OPINION:
A former member of President Bill Clinton’s Cabinet wants to see X owner Elon Musk behind bars for the crime of allowing people to speak their minds freely. It’s a preview of what’s to come in the event Democrats prevail in November.
In The Guardian last Friday, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote, “Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”
Mr. Reich is no stranger to disseminating lies. He gleefully swallowed the slanders that the Hillary Clinton campaign cooked up about Donald Trump having ties to Russia and peddled them in articles, on Facebook and on X.
The current Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris, agrees on the need for government-led speech control. She said in a 2019 interview: “There has to be a responsibility placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly talking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation — and that has to stop.”
Ms. Harris got her wish. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg willingly collaborated with a censorship campaign designed to silence Republicans and get Joe Biden elected in 2020 — an effort that continues today.
In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan last week, Mr. Zuckerberg admitted he was pressured to remove “corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family” printed in the New York Post in 2020 because the FBI told him it was “Russian disinformation.”
The “allegations” — or more accurately, the documents and evidence — came from Hunter Biden’s laptop. The FBI had the device in its possession and knew Russia had nothing to do with it. This means agents who participated in the censorship operation flat-out lied to manipulate the election.
It didn’t end there.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.
Rob Flaherty was the Biden administration point man for coordinating censorship demands with Facebook. Mr. Flaherty is now deputy campaign manager for Ms. Harris, and he would likely be rewarded with a prominent role in a potential Harris administration.
Given her past efforts, a future President Harris might heed Mr. Reich’s advice and follow the lead of France. Officials there have confined Telegram founder Pavel Durov for the “crime” of allowing users to communicate with one another without government agencies listening in.
She might also take inspiration from Brazil’s socialist government, which just banned X and threatened $8,900 fines for citizens who circumvent the blockade with VPN software. The satellite internet provider Starlink’s bank accounts in Brazil have also been frozen to punish Mr. Musk, who owns a 40% stake in the company.
Unfortunately for leftists, Mr. Musk is cleverer than they are. He’s now offering Starlink service in Brazil free of charge “until this matter is resolved.” With Starlink, no app is needed for direct access to X anywhere in the world.
A free people can always find such ways around censorship, but global authorities seek to snuff out the desire for freedom itself. Every time Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and other social media companies comply with demands from global authorities to silence speech threatening leftist regimes, they are complicit in that effort.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.