The Patriot Post® · Dems Support Speech Suppression Act of 2022

Nice reputation ya got there. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.

That’s the spirit and the mob mentality behind the DISCLOSE Act, the Democrats’ latest effort to suppress the speech of their political opponents. This hardy perennial was trotted out once again this week by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, ostensibly to rid campaigns of the “evil scourge of dark money.”

As Joe Biden ominously intoned on Tuesday, “Right now, advocacy groups can run ads on issues attacking or supporting a candidate right until Election Day without exposing who’s paying for that ad.”

The bill, which is sponsored by one of the Senate’s dimmest bulbs, Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, requires groups that talk about political issues to disclose all donors who contribute more than $10,000 to their cause within a two-year cycle. All groups that conduct issue advocacy and mention a candidate would be covered, and that includes those who mention federal judicial nominees.

Why this carve-in for judicial nominees? Joe Biden gives it away: “A conservative activist who spent, as was his right, decades working to put enough conservative justices on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade now has access to $1.6 billion in dark money to do more damage and — from our perspective — and restrict more freedoms.”

Biden is referring to Leonard Leo, the former executive vice president of the Federalist Society who helped former President Donald Trump compile and share his list of potential Supreme Court nominees. (Funny, but Democrats don’t like sharing such lists with the American people.) The Wall Street Journal editorial board explains further:

Including judicial nominees in the Disclose Act is a favor to progressive groups like Ruth Sent Us and others for which donor intimidation is a political strategy. They scour donor lists for names and then broadcast them to social-media lists that make them political targets. Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich resigned after he was attacked for donating in support of a ban on same-sex marriage. The goal is to intimidate individuals and businesses from donating to conservative causes.

Hey, when your ideas stink and your thirst for power is unquenchable, all you have left is intimidation, right?

The very idea that supporters of conservative causes and candidates can remain anonymous in our current system drives Democrats nuts. After all, they can’t intimidate those whom they can’t dox. And seeing as how they can’t currently accompany individual voters into the voting booth and peer over their shoulders, well, this is the next best thing.

Of course, exposing and shaming and canceling the donors behind the political ads that tend to eviscerate Biden and his fellow Democrats around election time is precisely the point of the DISCLOSE Act. Schumer called it “critical to fighting the cancer of dark money in our elections.”

When a partisan hack like Schumer says a bill is “critical to fighting the cancer of dark money in our elections,” he means it’s critical to keeping conservative donors from daring to fund the causes and candidates they support.

Incidentally, the act of doxing, as Merriam-Webster defines it, is to publicly identify or publish private information about a person, especially as a form of punishment or revenge. To “punishment or revenge” we’d of course add intimidation, but you get the idea. In fact, if Biden and Schumer and their fellow Democrats had any integrity, they’d come right out and call this speech-suppressing measure the DOX Act rather than the DISCLOSE Act. But perhaps truth in advertising is a bridge too far for the folks who brought us the Inflation Reduction Act.

Joe Biden, in his remarks Tuesday, says he and his party support “openness and accountability.” But it’s easy for him to make that boast when he has The Mob on his side. In virtually every other instance, the Left’s natural instinct is to deceive.

But here’s some good news on a Friday: Senate Republicans blocked the DOX Act DISCLOSE Act from moving to a vote yesterday. So those of us who appreciate free political speech have dodged a bullet, at least temporarily.

Thank goodness for the filibuster.