Hillary Makes Her Case for Controlling Speech
If free speech is the defining issue of our time, then she’s on the wrong side of it.
Hillary Clinton was never the most likable first lady, and she was even less so as a presidential candidate. But there was a moment when the mask slipped. That’s when we watched her lose the 2016 election by saying, “To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of [Donald] Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.”
Back then, we observed, “What is deplorable is just how condescending Hillary’s views of many Americans are. Leftists like Hillary believe that people serve the interest of government, rather than government being beholden to citizens via the Constitution.”
She’s not running for the Oval Office this time around, but you can tell Hillary is still bitter. And as part of the “formal deprogramming” she said last year she believes those “deplorables” need, she went to CNN over the weekend to prescribe a healthy dose of government censorship:
We need national action, and sadly, our Congress has been dysfunctional when it comes to addressing these threats to our children. So you’re absolutely right. This should be at the top of every legislative and political agenda. There should be a lot of things done. We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which gave Internet platforms immunity because they were thought to be just pass-throughs. But if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control. And it’s not just the social and psychological effects; it’s real harm. It’s child porn and threats of violence, things that are terribly dangerous.
As Ben Bartee of PJ Media noted, “Hillary Clinton never fails to remind non-lobotomized Americans what a massive bullet we dodged in 2016.”
We’re not going to argue that much of social media isn’t a sewer. It is. And it’s filled with a noxious brew of the “child porn and threats of violence” that Hillary brought up and so much more. But the person who can best decide that it’s a sewer is the end user, as discerning people will quickly figure out what is good and what isn’t. With the exception of child porn that she mentioned, it’s not the government’s job to hold our hands and dictate that to us, no matter how tempting the idea may be.
Unfortunately, government doesn’t see it that way. “And even now, for Hillary and other lefties, it’s not enough. Social media needs MORE censorship,” says Not the Bee in paraphrasing Clinton. “Because if anyone can say whatever they want, (you know, freedom of speech) they’re afraid Trump may be elected again.”
Speaking of Donald Trump, it’s interesting that Elon Musk seems to be allied with him on the issue of free speech. Had Musk been able to purchase Twitter prior to the 2020 election, there’s no telling how a free-speech platform might have allowed the election to play out. Or is there? For example, more voters would have known about the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Let’s just be happy that Hillary didn’t break that glass ceiling eight years ago. And that her loss to Trump reduced her to peddling books and complaining about how all those unwashed masses deprived her of the presidential power she craved. If she has the freedom of speech to continually retell her tale of woe, we should have the podium to call her out.
Free speech might be the defining topic of our time. And she’s on the wrong side.