The Return of Free Speech

December 24, 2024 by Christopher Roach

Self-government is utterly impossible under the sustained, government-led censorship campaign that has distorted public life for the last 15 years and which we are only now beginning to understand.

Lying, exaggerating, or just being stupid is not new. These sins existed before the internet, and they will always exist. No one deemed them a national security threat until recently.

As a point of comparison, 9/11 was the deadliest attack in the history of our country, exceeding the death toll of Pearl Harbor. Nearly 3,000 innocent people lost their lives. The event led to a mobilization of military and government power that rivaled the Cold War buildup.

Public opinion largely supported a campaign of retaliation, but there were some disagreements and dissenters.

No One Censored the 9/11 Truthers

Among the critics, there was an enormous proliferation of “9/11 Truthers.” These were generally conspiracy theorists of middling intelligence who opined about structural engineering and other things they didn’t understand. They said it was an inside job or was known in advance, and some denied that commercial airliners were used in the attacks at all, even though there were millions of eyewitnesses and hours of footage showing exactly that.

Most people ignored the 9/11 Truthers because most of what they said was ridiculous. There was almost no effort to censor these people. No one said they should be “deplatformed” from the internet, removed from Google search results, or banished from college campuses. The idea that “platforming” meant tacit endorsement or that “deplatforming” was the right solution to bad thoughts had not been invented yet.

There was significant controversy when dyed-in-the-wool leftists like Ward Churchill said the victims deserved it, but even he was allowed to speak on campus.

Obama and the Public-Private Censorship Complex

The supposed scourge of misinformation appeared later, during the latter part of the Obama administration. It was made out to be a big national problem in order to justify hand-in-glove coordination between government agencies and private institutions in order to manipulate public opinion. Without acting directly to avoid violating the First Amendment, government officers persuaded and pressured tech monopolies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to censor materials that officials did not want to be distributed.

They did all of this to advance a very narrow set of approved beliefs. The architects of this censorship regime labeled the system’s consensus Our Democracy™. Simultaneously, critics and skeptics of that consensus were defamed as election deniers, anti-vaxxers, bigots, terrorists, Nazis, Russian “assets,” and otherwise declared anathema.

This strategy did not come out of nowhere. We saw signs of coordinated messaging involving the mainstream media as early as 2008 when they did almost nothing to look into Barack Obama’s background as a radical, left-wing activist during his first presidential run.

Things then kicked into high gear in 2016. By that time, social media had eclipsed the importance of legacy media, the Brexit vote demonstrated a trend of populist rejection of elite opinion, and, in the United States, Donald Trump became the Republican nominee. These events worried the various players in the censorship game, and they correctly recognized Trump as a threat to business as usual.

Intelligence agencies and federal law enforcement worked closely with both legacy and social media companies to stop him. In the process, the media companies abandoned any pretense of neutrality, and this coordination continues through the present.

Fundamentally, all of this activity is premised on the idea that ordinary people need to be saved from themselves because they are too gullible, prejudiced, or prone to mass hysteria. The establishment believes it has the right to manipulate public opinion—through spying, censorship, criminal prosecutions, and lawfare—to counterbalance the populace’s self-destructive tendencies.

By 2016, censorship campaigns against right-wing dissent were becoming more effective, but Twitter was still a freewheeling place, and it became the central domain of political debate and discussion. Hillary’s surprise loss of the election led government officials to invest even more into censorship infrastructure and expand the network of compliant corporations, NGOs,intelligence agency “cutouts,” and other institutions to prevent this from happening again.

While Trump was president, much of this work continued without interruption. Misleadingly named organizations within the DHS and the FBI, as well as parallel government institutions like the Mueller Commission, not only spied but continued to put out counter-narratives to delegitimize the election and undermine the power of President Trump.

In 2020, during and after the election of Joe Biden, all of these groups operated on the same team. By that time, Twitter and Facebook were completely under the government’s thumb, having been shamed and criticized for not doing more to stop Trump’s victory in 2016. In addition, Antifa terrorists, legacy media, academics, banks, NGOs, the FBI, and even the military coordinated their messaging in the same direction.

Consistent with Mike Benz’s observations, this constituted an emerging infrastructure to mold public opinion through censorship and manipulation. Agencies designed to stop actual cyber threats—hackers, viruses—now were trying to stop online “harm,” which included everything from things that hurt people’s feelings to truthful information that contradicts official narratives.

Now, just as Trump is returning to power, the censorship-industrial-complex’s power is more fragmented. Formal political power is about to be in Trump’s hands, and at least a portion of the Silicon Valley billionaire class has softened their view of him. Twitter is now owned by Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg just donated a million dollars for Trump’s inauguration.

Even so, many other nodes of cultural influence remain hostile to Trump and to free speech.

We Won’t Be Fooled Again

One of the most important defenses to these propaganda campaigns is already available to everyone: the power of belief. You don’t have to believe what you’re being pressured—but not persuaded—to believe. Be skeptical. Being skeptical is a superpower.

During the most extreme COVID hysteria in 2021, amid heavy-handed pressure to remain afraid, use ineffective masks, and avoid friends, weddings, and hospital visits to loved ones, the offer of relief from an experimental vaccine was a useful test of one’s instincts. There were lots of reasons to be skeptical—including the slippery, dishonest, and ever-changing messagingfrom public health authorities—but people understandably wanted things to get back to normal.

Many took the vaccine only to regret it later after learning they had done permanent damage to their hearts. We were eventually told that the vaccines failed to stop transmission, even though much of the propaganda campaign was a guilt trip blaming the unvaccinated for harming others. Even amid the fetid atmosphere of 2021, many millions refused the experimental mRNA vaccines, sometimes losing their civilian or military jobs because of their well-justified skepticism.

The war in Ukraine is another example of the propaganda apparatus turned on to full blast. The campaign was powerful and effective, at least temporarily. For a year after the Russian invasion, almost everyone was on Team Ukraine. Dutiful liberals flew the flag and rallied around the military-industrial complex, forgetting their peacenik sentiments about the Iraq War, while many Republicans joined in the militarism, forgetting the Cold War ended 30 years ago.

Supporters were all programmed to believe that history began in 2022, that the Russian invasion was “without provocation,” and that the good guys would eventually win. After a while, the predictable failure of Ukraine’s defense and the corruption of Ukraine and its leadership became manifest.

Leaks of information from official sources, along with the return of dissenting voices to Twitter, showed the limits of the censorship complex in the absence of a cooperative relationship between the government and private social media companies.

It is depressing to see how easily people can be manipulated by these propaganda campaigns, especially with so many reminders to be skeptical. It is as if the lies about “weapons of mass destruction” or Obamacare did not happen.

While no one likes to be fooled, it turns out that people do not like to be mocked even more, and they will generally endorse official opinions when that is what “respectable people” are doing. The censors know we are social animals, and that for many people it is better to be wrong than ostracized and disliked.

This ubiquitous system of control has been so effective that the duller among us—such as former vice presidential candidate Tim Walz—just automatically assumed misinformation and hate speech were not protected categories of speech under the First Amendment, as if those were authentic categories denoting something real and not merely labels used to disparage speech that officialdom has a problem with.

The techniques of social manipulation are all well explained in this long article from Tablet. On a hopeful note, the author thinks this approach was coordinated by Obama and will decline because of his apparent ineffectiveness in 2024. I am not so sure. I believe it more likely that the Democrats and the left are simply regrouping at the moment and trying to determine their messaging strategy.

Freedom of speech includes the right to be wrong, mistaken, or dissenting, as well as the opposite, the right to believe and rally to the government and other authorities. It includes words one hears from one’s countrymen and foreigners, from old books and new, and from people one mostly agrees with and otherwise.

Self-government is incompatible with universities and social media excluding those who have unpopular minority viewpoints. And self-government is utterly impossible under the sustained, government-led censorship campaign that has distorted our public life for the last 15 years and which we are only now beginning to understand.

Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.