Kamala Harris’ Banana Republic on Free Speech

Is that so?

Every authoritarian leader in history has justified censorship of their citizens as a way to protect them from the scourge of disinformation.

But social media, contrary to the reliably illiberal Harris, does not “speak directly” to anyone. Millions of people interact and talk to millions of other people. Really, that’s what pisses off the modern left: unsupervised conversations.

Take, for example, the Brazilian Supreme Court panel that unanimously upheld the decision of one of its judges to shut down Elon Musk’s X over alleged concerns about “disinformation.”

We must assume that the Democratic presidential candidate who once promised to ban guns via executive order agrees with Judge Alexandre de Moraes’ decision to shut down the social media platform for refusing to comply with state-imposed censorship demands.

This Associated Press Press Agency reports that the Brazilian Supreme Court’s decision “undermines efforts by Musk and his supporters to portray Judge Alexandre de Moraes as a renegade authoritarian bent on censoring political speech in Brazil.”

Really? Because it seems to me that a state shutting down a popular social media site qualifies as a ban on political speech, whether one person or an entire government is responsible.

And make no mistake, it’s politically motivated. “Just because a guy has a lot of money doesn’t mean he can disrespect it (the country),” argued Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Well, the South American country’s constitution, like ours, apparently protects freedom of speech—without distinguishing between rich and poor: “All censorship of a political, ideological, and artistic nature is prohibited.” You can tell Brazil takes this super seriously, because the bullet point appears in Chapter V, Article 220, or on page 148 of my translated copy.

But suppose de Moraes is no renegade, but merely a typical Brazilian autocrat. Similarly, Musk is not just another billionaire, but a tech CEO who generally considers free speech to be a neutral principle.

I think the best evidence to support this claim is the fact that while Brazil has blocked Musk’s website, he allows far-leftist Lula to set up an account on X that has 9 million followers.

In Europe, freedom of speech is also supposedly protected by the constitution. Well, the law depends on “national security,” “territorial disorder,” “crime,” “health,” and other highly impressionable issues that ultimately allow police officers in the UK and Germany to show up at your door and throw you in jail for offensive posts.

As the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia observed, “every banana republic has a Bill of Rights.” The question is: How close are we to becoming one?

The answer is disturbingly close.

As our Supreme Court continues to occasionally uphold constitutional limits on state power, the left has engaged in soft, fascist—and I use that word with good reason—methods of manipulating speech codes.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that senior Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor” COVID-19 content, including “humor and satire,” during the pandemic. Zuckerberg vowed to never allow his company to be bullied again. Sorry if we don’t take his word for it.

Tech companies enjoy unfettered rights of free association and are free to detain or remove anyone from their platform as they please. Before Musk bought Twitter, now known as X, modern leftists celebrated the independence of social media platforms. “If you don’t like it, start your own Twitter,” they said.

OK. But when corporations that often spend tens of millions of dollars a year in Washington rent-seeking and lobbying for favorable regulations are given marching orders by state officials and giant federal bureaucracies about acceptable speech, we have a big problem.

If presidential candidates truly cared about “democracy,” they would support anti-cronyism laws and prohibit government officials from interfering with or coercing private parties on matters of free speech.

But now, as more CEOs refuse to accept political censorship, Democrats are simply threatening them. “For too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism without accountability,” Russia-collusion con artist Hillary Clinton, who pushed for European-style censorship a few years ago, observed.

“Regulators everywhere should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop spreading lies and hate about X,” Robert Reich, a former Labor Secretary and serial disinformant, wrote last week, setting a precedent, he said, with the recent arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France.

Many on the left rationalize this new zeal for censorship with the cynical claim that free speech is a “weapon” against “democracy.”

This formula must seem Orwellian to the average person. But rest assured, New York Times and other major media outlets consistently publish articles lamenting the dangers of unregulated expression and explaining why we need to “reimagine” free speech. The problem, as he puts it, is that the lack of access controls has allowed foreign disinformation, extremism, and hate speech — often a euphemism for long-held conservative societal beliefs — to corrode our institutions.

Perhaps the establishment media would have a more convincing case for curating speech if they weren’t constantly spreading their own misinformation. Most major media outlets have abandoned their commitment to upholding the ideals of open discourse. Instead, they have taken on the role of monitor and censor, as virtually all of them did when New York Post revealed Hunter Biden’s story ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

They did it for the Democrats, not for your safety or the good of the republic.

In any case, most of the left’s contemporary censorship plans would likely be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But who will protect unpopular speech when the Supreme Court is decimated?

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), for example, claims that Harris supports packing the Supreme Court—as do many prominent Democrats. The goal of judicial “reform” is not merely to decimate the narrow and politically inconvenient originalist majority by packing the court with “living Constitution” leftists, but to transform the entire court into a partisan institution that bends to the whims, emotional appeals, and partisanship of the day. In other words, the pressures against which the court is supposed to be a bulwark.

Is that possible? Of course it is.

There has been an erosion of respect for free speech among voters. Not so long ago, there was a national consensus that public officials should have no role in dictating proper speech or telling us what we can and cannot say. In fact, they had a duty not to do so.

Not anymore today.

Today, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz will argue that there are “no guarantees” of free speech when it comes to “disinformation” or “hate speech,” “particularly in the context of our democracy,” a completely invented standard of protection that is gaining popularity.

As it stands, free speech “around our democracy” is still protected. So Walz can mislead us about his military service or conceiving children without facing legal consequences.

But a number of polls show an alarming decline in belief in free speech, especially among younger voters. In one recent poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 61 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans at least somewhat agreed that the First Amendment goes too far in protecting expression.

In another FIRE survey of college students, only a small percentage thought someone who said transgender is a mental disorder or that “Black Lives Matter” is a hate group should be allowed to speak. At the same time, the vast majority thought it was OK for a speaker to attack religious freedom or the Second Amendment.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE IN THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Of course, because “hate speech” has become meaningless, “disinformation” is often a word that stands for perfectly reasonable inquiry into unresolved or disputed issues. Even if it were not, the state is not the final arbiter of the truth of speech. We tend to defend speech on the grounds of its legality, arguing that the state is often wrong or ill-equipped to dictate speech, which is a perfectly valid point. It is also true that even the most absurd conspiracies and fabrications are protected speech. We should not forget that.

Because many people no longer see free speech as a neutral, liberal virtue worth defending if it undermines their political goals. The most important of these, it seems, is the Democratic presidential candidate.