The party which sanctifies censorship and coercion

From The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship by Glenn Greenwald.  The subheading is "All factions, at certain points, succumb to the impulse to censor. But for the Democratic Party's liberal adherents, silencing their adversaries has become their primary project."

Greenwald brings all his formidable empirical reporting to explicitly to indict Democrats on their love-affair with censorship.  I find little to disagree with him in this particular essay.  It is worth reading.

I have lately been thinking of a heuristic which increasingly suggests itself.  Vote against and commercially punish all politicians, institutions, or enterprises which explicitly, by word or deed, endorse censorship and which also endorse governance by decree, mandate, and executive order.  

What might this look like?  Which politicians would disappear from the stage?  Which commercial enterprises?  How many would be left?  What sort of disparate impact might there be between the parties?  How do you distinguish those who merely rhetorically invoke censorship and rule by fiat and those for whom it can be seen as a central platform?

The reverse version is, How many politicians, institutions and commercial enterprises are explicitly committed to free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, private property and consent of the governed.

An interesting, and distressing, exercise.  The barbarians are among us to a greater extent than we acknowledge.

From Greenwald's ringing endorsement of free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, private property and consent of the governed.

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by "liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of "hate speech” to mean "views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech." Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.

When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont's heating system and Putin's sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being "Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is "disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID's origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely.

This "disinformation" term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of "disinformation.” Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard.

It is a temptation to continue an excerpt but the whole thing is worth reading.  

Greenwald is a Classical Liberal of whom both liberals and conservatives can and should be proud.  One of the few media voices explicitly standing up for our classical liberal traditions.

He ends with:

In sum, censorship — once the province of the American Right during the heydey of the Moral Majority of the 1980s — now occurs in isolated instances in that faction. In modern-day American liberalism, however, censorship is a virtual religion. They simply cannot abide the idea that anyone who thinks differently or sees the world differently than they should be heard. 

Read the whole thing.