The Patriot Post® · Brazil: A Free Speech Canary

Brazil has reminded Americans that free speech isn’t a universally embraced human right. Indeed, it’s one of the first rights that totalitarian governments will attack and attempt to eliminate.

The leftist regime now running Brazil does not like the fact that X, owned by Elon Musk, has not bowed to a judge’s demand that the social media platform censor its users’ speech and boot certain political individuals off its platform. As a result, Justice Alexandre de Moraes issued a nationwide ban of X in Brazil, a decision that was upheld by Brazil’s Supreme Court last week.

X happens to be one of the most popular social media apps in the nation of some 217 million people. Musk has thus far refused to comply with Moraes’s censorship order. In fact, Musk has kept X online in Brazil via his satellite Internet provider, Starlink. To further ensure that his order is followed, Moraes has instituted a $9,000 fine on anyone caught getting around the ban and accessing X via a virtual private network (VPN). To put that in perspective, that fine total is the average annual wage of most Brazilians.

Siding with Musk in this free speech fight is the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to pressure Brazil into lifting its block on X. “It’s concerning that governments across the Western legal tradition are starting to look at these companies as avenues to censor rather than benefits to humankind,” contends Jeremy Tedesco, ADF senior vice president of corporate engagement. “You really can’t truly be free, you can’t live in a democracy, and you can’t enjoy freedom unless you have free speech as an underlying foundation of your society.”

Freedom of speech is a fundamental principle of any democratic system. Without it, there can be no genuine democracy.

The irony is that the Left in the West has bought into the blatantly undemocratic notion that preaches top-down speech control as a necessity for “protecting democracy.” They couch such an ironically illiberal and totalitarian instinct under the guise of protecting people from “hate speech” and “misinformation.”

For example, Bill Clinton’s former labor secretary, Robert Reich, recently penned an op-ed arguing that Musk is “transforming his enormous wealth … into a huge source of unaccountable political power that’s now backing [Donald] Trump and other authoritarians around the world.” And how is Musk doing this? Well, by allowing free speech on X, which has allowed individuals like Trump to voice their views unfiltered to the masses. The irony is that those calling for authoritarian measures are not Trump or Musk but self-identified democracy advocates like Reich.

Furthermore, Reich relies on leftist anti-free speech organizations like the Center for Countering Digital Hate to supposedly reinforce his argument. Never mind that CCDH, a London-based nonprofit, doesn’t disclose much about its funding sources. But it does have it out for X and Musk.

CCDH has led a campaign against Musk following his acquisition of Twitter, warning advertisers that his refusal to regulate speech on the platform opens it up to increasing instances of “hate speech.” In response, Musk has sued CCDH.

The pressure is real, and X is facing massive revenue losses. Last week, Musk told investors that the social media company had lost more than $24 billion since he acquired it.

Much of this market value loss was due to the sustained pressure campaign by the likes of the now-defunct GARM and CCDH to chase investors away from the platform — all because they object to Musk’s commitment to free speech.

Unfortunately, too many left-leaning Americans have become so enticed by “benevolent” totalitarianism that they, too, are calling for restrictions to America’s first right, ironically in the name of “saving democracy.” And Kamala Harris is one of those Americans.

It used to be that there were no bigger defenders of America’s free speech rights than those on the Left. Now, they are the greatest threat to freedom of speech.