By Tom Woods
September 7, 2024
From the Tom Woods Letter:
There's very little that would surprise people like you and me at this point, but it still frustrates me how many dopes we have who cheer the idea of people being punished for things they say.
Oh, there's always some excuse that makes their censorship different. "It was a pandemic." "Lives were at stake." "Hate isn't free speech." "We have to prevent misinformation."
Set aside for a moment whether Covid was a pandemic or not: a pandemic is precisely when we most want a vigorous exchange of ideas.
There is zero chance that any one person or group would fully understand the situation, and certainly if people are going to advocate extreme policies like lockdowns, we ought to hear from those who warn about their effects. Why would we not want that?
"Hate" can mean anything, and it really is true that "hate speech" is more accurately described as speech the regime hates.
We want to give one institution a monopoly on determining what constitutes hate?
As for "misinformation," please. When the federal government suffers the slightest consequence for its nonstop barrage of misinformation, we can take it seriously.
And even then: as we saw during Covid, yesterday's "misinformation" suddenly became today's consensus. Who is this monopoly to decide for us what is "misinformation"? For them, whatever contradicts the story they're trying to tell is "misinformation."
Kamala Harris doesn't inspire confidence on this front. (You think I'm understating that enough?)
Social media is spreading around a clip from a 2019 interview in which she says, "There has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation. And that has to stop."
Think about that: They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation. The correct answer to that is so what?
You know who else speaks directly to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation? The U.S. government. But that's no problem, you see, because only wonderful and trustworthy people staff that institution.
More recently, Kamala threatened to "put the Department of Justice of the United States back in the business of justice." She doesn't mean actual justice, needless to say. Here's what she means:
We will double the Civil Rights Division and direct law enforcement to counter this extremism. We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms, because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy. And if you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare, if you don't police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable as a community.
Law professor Jonathan Turley warns that the situation is grave:
You have in Europe threats against Musk for arrest. They've already arrested another CEO of a platform. But it's really Brazil that I think many in the anti-free speech movement are watching carefully.
If Brazil can succeed in banning Twitter from the entire country, it will be replicated because many hold the view of what you just heard from Vice President Harris. They view speech as a privilege. It's like a driver's license that they think that can be rescinded if you're reckless. And this is the ultimate destination for this movement, where if they can't convince people to give up their own freedoms to embrace censorship, they're going to start to take sites offline to prevent people from hearing opposing views....
Free speech is on the ballot because, quite frankly, Harris/Walz's administration would be a perfect nightmare for free speech.
These regimes need to control the narratives they try to impose on us, and they've never before had to deal with institutions that can challenge them so systematically and relentlessly. So it is urgent that we hold the line.
