ANIT-WAR.COM

 

I really enjoyed the first amendment timeline. If I am being honest, I'm not much of a history buff and have never known much of the history of the United States especially the law background. This class has been interesting to learn about the history of the United States and what happened vs random facts you see online.  

The thing that shocked me about the whole timeline was the Espionage act. The fact that the espionage act had criticizing the government to be a crime is crazy to me. People were not allowed to be against the war and would go to jail if you were against it or wrote bad things about it. The government even found a way around this and made a law of “incitement”. “Incitement” is speech that causes violence or lawless action.  

The fact that you could not voice your opinions simply because they were negative towards the war seems unnecessary and unfair when you compare it to today. Today's world is so much different, free speech goes to so many lengths, basically anyone can say anything. Today would be so different if these laws were still in place. 

While looking at ANTIWAR.com you can see the website's views strongly and start to understand why you never hear any of this in mainstream news. Websites like ANTIWAR.com and The American Conservative will be less visible in mainstream media because their opinions are very strong and not everyone agrees with them. Mainstream media tends to align with dominant political forces, with this the mainstream media is usually connected to huge corporations and the government which both usually tend to have “pro-military choices”. 

It is hard for these websites to get some heavy media where it will be shown for a bunch of people. I think with technology it is easy to find strong anti-war voices with platforms like google. On the other hand, if you’re looking for strong anti-war voices through larger news platforms like big television news and newspapers, I would argue that it could be extremely tough, and this is why people need to resort to smaller platforms.