This Election Will Likely Decide Whether The God-Given Right To Free Speech Will Survive

Over the past weeks, freedom of speech has been getting pummelled in the West. In reaction to protests and riots, British Government officials--including the current Labor PM Keir Starmer and Peter Rowley, Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis--have threatened not only rioters, but social media posters. Threats from Rowley included extradition of those outside the UK, for prosecution due to internet postings.

53-year-old UK woman, Julie Sweeney, who had no prior criminal record, was sentenced to 15 months in prison solely for a social media post. Top Democrats and progressive media figures in the US, like Democrat icon Robert Reich, have proposed prosecuting Elon Musk for allowing “X” to become a free speech platform which allows alleged “misinformation”. The head of Telegraph, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France due to the accusation he was not doing enough to censor his platform. Again, progressives in politics and media praised the arrest and offered the opinion Elon Musk and others should face arrest here. Finally, a Brazilian Judge outlawed X in Brazil due to a lack of censorship. The American left has moved from the Berkeley Free Speech movement of the 1960s to demanding suppression and criminalization of speech they don’t like.

First, a few recent quotes from top progressives give us a window into the way the left views free speech and the extent to which they demand control of speech. Democratic strategist James Carville recently encouraged “fact checkers” not to print the truth but to slant “facts” with the goal of helping Democrats win elections. In his June podcast “Politics War Room”, Carville told the mainstream media they needed to slant coverage against Trump (as though Trump was not already facing overwhelmingly negative slanted coverage of 84% negative versus Harris at 89% positive!). 

On September 5, Carville told fact checkers “(Fact checkers) want to say, ‘We’re just umpires, man, we just call it like [we] see it, we don’t really have anything.’” Carville went on “My thing is, how would you fact-check World War II?” Carville then asked fact checkers to ponder “Is our role to be objective, impartial observers that report as accurately and fairly as we can, or is our role here to try to help save the Constitution of the United States?”(Source).

Around this time, Trump-hating MSNBC contributor and “whistleblower” Alexander Vindman lampooned the ideal of free speech when advocating the imprisonment of Elon Musk. Vindman decried what he called “Free Speech absolutists weirdos” that would allow for uncensored speech on social media platforms.

The Berkeley Free Speech movement and other such demands for free speech came primarily from the political left in the 1960s, and yet the 1960s also saw leftist arguments and passion for censorship. At around the same time as the Berkeley Free Speech movement, the father of the New Left Professor Herbert Marcuse, who was also a Frankfurt School Marxist, advocated repression of conservative speech. In his seminal work, Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse begins the manifesto by expressive his thesis “The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions”. (Source) 

Marcuse then goes on to make an argument similar to that of Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. Specifically, the need to flip the “cultural hegemony” from the alleged oppressor on top to the oppressed to bring a communist Utopia. Marcuse saw free speech as a primarily aspect of tolerance, but that true tolerance could only come through intolerance of what currently made up the cultural hegemony. At the time, Marcuse’s radical ideas were primarily within the realm of elite academic circles, but over time have become far more widespread. These ideas have become particularly common at schools of Journalism and help explain the worsening bias in media.

We learned the extent of the Biden Administration’s role in suppressing conservative speech at Twitter when the suppression efforts and compliance were exposed by Musk in 2022. The progressive head of Facebook, Mark Zuckerburg, recently admitted he “regretted giving in to pressure” to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and other conservative speech when pressured by Biden administration officials.(Source)

We know from polling after the 2020 election that 8 in 10 Americans believe Biden would not have won the race if the Hunter Laptop story had not been suppressed as alleged “Russian Disinformation” so this is critically important to Democracy. (Source)

If the Democrats win the White House again, we can fully expect the suppression of free speech to move into overdrive in coordination with Europe. We can expect the Harris Administration to be happy helping Rowley and others extradite conservative Americans for exercising free speech on the internet. We can also expect the continued hyperbolic justifications, like those of radical James Carville, to push media and fact-checkers further towards suppressing the right. We can expect Vindman’s unamerican slander of “free speech absolutist weirdos” to become pervasive. Once Americans have lost free speech, there will be no chance for regaining that right and the Liberty our forefathers bequeathed to us. It’s time to speak out now, as this next election could be the last time to do so and after that our God-given Liberty could become something we dare not even speak about.

Col. Bill Connor——Bio and Archives – Col. Bill Connor is a retired U.S. Army Infantry officer, attorney, and founding partner of NATIONAL DEFENSE CONSULTANTS, LLC. While in the Army, Connor logged multiple deployments to the Middle East, and he has commanded both light Infantry and Ranger training companies. From 2007 through 2008 he was deployed to Afghanistan where he became the senior U.S. military adviser in Helmand Province. Since the start of the October 2023 war in Israel, he has provided analysis to NEWSMAX.