The increasingly aggressive attempts by the left to silence political opponents reveal that they have begun to believe that controlling the political narrative is not just their obligation but their right.
Witness the Mayor of Brussels sending his police force to shut down a gathering of The National Conservatism Conference (NatCon). According to reports, “Mayor Emir Kir … expressed concerns about the views of some attendees. ‘Among these personalities there are several particularly from the right-conservative, religious right and European extreme right. … The far right is not welcome.’”
Although Belgium’s high court overruled Mayor Kir’s actions and allowed the NatCom conference to resume, Kir amply demonstrated just how far the left feels entitled to go in suppressing conservative speech. A police raid on a peaceful and orderly conservative conference attended by scholars and elected leaders? Why not? Their views are “not welcome.”
In the US, we see revealed the Biden Administration’s ordering social media companies to suppress views the Administration dislikes. If it were not for Elon Musk’s release of the “Twitter Files” to honest journalists and the successful efforts to obtain discovery rights in Missouri v Biden (now referred to as Murthy v Missouri), we might never have known the depths to which President Biden’s administrative state went to suppress the speech of its political opponents.
When US District Court Judge Terry Doughty ordered a preliminary injunction against Administration officials’ contact with social media platforms until the case could be appealed, he wrote that “During … a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’”
The Supreme Court placed a stay on Doughty’s injunction in October of 2023 until it could hear and decide the case. Dissenting from this stay was Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote: “This case concerns what two lower courts found to be a ‘coordinated campaign’ by high-level federal officials to suppress the expression of disfavored views on important public issues.”
Many Supreme Court observers came away from the March 18 2024 oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri believing the Court is unlikely to grant any meaningful relief from government suppression of disfavored speech. This is all the more reason the Congress and We the People should pay close attention to the speech rights we stand effectively to lose if we allow the entrenched leftists who operate the federal government to persist in suppressing and even silencing conservative speech.
The Twitter Files and Murthy v Biden have revealed incontrovertible evidence of motive. The Biden Administration and their operatives in the administrative state have a robust desire to suppress speech they dislike.
This is the single greatest reason those of us in the liberty movement should vigorously oppose the Biden Administration’s seizure of power over the internet. On April 25, acting on President Biden’s orders, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will formally claim vast new “Title II” powers over Internet Service Providers (ISPs), empowering the administrative state to define what internet service products may be offered and at what price.
What political favor could the federal government not demand with the threat of using such powers? Whatever soothing language the FCC may offer, the fact is that President Biden’s Commerce Secretary is demanding rate regulation as a condition of receiving broadband infrastructure dollars, despite such regulation being forbidden in the infrastructure law. If they are willing to pursue rate regulation in defiance of existing law, just wait till they give themselves the power to do it legally.
Whatever one may think of ISPs, or social media platforms, they control the vast majority of political speech in this country. With the deep corruption that comes with the ever-increasing powers of the administrative state and its ever-growing appetite to suppress conservative speech, hope is not a strategy.
The left controls the administrative state, academia, and the vast majority of corporate media. They have become more and more adept at pushing each other to label what was only recently commonly held beliefs as “hateful,” “dangerous,” “violent,” “conspiratorial,” “misinformation,” and therefore to be suppressed.
We know what the left’s motives are when it comes to free speech – they get it, and we don’t. We know what corrupt behavior they have engaged in with the power they already have. Why on earth would we stand by as they seize even more?
Andrew Langer, Director of CPAC Foundation’s Center for Regulatory Freedom
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