The worst times in American history for free speech were during the Civil War and WWI under Woodrow Wilson. World War II saw some terrible civil rights restrictions, most especially the internment of the Japanese. Actual political prisoners have been mercifully rare, although Eugene Debs and Japanese internees would beg to differ.

But overall, when speech was relatively easy to disseminate through an actual printing press it was pretty difficult to control, and personal communications nearly impossible since we have not had secret police in the US. Most people most of the time have been able to say what they want with relatively few repercussions. 

But the global elite is taking another stab at controlling speech and its dissemination, and they have some new and scary tools to use to shut you up. The majority of speech now takes place on the Internet, for good or ill, and after a few decades of actually enhanced free speech the tide has turned. The Empire is about to strike back, and the major social media platforms and the consolidation of platforms has made strangling and punishing unapproved speech much easier than at any time in history.

And the powers that be have noticed and begun to act. Witness the censorship on social media platforms, the spread of cancel culture that can cut people off from employment, and the closing down of financial tools to disfavored individuals. Entire websites where people exchange ideas have been shut down and deleted. Sites like Patreon and GoFundMe, and services such as PayPal can make it easier to distribute illegal or marginally legal photographs while simultaneously cutting off critics of gender ideology.

Jonathan Turley, a prominent lawyer who has made a name for himself by taking on the Narrative™ while not getting kicked completely out of polite society–yet–has a great column on New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s pitch to implement global censorship in the name of combating “misinformation.” She is hardly alone in this. In the UK they are preparing to pass an Internet censorship law, and as you recall here in the US the government has been attacking speech they have labeled “misinformation.” The FBI and the White House have been bullying, nudging, or whatever you want to call it, the social media platforms to censor speech on the government’s behalf, and have done so quite successfully.

The censorship has been blatantly political, up to and including self-consciously manipulating information during the election cycle (e.g. the Hunter Biden laptop story). I myself was (coincidentally?) restricted on Facebook for the first time a day after I started writing for HotAir. The cause? Posting a parody meme that I noted was a parody. It was labeled misinformation, of course.

Turley:

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the latest liberal leader to call for an international alliance to censor speech. Unsatisfied with the unprecedented corporate censorship of social media companies, leaders like Hillary Clinton have turned from private censorship to good old-fashioned state censorship. Speech regulation has become an article of faith on the left. Ardern used her speech this week to the United Nations General Assembly to call for censorship on a global scale.

Ardern lashed out at “disinformation” and called for a global coalition to control speech. After nodding toward free speech, she proceeded to lay out a plan for its demise through government regulation:

But what if that lie, told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others to take up arms. To threaten the security of others. To turn a blind eye to atrocities, or worse, to become complicit in them. What then?

This is no longer a hypothetical. The weapons of war have changed, they are upon us and require the same level of action and activity that we put into the weapons of old.

We recognized the threats that the old weapons created. We came together as communities to minimize these threats. We created international rules, norms and expectations. We never saw that as a threat to our individual liberties – rather, it was a preservation of them. The same must apply now as we take on these new challenges.

International rules. Norms. Expectations. About what can be said by people.

You can watch the relevant portion of her speech given at the United Nations:

I have said it before, and I will become tiresome saying it again, but the global elite wants to mimic the Chinese social credit system. In that system citizens are literally given a score by which they are judged–a score of how well they comply with and parrot the Chinese Communist Party’s ideal–and are given privileges based upon how high their score is. Their rights are literally tied to how compliant they are.

If you think that worries about this system creeping into the West are overblown, consider the Canadian example. We like to think of Canada as a nicer little brother who tags along with his bruiser big brother America. They are hardly an unfree country, right?

They are actually much farther along the path to digital authoritarianism that we are. During the truckers’ protest they shut down bank accounts not just of the truckers, but of people who supported them. The PM Trudeau openly attacked his own citizens and set the police on the protests–protests which were, unlike the riots in America, completely peaceful. Canada has much stricter COVID travel rules, and has been very open about cracking down on dissent. People have COVID apps on their phones in order to travel,

Now New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wants to globalize the crackdown on dissent:

Ardern noted how extremists use speech to spread lies without noting that non-extremists use the same free speech to counter such views.   To answer her question on “how do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists” is that you convince people using the same free speech.  Instead, Ardern appears to want to silence those who have doubts.

While referring to a global censorship coalition as a “light-touch approach to disinformation,” Ardern revealed how sweeping such a system would likely be. She defended the need for such global censorship on having to combat those who question climate change and the need to stop “hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology.”

“After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?”

That is the same rationale used by authoritarian countries like China, Iran, and Russia to censor dissidents, minority groups, and political rivals.  What is “hateful” and “dangerous” is a fluid concept that government have historically used to silence critics or dissenters.

Ardern is the smiling face of the new generation of censors. At least the old generation of censors like the Iranians do not pretend to support free speech and openly admit that they are crushing dissent. The point is that we need to be equally on guard when censorship is pushed from the left with the best of motivations and the worst of means.

As the great civil libertarian Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

Turley could not be more right. Well, he actually could be. He could openly echo my own concerns that we have have already gone very far down this path, but I am pretty sure he doesn’t read me and is more of a pollyanna than I. He still believes that America can be saved. In my darkest moments I have my doubts.

Ugh. Maybe all I need is a stiff drink and a good cigar and my optimism will return. But right now I am just disgusted with our elite class and very worried about our future.

Yet tomorrow I will get up to fight them with all I’ve got. Things looked pretty bleak in 1980 until Reagan got elected. Maybe Ron DeSantis can duplicate his feat of saving us.

As Otto von Bismarck once said, “There is a providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.” Let us hope he is right about that.