Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Jon Turley began a recent article on the rise of censorship with this quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, warning us that we can end up being the monsters we hate.
Turley, an old-fashioned Democrat who still believes in free speech and opposes censorship, observed, “President Donald Trump in particular and conservatives in general. It’s an age when reason and restraint are strangers…In various areas, Democrats have embraced repellent concepts in the effort to silence or even jail their opponents. What is most striking is that legal arguments now used by the left were once used against the left… As someone who was raised in a liberal, politically active Democratic family in Chicago, one of the greatest disappointments of my lifetime has been to watch the Democratic Party fight against free speech, pushing both censorship and blacklisting.”
Examples he has given included.
- Democratic leaders have called for social media to ban or suppress opposing points of view, and the Twitter files showed, there was secret efforts by federal agencies including FBI to engage censorship by surrogate.
- President Biden declared Social Media companies were killing people by not censoring citizens, never mind the fact that much of the information about the vaccines and Covid-19 by the government and much of the “establishment” were wrong and the skeptics censored were far more correct in their information.
- New York Democrats proposed a bill to limit speech to “save democracy and as Turley noted, “former Democratic labor secretary suggested that free speech could be a form of tyranny.” (Reich praised Twitter removing a former President Donald Trump from their sight as a move to save Democracy, so Reich makes it clear that social media can decide what is and is not seen when he noted, “Someone has to decide on the algorithms in every platform – how they’re designed, how they evolve, what they reveal and what they hide.” So as long Reich side is in control of the censorship, it is okay.)
Turley noted that when he warned of the abuses of prior periods like the Red Scare in congressional hearings, Representative Don Goldman invoked Oliver Wendall Holmes view that you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, Turley pointed that this quote came from a case to justify the imprisonment of socialists for their views during the Woodrow Wilson administration. As Turley noted, “Other Democrats have used the line as a mantra, despite its origins in one of our most abusive anti-free speech periods during which the government targeted political dissidents on the left… Many today dismiss free speech concerns over the prosecution of Trump and his aides for their actions in challenging the 2020 election.”
On the recent Georgia indictment, Turley warned, “Like others, I opposed those actions and rejected Trump’s claims of systemic voting fraud. However, some of us have great reservations about the criminalization of such challenges, particularly under the type of sweeping conspiracy theory put forward by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. …While the Georgia indictment contains serious charges related to some individuals, the effort to bag Trump through a sweeping racketeering claim could lead in the future to the criminalization of election challenges by both parties. At one time, such a prosecution would have raised a modicum of concern on the left.” Turley reminded the left that Democrats opposed certification of Republican victories and certainly if one can go after Trump for opposing the 2020 election, what could be done to any Democrats since they have challenged Republican victories.
The Democrats are now the party of censorship, and we are talking the censorship of political ideas. We now know much of the censored information from Covid to Biden’s corruption has proven to be correct.
The Donelson Files 