Unhinged and wingnutty statements are par for the course at the Conservative Political Action Conference. But more often than not, a speaker at that gathering says something that is really chilling, even by CPAC standards. This year’s edition of CPAC may have seen one of the scariest speeches ever delivered in that gathering’s 44-year history. Before you ask, it wasn’t from Donald Trump. Nope, it was from a hard-right actor and talk show host who effectively called for the gutting of the First Amendment.
You may know Robert Davi as Jake Fratelli on “The Goonies,” Franz Sanchez in “Licence to Kill,” and Bailey Malone on NBC’s “Profiler.” You may also know him for his covers of Frank Sinatra hits. But what you may not know is that Davi is a no-questions-asked conservative. He writes a regular column for Breitbart News, and was one of Trump’s staunchest supporters in Hollywood. Before then, he the voice of some of the ads for Carly Fiorina’s 2010 Senate campaign. Since the summer of 2016, he has hosted a nationally syndicated radio show.
The fact that Davi writes for Breitbart should have been enough by itself to prove that he isn’t, in the words of Trump’s alt-right followers, a “cuck.” But he put any questions about his bonafides to rest with his speech on CPAC’s final day. Watch here.
Davi believes that ancient Rome had a perfect tool to ensure “accountability” and “transparency” in the media–or “the media-industrial complex,” as he calls it. He recalled that the Roman Republic had laws against “calumny”–what we would call libel today. The anti-calumny laws made it a crime to “spread false rumors or lies against upstanding and virtuous political candidates.”
According to Davi, these laws were enacted because “good people had stopped running for office” rather than deal with being verbally or physically attacked. As a result, Romans were being saddled with “only the worst types” in office. Anti-calumny laws were intended to coax “good and virtuous men” back into the arena. Anyone who maligned or falsely attacked a candidate would have to answer for it in court, and possibly face jail time. Davi believed it was time to give such laws a try in this country.
“Let’s go back to ancient Rome. Because if such laws existed today, we would see more men like Donald Trump and Mike Pence running for Congress or the Senate or the presidency, and more fake reporters perhaps going to prison for the very lies they make up to commit cruel character assassination against the very best of our American heroes.”
I had to listen to this twice in order to believe what I was hearing. Davi was openly calling for reporters to be thrown in jail if they maligned someone running for office. And yet, in the same breath, he claimed that he favored a free press. Well, here’s a news flash, Robert. Any country where reporters have to fear being arrested for criticizing politicians does not have a free press.
Two things were particularly unnerving about this speech. One was how calm Davi sounded when he effectively called for the destruction of the First Amendment. It was almost as if he was having a casual conversation about, say, last night’s game or the weather. The other was the crowd’s reaction–fairly warm applause, and a few whoops and cheers. Then again, it might have been because Davi’s proposal was the logical end of the Orange Calf’s campaign promise to use the libel laws to sue his critics into silence.
From the looks of it, Davi’s hard-right turn started when he was 11 years old. He told the audience that his father, a Navy veteran, had him read two books that are considered gospel on the far right–“None Dare Call It Treason” by John Stormer, and “Masters of Deceit” by J. Edgar Hoover. Those books, written at the height of the Cold War, detailed the supposed Communist infiltration of American society. For Davi, those books foretold “a concerted movement to take America from within.” He believes much of what Stormer and Hoover wrote has already come to pass.
Seen in that light, Davi’s call for Roman-style anti-calumny laws isn’t a throwback to ancient Rome. It’s a throwback to McCarthyism, in which rights and freedoms were frequently trampled supposedly in the name of protecting them from the Communist menace. In so doing, its proponents revealed that, at bottom, they were no different from the Communists.
Davi may think that his call to destroy one of the very foundations of our democracy will go unnoticed. Well, it’s time to let him know we’re watching, and we’re not pleased–politely, of course. Let him know what you think of his outrageous proposal on Facebook and on Twitter.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
