The Patriot Post® · Americans Are Warming Up to Censorship

Don’t look now, but we’ve become a nation of sheeple.

The evidence is everywhere, but perhaps no place is it more apparent than in our collective and ever-increasing willingness to be censored.

Take a recent Pew Research poll, for example, which shows that a majority of Americans now favor government and Big Tech telling us which information we can and can’t be subjected to. By a margin of 55% to 42%, the American people “support the U.S. government taking steps to restrict false information online, even if it limits people from freely publishing or accessing information.”

And it’s getting worse, not better. From the survey: “Support for government intervention has steadily risen since the first time we asked this question in 2018. In fact, the balance of opinion has tilted: Five years ago, Americans were more inclined to prioritize freedom of information over restricting false information.

The results from five years ago? Only 39% favored government intervention at the time, while 58% were against it.

Hmm, what happened within the last five years to swing public opinion? Oh, right — the coronavirus pandemic, for one thing. And the 2020 election, for another.

With those things in mind, notice that Pew couches censorship under the euphemism of restrictions on false information. We’ve come to expect this sort of linguistic sleight of hand from left-leaning pollsters who know that a particular result can best be achieved by asking the question in a particular way. Clearly, the numbers wouldn’t be so depressing if the term "censorship” were used instead of the more noble-sounding effort to police “false information.”

But this merely supports our “sheeple” assertion: Given all the abuse we’ve seen in recent years, are we really comfortable with ceding the role of information arbiter to the government? To Big Tech? To media “fact-checkers”?

This shaping of the question being asked is part of the media’s “pollaganda” approach to shaping public opinion — a technique our Mark Alexander described years ago:

Media outlets accomplish the pollaganda effect by first indoctrinating viewers with “reporting” that reflects a particular bias, then conducting “opinion polls” which, of course, reflect that indoctrination. Then the media uses poll results to proselytize further by treating the results as “news,” which, in turn, induces “bandwagon” psychology — the human tendency of those who do not have a strong ideological foundation to aspire to the side perceived to be in the majority — and thus further drives public opinion toward the original media bias, ad infinitum.

Not surprisingly, left-leaning respondents are more likely to relinquish their freedom of speech than those on the Right. As Pew reports, “Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to support the U.S. government taking steps to restrict false information online” by a whopping 70%-to-39% margin.

Interestingly, though, there was virtually no difference between the parties in 2018, when both were right around 40%. What might’ve caused the Democrats to warm up to censorship since then? Beyond the pandemic, it’s clearly because they know the censors are on their side. Take the 2020 presidential election, for example, whose results were largely influenced by the corrupt collusion of Big Tech, Big Media, the FBI, and our nation’s intelligence services. Given this, the Left’s affinity for censorship is no surprise.

Here, it’s worth pointing out another alarming takeaway from the poll — namely, that the American people are more inclined to support tech companies moderating false info online than the government by 65% to 55%.

Again, the partisan gap has grown substantially since 2018. And why wouldn’t it? With the exception of Twitter, Big Tech is run by America-hating, speech-suppressing leftists.

When it comes to matters of freedom, it’s remarkable to consider the metamorphosis of the Left. Once the leading proponents of civil liberties, they’re now the leading usurpers of them. As columnist Jeffrey Tucker observed recently:

Someone coming of age right now would never have any idea that the Left once had some central principles that revolved around themes of freedom. They were free speech, bodily autonomy, peace, small business over large, the poor and middle class over the rich, freedom of expression and art, and opposition to ruling-class manipulation of the system on behalf of the privileged instead of the common good. They were deeply suspicious of the national-security state, corporate elites, and arbitrary uses of executive power. They were against corruption in government.

Liberals have been abandoning liberal values for years now, and freedom of speech is chief among them. The rest of us must resist government and Big Tech censorship as if our way of life depended on it — because it does.

As Democrat President John F. Kennedy presciently put it more than half a century ago, “A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”