The Patriot Post® · Some Leftists Get It Right

In a post titled leftist censorship, leftist Glenn Greenwald, who has a solid track record when it comes to his assessment of the now well-established leftist tactics of silencing opponents by redlining free speech, went after the latest effort to silence Joe Rogan.

Greenwald notes:

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard. For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of “hate speech” to mean “views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis.

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.

Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard.

The goal of liberals with this tactic is to take any disobedient platform and either force it into line or punish it by drenching it with such negative attacks that nobody who craves acceptance in the parlors of Decent Liberal Society will risk being associated with it.

Leading Democratic Party politicians have repeatedly subpoenaed social media executives and explicitly threatened them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more aggressively — a likely violation of the First Amendment given decades of case law ruling that state officials are barred from coercing private actors to censor for them, in ways the Constitution prohibits them from doing directly.

Greenwald concludes, “When it comes to authoritarian tactics, censorship has become the liberals’ North Star. Every week brings news of a newly banished heretic.”

The Patriot Post has been targeted by leftist speech suppressors repeatedly, particularly by so-called “fact-checkers” using these tactics, thus we are very familiar with this new iteration of speech suppression.