Leftists are terrified of free speech because it truly is the voice of the people

The American Revolution channeled power away from the government and empowered individuals. The French Revolution—the first socialist revolution—violently switched totalitarian power from a king to a cabal of insiders. That happened in all subsequent socialist revolutions, too (e.g., Russia, China, and Cuba), although the mantra was invariably about “power to the people.” Last week, a Canadian outlet dropped the mask: It’s never been about power to the people; it’s always been about power to the elites, and free speech needs to be abolished to keep that power structure intact.

The editorial appears in Canada’s The Globe and Mail, which is essentially Canada’s New York Times—read all across the country, with a powerful political effect. The author, Lawrence Martin, not unsurprisingly, has a Harvard degree in his background. His editorial is boldly titled, “Excessive free speech is a breeding ground for more Trumps.”

The essay’s springboard is Murthy v. Missouri, a case asking whether the government can coerce private communicative enterprises (e.g., social media) to censor citizens, all in the name of silencing opposition to government policies. It was during oral argument in this case that affirmative-action hire Ketanji Brown Jackson complained that the plaintiff’s First Amendment arguments were “hamstringing the government in significant ways.”

Public domain.

Martin’s essay usefully explains why he, Brown Jackson, and others like him (the self-styled elite) want to silence the common people. According to Martin, “free speech” was once a sensible system in which governments populated with people like Martin and Brown Jackson placed civilized limits on discourse. The internet, however, took the government out of the equation:

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.

The horror of this revolution was the internet changed vox populi (that is, the “voice of the people”) into the actual voice of the people. Before the internet, democracy, as leftists use the term, was a pleasant fiction keeping power in the hands of the academically credentialed aristocrats and their hangers-on. The internet turned the fiction of “democracy” into actual democracy and the Martins of the world hate it:

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.

In this world, misinformation and propaganda are unrelated to the left’s repeatedly exposed lies about COVID, ivermectin, the Russia hoax, January 6, and the election. Polarization doesn’t refer to Biden using the State of the Union address to launch into a screaming attack at the political opponent he’s subjecting to relentless civil and criminal lawfare. And child pornography doesn’t count if it means forcing abnormal sexual practices onto kindergarteners and inviting to schools fetishistic men in women’s clothes who routinely get arrested later for child pornography.

If you look at what the people (the ones who now have a voice) see, it’s obvious that Martin and his elite comrades are naked Emperors preening in front of mirrors, convinced that they look dazzling. Thanks to the warped mirror into which he views the world, Martin can reveal the true horror of free speech, which is that it gives the little people a real say in politics (i.e., it creates democracy):

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.

The internet undermined the established newspaper business model, greatly reducing the number of papers and coverage and creating a void for Mr. Trump and the like-minded to fill. His cries of fake news had the impact – it’s charted well in former Washington Post editor Martin Barron’s book, Collision of Power – of compartmentalizing the media landscape into left-right silos, which helped bring on the extremes of polarization.

Fortunately, Martin has a prescription for the horror of the people’s choice in a democratic republic: Repression. And no, I’m not exaggerating. “The way to reverse the trend is with rigid regulation,” he explains. Shorn of that bureaucratic language, he’s demanding government censorship.

Starting with COVID, nations that once had a tradition of free speech (e.g., Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, etc.) have been criminalizing and regulating speech. That’s because a tradition is not a right.

America, by contrast, has a contract between the government and the people (i.e., the Constitution) acknowledging that free speech is a citizen’s right, not a government’s prerogative. But people break contracts all the time, and that is what the Biden government is doing now. Once it fully succeeds, there’s no going back, so vote wisely in November. (And no, a protest vote against both Biden and Trump is not wise.)