KAMALA HARRIS’S BANANA REPUBLIC ON FREE SPEECH:
In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.”
Does it?
Every two-bit authoritarian in history has justified censoring its citizens as a way of protecting them from the menace of disinformation.
But social media sites, contra the reliably illiberal Harris, aren’t “directly speaking” to anyone. Millions of individuals are interacting and speaking to millions of other individuals. Really, that’s what grinds the modern Left’s gears: unsupervised conversations.
Take the Brazilian Supreme Court panel that unanimously upheld the decision by one of its justices to shut down Elon Musk’s X over alleged “misinformation” fears.
We must assume that the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, who once promised to ban guns via an executive order, agrees with Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s decision to shut down a social media platform for refusing to bend to the state’s demands of censorship.
Related: What Kamala Harris means by ‘freedom.’
When Harris mentions the freedom to vote, which is certainly a cherished freedom in the U.S., what she means is this: “With this election, we finally have the opportunity to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.” Those are two bills Democrats have long been trying to pass that would federalize and restructure elections under terms favorable to Democratic candidates. Passing the two bills is the current Democratic definition of “the freedom to vote.”
So that is the Harris “freedom” platform. With the exception of abortion, in which Democrats seek to allow any woman to have an abortion at any time in a pregnancy, the listed freedoms don’t add any freedom at all. Indeed, some, such as the freedom to “live free from the pollution fuels the climate crisis,” could lead to the curtailment of freedoms people enjoy.
In the end, when Harris talks about “freedom,” she means giving people the freedom to live under the Democratic policy agenda. Of course, millions of voters would choose otherwise. That is what the election is about.
The Ghost of FDR would approve of the definitional slight of hand:
Is it possible that the History of the 20th Century can be explained by simple reference to a change in prepositions? That is the gist of the epiphany that struck me while watching David M. Kennedy on Booknotes (C-SPAN). He and Brian Lamb were discussing the fact that this book is part of the Oxford History of the United States joining James McPherson’s excellent one-volume history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom : The Civil War Era (1988). Suddenly, the switch from “of Freedom” to “Freedom from”, in the respective titles, struck me as emblematic of the pivotal change of emphases in the Modern world. The history of America from Plymouth Rock until the Crash was essentially the story of Man’s struggle for Freedom, but Freedom in a positive sense, Freedom to do things–to worship, to speak, to gather, etc. Thus, McPherson’s book details the great convulsion of the 19th Century, the Civil War and the struggle to free the slaves–a struggle to expand freedom. But Kennedy, charting the great 20th Century convulsion, has it exactly right, the importance of the responses to the Depression by both Hoover and Roosevelt lay in their decision to elevate a negative idea of Freedom, freedom from want, from hunger, from “the vicissitudes of life” above, and against, the traditional American ideal of republican Liberty. This shift from a government aimed at protecting Freedom to one designed to provide Security is the single most important thing that happened in 20th Century America.
You may be surprised to see Hoover’s name there, but one of Kennedy’s great contributions in this book is this formal recognition by a liberal historian (joining the great conservative Paul Johnson, see Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties) that Hoover, far from being a do-nothing antediluvian, was basically a liberal interventionist, who started us down the path that lead to the New Deal. (Of course, the great difference here is that Kennedy concludes that this makes Hoover a more laudable figure, while Johnson lambastes him.) In fact, Kennedy’s reappraisal of Hoover’s activism, coupled with the quotes above, unintentionally leaves the, I believe accurate, impression that the only achievement of the New Deal–the change in focus from government as a guarantor of individual freedom to a provider of succor in time of want–was not even unique to the New Deal, but was instead a general response to the intractable Depression.
Obama’s imaginary friend Julia and Footie Pajama Boy smile as well.