. Women claiming assault or abuse are blamed for being victims. Members of the communist party were victimized to satisfying the fears of the right. Journalists are imprisoned and KILLED to keep their words from revealing the terror they witness. Now RT is slandered and requested to register as a foreign agent without regard to freedom of the press. When blaming/killing the messenger includes limiting constitutional freedoms, we are likely to lose those freedoms too.
Other than changing “liberal media” to “profit-centric corporate media,” I concur with this article: “As for those on the so-called left who have remained silent, or worse are gloating over the moves to shut down Russian media, they are like people feeding a crocodile hoping it will eat them last.”