We noted, a year and a half ago, how President Biden and his leftist minions, proposed the creation of a Ministry of Truth ‘Disinformation Governance Board‘ within the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, and had chosen Nina Jankowitz, who for months told us that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, to head it.

On April 25th, she told us how she feels about #FreedomOfSpeech:

I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities . . . which are already shouldering . . . disproportionate amounts of this abuse.

Then came Helen Ubiñas, who has a very visible platform as a regular columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, claiming that Freedom of Speech is dangerous and harmful to people like her:

With Elon Musk trying to buy Twitter, it’s likely to become more hostile for people like me. So why am I not leaving?

Civil discourse has long been the biggest casualty on the platform — and that was before a problematic billionaire touting freedom of speech made a deal to purchase the site.

by Helen Ubiñas | Wednesday, April 27, 2022

I’ve thought a lot about how I came to Twitter lately, and why I’ve stayed, despite the near-daily harassment and threats and hostility. (“You’re a scumbag,” according to one of my latest interactions on the site.)

Civil discourse has long been the biggest casualty on the platform — and that was before a problematic billionaire touting freedom of speech reached an agreement to buy the site.

As right-wing users cheer the news of Elon Musk’s deal to purchase Twitter (and eagerly await the probably inevitable return of the former Tweeter-in-Chief), many of us who are part of communities that have long been marginalized expect the platform to become more hostile. Many women and people of color, in particular, have expressed their intentions to leave, if they haven’t already.

“Probably inevitable”? What kind of grammar is that? It’s either probable, or it is inevitable.

Somehow, it’s difficult to think of Miss Ubiñas as “marginalized.” She has been employed by the credentialed media, first the Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continually published newspaper, and then The Philadelphia Inquirer, the third oldest, since being graduated from Boston University, current cost of attendance $69,780 for commuters, or $82,760 for residents, a highly selective private college, in 1994, and an opinion columnist since January of 2001.

The credentialed media newspapers, naturally, love the freedom of speech and of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment, or at least they love it for themselves. For others? Perhaps not so much.

Newspapers have long employed censorship, in that, formerly in an era of limited space, editors had to pick and choose which stories to cover, and how many column inches to give those stories. With the advent of digital publishing, many of those limitations have disappeared — though not in the dead trees editions! — but, as we have often reported, Miss Ubiñas’ newspaper still censors the news, at least if the news is politically incorrect.

I’m old enough to remember a time in which “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” the text of the First Amendment, would not have been controversial.

And now we come to a Poll by Real Clear Politics, also covered by William Teach, in which we are told that, “Overall, 9 in 10 voters in the U.S. think First Amendment protections for freedom of speech is a good thing, while only 9% think it is a bad thing,” but — and you knew that there’d be a ‘but’ in there — when you get into the details, a lot of people who support the concept of freedom of speech in general sure get mushy on the details!

Painting with a broad brush, Democrats grant significantly more deference to government than do Republicans when it comes to regulating free speech. This wasn’t the only fault line revealed by the RCP survey.

Some of what is dividing these differences is generational, as Millennials and Gen-Z have come of age in a digital age environment in which reasonable expectations of privacy seem a relic of the past. “Those under 30 are most open to censorship by the government,” Kimball noted, adding that 42% of this cohort deem it “more important” to them that the government protect national security than guard the right to free expression. Among those over 65 years old, the corresponding percentage was 26%.

Also, a gender gap reveals itself, one that dovetails with the discrepancy in party registration between men and women — but which is more pronounced. Asked whether they support free speech even if it’s “deeply offensive,” 78% of men answered affirmatively, compared to 66% of women.

But the most glaring gap is between conservatives and liberals, i.e., between Republicans and Democrats. On the issue of free expression, at least, Republicans are not the authoritarian party. That distinction belongs to the Democrats, the party launched by Thomas Jefferson — the Founding Father who famously said that if he were forced to choose between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

“75% of Dems say government has a responsibility to censor ‘hateful’ social media posts”, Tom Bevan’s tweet noted. So, who defines ‘hateful’ social media posts? The left, at least 75% of them, would be just fine, thank you very much, if it was the Biden Administration, and its left-wing minions, but would they say that if Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis took the White House on January 20, 2025? Then ‘hateful’ social media posts could be defined as anything promoting homosexuality or transgenderism, or supporting the war in Ukraine, or any of a whole host of other things.

These are the same things which inspired the now trashed notion of setting up that Ministry of Truth!

It was the mid-1960s when the Berkeley Free Speech Movement began, as the leftists at the University of California at Berkeley were complaining that coverage of resistance to the war in Vietnam, among other things, was being censored. In the mid-1960s, there were no personal computers, no internet, and no 24-hour cable news networks. People got the news from printed newspapers, perhaps weekly journals like Time or Newsweek, and the Huntley-Brinkley Report at 6:30 PM.

And today, with all of the methods of communication available to us, today’s left are the ones who want to censor people with whom they disagree!

We have previously noted how, in 1971, President Richard Nixon sought a restraining order to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from printing more of the so-called “Pentagon Papers,” technically the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, a classified history and assessment of American policy and operations in the Vietnam war. The Times and the Post fought the injunctions in court, the Times winning in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). The press then were all about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press.

But, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, Times Editorial Board member Greg Bensinger told readers that “Twitter Under Elon Musk Will Be a Scary Place,” and also gave major OpEd space to Andrew Marantz, a staff writer for The New Yorker, to tell us that Free Speech Is Killing Us, and to Chad Malloy^[1]Chad Malloy is a male who thinks he is a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker” Malloy. to tell us How Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech. It seems as though the guardians of the so-called Fourth Estate just don’t like interlopers!

What would today’s left allow, were it not for the First Amendment? When “47% of Dems say free speech should be legal only under certain circumstances”, I have to ask: what would those certain circumstances be? We already know that much of the credentialed media shut down any discussion of whether ‘transgender’ women really are women, but they can’t shut down the internet, and there are scads of articles noting ‘transgender women’ — meaning males who claim to be women — participating, and setting records, in women’s sports. Twitter, under Mr Musk rather than the previously censorious regime, allows evil reich-wing conservatives like me to note that a man male in a dress is still a male, and not a woman, and with the internet, conservative sites like The Other McCain, The First Street Journal, and American Free News Network can exist and publish and be seen by millions — don’t we wish that millions actually read us! — things that the American left seem to think are not good ideas.

But it’s more than just random leftists! As we have previously noted, the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the law enforcement agency supposedly going after criminals and terrorists, were investigating ‘Radical Traditionalist Catholics,’ and their possible ties to ‘the far-right white nationalist movement,’ until it became public and the FBI had to ‘retract leaked document’ orchestrating the investigation, though who knows if the investigation is continuing sub rosa?

Remember: the FBI and the Department of Justice are under the authority of President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland, leftist Democrats! Apparently, if the Real Clear Politics poll is reasonably correct, the idea that the government could censor speech and investigate religious groups doesn’t really bother all that many Democrats.