Christmas
Chooster’s
Choo Choo
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Those words from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche capture the fear that the struggle against the ideas and people we oppose will twist us into the very thing we hate.
For Democrats, that moment has come in an age of rage against former President Donald Trump in particular and conservatives in general. It’s an age when reason and restraint are strangers.
In various areas, Democrats have embraced repellent concepts in the effort to silence or even jail their opponents. What is most striking is that legal arguments now used by the left were once used against the left.
Power of the state used to suppress information
As someone who was raised in a liberal, politically active Democratic family in Chicago, one of the greatest disappointments of my lifetime has been to watch the Democratic Party fight against free speech, pushing both censorship and blacklisting.
Here are a few examples:
∎ Democratic leaders for years called on social media companies to ban or suppress those with opposing views. As shown in the Twitter Files, there was a secret effort by the FBI and other agencies to engage in what I called “censorship by surrogate.”
∎ President Joe Biden declared that social media companies were “killing people” by refusing to censor more citizens. Biden administration officials followed suit. Robert Califf, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, even declared that “misinformation” was a medical risk.
∎ Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
∎ New York Democrats proposed limiting speech as a way of protecting democracy, and former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich suggested free speech could be a form of “tyranny.”
∎ A federal judge recently found that the Biden administration had orchestrated “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” Yet, 70% of Democrats still support speech limits.
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