One sign that a fundamental change is in the offing would be a new commitment to free speech. Unfortunately, that is one traditional liberal virtue that is under greater siege today than at any time in recent memory. Especially worrisome is the fact that it is under siege as much in Western democracies as in explicitly totalitarian regimes. It is said that in communist countries, the future is well known, and it is only the past that is up for grabs. That is part of the Orwellian commitment to Newspeak, where truth is always and everywhere subject to the requirements of the party. The future is inevitable, but the past can always be rewritten.
The recent promiscuous attacks on Elon Musk, who, among other things (Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City, etc.), is the owner of the social media company X (formerly Twitter), are a sign of the times. Robert Reich, the first secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, recently took to the pages of the reliably left-wing English paper The Guardian to tell the world that “Elon Musk is out of control. Here is how to rein him in.”
What was Musk’s tort? It was twofold. First, he allowed people to speak their minds on X, even if what they said ran counter to the prevailing elite narrative. Second, he himself said things with which those sentries disagreed.
Reich and others allege that Musk has not fulfilled his obligation to “moderate” content on X. But that is not true. One may not advocate violence, promote child pornography, or violate other laws. In fact, the list of rules and acceptable-use policies is long. But one may express one’s opinions, even the mother of all unacceptable opinions, that Donald Trump should be president. For this, Reich proposes a range of remedies, including canceling government contracts with Musk’s various companies (which would, in the case of SpaceX, bring America’s space industry to a standstill). Reich even suggests that Musk may need to be arrested, just as Pavel Durov, the founder of the messaging platform Telegram, recently was by the French government.
Kamala Harris, currently the vice president, evinced a similar sentiment to Reich’s in 2019, though with a different target. Back then, she claimed Trump had lost the “privileges” of free speech, because the opinions he expressed on Twitter were influencing people. “They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people,” she said in an interview, “without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.” Perhaps some intrepid soul can volunteer to explain to the vice president that in the United States free speech is a constitutional right guaranteed by the First Amendment, not a “privilege,” and that untethered governmental “oversight or regulation” of speech is precisely the problem.
How big a problem governmental interference is in free exchange was shown at the end of August in an extraordinary letter Mark Zuckerberg, the ceo of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, etc.), wrote to Congressman Jim Jordan, the head of the House Judiciary Committee. In it, Zuckerberg noted that “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.”
Zuckerberg also confirmed that the administration pressured Facebook to dissemble about or throttle or bury reporting around Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop and his dealings with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. In other words, if it is the spread of “disinformation” you are worried about, look not to the platforms that encourage the free exchange of ideas but to the denizens of government. It is they, aided and abetted by a compliant media, who are the most potent sources of censorship and disinformation in a country that once upon a time cherished free speech as a bedrock political right of free citizens.
