Coconuts vs golliwogs vs bananas vs oreos.

[liberty]

George Orwell said in the appendix of his book Animal Farm on page 106 the following:

I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech, the arguments which claims that it can not exist and the arguments which claims it ought not to. I answer simply that they don‘t convince me and our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian regime is mainly an evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR in a war I want to see won.
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I concur with Orwell and believe that we should guard against the possibility our system becoming an evil empire.

[Big RR]

I am not at all afraid of my government; I know that it is properly restrained by our constitutional guarantee of free speech. No one can prosecute me for a rude or impolitic comment,

Tell that to the victims of Joe McCarthy and HUAC in the late 40s/50s or anyone who has the audacity to say anything which could be seen as support of a terorist group since 9/11. We have a pretty good system, and one cannot generally be criminally prosecuted for imprudent or politically unpopular comments, but there are other governmental sanctions, from warrantless arrests/imprsonments and public censures in unfair proceedings which the govrnment still has in its arsenal for use against its "enemies". It's restrained, but the system could, and should, be better.

[Lord Jim]

Tell that to the victims of Joe McCarthy and HUAC in the late 40s/50s or anyone who has the audacity to say anything which could be seen as support of a terorist group since 9/11

Big RR, do you have any numbers or examples of anyone who was criminally prosecuted by the government for anything they said during any of the situations you cite?

I'm not aware of any.

Even during the height of the McCarthy Era, the CPUSA and Gus Hall operated openly.

[Big RR]

Jim--as I said, criminally prosecuted, not to my knowledge. But held up to public censure, and/or prosecuted for contempt for refusing to name the names of others who attended those "insidious" communist meetings, there were a number which I'm certain could be found by googling. Indeed, the government acted as an instrument in fomenting the hysteria, and then threatened those who did not cooperate with the loss of their jobs (based on that same hysteria--look at the Hollywood blacklist), with the loss of ther right to travel outside of the US (even the two time nobel laureate Linus Pauling suffered here), or threatened with contempt when they refused to answer questions about others. IMHO, this was tantamount to the government part and parcel seeking to curtail freedom of speech when it came to the communist party. Yes, Gus Hall may have operated openly (I really don't know much about him during this time), but many were ruined by the government conspiracy to control the beliefs of its citizens, especially prominent citizens.

edited to add: Jim--re Gus Hall, I found this in Wikipedia:

Indictment during the 'Red Scare' and rise to the head of the CPUSA

Hall's mugshot, taken during his prison sentence in Leavenworth, Kansas for "Conspiring and Teaching Overthrow of the U.S. Government by Force or Violence." Date 1954.Now a major American communist leader in the post-war era, Hall caught the attention of US officials. On July 22, 1948 Hall and 11 other Communist Party leaders were indicted under the Alien Registration Act, popularly called the Smith act on charges of "conspiracy to teach and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence," although his conviction was based on Hall's advocacy of Marxist thought. Hall's initial prison sentence lasted for five years.[4] After a release on bail, he rose to the secretariat of the CPUSA. [2] At the height of McCarthyism, there were renewed efforts to jail Hall, who had skipped bail and gone underground.[4] During an failed attempt to flee to Moscow[4], Hall was caught in Mexico City[2], and ultimately served a total of eight years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.[3] In prison he distributed party leaflets and lifted weights, and was located in a cell adjacent to that of George Kelly, a notorious gangster of the prohibition era.[11] The U.S. Supreme Court later reversed some convictions under the Smith Act as unconstitutional.

Hall was in danger of facing yet an another indictment, this time under the Internal Security Act of 1950, known as the McCarran Act in the early 1960s, but the Supreme Court found the Act partly unconstitutional and the charges were abandoned. [2] However, the act required "Communist action" organizations to register with the government, and limited party members from applying for United States passports and from holding government jobs.[11] Because of the Act, Hall's driver's license was revoked by the State of New York.[11]

After his release, Hall continued his activities.[3] He began to travel around the United States, ostensibly on vacation, but actually gathering support to replace Dennis as the general secretary. [13] He accused the general secretary Dennis of cowardice for not going underground as ordered in 1951 and also claimed Dennis had used funds reserved for the underground for his own purposes.[11][13]. Hall's rise to the position of general secretary was generally unexpected by the American Communist circles (the post was expected to go to either Henry Winston or Gil Green, both important figures in the YCL[13]) although Hall had held the office of acting general secretary briefly in the early 1950s during Dennis' arrest.[13] In 1959, Hall was elected CPUSA general secretary, and afterward, received the Order of Lenin.[3]

So it does seem he was targetted, prosecuted, and even jailed for several years. The system did eventually work when the USSC found the McCarren Act partly unconstitutional, but he was prosecuted and jailed for his beliefs. Face it, at tghe time admitting to be a communist meant that you automatically advocated the violent overthrow of the US government, even though very little communist literature of the time supported that; but then, telling the working class to flex their collective muscle and sieze control of thei destinmies was a very scary thing to some.