{"id":2493,"date":"2008-04-21T10:29:26","date_gmt":"2008-04-21T16:29:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/election\/the-party-of-fear\/"},"modified":"2008-04-21T10:29:26","modified_gmt":"2008-04-21T16:29:26","slug":"the-party-of-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/election\/the-party-of-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"The Party of Fear"},"content":{"rendered":"<h4><a href=\"http:\/\/thinkprogress.org\/2008\/04\/18\/gingrich-franklin\/\">Contradicting His Hero Ben Franklin, Gingrich Says Americans \u2018Will Give Up All Their Liberties\u2019 For Safety<\/a><a>\u00bb<\/a><\/h4>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px\" alt=\"gingrich.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/thinkprogress.org\/wp-content\/mine\/2008\/04\/gingrich.jpg\" align=\"right\"\/> Yesterday, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich visited Drew University in New Jersey, where he took questions from 20 political science majors there. When one asked him how the government could justify stripping rights from Americans in such pieces of legislation as the Patriot Act, <strong>Gingrich said that the government has a \u201cright to defend society,\u201d and when under threat, \u201c<\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nj.com\/news\/ledger\/morris\/index.ssf?\/base\/news-4\/120849342681440.xml&amp;coll=1&amp;thispage=2\"><strong>people will give up all their liberties<\/strong><\/a><strong>\u201c:<\/strong>  <\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>\u201cIf there\u2019s a threat, you have a right to defend society,\u201d Gingrich said.<\/strong> \u201c<strong>People will give up all their liberties to avoid that level of threat.<\/strong>\u201c<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Gingrich is directly contradicted by Benjamin Franklin, who <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikiquote.org\/wiki\/Benjamin_Franklin\">rejected<\/a> the notion that one should give up one\u2019s liberties out of fear:  <\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Contradicting His Hero Ben Franklin, Gingrich Says Americans \u2018Will Give Up All Their Liberties\u2019 For Safety\u00bb Yesterday, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich visited Drew University in New Jersey, where he took questions from 20 political science majors there. When one asked him how the government could justify stripping rights from Americans in such &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/election\/the-party-of-fear\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Party of Fear<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}