As America enters the final month of the presidential election season, there are fresh calls for censorship. Oddly enough, I’m not hearing any lately from Donald Trump or other Republicans. The current demands to censor Americans are coming entirely from Democrats which, given the timing of them, stand as an indictment of the party’s confidence in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
Most recently, Rep. Adam Schiff was the lead signatory on a September 30 letter to social media company CEOs and “demanded" answers as to why they’re not more aggressively censoring people. The letter raised concerns about corporate policies, the treatment of proprietary data, hiring and staffing practices, and other aspects of how these companies operate.
The government’s demand to know why these companies are not conducting themselves as politicians insist is cloaked in worries about “the spread of misinformation and disinformation.” This is also odd seeing as how they don’t express similar concerns about the mis/dis information being spread by cable news outlets and even Schiff himself, not to mention the Biden-Harris administration’s promotion of information with the potential to incite violence up to and including political assassination.
A few days before the Schiff letter was released, former secretary of state and failed presidential candidate John Kerry told the World Economic Forum that “our First Amendment stands as a major block,” to censorship. As for Americans’ right to free speech, Kerry is very concerned about whether he and like-minded politicians would be able to “hammer it out of existence.
These high profile Democrats promoting censorship relieve Kamala Harris of having to promote it herself, but she has in the past. She told CNN’s Jake Tapper during the 2020 primary election cycle that she thought it important to quash “the privilege of speaking,” on social media. To his credit, this prompted Tapper to ask Harris “How is that not a violation of free speech?” Having been told in recent weeks that, “when people tell you who they are, believe them,” I believe Harris is genuine when she deems free speech a privilege rather than a constitutional right.
Frightening as these current threats are, they’re nothing new in American society; government sanctioned censorship is nearly as old as the republic. John Adams, our second president, jailed newspaper editors for criticizing him. A little more than a century later, Democrat President Woodrow Wilson aggressively censored the media from saying anything that might “injure morale,” or “embarrass the United States,” during World War I.
Censorship reemerged in the modern era in the form of speech codes across college and university campuses. One of the early pioneers in collegiate censorship was my old boss Donna Shalala. During her tenure as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1980s, and my concurrent tenure as managing editor for the university’s statewide radio news network, Shalala issued a raft of speech restrictions addressing what she considered hate speech, which was essentially any speech she hated. It took a few years but Shalala’s censorship was ultimately declared unconstitutional by a federal court in 1991.
With most Americans being understandably worried about the economy, inflation, and unbridled illegal immigration, censorship isn’t a top of mind issue for many voters. But it should be and vice presidential nominee JD Vance was right to bring it up in the October 1 debate with his Democrat counterpart Tim Walz, who earlier claimed there’s “no guarantee to free speech.”
There’s a reason that freedom of speech is part of the First Amendment to the Constitution and not a subsequent one. Living in a world of monarchies and dictatorships during the 18th century, the framers knew all too well that one of the first actions of a tyrant was to prevent people from expressing themselves. As theologian Martin Luther did in the 16th century, the founders similarly understood that freedom of conscience and expression were fundamental to a new democratic republic, and that extinguishing speech was the first step toward extinguishing democracy.
In the book The Friends of Voltaire, the French philosopher’s belief in free expression was encapsulated in the well known phrase, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Many Americans, myself included, share that perspective. Some have defended free speech in courtrooms, others as public advocates or through military service. There aren’t a lot of ideas worth dying for but free speech is one of them.
Adam Schiff, John Kerry, and the nominees at the top of their ticket are advocating what tyrants across time and space have done to reduce their citizens to subjects. A nation without free speech is not a free nation, but the good news is that we don’t have to die to defend freedom of speech. We need only to show up on Election Day.