Thom Nickels: Harris and Walz would degrade free speech in America
The elephantine death of the Democratic party has taken place over a number of years. Piece by piece, the party of John F. Kennedy has been dismantled and refashioned into a totalitarian super structure where free speech and the First Amendment are increasingly under attack.
Yet many ordinary Democrats refuse to see this or if they do see it they make excuses for it. “There can be no free speech when it comes to hate speech” they’ll say. “There must be laws against hate speech and misinformation!” And so they let the issue pass without thinking what governmental body or panel of “experts” will get to decide what constitutes hate speech or misinformation. Perhaps their minds are incapable of stretching that far.
“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy,” Democrat VP nominee Tim Walz told MSNBC in December 2022.
Walz of course had no clue about the 2017 Supreme Court ruling that “speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground” is protected by the First Amendment.
Pro-censorship Kamala Harris is on the same page as Walz. Before dropping out of the presidential campaign in December 2019, the former California Attorney General came down hard on free speech.
“We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat against our democracy,” she said. “And if you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare…if you don’t release your platforms we are going to hold you accountable as a community…”
The “we” Harris is referring to would be the “hate” and “misinformation” czars, a panel of “experts” modeled after the Soviet system before the fall of the Iron Curtain, state censors that reflect genuine Russian influence over and above the fake Russian labels directed at Team Trump.
If Harris and Walz are elected in November they would systematically chip away at freedom of speech until the United States becomes a mirror image of Great Britain or Germany, two countries where in the name of “national security,” “territorial disorder,” or “crime” a police officer can knock on your door and arrest you because of an offensive social media post.
If you think extreme censorship like this can’t happen in the United States, you haven’t studied the current trajectory of the Democrat party.
A few examples:
1. April 2021: Biden Administration officials met with Twitter to advocate that conservative users be shut down.
2. July 15, 2021: White House let it be known that it was in “regular touch” with social media companies about monitoring content it deems as “misinformation.”
3, April 27, 2022: Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of a “Disinformation Governance Board.”
On X, defenders of free speech who understand the threat to the First Amendment posed by Harris and Walz, often describe Kamala Harris as a communist or socialist. Posts with Harris’s face superimposed inside images of the hammer and sickle old Soviet flag are common. This is because the vice president’s record is dismal when it comes to free speech,
As Attorney General of California, Harris demanded many conservative nonprofit organizations relinquish their IRS records revealing the identity of donors. Harris stated she needed the information because she wanted to fight fraud in the nonprofit world. The Supreme Court ruled against Harris’s misdirection when it declared such action was not fighting fraud but silencing conservative voices, a violation of the First Amendment.
In 2019, Harris called on Twitter (X) to suspend President Trump’s account. She even had the gall to repeat this request during the fourth Democratic primary debate hosted by CNN and The New York Times.
As a U.S. senator in 2018, Harris questioned judicial nominee Brian Beuscher because he was a member of the Knight of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization. She described the Knights of Columbus as “an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men,” and yet she asked Buescher if he was aware the organization opposed a woman’s right to choose.
The question was alarming: How could a venerable ultra-Catholic organization like the Knights of Columbus not be pro-life?
Harris’s Knights of Columbus dig indicates her hostility to Catholicism when it challenges the tenets of (orthodox) feminism. Her attack on Beuscher indicates it is more than conceivable that a President Harris would entertain thoughts of classifying anti-feminist rhetoric — any criticism of a woman’s right to choose — as hate speech.
Ironically — and sadly — the views of Americans are disheartening when it comes to First Amendment rights.
According to a Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) poll, about a third of Americans — this includes Democrats and Republicans — believe First Amendment rights go “too far.” More than half of the respondents stated local communities should ban any public speech that comes off as offensive to them.
A Harris-Walz Administration would be the death knell for free speech and the First Amendment, since pro-censorship views now dominate the Democrat party.
Add to this the corruption of the so-called fact-checking news industry, from the Associated Press to the countless numbers of online fact-checkers ready to scrutinize and analyze anything published or spoken by conservatives.
As the Financial Times noted in 2021:
“Fact-checking can be a powerful tool in the fight against online falsehood. But it can be used as a means of censorship if not only facts but also opinions and narratives are checked.”
And as Matt Palumbo noted in his book, Fact-Checking the Fact Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry:
“Google started a fact-checking nonprofit called First Draft at the beginning of the 2016 election cycle. In addition to being supported by Google, it’s supported by the Ford Foundation and Soros’s Open Society Foundations. One of the group’s original organizers, Alastair Reid, constantly shares leftist propaganda and anti-American rhetoric on his social media feeds. The group has also uncritically spread misinformation, such as directing readers to the bogus story that Trump told ‘people to drink bleach’ to fight Covid-19.”
Palumbo writes, “Nothing is truly too absurd to check as long as it’s coming from a Republican.”
He goes on to mention a TDS-inspired fact-check from The Mercury News, “which fact-checked Trump’s obviously not literal claim that, if you stacked up the 1,000 burgers he’d bought to cater an event at the White House, they’d pile up ‘a mile high.’”
The Mercury News, in TDS full swing, reported: “Fact Check: At two inches each, a thousand burgers would not reach one mile high.”
Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.
I have a question. When someone posted to social media that Hattians in Springfield, OH were eating residents cats and dogs, which was amplified on social media and at public events by a Presidential candidate and his supporters. It has resulted in over 30 bomb threats closing public schools, government buildings, a college, and the cancellation of two day festival. Should government officials, fact checkers, and the media remained silent about this lie?
Freedom of speech does not protect you from others using the same right to speak out against you.
The fact you do not know the bomb threats were made by a foreign country is surprising. The fact the governor of Ohio won’t reveal which country or countries were making those bomb threats is revealing.
It has been verified that the springfield bomb treats were hoaxes made from overseas bad actors.
Keep the false narrative alive, TDS boy.
Please feel free to provide evidence of your claim. If you can.
Simple google search: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/springfield-facing-threats-from-overseas-after-trumps-lies-about-haitians-ohio-governors-office-says.
Go sit in the corner.
Thom, you left out a major instance: when fifty-one so-called intelligence officials released a statement on Oct. 19, 2020, discounting the Hunter Biden laptop story as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” in a bid to discredit the New York Post’s report. These are the same so-called intelligence officials that enrich themselves at Ukraine’s expense and U.S. taxpayers’ expense on behalf of mega corporations and oligarchs.
Now, nine (9) of those fifty-one just signed a letter supporting Harris. These are the very people that want to censor what you can read in order to control what you think. Who are these previously abjectly incorrect fools, or lying treasonous scum (whichever the case may be?) They are: former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper; former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden; former CIA Director Leon E. Panetta; former CIA Director John Brennan; former Acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin; former CIA chief of staff Laurence M. Pfeiffer; former Department of Defense chief of staff Jeremy Bash; CIA chief of station John Sipher; and former National Intelligence Council Chair Gregory Frye Treverton.
Btw, Dana Bash (née Schwartz) from CNN divorced Jeremy Bash in 2007. Yes, the same former Department of Defense chief of staff Jeremy Bash – one of the nine (9) doubling down from out of the fifty-one so-called intelligence officials that got it wrong about Hunter Biden’s laptop. And according to the New York Times, Dana Bash’s father, Stuart Schwartz, was the senior broadcast producer for Prime Time Live in 1998, an ABC News program based in New York City. The paper also described her mother as a “lecturer and author on Jewish issues.” It wasn’t only Dana Bash’s parents who had similar career paths, however. Dana has been married twice, first to Jeremy Bash, whose last name she kept professionally. The couple divorced in 2007, and Bash remarried in 2008 to fellow CNN anchor John King. According to the Washington Examiner, both reporters predominantly covered Republicans during the 2008 election, and they were married on Cape Cod. Although the two did split in 2012, per The Washington Post, they had a son, Jonah Frank King in 2011. If history is any teacher, we can expect Jonah King on CNN in about 15 years. Just like Peter Doocy on FOX “news.” The “Swamp” is our media. It is fake. Designed and curated information by “deep state” actors. Is Dana Bash working for the C.I.A? Who knows? I do know that immediately following Biden / Trump debate she had her notes ready to attack Biden… as if it had all been scripted like a WWF match.