Free Speech is On the Ballot

By: Chris Johnson

233 years – that’s how long the First Amendment to the United States Constitution governed uncontested in the United States of America.

In this 2024 election, the formerly universally respected and enshrined principle that people have the right to think and speak freely has been rebutted by a presidential candidate – and, soberingly, the race is tied.

In 2019, after the Democrat debates, then presidential Democrat candidate Kamala Harris called for then sitting president Donald Trump’s prolific Twitter account to be deplatformed. She went on to say this about Twitter and Facebook and other social media sites by extension: “…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.”

We quickly got a sense of what that oversight would look like in the following months. Immediately after he stepped down from office, all of the former President’s social media accounts were taken down. This happened after those same social media sites banned the publishing and sharing of certain news stories which hinted at a Biden corruption scandal, the Hunter Biden laptop story, at the behest of the intelligence community.

The months and years to come would see the attempted installation of a United States “Ministry of Truth,” the Disinformation Governance Board, and then the release of the Twitter files which revealed the extent to which unelected federal government bureaucrats had already acquired the “oversight” that candidate Harris was calling for. Constant communications with Twitter executives allowed the White House and other government officials to silence their political opponents before Elon Musk bought the company.

Then, just last week, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee saying this: “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19-related content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. Ultimately, it was our decision to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement policy in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong…”

He goes on to admit to throttling the Hunter Biden laptop story due to FBI communications saying that it was Russian disinformation, though he now realizes it was not, and says his company has changed their policies to apparently not take the FBI’s word for it next time.

It is obvious that this administration, and the army of bureaucrats it represents, has an interest in limiting the information it allows the public to access. The fact that I’m writing those words in reference to my own government and not a fictional dystopia or foreign dictatorship is chilling.

Just as candidate Kamala hinted at what the future would hold in 2019, her 2024 VP candidate Tim Walz has given hints as well. Here’s what he had to say about free speech as Governor of Minnesota in 2022: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy…”

The thing is, of course the guarantee of free speech extends to “misinformation” and “hate speech!” Saying popular things that people like to hear doesn’t require constitutional protections, it’s the unpopular, critical things which will be received as stupid or mean that require protection.

To put a fine point on the position our “free” country is in, the New York Times dared to run this headline: “America’s Constitution is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” The article asks this question because Donald Trump was elected President in accordance with the Constitution!

So, the Constitution is sacred, until Americans choose a president that liberals don’t like. Free speech is sacred, until Americans begin to question Covid vaccine efficacy, or election integrity, or transgender ideology, or public school curricula. Or, if one speaks out against the current administration.

One of Kamala Harris’ opponents for the 2020 Democrat Presidential Nomination can give us insight into that. In a video posted to X on September 4, Tulsi Gabbard, an Army veteran and former Congresswoman and former Democrat presidential candidate, shared that Federal Air Marshal whistleblowers had recently revealed that Gabbard had been added to a secret domestic terror watchlist called Quiet Skies. Starting on July 23^rd, she and her husband were repeatedly subjected to enhanced searches by TSA, and she later learned she was being monitored by three Air Marshals on every flight. On July 22^nd, Gabbard had appeared on cable news to speak out against Harris as the Democrat candidate after it was revealed that Biden would not be running again.

Did you catch that? The very next day, she was labeled a domestic terror threat.

That seems impossible in America. It seems even more impossible that such actions could be taken against nobodies like you and me. Kamala’s political opponents? Sure, but us?

I’m sure it also seemed impossible in the U.K., where citizens are being arrested for sharing anti-immigration memes. If that seems like it can never happen here, Harris said in 2019: “We will… direct law enforcement to counter this extremism.”

As hard as it is to imagine, free speech is on the ballot this November. Will what you think be illegal to say in 2025?

 

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