Our freedom to speak our minds is under attack from the left.
That sentence alone is ominous. But when we take a closer look at Democrat Party efforts to suppress or censor conservative speech or written content that runs counter to the left's various narratives (always with the eager assistance of the left-media), today's blatant attack on the First Amendment is downright chilling.
We are arguably living through the most dangerous anti-free speech movement in American history. From the Biden-Harris administration pressuring Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to censor COVID-19 information to a Columbia University professor and former Biden aide's NYT op-ed in which he declared that "The First Amendment is out of control," the left continues to up its anti-free speech game.
And if the Harris-Walz ticket wins the election? God help us.
During the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate, JD Vance charged that Kamala Harris would "like to censor people who engage in misinformation."
[She] is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale. She did it during COVID. She’s done it over a number of other issues.
And during a back-and-forth exchange with Tim Walz, Vance said:
[Harris] wants to use the power of government and big tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment.
George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley recently weighed in on Walz's censorship comments during the debate, as well, calling the Minnesota governor "fundamentally wrong."
In the vice presidential debate Tuesday, Minnseota Governor Tim Walz pulled the fire alarm. His opponent, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, cited the massive system of censorship supported by Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate.
Walz proceeded to quote the line from a 1919 case in which Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said you do not have the right to falsely yell fire in a crowded theater. It is the favorite mantra of the anti-free speech movement. It also is fundamentally wrong.
Holmes wrote, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” [T]he line was largely lifted from a brief in an earlier free speech case. It has since become the rationale for politicians and pundits seeking to curtail free speech in America.
Turley went on to label the Biden-Harris administration the "most anti-free speech administration in two centuries."
The "censorship" charges against the Biden and Harris administration intensified in August after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress that the Biden administration has pressured the company to censor some posts.
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Even worse, the mere thought of a Harris-Walz administration should make all freedom-loving Americans quake in their proverbial boots. Perfect example: Walz recently showed up on MSNBC to support censoring "disinformation" and "misinformation," declaring:
There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.
As Turley noted, Walz's claim was "entirely untrue and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the right called "indispensable" by the Supreme Court.
"Even after some of us condemned his claim as ironically dangerous disinformation," Turley said, "Walz continues to repeat it."
There's a larger point here, also, with respect to the lies of the left. Democrat politicians and party elitists could not care less when they are discredited by facts. What Democrats very much care about is convincing low-information, rank-and-file Democrat voters that their lies and misstatements are true.
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Free Speech Is on the Ballot: Jonathan Turley Shreds Harris for Her Hostility to the 1st Amendment
'Fact-Checking': The Left's Latest Form of Censorship
What we witnessed in both the presidential and vice-presidential debates amounted to suppression and censorship of Donald Trump and JD Vance, only. And in several instances, the so-called "moderators" were demonstrably wrong and the statements they "fact-checked" were correct. And given that they only "fact-checked" Trump and Vance, they could not have been more blatantly biased.
Here's more:
“Fact-checking” is like “fake news”: Something that is now entirely in the eye of the beholder.
At the vice presidential debate this week, the CBS moderators once again tried to show that they were the fair and impartial people in the room
Except that — as with the Trump-Harris debate — they only seemed interested in fact-checking in one direction. Against the Republican. On Tuesday night the subject of Springfield,
Ohio, once again came up. And once again Springfield revealed one of the big problems of this media era. CBS’s Margaret Brennan decided to fact check something that JD Vance said and immediately relayed a piece of false information herself.
Following Vance’s point about the number of illegal migrants Brennan announced authoritatively that Springfield does in fact have “a large number of Haitian migrants” but that they have “legal status [and] Temporary Protected Status.”
It was then down to Vance to fact-check the fact-checker by pointing out — correctly — that what Brennan had just described was actually a “pathway” opened up by Kamala Harris explicitly to fudge the true levels of illegal immigration.
Without Vance's correction, viewers could easily have believed Brennan's implied "legal status" claim that there are no problems in places like Springfield because the stories of illegal aliens are "incorrect." Think about how many other claims made by Harris and Walz and backed by the left-wing media lapdogs have gone unchecked.
The same thing happened in the presidential debate when, for example, the ABC "moderators" allowed Harris to claim without proof that Donald Trump backs the 2025 Project, unchecked, but got all over Trump's assertion that Haitians in Springfield were eating dogs and cats.
Meanwhile, the Harris-Walz censorship band plays on.
