Leftists Argue Government Censorship is the Highest Form of Speech

Sult ^ | July 10, 2023 | Daniel Greenfield

[Chad C. Mulligan]

When Judge Terry Doughty issued an injunction in Missouri v. Biden that banned the government from “specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression”, all hell broke loose.

Evelyn Douek, a Stanford law professor, formerly of the Knight First Amendment Institute, warned that preventing the government from colluding with corporations to censor citizens would have a “chilling effect on communication between the government and platforms.”

In traditional free speech jurisprudence, ‘chilling effects’ were inflicted by the government, but Douek is worried that free speech might have a chilling effect on government censorship. After advocating, in cases like Lamont v. Postmaster General, that any interference with speech, no matter how odious including, in the aforementioned Supreme Court case, asking recipients of Communist propaganda to affirmatively agree to receive it, entailed a ‘chilling effect’, liberals don’t want to chill the censors, instead they’re worried that civil rights will chill censorship.

Even though it’s the height of summer, chilling effects on censorship were on display.

Liberals who might have once worried about free speech now fret that the government will be inhibited from censoring free speech. According to CNN, “Legal experts say that the order is overly broad and scholars on online misinformation warned that it could have a chilling effect on the government’s efforts to curtail lies about public health emergencies and elections.”

[lowbridge]

I disagree. It’s been my experience that lifelong democrats are more than OK with government AND non-government censorship, especially of their political opponents. Same way they’re OK with stripping us of all our other freedoms. Right to own guns. Right to vote. They’re OK with the news media acting as propaganda arms of the democratic party. They’re OK with censorship of conservatives on social media. They’re OK with fellow democrats in office abusing their positions to harass and persecute their political opponents. Which is why they jumped for joy each and everytime Trump got harassed. The raid on Mar a Lago. The indictments. The impeachments. The lawsuits.

One lifelong democrat told me that while he didn’t believe Biden won 2020 because of cheating, IF Biden did win thanks to election fraud, he was OK with it just as long as it got Trump out of the white house.

IF there is any such thing as lifelong democrats who are opposed to government censorship, they’re a very, very tiny minority in the democratic party.

[neverevergiveup]

The most difficult and unbearable, literally unbearable, part for me, of all of the insanity, is that general population accepts and agrees. It is terrifying and truly unbearable

I agree. I'm not sure what percentage of the general population 'accepts and agrees', but anything more than a few percentage points is totally unacceptable.