Meanwhile, Matt Drudge, purveyor of a sort of National Enquirer website for “conservatives,” has dragged out an old Hillary Clinton quote: “We are all going to have to rethink how we deal with [an uncensored internet], because there are all these competing values … Without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function, what does it mean to have the right to defend your reputation?” Clinton said in 1998, in response to offscourings in the wake of the so-called “White House sex scandal” (actually, a well-orchestrated attempt by sulking Republicans to evict a Democrat from office—not that there is a dime’s worth of difference between the two camps). Of course, it makes sense for Drudge to refloat this bit of almost ancient political history, since he was the source of the Monica Lewdinsky, er Lewinsky revelations. Now he wants to sink Hillary once and for all—or at least tarnish her carefully groomed image—as the Grand Dame of Statism plans to run for the presidency.

“I don’t have any clue about what we’re going to do legally, regulatorily, technologically—I don’t have a clue. But I do think we always have to keep competing interests in balance. I’m a big pro-balance person. That’s why I love the founders—checks and balances; accountable power. Anytime an individual or an institution or an invention leaps so far out ahead of that balance and throws a system, whatever it might be—political, economic, technological—out of balance, you’ve got a problem, because then it can lead to the oppression people’s rights, it can lead to the manipulation of information, it can lead to all kinds of bad outcomes which we have seen historically. So we’re going to have to deal with that,” Clinton declared.

Of course, this is a complete load of hogwash, a cynical twisting of history and facts. First and foremost, the checks and balances Clinton mentions here are intended to prevent what we now have—an emerging dictatorship usurping all branches of government—and the original checks and balances were not devised to check the “competing interests” of citizens, especially citizens who criticize the president or Congress (apparently, Clinton believes the government needs to “check” the “balance” of free speech, especially when free speech she disagrees with is directed at her husband). Clinton believes free speech needs to be held “accountable” to “power” (the power of the government and its corporatist owners) and only government can decide when speech “leaps so far out ahead” of statist power (reference the actions of China, noted above) and is deemed “out of balance,” or insulting or dangerous to rulers. Unfettered and unmolested speech “can lead to all kinds of bad outcomes,” for instance overturning the regnancy of our pedigreed rulers, so “we’re going to have to deal with that.” It should be remembered Clinton was singling out websites—most notably Drudge’s rumor-mongering website—for posting stories about the prurient activity of her husband, not the government, although she once claimed there was a “right-wing conspiracy” afoot in Congress to impeach her oral sex obsessed and philandering husband. It should be remembered as well that Bill Clinton faced impeachment not for engaging in sex but for lying about it while under oath.

Hillary Clinton is not alone in her desire to censor and impose regulations on the internet. The Communications Decency Act (CDA) was passed by Congress to control “obscenity” on the internet (once upon a time, protecting children from obscenity was the duty of parents, not government). In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled the CDA to be unconstitutional. Justice John Paul Stevens held that “the CDA places an unacceptably heavy burden on protected speech” and found that all provisions of the CDA are unconstitutional as they apply to “indecent” or “patently offensive” speech. The “Supreme Court ruled that the Internet is a unique medium entitled to the highest protection under the free speech protections of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. This gives the Internet same free speech protection as print,” notes the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Of course, this ruling may eventually go the way of the dinosaur. Bush is in the process of packing the Supreme Court with corporate-beholden reactionaries who will do the bidding of the globalist plutocracy. Moreover, the United Nations is in the process of erecting barriers to free speech on the internet, disguised as cultural diversity. “The UN recently announced that its members had agreed that the Internet was a global ‘facility’ whose management should be ‘multilateral, transparent and democratic’. To this end, the UN has set up the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) to spend 12 months consulting and reporting on the way ahead,” ZDNet UK reported last September. In essence, the “way ahead” will terminate in a dead end as countries such as China and Saudi Arabia, who have extant national laws filtering internet content, will have a say in the future of free speech and unregulated content in what should be a hands-off commons of information. “ICANN [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers] and other Internet governance bodies should have accountability, but not necessarily political accountability to the U.S. or UN. These organizations have a role in deciding on the technical specifications that will encourage the free exchange of information, not limit it,” writes Braden Cox.

In short, the globalist elite (including Hillary Clinton) will determine what acceptable content is and will endeavor to erect a “gatekeeping function” because the medium is increasingly used to criticize government and organize against its habitual predation. If Clinton has her way, we will all be living in a Chinese gulag where free speech is not tolerated and those who exercise it are punished for heresy—and ultimately, as in China, executed for crimes against the state, their bodies reduced to face cream for self-obsessed women.