Boomer Democrats Reject Free Speech
It’s not surprising that the new crop of politicians picked up censorious moods.
You may hate Hillary Clinton and John Kerry with a burning passion, but you don’t hate them enough. In a recent interview at the Clinton Global Initiative, the former First Lady, seated next to Hollywood’s own bobblehead Matt Damon, complained about the insufficiently obedient journalists: “The press needs a consistent narrative about the danger that Trump poses,” she suggested. She didn’t explain what mechanism should be implemented to ensure proper compliance, but in a later CNN interview, she expressed support for social media censorship.
Fellow Boomer and former presidential nominee Kerry appeared to be doing just that — he evidently proposed winning democratically to then do away with constitutional protections of individual liberties, presumably instituting a dictatorship:
[O]ur First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it [disinformation] out of existence. So what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.
Kerry blamed social media for the proliferation of undesirable information:
The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle.
Although the former senator echoed Barack Obama’s infamous lament that he doesn’t have the power of a Chinese president, he was wistful about some mythical American past when ruling the plebs was easy:
So it’s really hard to build consensus today, harder than at any time in 40-45 years that I’ve been involved.
Yet the consensus going back forty-45 years was passionately pro-free speech. Both the right and the left, the young and the old, generally agreed that First Amendment rights were a critical part of the American experiment — even if we disagreed about everything else.
To be sure, there were some attempts to undermine this most quintessentially American freedom. For instance, in 1985, the future Second Lady, then the wife of a Tennessee senator, Tipper Gore, tried to censor salacious popular music. However, having been met with resistance, including, most notably, from left-wing entertainers, she settled on Parental Advisory stickers on recordings.
Fifteen years later, her husband Al used his First Amendment freedoms to fear-monger disinformation about what was then called global warming. Before the advent of social media, his work hammered out something like semi-consensus for governing — it enabled the continuous efforts to restrict the use of energy, places of dwelling, and ability to move. In the process, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars changed hands. In the process, the Gores became multimillionaire beachside property owners. Freedom of speech served Boomer Democrats well — now they are working to ensure it can’t be used to challenge them.
Today, the popular pro-First Amendment consensus is shattering. If the 1960s student protests were inspired by the University of California, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and the ability to express oneself was seen as a part of liberation, college students today are skeptical of these kinds of ideas. According to the 2017 Brookings Institution survey, 44% do not believe that the Bill of Rights covers “hate speech,” and 51% think it’s acceptable to shut down an unwanted speaker. It’s a complex phenomenon with multiple explanations, but I am not aware of a theory that blames America’s softening on freedom of speech on social media disinformation. Kerry’s argument that digital platforms dissolve consensus doesn’t hold water.
It’s not surprising that the new crop of politicians picked up censorious moods. For instance, in 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remarked on Antifa/BLM rioters:
The whole point of protesting is to make people uncomfortable. To those who complain that protest demands make others uncomfortable, that’s the point.
Four years later, she defended the Qatar-backed Students for Justice in Palestine, blocking Jews from sections of college campuses as “peaceful.”
The current Democrat Vice Presidential nominee and his wife display the exact inversion of a prohibition on speech and endorsement of violence. Gwen Walz recalled with odd fascination how she kept the windows open during the race riots to inhale the fumes of burning tires — our potential second family views goons with toxic reverence. At the same time, her husband, the governor of Minnesota, is on record believing that the First Amendment doesn’t cover hate speech and misinformation.
Walz and AOC are relative newcomers. On the other hand, Clinton and Kerry have been around for nearly half a century. Both started in the 1960s student and anti-war movements, where free speech was a rallying cry. They initially positioned themselves within the counterculture—it didn’t occur to anyone to question their commitment. It now looks like their commitment to the First Amendment was strategic.
The countercultural aura was anarchic and irreverent. It went along with the design of our nation—the Founding Fathers created a republic that would be difficult to govern because any significant change would require a consensus that would be near-impossible to arrange.
The fact that the opponents of the First Amendment bring up misinformation and hate speech — the supposed limits of free expression — while they assert the right to violence and intimidation through rioting and blocking roads suggests that they are trying to create entirely new power dynamics. The old consensus on tolerance and freedom of expression is in danger.
Individuals with access to power—think BLM and SJP, not January 6—are given the mandate to use the heckler’s veto. The Democrat Party vanguard, including legacy politicians, is waiting for the opportunity to consolidate their grip on the nation via the democratic process and manipulate social media platforms to ensure ascendancy. How many Americans want their votes back?
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and they are again
winning
around the world the left is gnawing away at freedom of speech,,made even easier by having already disarmed the citizens..as demvid19 proved
they can and will do as they want
Heckler’s veto. Not hacker’s, at least I hope.
This ‘new left’, a product of rectal birth if anything could be, will stop at nothing to subjugate free people. They and their misshaped ‘religion’ may very well be what Scripture was describing as the
anti-Christ. Not necessarily a ‘he’ but an ‘it’.
They do seem to prove that there is a result of anal sex.
The mask off these vile totalitarian faux democracy liars. Not for nothing do I label them DEMONcrats.
Similar to losing free speech is cultivating siloing. Clicks go only to stuff you like to be outraged by, and the other stuff is strongly dismissed as in error.
Basically what looks and acts like moron readership. Unfortunately cultivating that is the key to business survival.
“Similar to losing free speech is cultivating siloing.”
No. Not even close.
Your Asperger’s must be flaring up again.
I’d give you an up-vote on that, if I gave votes.
I’d rather get posts from you that actually make sense, rather than the fetid circular logic you usually employ.
Sez the ossified 60’s libertarian.
But it’s Trump who’s going to end democracy in the US, right?
All this generation wants is more TV commercials showing freckled blondes with their African husbands enthusing over their new Audi SUV parked in front of their mansion. It will take heavy shelling to awaken them from their lotus-eating slumber.
We do ?
It is also important to remember that the first “progressive” president Woodrow Wilson was anti-free speech (besides being a racist).
Wilson soiled the term ‘progressive’ for a long time. “Liberal” took its place until the old term could be resurrected..
the problem with free speech is exactly that-it is free. Money is made over carefully chosen and dictated words that are approved via select few.
Money wins every time.
Freedom of speech is going #MeToo. An agreement that nobody in fact agreed to takes hold and speech is restricted by forces that only retired people can safely offend. And not even that in the UK.
“Our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it [disinformation] out of existence.”
Really? How so? It’s a two way street. If they had anything worthwhile to say, people might listen and they could hammer their “misinformation” out of existence by speaking freely. These people are hell bent on a one world government euro style. If Covid was so deadly had come the oldsters Clinton and Kerry are still alive? Maybe they weren’t exposed to high enough dose of disinformation?
The choice is coming. Dictatorship or civil war. I suspect Americans will choose dictatorship. It takes a population of aggressive men. With testosterone levels down we don’t have enough aggressive men.
All it takes is about 3% of the population to defend liberty. It may not include blue states, but there are enough veterans in red states to push back.
So it may be some kind of uncivil war, but people want their liberty. Many of us went to war to fight for it. Many of us will do so again before a dictatorship ensues.
We will demand that our states defend the 10th Amendment first.
A very uncivil war with brave, new tactics never before seen. This does not end well.
The reason the progressive fascists are hell bent on banning civilian owned assault weapons is because they are the best tool for citizens to resist tyranny.
The truth is that only 3% of all murders are committed with rifle let alone assault rifles. Furthermore, the progressive fascists don’t care about stopping crime, just look at their views on crime and punishment.
They never supported free speech. They only wanted power. To them, free speech by leftists was a means to power. Now, they have so much power, they don’t like free speech anymore since it no longer serves their purpose.
There’s a cure for “disinformation.” It’s called “truth.” If our government had been more consistently truthful with us, we would not have developed a sense we are being lied to (a sense that is nearly always accurate, so nearly continuously does the government lie).
But this is a pill that’s apparently to bitter for the state to swallow. So, rather than attend to the disease, they’ve determined they’ll attend to the symptoms. They propose an asymptomatic form of chronic lying syndrome.
It is far from just the First Amendment that the Left, of which the Democrats are the public face in this country, hates and wishes to destroy. The entire Bill of Rights is anathema to them and they would gladly remove [to a GULAG or more permanently] anyone who supports them or any limitation on the absolute power that they seek. I suspect that the key point will be when they and their collaborators are too blatant in seizing power and what passes for the “Mandate of Heaven” is obviously gone. At which point the traditional human means of maintaining or overturning rulership will come into play. It will be most untidy.
Subotai Bahadur