that CAN'T be real.
Are you questioning me? ME?!?!
Racism and free speechCongress shall make no law...
The downside to the First Amendment
Apr 15th 2010 | ST LOUIS | From The Economist print edition
RADIO audiences in Kansas City and Springfield, Missouri, are used to being harangued by political commercials even this early in the electoral season. But nearly everyone has been shocked to hear the ads of Glenn Miller, a write-in candidate to replace the retiring Kit Bond in the Senate. Mr Miller?s ads are overtly anti-Semitic and racist tirades, complaining that ?Jews control the media? and attacking whites for ?watching the coons play ball? instead of fighting for their rights.
Even more shocking than the ads themselves is the fact that under federal law, radio stations are powerless to refuse to run the commercials or censor them in any way. Mr Miller?s status as a candidate, no matter how ridiculous, puts the ads under the protection of political speech, the highest level of the First Amendment.
Mr Miller was a master-sergeant in the army and a self-described redneck when he joined his first white racist group in 1974. He formed his own offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan which he later renamed the White Patriot Party because, as he later wrote, the Klan carried too many negative connotations. In 1984 he ran in the North Carolina Democratic primary for governor, taking great delight in provoking outrage while gaining publicity for his movement. He served three years in federal prison for declaring a paramilitary race war and for illegal possession of weapons. In a previous run for Congress he won a grand total of 23 votes.
Winning office is not, of course, the point for Mr Miller. His ads direct listeners to a website run by David Duke, a white supremacist and former Republican legislator. His campaign web page has little about his Senate race but a lot about various neo-Nazi, Confederate and other extremist causes. And because Mr Miller is registered as a write-in candidate his protected status will last beyond Missouri?s primaries in August, until the November election in what will be one of the most closely-watched races of the year. The Missouri Senate race is one of the few opportunities for Democrats to pick up a Republican seat, and is shaping up to be an epic battle between two of the state?s most powerful political dynasties.
One Kansas City station has begun airing disclaimers before Mr Miller?s ads explaining that its hands are tied. It may be that the price of free speech is to turn down the volume for 60 seconds.
