The Constitution’s First Amendment protects free speech for good reason.
If people can’t say what they want, we don’t have honest debate.
I was relieved when Donald Trump, campaigning for the presidency, said, “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country!”
Good for him. Free speech is crucial to freedom.
Democrats, by contrast, had been eagerly censoring. During Covid, they threatened social media companies, ordering them to censor the internet.
“They are directly speaking to millions!” complained Kamala Harris, “without any level of oversight, and that has to stop!”
Fortunately, once Trump was reelected, he told his staff: “Stop all government censorship.”
Hooray!
But now that Trump’s president, and getting lots of criticism from the media, he’s started calling speech that he doesn’t like “illegal.”
“They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad. I think that’s really illegal, personally.”
He also threatened TV stations: “They give me only bad publicity … maybe their license should be taken away.”
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” said his attorney general, Pam Bondi. “We will absolutely target you … if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
They will “target” people?
Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, joined in. When Jimmy Kimmel said nasty and incorrect things about Charlie Kirk’s murder, Carr threatened ABC’s TV licenses, saying, like a mafia boss, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Yet months earlier, he’d tweeted: “Dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights.”
And years earlier, he tweeted that the FCC does “not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the public interest.”
He was right … then.
But power tends to corrupt.
Once Carr was in power, he no longer supported the speech he’d recently promoted.
Fortunately, some Republicans pushed back.
Sen. Rand Paul: “Brendan Carr has got no business weighing in on this.”
Sen. Ted Cruz: “I like Brendan Carr … but what he said there is dangerous as hell.”
It was.
Carr and Bondi later “clarified” their comments. Carr said his “easy way or hard way” comment was not a threat to pull licenses. Bondi said hate speech itself won’t be prosecuted.
Good.
Bizarrely, Democrats suddenly became free speech advocates.
“Reject the government’s attempt to weaponize this moment into an all-out assault on free speech,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But wait. When her party was in power, Ocasio-Cortez wanted government to “rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation!”
And “rein in” is exactly what Democrats tried to do, often succeeding.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg complained that Biden administration officials “would call up our team and scream at them … all these different agencies and branches of government basically just started investigating, coming after our company. It was brutal!”
Whoever is in power likes to use that power to shut the other side up.
In America, no government has the right to censor.
Politicians eager to shut the other side up should have paid attention to Charlie Kirk when, just a few months before he was killed, he said: “You should be allowed to say outrageous things! You should be allowed to say contrarian things. … That is the bedrock of a liberal democracy.”
Photo by Brandon Mowinkel on Unsplash
I fully agree that the 1st Amendment is crucial to a free America.
Queen Tyrant Hill who chairs the county commission in Washoe county Nevada has prohibited signs over 8 1/2 x 11” inside “her” chambers, threatened to have me arrested and removed for standing in a place she simply didn’t like. Has refused to let the public see my presentation on election integrity and also tried to eliminate the “citizens” advisory boards.
The one point from John i disagree with is that somehow there needs to be accountability for the press to articulate BOTH sides of the story accurately and be held to account when they simply make sh*t up to disparage anyone.
How can that be done without impinging on the presses right to free speech?
Can you please do a story on the cartels and fentanyl?
As a paramedic, I have seen so many deaths and poisoning from opioids. I say poisoning because the word ‘overdose’ implies there is a known dose. People who use have NO idea how much they’re getting and are playing Russian roulette when they use. I feel the fentanyl and heroin that comes into this country is meant to kill our young men intentionally and deliberately to weaken our country. I’m not sure if it’s China, Russia or the southern Americas. I would like to see the boats that are being blown up that carry cocaine to continue but I wonder why narcotics / fentanyl is continuing to kill our people. Why are those boats not getting hit? Or am I wrong to say that as it’s what I’ve heard is reported??? Always curious 🧐
Thanks!
Liberal or Communist, as you prefer, ideology says their victory is not only historically preordained (Marx), but, once achieved, is permanent (Brezhnev)–so when they lie, buy, steal or shoot their way into power, they create all manner of ghastly precedents, never dreaming they might someday be on the receiving end.