The Democrats Have Some Seriously Dangerous Pro-Censorship Views.

It has now become mainstream Democratic Party Orthodoxy to not believe in the First Amendment.

Historically, freedom of speech has been a left-wing cause. Noam Chomsky, one of the intellectual pioneers of left-wing thought was always a strong defender of free speech famously saying :

If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.

In the 70s the left-wing Civil Liberties organization ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) defended the rights of Neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, a predominantly Jewish suburb in Chicago based on the principle that if the speech of the vilest people is not defended, there will be no free speech protection left.

However, as the Democratic Party moves farther and farther away from traditional left-wing values and closer toward authoritarian neo-cons such as Dick Cheney they have abandoned this traditional left-wing principle for the establishment view that America needs more censorship to police so-called “misinformation”.

Under the Biden administration, the Democrats have become more anti-free speech than ever. Early in his presidency, Joe Biden created an Orwellian sub-division of the DHS called the “disinformation governance board” that was intended to police so-called "disinformation” and “misinformation” online. The board was headed by Nina Jankowitz, someone who herself was guilty of spreading CIA misinformation such as whitewashing state department-backed neo-nazi groups in Ukraine and spreading the CIA-generated lie that Russia was putting bounties for the Taliban on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan.

Jankowitz also made it clear her goal was to crack down on dissident American media, attacking anti-war media figures and outlets by names such as Glenn Greenwald, Wikileaks, and The Grayzone and calling for them to be censored. While the board was eventually dissolved after public backlash, its creation shows that the democrat’s intentions are to label anything that goes against the government’s lies “misinformation” and censor media outlets that are poking a thumb in the eye of the establishment.

When the Twitter Files leaks revealed that intelligence agencies and government-aligned think tanks were pressuring Twitter to take down posts critical of the official narrative on issues ranging from foreign policy to Covid-19 the Democrats were the strongest defenders of this policy. At a Senate hearing where journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified on the context of these leaks, Democrats like Representative Collin Allred defended intelligence agencies censoring social media by saying “Ordinary folks and national security agencies responsible for our security are trying their best to find a way that our online discourse doesn’t get people hurt or see our democracy undermined”.

The Democrats not only defended the intelligence agencies’ censorship of social media but actively tried to put Matt Taibbi in prison for revealing this fact. On the same day that he testified at the House Judiciary Committee about the Twitter Files, he received an unannounced visit from the IRS. The visit was clearly an intimidation technique to stop him from testifying about the leaks, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted “The curious timing of this visit, on the heels of the FTC demand that Twitter turn over names of journalists, raises questions about potential intimidation”.

Even worse Stacey Plaskett, a Democratic congressional representative from the Virgin Islands threatened Taibbi with five years of jail time over a minor error in the Twitter files reporting-that was later corrected by him-falsely accusing him of perjury.

The Democrats have also used attempts at countering “foreign election interference” as an excuse to crack down on America's speech. Under the Biden administration former Hawaii representative and 2020 presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard was accused of being a “terrorist affiliate” and followed by U.S. air Marshals.

The FBI raided Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s house because he has written articles for Sputnik, a Russian state-backed news outlet. The FBI also raided the house of journalist Dimitry Simes for the same reason.

Most recently Secretary of State Anothony Blinken accused the independent outlet “Africa Stream” of being run by Russia -without evidence- leading to their removal on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Stripe. The accusation came after Africa Stream debunked a hit piece on them from the American state propaganda outlet VOA (Voice of America) that tried to whitewash American drone strikes in Somalia.

All of these developments have led it to be mainstream democratic party orthodoxy that the First Amendment should not be abided by.

Kamala Harris’s Vice President Tim Walz said “There is no guarantee of free speech on misinformation or hate speech” even though they are clearly both protected by the First Amendment.

2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton took this a step farther and said that Americans who spread so-called Russian disinformation should be “civilly, or even in some cases criminally charged”. Clinton is quick to call anyone that calls out her bloodthirsty warmongering bullshit a foreign agent. In 2019 she claimed without evidence that Jill Stein was a “Russian asset” and implied the same about then-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard. Most recently she implied again without evidence that pro Palestine protests at Columbia had “outside funding and outside direction”. The fact that an influential Democrat-who thinks anyone who doesn't want to set the world on fire is a foreign agent-wants Americans to be jailed over accusations of spreading “foreign misinformation” is extremely scary to say the least.

Even Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who ran in 2018 in opposition to the democratic establishment but overtime morphed into a useful tool for it said “We're going to have to figure out how to rain in our media environment so that you can’t just spew misinformation and disinformation”.

Most recently at the WEF (World Economic Forum) John Kerry said that the First Amendment was a “major block” in stopping “disinformation” and having “some accountability on facts”. As journalist Matt Taibbi jokingly said he was “sitting in Klaus Schwab’s lap, apologizing for the First Amendment to a crowd of Europeans”.

But there is some real truth to that joke, the Democrats do seem to want to change the American view on free speech into the European model where the lack of first amendment protections can allow the establishment to crack down on dissidents much easier. In the UK the government has weaponized section twelve of the “terrorism act” which makes it illegal for anyone to say something supportive of a “prescribed terrorist organization”. This has been used to charge Journalists Richard Medhust,Richard Barnard, and Sarah Wilkinson for their reporting on Israel’s war crimes.

The situation has gotten so bad that journalist Jonathan Cook has been forced to put a disclaimer on his articles in order to protect himself from being jailed for criticizing Israel saying:

Nothing in this post, in line with Section 12 of the UK Terrorism Act, in any way indicates, or should be seen to be encouraging, support for any group designated as a terrorist organization by the British government.

In Germany author CJ Hopkins is being prosecuted for a clearly satirical book cover that compares overreaches in the response to Covid-19 to Nazi Germany. Hopkins was clearly making a point that he believed Mask and Vaccine mandates were authoritarian but is being prosecuted for “trivializing National Socialism” anyway. By this standard people who jokingly use the term “Grammar Nazi” should be prosecuted.

By saying at the World Economic Forum that the First Amendment is a “major block” to policing misinformation, what John Kerry meant was it made it harder for them to create cases like those listed in the UK and Germany.

The saddest irony of the Democrat's full embrace of authoritarianism is that it has allowed the Republicans to pretend they are free speech warriors when in reality they are no better. When it comes to speech they like, they are the biggest defenders of free speech but those principles go out the window when speech comes up that they don’t like.

As Jullian Assange brought up in a recent press conference Trump brought one of the biggest blows to the First Amendment in his first term by prosecuting him under the espionage act for his reporting. This case made it not only illegal to leak classified documents but now made it illegal to publish classified documents, something even Obama refused to do even with his massive use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers.

Even worse, the Trump administration attempted to kidnap and kill Jullian Assange and the plot was discussed “at the highest levels of the Trump administration” according to an investigation in Yahoo news.

Trump has also called to jail people for burning the American flag despite the fact that the supreme court ruled it is first Amendment-protected speech.

The official 2024 Republican platform has threatened to deport students for protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza saying they want to “deport pro-Hamas radical and make our college campuses safe”. The platform also threatens to crack down on academic freedom by vowing to “fire Radical Left accreditors” on college campuses.

Free speech, just like war and peace is another issue where the democrats have taken the neocon establishment line and the Republicans despite claiming otherwise are not better.