Democrats Embrace the Cornerstone of Fascism

It's not a surprise at this point, but still grim news.

Alex Berenson has the story. We kind of knew it before, but a Pew poll confirms it:

A majority of Americans - and an overwhelming number of Democrats - no longer support First Amendment protections for free speech.

The government should restrict “false” information online, even if doing so blocks people from “publishing or accessing information,” 55 percent of Americans said in a large poll released Thursday. Only 42 percent disagreed.

The antipathy to free speech represents a sea change in attitudes in just five years. It is driven by a powerful new hostility to First Amendment rights on the left.

In an identically worded poll five years ago, Democrats and Republicans favored free speech online by roughly 3 to 2 margins. Today, Republicans still favor the First Amendment by about that much. But Democrats have turned against it by even more.

The support for government suppression of “false” speech clearly violates the First Amendment, which does not distinguish between “false” and [“correct”] speech, or online or traditional platforms for speech and debate.

The stunning finding comes from a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, a Washington think tank. Pew’s online poll covered over 5,000 adults, and Pew has asked the same question three times in five years; the trend is unmistakable.

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When Pew split the respondents by political party, the split - and the change in attitudes - was even more striking.

In 2018, Democrats supported free speech by a 57-40 margin, almost identical to the Republican view. They now oppose it by 70-28, a massive shift over the last five years, while Republican views have not changed.

So here’s the story. More than two-thirds of Democrats oppose free speech. Three facts should be noted about this. First, when the Dems talk about “false” speech, they simply mean assertions with which they disagree. It has nothing to do with actual falsehood, and of course they disagree with many things that are palpably true when they are spoken or will turn out to be true if and when an inquiry is permitted (see, e.g., the lab leak theory of the origins of COVID).

Second, it means that the country is in big trouble, and a more fundamental kind of trouble than I have seen in my lifetime. One of our two major parties, together with the most powerful institutions of journalism that are its fighting arms, want to, and increasingly have to power to, silence opposing views. I’ve seen plenty of fights over the years, about Vietnam and civil rights and the Soviet Union and you name it, but I never felt that either my side or the opposing side in those fights would be unable to speak its piece. That is no longer true.

Third, it means that I may well wind up having to vote for Trump next year even though he is dishonest, very likely unrepentantly guilty of a number of felonies, and otherwise clearly unfit to hold a public trust, still less the Office of President. Life is choosing, and the other choice will be to hand over the executive branch of the government, with all its gargantuan size and power, to a party that wants to, and thinks it has the right to, silence the opposition.

Did anyone mention threats to democracy?

The Democrats’ destructive and repulsive policies would normally be the obvious reason to vote against them. But their new and cocksure determination to prevent their opponents from speaking out against those policies — and thus to keep themselves in power regardless of popular will (did anyone mention January 6?) — leaves me with no choice. Or if I have one I’m not seeing, please use the comments section to let me know.