Illinois Mayor Claims Anonymous Bloggers No Different Than 9/11 Terrorists; Says Anonymity Is A First Amendment Challenge

from the the-federalist-papers,-anyone? dept

Perhaps if you're an elected official in the US, you should be required to take a basic history lesson. Michael Scott points us to the story of how the mayor of Mokena, Illinois (where?) has apparently become so fed up with anonymous people online that he's declared that "bloggers" were just like the 9/11 terrorists who flew planes into buildings. In clarifying, but not backing down, he claimed that he's really talking about anonymous bloggers and commenters, not "bloggers" as a whole. Later, in discussing it further, he claimed that "this is the greatest First Amendment crisis in this country's history." I'd say that the mayor of Mokena is a bit prone to hyperbole.

Phil Kadner, from The Southtown Star newspaper, who has been covering the mayor's comments, has a great response at the end of his writeup (the last link above):

I told him about the early days of newspapers in this country, when Founding Fathers such as Jefferson and Hamilton actually paid people to write scandalous articles under false names about their political enemies. Somehow the country survived and democracy thrived.

Ultimately, you have to have faith in the wisdom of the average person. That's what the First Amendment really is all about.

Let everyone have their say, and the public decides who to believe. It was a radical idea then and still is today.

And so, the mayor of Mokena gets a history lesson on the First Amendment from the press that the First Amendment enables. There's something nice about that, though, you would have hoped the history lesson would have come sooner.

Filed Under: anonymity, free speech, mokena