The far-left Atlantic Magazine is openly lobbying for the coronavirus pandemic to lead to more China-style speech censorship here in America.
I know the above sentence sounds like hyperbole, like I’m taking the Atlantic’s argument to an extreme… But I’m not. This is precisely what the Atlantic is calling for and hoping for…
As the saying goes these days, the Atlantic is saying the quiet parts out loud…
As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China. Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.
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We live—and for several years, we have been living—in a world of serious and growing harms resulting from digital speech. Governments will not stop worrying about these harms. And private platforms will continue to expand their definition of offensive content, and will use algorithms to regulate it ever more closely. The general trend toward more speech control will not abate.
If that isn’t frightening enough, the piece was written by two law professors.
So we now have two law professors, one from Harvard, using a mainstream publication to argue in favor of big tech and big government teaming up to censor speech and ideas, in favor of embracing a communist country’s speech oppression techniques as a means “to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”
And who exactly will be put in charge of deciding what our “society’s norms and values” are?
I’m guessing it won’t be We the People. And it sure as hell won’t be Donald Trump, the only person elected by way of a national referendum.
No, it will be the corrupt media and bureaucrats and, of course, Harvard law professors, who will decide what America’s “norms and values” are.
Dear God.
The American left is finally coming out of the Stalinist closet, and not only embracing a big, central government, but also big business in the form of big tech.
The American left is finally coming out of the Orwellian closet to announce that Slavery is Freedom! Government Censorship is Freedom! Big Business Controlling Speech and Blacklisting Ideas is Freedom!
What’s especially grotesque about this is that if you want to talk about our society’s norms, there was a time when the idea of encouraging our government to use Facebook as a black site to abuse our civil rights would have been laughed out of the offices of the Atlantic. What could be more illiberal?
But true liberalism is dead at places like the Atlantic, replaced with a dangerously unstable leftism that openly seeks to control the free flow of speech and ideas by way of massive corporations. And then the Atlantic sells this malevolent oppression of ideas as the key to preserving democracy.
This of course is proof the left knows their ideas cannot survive scrutiny in the era of the Internet, an era where the elites in the elite media can no longer bottleneck debate through a few television networks and magazines.
It is also proof the left are un-American tyrants.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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