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[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
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.”
Nina Jankowicz, Biden’s former disinformation czar, popped up to argue that,”it’ll have a chilling effect on government and academia, ensuring that officials and researchers think twice before trying to counter those spreading conspiracies and false information.”
The axis of concern had shifted from worrying that government action would inhibit free speech to agonizing that judicial interference would prevent the government from inhibiting free speech.
The existence of ‘chilling effects’ in free speech cases testified to the degree to which we protected free speech from even the faintest tinge of indirect discouragement. Now, lefty academics and experts want to not only reverse the polarities of free speech, but they are just as worried that any protection for free speech will interfere with government censorship.
Its new victims are not civilians who engage in political speech, but government censors.
To justify this inversion of civil rights, they have also inverted the concept of censorship so that the true form of free speech is to prevent others from speaking.
According to Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, preventing the government from censoring citizens was… censorship.
Litman told NPR that the injunction “literally prevents the federal government from sending emails to social media companies about their content moderation policies or having meetings with social media companies about taking down speech and posts. And so that prevents speech, really important speech, from ever happening.”
The most important speech is government speech that suppresses the speech of the public.
If government censorship is speech, then any interference with government censorship is a violation of free speech. And the government must be allowed to censor everyone lest its really important speech be restrained from taking place. And then where would we be, except free?
Judge Terry Doughty was attacked by pro-censorship leftists for invoking George Orwell’s 1984 and yet that same faction insists on ‘literally’ arguing that censorship is speech.
Crying censorship has become the last resort of censors who demand the right to censor.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis and other governors signed laws barring Big Tech monopolies from deplatforming candidates for public office, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Amazon, Google and Facebook, sued in the name of free speech.
“We are bringing this suit to safeguard the industry’s free speech,” CCIA boss Matt Schruers claimed. “A digital service that declines to host harmful content is exercising its own First Amendment rights.”
“Section 7 does not chill speech; if anything, it chills censorship,” the Fifth Circuit court replied.
“We reject the Platforms’ efforts to reframe their censorship as speech. It is undisputed that the Platforms want to eliminate speech—not promote or protect it. And no amount of doctrinal gymnastics can turn the First Amendment’s protections for free speech into protections for free censoring.” But that hasn’t stopped the totalitarian gymnastics from going forward.
After arguing that censorship by some of the biggest companies in the world was really speech, lefty legal scholars are arguing that government censorship is free speech, and that when judges prevent the government from censoring, the government’s speech is being violated.
The official Biden administration position is that it is entitled to censor in the event of emergencies.
“We’re not going to apologize for promoting responsible actions to protect public health, safety and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic or foreign attacks on our elections,” Sharon Yang, a White House spokeswoman, argued.
These deadly challenges and foreign attacks included a video mocking Jill Biden and a Twitter account impersonating Biden’s granddaughter. Biden officials insisted on having these and many other posts, accounts and materials that they disliked taken down.
Emergencies have never been anything other than an excuse for a broad censorship scheme.
Liberals have abandoned even the pretense of caring about free speech. Laurence Tribe, a lefty constitutional law professor, co-authored an op-ed complaining that the injunction “seems to maintain that the government cannot even politely ask companies not to publish verifiable misinformation.”
What would Tribe’s view be on the Nixon administration “politely” asking the media not to spread lies about the Vietnam War, the Reagan administration “politely” asking the media not to lie about the War on Drugs, and the Bush administration “politely” asking the media not to lie about the War on Terror? Any such suggestions, no matter how mild, were greeted with rabid rage.
“The First Amendment certainly doesn’t prevent them from merely asking,” Tribe contends, and preventing the government from doing so “would turn the Constitution’s protection of free expression in an open society into an obstacle course for some of the most valuable exchanges of information and ideas we can imagine.” The most valuable exchanges of ideas apparently involve asking social media monopolies to take down content mocking the president.
Lefty legal scholars keep arguing that government censorship is the highest form of speech.
After abandoning free speech, lefty legal scholars now celebrate the virtues of censorship in the glowing language once used for promoting reverence for a free exchange of ideas. Forget an open society, a truly valuable exchange of ideas consists of government officials telling huge corporations whom to censor this morning.
None of this is remarkable when you go back to the origins of lefty support for free speech.
In 1934, Roger Nash Baldwin, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the ACLU, quite clearly explained why he was fighting for civil liberties. “I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which worker’s rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental. When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever.”
The American Left believes it has gained enough power that it no longer sees any value in maintaining protections for free speech, at least at a federal level, and has publicly switched its enthusiasm from speech to censorship. It now lovingly speaks of the valuable “speech” of government censors and of the ‘chilling effects’ of extremist judges who interfere with them.
There are still select conservative enclaves where the Left pretends to care about free speech. Should parents persuade a middle school library to pull a work of hard core LGBTQ pornography off the shelves, the Left will describe this as an attack on the First Amendment. But otherwise, freedom of speech has been buried in the same unmarked grave as freedom of religion with the bulk of the First Amendment soon set to join the Second Amendment.
Censorship is becoming speech and speech is becoming censorship. The real threat to civil liberties comes from people interfering with the speech of censors telling them to “shut up”.
In a world where governments have rights and people have none, the right to censor is the only right. And if they disagree with you, liberals will fight to the death for the right of the government to silence you.
Mo de Profit says
Have you ever considered becoming a teacher of logical thinking?
My brain hurts after reading this!!
dennodogg says
Was thinking the same thing. Looking at her picture I was wondering when Jay Leno went trans.
Algorithmic Analyst says
I was trying to think how to characterize government speech.
“The highest form of lying”
or the art of using speech to secure and maintain political power.
So the poor sucker who is a civilian has to constantly exercise his judgement to figure out what is true and what actions he should take.
;^) says
We’re essentially being told, “You Can’t Handle the Truth!”
Apparently, we aren’t smart enough to judge true from false, so we need bureaucratic oversight…
to protect us!
Actually though, tyrants always fear free-thinkers. Reality must be spun, to keep us from realizing how long we’ve been lied to!
Just a final thought…when government and corporations align against the people, it’s called FASCISM!
Steven Brizel says
Freedom of speech should never be confused with freedom to censor dissenting views
Ugly Sid says
Without proper examination I can’t say for sure, but I suspect cranial worms.
Kampala’s speech writer may be patient zero.
Rich Collins says
Show me a Leftwinger and I’ll show you a lobotomy candidate.
Alan Falk says
More like a “lobotomy recipient…”
David Ray says
Those at Buckingham Palace are about to experience the same groans & eye-rolls that B. Hussein and his staff had to, when the idiot VP Sleepy Joe would enter a room. (“Ah shit! How the hell did he find out about this meeting!?? There goes 30 minutes of my life.”)
When a moron like Sleazy Joe has convinced himself that he’s not that stupid, the people who are forced to listen to him suffer.
They check their watches (more than Sleepy did at Dover Airforce Base) while enduring his bullshit, having to act like they’re interested, waiting for him to finally shut up.
(I can mute the TV or radio within seconds of FJB running his yap; dignitaries don’t have that option.)
Alan Falk says
True, that!
I see one of the major dangers is that…
“The official Biden administration position is that it is entitled to censor in the event of emergencies.”
And the same dictators assume the ultimate power to decide what comprises an “emergency.”
Thus dictatorships grow and freedoms die.
Kasandra says
How Orwellian – preventing the government from pressuring private entities to censor material it doesn’t like is censoring the government’s free speech rights. I suppose it never occurred to these idiot professors that it is nothing of the sort. Government has the mega-megaphone of being able to put out mountains of news releases and give the media interviews in which it can dispute posts with which it disagrees. But it cannot act to prevent those views from getting out there. That is prior restraint, the very evil the First Amendment from which it was intended to protect us.
Kasandra says
FWIW, it’s probably more of a philosophical debate but does the government even have First Amendment rights under the Constitution. The Bill of Rights is a list of the peoples’ rights that the government may not violate. It has nothing to do with the rights of the government except for expressing a negative right as to what it can do to the citizen. But, apparently, that “subtle” distinction escapes our learned legal professors.
Daniel Greenfield says
government officials as individuals could have first amendment rights to express their views
e.g. can they wear a BLM or MAGA cap (this came up when Christie fired a NJ employee for protesting against a mosque)
they don’t however have first amendment rights in their functions as government officials, that becomes absurd since freedom of speech is a right from the government, not of the government
Paul Marks says
A protection from government.
Dr_Goldstein says
I would describe Freedom of Opinion, and Freedom of Expression as God given rights.
Albert Barnett says
How do we pull the soapbox away from these billionaires? If they control who can stand on the soapbox or how loud they may shout, how long before they only allow their friends to be the only ones whose voices count for anything. We need a public town square that needs not the computers of the tech billionaires. Maybe a distributed network of freedom supporters creates a blockchain type soapbox. We need a common simple app that does not need their access control and runs quietly on an average home computer only taking up a few compute cycles and a small amount of your network bandwidth.
John Smith says
The easiest way for the government to dampen viewpoints that they perceive as false, is to come clean with the truth about their own activities. A people completely sick of being lied to will enthusiastically accept the government viewpoint if the people feel they’re being treated with respect and told the truth, no matter how toad-ugly. Try playing it straight, just for once. Of course, the “disinformation specialists” will be totally opposed to that, because they get their power from trying to get the people to believe lies. But, of course, the people won’t cooperate, because even if they end up being influenced by deception, they still embrace the principle of seeking after and desiring the truth.
SPURWING PLOVER says
And Censorship id Freedom of Speech who in the world do these imbeciles think their kidding?
Daniel Greenfield says
the people who watch the media
M. Tiro says
1, Excellent, as usual. TY for your terrific work, Mr. Greenfield.
2, You correctly described the standard Marxist playbook, which the American left has totally adopted–change the meaning of words, and then saturate the compliant/corrupt media with incessant propaganda (hello, Josef Goebbels). I’m sure you noticed the talking-points repetition of phrases like “chilling effects.” They all say the same thing b/c they’re all reading from the same script.
TG for Judge Doughty’s courage, and TG for you too, Mr. Greenfield!
Daniel Greenfield says
Thank you. Indeed. They adopt ‘buzzwords’, ‘spin’ the meaning of a concept like free speech so that it means the exact opposite, and then ‘flood the zone’ to achieve informational dominance
tactics taken from mass propaganda, advertising and wars
Elka Zelda says
Without double standards the left would have no standards at all. The whole Russian hoax, the Steele dossier etc.etc.- if Trump had dared try to,have that silenced ( not that he would have succeeded) the screams of First Amendment rights and censorship would have beeen verberating for months, if not years!
Jeff says
The left has been using the same tactics related to voting “rights” for decades. Any attempt to assure the integrity of the voting process and prevent fraud is deemed to be denying the “voting rights” of minorities. If they can’t cheat or otherwise subvert the election process then it becomes a civil rights issue.
Daniel Greenfield says
civil rights gives them total unlimited power
legislation was written that effectively overrides almost everything in the name of civil rights
now the Supreme Court came out and said that the First Amendment supersedes it
steven l says
Leftist theology is fascism!
Snellville Bob says
I am waiting for an enterprising lawyer to sue these agencies for tampering with an elect using the Hatch Act.
Kit_Jefferson says
Liberals are so hard headed they simply refuse to take “no” for an answer; up to the point of throwing a hissy fit they hope will allow them to have their way. Expect a Battle Royale to ensue and expect the powers that be to find other devious ways to censor what they do not want the public to see and hear.
clayusmcret says
“…warned that preventing the government from colluding with corporations to censor citizens would have a “chilling effect on communication between the government and platforms.””
There should be a chilling effect on communications between government and platforms. There should be NO coordination between them where it comes to censorship. None!
Daniel Greenfield says
exactly
Joey says
These pro government censuring lawyers are real snakes and their logic is contorted and does not hold up. The argument “preventing the government from censoring citizens was… censorship.” is completely illogical. The government has the right to publish all they want, but the constitution does not give it the right to censure citizens whether that be directly or indirectly through 3rd party platforms. Censuring is not an enumerated power in the constitution for the federal government and the government cannot engage in it either directly or indirectly.
mj says
We live in a three ring circus, complete with a malevolent ring master, clowns, freaks, dare devils and ferocious beasts.
And don’t forget the
behind-the-scenes folk who clean up after the elephants (what? And leave show business?!).
I for one don’t know what this “free speech”, pryed and twisted by this government out of constitutional context, means anymore.
In grade school I understood what free speech meant from what I learned about Peter Zenger and the free press. Hah!!!!!
This government tosses around the words free and speech like a smug juggler in a carnival, an ideological carnival of evil.
RS says
When free speech is shut down, so is Freedom and rights, Its called a dictatorship.
Jim1937 says
I believe after 86 years on this planet, 20 years in the military and a masters degree, I don’t need Joey Biden and his clown car explaining things to me.
JVR says
If the wonderful government’s wonderful speech (as previously delivered in secret to gatekeepers of social media) is so important and valuable, why not let everyone hear it?
Greebo says
There cannot be a free people if they do not have free speech. Censorship is unlimited power over the people & it corrupts. Corrupt power OVER the people will enslave them in the worst sort of tyranny.
Paul Marks says
The “disinformation” came from the government and the pet (“partner”) corporations which are joined at the hip with the government. What they tried to censor or shadow ban, was the truth.
Dr_Goldstein says
I’m pretty old fashioned. I stand by the old saying “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend with my life your right to say it.”
Censorship of opinions has no place in Free Country.