A clear majority of Americans now back restrictions from both the government and tech companies on "false" content, per the latest Pew Research Institute poll, revealing how successful the effort has been to build a constituency around silencing dissent.
Five years ago, a similar Pew survey showed that a majority of Americans—58 percent—understood that protecting freedom of information was more important than concerns about the veracity of what was posted online. Why did that number flip to 55 percent in favor of silencing so-called false information, with only 42 percent now clinging to faith in free speech?
The blame clearly belongs to the political Left, and in particular, President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, and its corporate media and Big Tech collaborators.
This spirit of intolerance was given new life by the reaction to the 2016 presidential election and the rise of former President Donald Trump. Rather than admit that their ideas and candidate had no appeal to working class voters, Democrats and their press cheerleaders preferred to blame fables about Russia. Liberals and Democrats concluded that Trump constituted a threat that could not be met by the conventional methods of democratic debate; the only answer to conservatives was to label their speech as beyond the pale.
And when damning evidence of Biden family corruption was uncovered during the last weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, the Left closed ranks to ensure that the New York Post's story about Hunter Biden's laptop was suppressed. They then bought into the lies concocted by the Biden campaign—backed up by dozens of former members of the security establishment—that it was Russian "disinformation," effectively ensuring that the Democratic candidate was protected from the fallout.
The spirit of that effort continues to this day as liberal media still downplays or refuses to cover new revelations from whistleblowers about the presidential family's corrupt activities.
But it was the coronavirus pandemic that did more than anything to legitimize opposition to free speech.
We now know that the lockdowns, mask and then vaccine mandates were both misguided and failed to protect Americans from the disease. The medical establishment's lies about what the "science" truly was and then their determination to silence all opposition to their pronouncements and rulings led to their labeling of all dissent as dangerous "misinformation" which should be suppressed rather than debated. As we learned from the revelations provided by the Twitter Files, they used their power and ability to influence the few companies that effectively control the Internet to brand a great deal of information that was actually truthful as lies that were too dangerous to be allowed to be heard.
It was the Biden administration that fully weaponized the effort to shut down opposition to its COVID-19 mandates. Silicon Valley oligarchs effectively own the virtual public square where contemporary debate takes place. They were the Biden administration's willing accomplices. The result was a dramatic curtailment of free speech that has no previous precedent outside of wartime.
Similarly, in another arena entirely, the Left's conquest of academia, the education establishment, and much of the press enabled them to push a false narrative about American racism. The promotion of critical race theory indoctrination as well as ideas about race and gender in schools prompted a furious pushback from grassroots groups of parents across the nation. But here again, the Left's appetite for silencing opposition went into effect. Not only were critics of local school boards who wished to protect their children from being lied to and sexualized falsely labeled as racists and homophobes. They also became targets for investigation by the Biden Department of Justice that was quick to label them and other dissidents from liberal orthodoxies as "domestic terrorists."
Two and a half years into the Biden administration, we've seen a clear pattern of efforts to target political opponents for prosecution and to use the powerful combination of corporate media and Big Tech to shut down or marginalize the speech of their opponents.
By contrast, it is conservatives who are fighting back against this toxic collusion of corporate and government power. The Pew survey shows a stark partisan difference when it comes to support for curtailment of free speech with Republicans opposing and Democrats supporting them. If our freedoms are to survive this assault, it will only be made possible by the defeat of the woke Left and its Democratic Party handmaids.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
