Freedom of Speech

President Harry S. Truman—a Democrat in the old-school sense of the word—had this to say about government censorship:

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."

The current Democrat president, his DoJ and other deep state agencies (e.g., FBI, CIA, CDC, NIH) have adopted covert and overt strategies that are designed to "silence the voice of [their] opposition." They tell us that it's all about eliminating "dis-information" (which almost invariably turns out to be the truth) or abolishing hate speech (which is usually just speech that criticizes their positions and decisions), or that it's in the interest of public health (when what they propose is NOT in the interest of public health at all) or in "defense of democracy" (which is laughable, given that they're working hard to eliminate freedom of speech, an overriding principle of democratic governance, rather than encourage it).

Image generated using A.I.

And when someone steps up in defense of free speech, he is demonized by the Democrats' trained hamsters in the media and investigated by the same government agencies that are the enemies of free speech. That someone would be the current owner of X (once known as Twitter), Elon Musk.

When Musk was interviewed by ex-CNN talking head, Don Lemon, it was a lot like Mike Tyson getting in the ring with a lobotomized Woody Allen. Lemon is a guy who thinks he's smart, when in fact, he's not very. Lemon challenged Musk on his principled stand in favor of free speech, suggesting that it was flawed because ... all the faux claims noted earlier. Here's a snippet of the conversation:

DON LEMON: We don't agree on this.

ELON MUSK: Yes, you want censorship and I don't.

DON LEMON: No, I don't want censorship.

ELON MUSK: Yes, you do.

DON LEMON: No, I want responsibility.

ELON MUSKl: I think you desperately want censorship. You want censorship so bad, you can taste it.

DON LEMON: No, that's not true. It's not true. I think that there's right and wrong.

And I think that when you have a platform that's as big as yours and as powerful as yours and as influential as yours, and you are a person of consequence to the world with what you do, that there is a certain responsibility that goes along with what you have on your platform and what you put out to the world. And I think that's important. You don't see that responsibility?

ELON MUSK: I think we have a responsibility to adhere to the law. And if people want the law changed, they should talk to their elected representative and get the law changed and then we will adhere to the law. But if you want us to go beyond the law, that is, that is us deciding to be censors. And I'm against censorship. I'm in favor of freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech only is relevant when people you don't like, say things you don't like, otherwise it has no meaning.

All of this is occurring as SCOTUS is in the process of deciding a government censorship case. In her comments as part of that case, liberal SCOTUS justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, said, "'... you've got the First Amendment hamstringing the government." Did she imply that was a bad thing? I'm not a legal scholar, but as I understand it, the 1st amendment is supposed to limit the power of our government from suppressing opposing speech. The Constitution was written to protect the people—NOT the interests of the government.

The Democrats—particularly the increasingly large left-wing of the party—have an authoritarian tendency. They see every solution to the problems facing our country as a centralized and large government. Free speech threatens the authoritarians because it questions their world view, their orthodoxy, and their ideas. And for that reason, in their view it must be limited. They're wrong, but then again, they're wrong about most things.