Speech Suppression: The Erosion of Our Rights Continues

By David A. Clarke Jr., Sheriff (Ret.) Milwaukee County

We are entering a very precarious and dangerous time in the American history of our experiment in self rule. The Framers of the Constitution knew that if they didn’t codify what a strong central government was limited to in its exercise of power over the people that the abuse they experienced under the Crown of Great Britain would continue. We would simply have new masters. We are seeing that today like no other time in recent history.

There is nothing ambiguous in the words, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech found in the First Amendment to the US Constitution." 

Once upon a time, both sides of our political discourse, certain aspects of freedom and liberty like free speech practice of faith, right to protest, unreasonable search and seizure extremely sacred. Today? Not so much. What is interesting is that a half a century ago, it was the American left, liberals and Democrats who were very distrustful of a strong central government. They recoiled when they felt free speech was being infringed upon. They despised government intrusion into their lives. They were very distrustful of agencies like the CIA and FBI. They guarded their right to speak freely so closely that liberals sometimes even went overboard like protecting flag burning and hate speech. They saw that no right was safe unless taken to the extreme. Civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union did not hesitate to sue in federal court when they suspected an infringement on speech no matter what the political persuasion of the aggrieved. That day is gone.

We are now in a period where speech is being not just limited, but suppressed. Only certain speech is allowable. Now certain words are called “triggers” that will get the person who uttered it fired from their jobs or ordered to attend brainwashing training on becoming woke. It gets you suspended from social media sites. Even constitutionally protected political speech is being squashed.

The difference today is that government isn’t necessarily the oppressor. They have proxies doing it for them. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube are squelching speech on behalf of government. The CEO’s of these sites are unabashed liberals who vote Democrat and hate conservatives. What makes this untenable is that they receive government protection under what is called Section 230 of the Federal Communications Commission code. Without getting into the weeds in understanding this federal bureaucratic maze, this section protects platform providers from Big Tech corporations and says they are not responsible from what others say or do online for instance. In part it says, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In other words they cannot be held responsible for what somebody else says. So the question is why does Twitter, Facebook or YouTube care what somebody posts, within limits of course, or whether or not it’s true. Section CDA 230 was created to allow free speech online to flourish but it is being abused by totalitarian speech Nazis. Instead, these corporations have turned this on its head by monitoring things said on their platforms and removing it if they find it distasteful whether true or not. They have anointed themselves fact checkers. It’s highly subjective as it appears that people on the left can say anything they want with impunity and only conservative speech is removed. In other words they are deciding who can say what.

What makes this even more oppressive is that the goal post of the media corporation’s terms of service continue to move. Nothing is clear. The rules continue to be interpreted on a sliding scale. Who is making these decisions to remove speech from the public domain, some millennial living in their parent’s basement? Do they have any First Amendment education or training? Do they have names where we can search their social media for biases?

What Big Tech needs to be reminded is that although they own the platform, they do not own the content. In other words the speech is owned by the person posting it. If it is simply an opinion and the person saying it is way off base, who cares? If something factual is posted with accompanying evidence that hurts Democrats like Joe Biden about what role he played with his son and selling US influence in dealing with government leaders in China and Ukraine, why would Big Tech remove it? The answer is obvious. It is a power political move to suppress information from the public.

I have personal experience in having my speech suppressed by Twitter numerous times. In one post referencing government lockdowns due to the pandemic, I posted for people to resist and take to the streets because there is no health crisis exception for government to violate my freedom of movement by putting me under house arrest without due process. Some courts have shot down some of these onerous restrictions regarding lockdowns. Twitter said that my post violated their terms of service because it promoted and advocated for suicide. I am not kidding.

This is how dictatorships are spawned. It’s straight up totalitarianism. There is only one way to stop this. We the people have to stand up to government and their proxies. One way is to build a critical mass of people to rise up and resist. If this doesn’t work, then we have to up the ante. Just like the Founders had the courage and will to in the Declaration of Independence. Our rights are God given and no man or woman can take them away through some edict.