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Michael Moriarty is famous for his opposition to the Clintonian/Janet Reno efforts to turn prime time TV into a propaganda outlet for the DNC.

An editorial of his from 1995:

TREES FOR ALL THE DEAD CHILDREN

By Michael Moriarty

(Caption under his photo reads: The author is an Emmy, Tony, and Golden Globe award-winning actor. He is also an accomplished classical and jazz painist-composer, with three CDs in release and another about to be recorded.)

“A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them for a century.”
-—Montesquieu

I am sitting in a sidewalk cafe in Canada at the moment. I am here because I can no longer live in the United States of America. The nation my father knew as a surgeon for the Detriot Police Department and the country in which my grandfather built a 50-year professional baseball career has become a nightmare of lies, propaganda, and vicious disinformation pouring out of Washington, D.C.

Today, the F.B.I. and Janet Reno are asking for a new legislation that would permit them to investigate anyone for simply opposing their ideas of what causes violence. I protested the attorney general’s initial assault on network television during her back-room meetings with NBC executives. “What are we talking about here?” asked Dick Wolf, executive producer of “Law and Order.” “Federally controlled programming between the hours of three and six?”

“How about three to nine.”

Janet Reno said that without a question mark. It was not a request. It seemed to her a foregone conclusion. She had the right to say the most insane thing I’ve ever heard from a reasonably well-dressed person, let alone the highest law-enforcement officer in the land. She claimed that the mere words of a murder-mystery show were dangerous to the health of this nation.

I simply asked that she be relieved of her post and sent on a long vacation and given therapy. Who left their jobs instead? Phillip Heymann, her respected deputy, and yours truly. Resignations in protest. Now she and her Justice Department—and even more recently, Bob Dole, the next frighteningly viable candidate for president of the
United States—would like to brand all artists and producers dealing with dramatized violence and sex as accessories to drive-by shootings, terrorist bombings, and the moral degradation of our nation. And she’s hoping that people like me and Rush Limbaugh, and anyone else who makes fun of her, like David Letterman, will be counted by the American public as accessories to the bombing in Oklahoma City.

Did Al Capone really learn everything he knew from George Raft? Was the death of Christopher Marlowe a product of fight scenes in William Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_?

Blaming violent drama for real-life violence is like indicting Penthouse for the spread of AIDS.

Until I left my country, I was living in a novel by Franz Kafka, with characters like the real Elie Wiesel telling me, “It’s not possible, Michael. This is America.”

They told Elie and his family the same thing in Europe, just before they carted him off to Auschwitz. “It’s not possible, Elie. This is Germany.”

How far is Janet Reno willing to go in her definition of what is causing violence?

“I know _Murder She Wrote_ has no violent images,” said the attorney general, “but they talk about nothing but violence.” What does this mean? Does she charge that Jessica Fletcher was an agent provocateur for Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing? Has Angela Lansbury been derelict in her concern for the children? Was Reno’s fear of language, this frontal assault on the entire meaning of the First Amendment, merely a lapse in the attorney general’s thinking process? AS “kooky” and as “noisy” and as “paranoid” as I am accused of being? I have never put together a sentence quite that sick.

Where was the reaction from the Fourth Estate, the one branch of our democratic process that is sworn, above all, to uphold our freedom of speech? Today, unfortunately, the media is a direct extension of the two-party system, and now that the Republicans and Democrats are a coalition dedicated to expanding federal law-enforcement armies exponentially, there is little protest from the pundits. A coalition in a two-party democracy is not an option. It is a tyranny.

Since mainstream American journalism is either Republican or
Democratic, we now hear no outcry (although _The New York Times_ did quote one “law enforcement official at the Treasury Department... who spoke on condition that he not be named, [who] said there was a tremendous potential for abuse in some of the recent F.B.I. proposals to relax the standards for investigating suspected terrorists”).

Speaking out publicly would risk careers, and if anything is at fault for the disastrous situation we are in, it is a mad obsession with career. Read John Dean’s _Blind Ambition_ if you don’t believe me. My role in the minisreies “Holocaust”—that of the Nazi lawyer Eric Dorf—was inspired by the idea that if Watergate’s John Dean were a German professional in the 1930s and less sensitive to his own corruption, he would have risen to the very top of the Third Reich. With no strong feelings, apart from an obsession with his own career, such a man would find himself standing proudly at the side of Adolf Hitler.

“Free speech,” the Justice Department seems to be saying, “is the root cause of all violence.” Has anyone been fired for such a tyrannical notion? No, but Joycelyn Elders was dismissed for broaching the possibility that our drug laws should be reexamined, and for speaking honestly about AIDS and condoms and children.

I began my campaign fighting the drug laws. I’m right back to those statutes as the main cause of domestic violence in America. Only this time the violence is not the drive-by shootings in the ghettos. It is the speed with which our law enforcement has been destroyed from within by its own increasing power.

The F.B.I. will be given almost absolute power to harass and wiretap and investigate any opponent of the standing government. The drug laws and now, so conveniently, the Oklahoma City bombing are the linchpins for billions of dollars pouring into the American law-enforcement community. Their increasing freedom to hassle suspected anti-big-government agitators must not be threatened.

Will it work? Not if this nation see the tapes called _Waco: The Big Lie_, a two-part examination of the murder of the Branch Davidians.

This video, which Gary Null wrote about in Penthouse_ this past April, is all over the country now, and more and more people will see it despite how Janet Reno, the F.B.I., and the leadership of both parties try to misinform the public about the tapes and their maker, Linda Thompson. The obvious questions raised by Thompson’s analysis of government-approved violence are damning to the F.B.I., the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Janet Reno, and all other parties accessory to the obvious cover-up. They show hard evidence of a government lynch mob at Waco.

If the Rodney King tapes won him $2 million, the implications of _Waco: The Big Lie_ could win the surviving Branch Davidians tens and possibly hundreds of millions from the government, criminal charges against the perpetrators, and the downfall of major careerists in the current administration.

Now, with the help of her spokesmen, who just happen to be President Clinton and Bob Dole, possibly the next occupant of the White House, Janet Reno is trying to convince America that her enemies are just as bad as her own army. They can’t be worse. Try as she may, she knows that history cannot draw the bombers of children any worse than the burners of children.

Washington, D.C. is saying that there is a difference between the children of Waco and the children of Oklahoma City. The deaths in Oklahoma warrant capital punishment. “Swift and severe punishment,” was the fate the president and attorney general promised for the killers of federal employees.

Since the F.B.I., the C.I.A., A.T.F, and other arms of federal law enforcement have been gutting the Bill of Rights for years, such threats are not unlike the reprisals announced in Germany following the Reichstage fire.

What about the deaths of civilians? Not only does Reno not call for capital punishment for the incineration of the Waco children and all the equally cold-blooded murders in Idaho of survivalist Randy Weaver’s wife and child by federal agents, her response to these crimes doesn’t even merit the term “pursuit of justice”. And any movement that calls for such justice, like Linda Thompson’s American Justice Federation, is branded “fanatic”.

Who has more blood on their hands? Network television or federal law enforcement?

Until justice befalls the Justice Department, a tree must be planted for all the children of violence... including the children of Waco.

“Peace is not the absence of war,” said one letter written to me while is was performing in the television series “Law and Order.” “It is the presence of justice.”