text: Every side in the political debate has a natural tendency to appeal to freedom of speech when they feel threatened?but to ignore (or initiate) threats to the free speech of the other side. My favorite example is from the early 1990s, when the Yeltsin government dispossessed Russia's Communist Party of the vast holdings it had amassed in the decades when it controlled the state. The Communist Party screamed in protest, denouncing the supposed attack on its "property rights and freedom of speech." Which was pretty rich, considering that the Communists had just spent 70 years ruthlessly stamping out everyone else's property rights and freedom of speech.