Democrats have become the enemies of free speech
We already know that, but here’s a discussion by Turley:
After years of being told that free speech is harmful and dangerous, many young people are virtual speech phobics — demanding that opposing views be silenced as “triggering” or even forms of violence. Now a Pew poll shows just how much ground we have lost, including the emergence of the Democratic Party as a virulent anti-free speech party. Pew found that “Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to support the U.S. government taking steps to restrict false information online (70% vs. 39%).”
I think the explanation is fairly simple, and it has to do with the extent of the left’s power to shape opinion. Back when the left was not in control of much of anything in the US, it was all for freedom of speech because it was guaranteeing its own freedom of speech. But once the Gramscian march was well advanced, and the left controlled (for the most part) the MSM, education, entertainment, law schools, librarians, some social media, and many government agencies such as the DOJ – the left was free to toss away free speech because now the left itself was in a position to do the censoring.
To what used to known as “liberals,” free speech was a principle worth defending. But to the left it never was; it was merely an instrument briefly championed when it helped the left and dropped when it no longer did. Censorship was fine and dandy as long as it was the left doing the censoring.
Turley writes:
The growing support for censorship may reflect the echo chambered media environment. Many people watch and read news that continues to downplay or entirely omit reports on biased censorship. President Biden even charged that companies who refused to censor opposing views on social media were “killing people.” Others have denounced free speech as “a white man’s obsession.” New York democrats called for limiting speech as a way of protecting democracy. Indeed, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has declared free speech is “tyranny.”
Many journalists have joined politicians and professors in decrying the dangers of free speech. Some falsely claim that hate speech is not protected under the First Amendment. Others panicked at the notion of free speech protections being restored at Twitter. On CNN, speech limits were called a “harm-reduction model” for the media. …
The European crackdown on free speech has now reached our shores and there are a growing number of citizens calling on the government to limit their right to free expression. It is a form of constitutional immolation by citizens who have never known true authoritarian government.
I’ve already explained where I think this is coming from. But I agree with Turley that some of it is also influenced by similar trends in Europe. I write “similar trends,” but that’s not really the best way to put it because Europe has never had a robust defense of free speech such as that in the US. It’s reflected in Europe’s lower standard of proof for defamation, and its enactment of hate speech laws and Holocaust denial laws. To a large extent, Canada is similar to Europe in this regard.
Both in Europe and in Canada and the US, the left’s stance against free speech also represents two competing although linked visions. The first is that the left and its ideas are far superior and the leftists are smarter and better than the rest of us, and as such should have the right to dictate what we can think and say. The second is that leftist thought is fragile and threatened and can’t win if freedom of speech is allowed to puncture its balloon. Both ideas argue in favor of censorship by the left.
ADDENDUM: And speaking of Europe and free speech, please see this:
The new German government coalition, which is likely to be the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) is looking to ban “lies,” according to a working paper that emerged from the group “culture and media” between the two parties.
the current govt in germany, has gone so far as to include a former member of the German Communists, now the Democracy Society sigh, as President, Gysi, yet the AfD is the real threat, (ht aegyptius) I’ve referred to other leftist figures like aldo spinelli, who designed the modern EU
in the UK, theLabour Party which has demonstrated to be as extreme as the one in the 80, see the confiscatory tac regime they have introduced against farmer, saw with the NewSpeak framework instituted after the Stockport murder spree, carried out by an Al Queda terrorist, with the cooperation of the wet tory Dominic Grieve,
now in this country, the organizer of at least some of these acts of repudiation against Musk*, is an associate of mis disinfo, Nina Jankewitz, what are the odds,
*two minute hates,
Back when the left was not in control of much of anything in the US, it was all for freedom of speech because it was guaranteeing its own freedom of speech.
Forget where I first saw it but it has been kicking around the right-o-sphere for a couple decades now.
For those who don’t click links, it’s Calvin’s babysitter quoting Frank Herbert in a game of Calvinball:
And this is what folks like the Bulwark and the Remnant and the other True and Principled Conservatives affect not to understand.
A norm requires almost everyone to buy in; otherwise it’s a device to flush the chumps. You can’t have a norm that 50% of people pretend to believe in when it suits them and violate when they gain by it, and that 50% actually believe in it and stick to it no matter how badly they get taken advantage of.
Some folks won’t understand the value of a norm until they have felt the consequences of losing it. And to quote Frank Herbert again, a little out of context,
What do leftists really desire?
Well, yet again, Orwell said it best:
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
George Orwell, 1984
of course we have this fellow,
https://twitchy.com/amy-curtis/2025/04/01/jamie-raskin-demands-return-of-illegal-alien-gang-members-rapid-response-47-n2410808
I won’t ellaborate on his lineage on the left, but we know he was a party to the attempted epuration after January 6th
You draw a distinction between ‘liberals’ and ‘the left’ which is factitious.. IMO, what you’re looking at is a generational shift in attitudes. An older generation (think Nat Hentoff or George McGovern) saw itself as a participant in public discussion that it did not control nor expect to control. They may have had little curiosity about the opposition’s ideas, but they weren’t terribly fazed that there was an opposition. They were also only ankle deep in the set of attitudes which refuse to recognize the distinction between an academic discipline and assumptions entertained or conclusions reached in such a discipline.
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Note also that the social vision of leftoids resembles that of a high school. They fancy their antagonists are disruptive adolescents and not what they actually are, which is people earning a living and running their own households.
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Agitating left has been that institutions they controlled – the schools, the media – have since 1995 seen severe erosion in their capacity to curate public discussion, By a social process which has yet to be elucidated, abusive leftoids were able to take control of gatekeeper positions at Google and Twitter and you had a critical mass of leftoids in tech who would launch denial-of-service attacks at centers of opposition. We know now the security state was leaning on these companies (and we can posit that Soros and Blackrock had a role in this). Musk has disrupted this effort to re-impose curated public discussion. A great many partisan Democrats are loosely wired people and people thinking and saying things they do not care for upsets them greatly.
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Something Turley has acknowledged from his own experience in academe is that there has been a concerted effort to prevent the hiring of faculty members who dissent from the official idea.
Boy are they going to be surprised. Trump has enormous power that he refrained from using or even hinting at. So far he seems to be letting the big fish run until it tires out. Then comes the harpoon.
Jamie Raskin is the son of Marcus Raskin, who with Richard Barnet founded the Institute for Policy Studies. I doubt a forensic audit of the Institute’s books back to 1962 would be anything but embarrassing to the Raskin and Barnet families, (It was a pro-Soviet outfit during the Cold War).
And this is what folks like the Bulwark and the Remnant and the other True and Principled Conservatives affect not to understand.
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The Remnant is a Catholic traditionalist newspapers. Their concerns are quite otherworldly. The Bulwark is a collecting pool of shills.
that remnant is erickson’s, quite apart from the bulwark and the dispatch,
“Indeed, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has declared free speech is “tyranny.”
It is always to be welcomed when traitors publicly announce wherein lie their true loyalties. As declaring free speech to be tyranny is to leave no doubt of their goal; to destroy all support for there even being such a thing as inalienable rights.
@Art Deco:The Remnant is a Catholic traditionalist newspaper…
More than one thing can be called the Remnant.
I’ve had a suspicion for a number of years that Reich’s children should be monitoring him carefully. It’s only retrospectively that you realize it was the dementia talking.
More than one thing can be called the Remnant.
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Evidently Michael Matt isn’t protecting his trademark.
Has Robert Conquest’s Third Law come around for the Democrat Party?
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Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics
(1) Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
(2) Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
(3) The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
________________________________
The propensity of today’s Democrats to double-down against free speech, closed borders, and deporting illegal migrant monsters, while supporting porn in school libraries and males competing in female sports suggests that Democrats are now controlled by a cabal of their enemies.
If Democrats want to die on those hills, it’s fine with me.
I’m wondering who the undercover MAGA operatives might be in that cabal. Or does it just appear that way?
Freedom of speech has been rare in human history. The forces that oppose it are always present, always looking for a way to suppress it. It’s terribly inconvenient to rulers who don’t like having to court the consent of the governed, when their ideas are hard to defend in the context of free debate.
It would appear that Bill Clinton and Robert Reich are giving the Rhodes Scholarship a bad name. Or has it always had that flavor baked in?
If one really wants to know where this is going—in real time—have a gander at Starmer’s UK.
And of course read and re-read Orwell (cf. the above quote) BUT one might fall into the false assumption that Orwell is merely theoretical ( though he most certainly isn’t); Starmer, OTOH, is most unfortunately (just one putrid example) of the real, if false, McCoy.
Art Deco
That’s not dementia talking. That’s his political philosophy talking. I am old enough to remember Time Magazine featuring Robert Reich as one of a group of outstanding college graduates of 1968.
And another from the “Heh” File (with special cameo by Marc Elias!…of course):
“DNC, Schumer Sue Trump Over Order Targeting Illegal Immigrant Voting;
“The order is unconstitutional, Democrats allege.”—
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/dnc-schumer-sue-trump-over-order-targeting-illegal-immigrant-voting-5834797
They are so smug and self righteous about it.
There is both the the attempt to ban saying things and the attempt to force verbal affirmation of things that are not true.
That’s not dementia talking. That’s his political philosophy talking. I am old enough to remember Time Magazine featuring Robert Reich as one of a group of outstanding college graduates of 1968.
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I’m old enough to remember him writing rather amiable articles for The New Republic on industrial policy. (He was a law professor who had no business writing about business or economics, but that’s another matter). The man’s deteriorated over the years. Part of the deterioration has been divorcing his wife and decamping to the Bay Area.
Hes a contemporary of bill clinton who tagged around on the boat to oxford so like a barnicle we cant get rid of him
Hes a contemporary of bill clinton who tagged around on the boat to oxford so like a barnicle we cant get rid of him
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He’s 78 years old and hasn’t held a public sector position in 28 years. His CV has not been updated in six years. He’s written a great deal, but you’d have to scrounge on his CV to locate any scholarly publication. He has a faculty position at the school of public policy at Berkeley, but neither his CV nor his faculty page list any courses taught.
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The guy is his generation’s John Kenneth Galbraith. Stick a fork in him. He’s done.
https://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2025/04/01/anti-musk-group-behind-day-of-action-against-tesla-offers-tips-on-jail-support-finding-targets-home-address/
Likewise
https://x.com/walterkirn/status/1907162257034993677
I have come to respect taibbi for some of his insights (he has blind spots like greenwald without a doubt)
As far back as I can recall, which is not as far as it goes, liberals and those further left could hold both sides of a position in a single sentence if it were tactically necessary.
This was done, of course, by flipping the definition of certain words. “free” might mean free to speak, or, if necessary, free from bad feelz on account of bad speaking.
When you hear audio of “protestors” confronting cops or conservatives, the word barrage coming from them is meaningless. Every third word needs a definition because they’re using it to mean something it doesn’t mean and you’d get distracted arguing about that in which the process is repeated.. Going down that rabbit hole is a waste of time. I wonder if that’s how they think or if it’s a tactic.
And in matters of freedom of speech, ill will is imputed so…you don’t want to be a big meanie, do you? In fact, there should be a law against it.
It’s very, very bad.
Young adults refuse to debate with people they disagree with.
And then there’s the “no contact” movement where young liberal adults cut off all contact with family members they disagree with because of different political opinions.
Young adults refuse to debate with people they disagree with. And then there’s the “no contact” movement where young liberal adults cut off all contact with family members they disagree with because of different political opinions.
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Waal, kids, you’re gonna miss us when we’re gone.
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In fairness, just this morning I told a family member who asked me a question about why I favored a certain thing that I would give a précis of why I held to my position but not discuss it with her further. From 29 years experience, I understand further discussion would lead into a rabbit warren, and I haven’t the patience or presence of mind at my age. (The leftoid males in my family are not any easier to talk to, just more supercilious).
Here’s a retrospective of slimy Joe Scarborough telling us that Biden is “sharp as a tack” and his “best version ever.”*
The Internet is forever.
*See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nWUxRxrPU8
This conversation has failed to include the failure of our schools of journalism. Almost all colleges now adhere to the position that news reporting cannot be “facts only” because humans are doing it. That is to say that “objectivity” loses while “advocacy” is the correct way to report an event–because after all you–the reporter–are only human, and you cannot remove your own opinions from any event! THAT is the philosophy and pedagogy of almost all schools of journalism today! What are you going to do in your state to challenge your local university/college?