“Excessive Free Speech?” Newspaper Calls for Censorship

For some reason this is Canada Day here at Hot Air.

At least for me it is. You know I am deeply concerned with the fate of the Anglosphere, and that I fear that this cultural bloc which has been at the vanguard of promoting freedom is on the verge of becoming a haven for totalitarians.

So far I have written about Canadian librarians for censorship and the CBC’s calling for “scrutiny” of a recall effort because it is, HORRORS!, a front for conservatives trying to get elected.

Now we have Canada’s newspaper The Globe and Mail worrying about “excessive free speech,” which promotes dissent from the approved narrative.

Opinion: Excessive free speech is a breeding ground for more Trumps https://t.co/vExvNdRKf1

— The Globe and Mail (@globeandmail) March 20, 2024

I feel like we are living in a nightmare world where Xi Jinping became president-for-life in the US, Canada, and Great Britain. Throw in New Zealand, too.

There was a bit of good news about the future of public discourse this week. The United States Supreme Court, even though stacked with right-wingers, sounded like it was ready to give the Biden administration the go-ahead to try to persuade social-media platforms not to put out content promoting nonsense about the presidential election, conspiracy theories about the pandemic and other assorted bilge and crackpottery.

The states of Missouri and Louisiana accused the government of stifling their speech by pressuring platforms to downgrade or drop their posts. But the justices, including conservatives Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, didn’t sound like they were buying it.

Good. Hopefully the court’s final decision will tell the complainants where to get off. It would be a victory for regulation of the internet. But no one should get too excited. The genie is already out of the bottle and there is little likelihood of getting it back in. The greater likelihood is that extremes of free speech will continue to be tolerated, creating a pathway for more Donald Trumps.

Everybody knows we should live in a world where all the “wrong” people are forcibly shut up, apparently, lest they speak their mind or elect the wrong people.

God forbid we live in a world where people can say school closures were wrong, the jab was neither safe nor effective for most people, or that Biden’s economy isn’t going gangbusters or that Justin Trudeau isn’t just dreamy.

When other communications revolutions like the printing press, radio, and television came along, they were still largely controlled by the elites. But when the internet came along, regulatory bodies like Canada’s CRTC backed off. It was open season for anything that anyone wanted to put out. No license needed. No identity verification.

What a far cry from the days when the masses had no outlets save things like “man-on-the-street” interviews or letters to the editor or protest placards. We moved from one extreme to the other.

The masses were finally weaponized – not with arms, but with a communications instrument that empowered them against establishment forces like they had never been empowered before. The change represented one of history’s significant power shifts.

Horrors! The people can speak!

This is, as I have been screaming from the rooftops, exactly how the elite thinks. It is their right to control everything, including your minds. You are dirty, smelly proles who need to know your place.

Eat bugs in the dark, peasants.

Unchecked, the internet dumped megatons of raw sewage on the public square. With filters that had been around for ages now removed came mountains of misinformation and disinformation. And propaganda, polarization, child pornography. And threats against leaders and bigotry and conspiracy claptrap.

Would the rise of the hard right and Mr. Trump have been possible if the internet had been given guardrails? Not a chance. The internet gave him – before his account was suspended in 2021 – 88 million Twitter followers. With that came the freedom to circumvent traditional media and create an alternate universe, a smearsphere wherein he could lie like he breathes and get away with it.

By now it is obvious that the greatest spreaders of disinformation in the world are the MSM. They have trillions of dollars in capital to deploy, control over what gets published, and a lust to ensure that Twitter accounts with a few thousand followers get censored lest the proles get any dangerous ideas.

We keep being told that Donald Trump is a great threat to democracy, and yet we keep seeing the Left doing everything they can to rig the system against anybody who dissents from them. They censor, debank, slander, and use lawfare to destroy anybody they disapprove of.

How much disinformation have been subjected to by the MSM? You know the answer. On almost every issue over the past few years the dissenters have been right and the establishment provably wrong. During the pandemic we were flooded by disinformation about school closures, how resilient kids are, how infants need COVID vaccines, and that people who wouldn’t wear masks were killing grandma.

Now we see this:

Jake Tapper seems pretty upset that his employer & associated ideological allies in the media and teachers unions ensured that schools stayed closed for *years*

Wonder if we’ll get any acknowledgment that his party tried to label Ron DeSantis as “DeathSantis” for opening them https://t.co/CXf8riGN3z

— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) March 20, 2024