Columns, Congress, Constitutional Law, Free Speech

Want More Freedom of Speech? Try Less Government.

Below is my column in The Hill on my call for a bill that would bar federal funding of any program and grant to censor, blacklist, or target individuals or sites based on their content. It is time to get the U.S. government out of the censorship business. The column discusses the proposal in my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” to block any further funding for the current system of corporate, academic, and government programs targeting opposing or dissenting views.

Here is the column:

It is time to get the United States out of the censorship business for good.

In the last three years, the House of Representatives has disclosed a massive censorship system run in part with federal funding and with coordination with federal officials. A federal court described this system as truly “Orwellian.”

The Biden Administration has made speech regulation a priority in targeting disinformation, misinformation or malinformation. President Joe Biden even said that companies refusing to censor citizens were “killing people.”

His administration has now created an anti-free speech record that is only rivaled by the Adams Administration, which used the Alien and Sedition Acts to arrest political opponents.

Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is an example of how speech controls and censorship have become mainstream.  Her agency was created to work on our critical infrastructure, but Easterly declared that the mandate would now include policing “our cognitive infrastructure.” That includes combating “malinformation,” or information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

I have testified for years about the censorship system. For much of that time, Democrats insisted that there was no proof of any coordination or funding from the government. Such evidence did indeed exist, but Democrats worked to block any investigation to confirm what we already knew about government officials targeting individuals and groups for throttling, bans, and blacklisting.

Then Elon Musk bought Twitter. The release of the Twitter Files destroyed any plausible deniability of the government’s role in this censorship system. Various agencies had employees working with social media companies to target those with opposing or disfavored views. At the same time, we learned of grants from the federal government supporting blacklisting and targeting operations.

That includes efforts to quietly choke off the revenue of disfavored sites by pressuring advertisers and donors.

While companies like Facebook have continued to fight to conceal their coordination with the government, the Twitter Files pulled back the curtain to expose the system. Indeed, Democrats largely abandoned their denials and turned to full-throated defenses of censorship, even calling free speech advocates “Putin-lovers” and “insurrectionist sympathizers.”

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams in the only election where free speech was a primary issue for voters. It should be again. Vice President Kamala Harris is known as a supporter for these censorship and blacklisting operations. She can now defend that record and convince Americans that they need to have less free speech.

This debate should ideally focus on one simple legislative proposal. In my new book, I suggest various measures that can regain the ground that we have lost on free speech. One such measure is a federal law that would ban any federal funding of any offices or programs (government, academic, or corporate) that rate, target, censor, throttle, or seek to take adverse action against individuals or groups based on their viewpoints in public forums or social media.

There can be easy exceptions to this ban for individuals or groups engaging in criminal conduct or unlawful foreign interference with elections. Threatening individuals or trafficking in child pornography constitute conduct, not speech. They are criminal acts under the federal code.

Nothing in this law would prevent the government from speaking in its own voice. If Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas wants to challenge claims made about him or his agency, he can do so on the agency website or make his case to the media. That is the essence of free speech. What he cannot do is create a Disinformation Governance Board to regulate the speech of citizens or groups.

In my prior testimony to Congress, I warned about the use of what I called “censorship by surrogate” through which agencies did indirectly what they are barred from doing directly under the First Amendment.

This new law will not put an end to the burgeoning anti-free speech movement. It will not end the new market for groups making millions in seeking to silence or strangle sites with opposing views. However, it will create a wall of separation of the government from censorship systems.

It would also offer a simple and clear line for the 2024 election. Candidates will have to take sides on free speech. If candidates like Harris want to continue to support the government in blacklisting or censoring citizens, they should own it. We spent years of politicians engaging in cynical denials of the government’s role in censorship. If these politicians are “all in” with censorship, then they should be honest about it and let voters make the same choice that was made in 1800.

With billions to play with and enabling allies in Congress to conceal federal operations, speech regulation is an irresistible temptation for the government. We have seen how this temptation quickly becomes an insatiable appetite for government officials seeking to silence rather than answer critics.

Let’s get our government out of the business of rating, throttling  blacklisting, and censoring citizens.  It is time to pass a free speech protection act.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster).

This op-ed is part of The Hill’s “How to Fix America” series exploring solutions to some of the country’s most pressing problems. 

376 thoughts on “Want More Freedom of Speech? Try Less Government.”

  1. Turls: your proposed ban is actually just your attempt to censor what you deem to be unfavorable to your position.

    And I guess now would be a good time to mention that, because a person or entity doesn’t agree with your matador approach to mis and disinformation being able to access broad public consciousness it doesn’t mean that person or entity is ‘pro censorship’. That’s a ridiculously infantile position on your end, Jon. No doubt informed by who you work for…, but infantile nonetheless.

    1. Curls: your proposed comment is actually just your attempt to discredit what you deem to be unfavorable to your position. Juvenile. really really juvenile.

  2. AI is on the verge of obliterating trust of any and all speech. And Turley wants to protect the bad actors who want to cause chaos, vandalize and steal.

    1. …including skilled foreign adversary actors who use our open internet media to reach into the minds of our impressionable youth via TikTok, Telegram, YouTube, FB. Turley is stuck in some quaint romanticism about the free flow of ideas, meanwhile global PsyOps infowarfare with the intent to destroy our nation via U.S. children goes mostly unchallengeable by law. And Turley naively is proposing law that will further WEAKEN our ability for National Defense from daily international infowarfare attacks.

      His heart is in the right place, but his head is in the wrong century.

      1. Turley’s rules do not prohibit foreign actors from being controlled. One can provide laws to protect personal data. That is not censorship.

        There are many ways to attack the ghosts you wish to abolish without censorship. Censorship is the only way to stop Donald Trump, and that is what you are after.

        1. Freedom of speech allows me to create an AI generated voice that sounds like you. But you’re okay with this as long as it comes from within the country.

          1. There are tort laws meant to manage such problems, so I don’t know what you are talking about.

        2. Donald Trump has already been stopped, lol. If he were, for 10 seconds, to sound like a normal non-psychotic person he’d win in a landslide.

  3. Interesting that Ms. Easterly declared that her federal agency’s mandate would now include policing “our cognitive infrastructure.” God help us that’s defined by her. A true Kool-Aid drinker that’s for sure.

  4. If the government can be questioned and criticized, but a business cannot be questioned and criticized, then
    this proves that a business can be more tyrannical than the government.

      1. Then why not throw all of the other employee-related rules. laws, and regulations out the window in order to
        maximize profits?

        1. And the unions. This isn’t 1940 anymore. Yes, at one time you could say people who wanted to succeed were stifled by business and government. Not anymore. Even with inflation, if you find yourself not being able to afford gas… you’re lazy.

  5. If everyone had to leave for saying something that someone does not agree with, then this blog would be empty.

  6. You have the freedom to say whatever you want. I have the freedom to fire your ass if you say things that harm my business.

      2. That’s what the mafia boss said about putting out a hit order…. it’s just speech.

      4. Suffering negative consequences for saying or doing something is not freedom.

        “I called in sick to get away from work today to exhort all of you to go out and hunt down Jews to kill”

        How DARE you suffer negative consequences when your employers hear that! Your freedom has been stolen!

    1. It’s amazing some want gubment to take care of them. It must be easier or It’s all they’ve known or they’re in a minority and want a hammer or they came from nations of big gubment.

      Freedom can be unknown to many.

    2. Less gub’ment???? That ain’t Harris. It sure as hell ain’t Trump.

      That favorite escape that Soviet Democrats hope normal Americans will accept: moral equivalency. Trump also has a record of growing government and refusing to cut the regulatory load on Americans. Which is why Trump supposedly hated SCOTUS throwing out the Chevron Deference case.

      Yep, Trump is EXACTLY as much big government as Obama, Harris, and now Obama’s Third Term.

      There is exactly no difference – and so you should either stay home or vote for Obama’s Fourth Term instead of Trump.

  8. I want to spice up my life and befriend some crazy people. Have I come to the right place?

  9. So private entities can tyrannize their employees, but they don’t want to be tyrannized by the government? This seems hypocritical.

    1. The government has no competition, and little care for its reputational interests. It also has a monopoly on the use of force. It also extracts taxes rather than paying its citizens (in most cases). It’s not clear what you mean by a private company tyrannizing its employees but it has to be qualitatively different than the government tyrannizing its citizens. And it would still be beneficial to reduce governmental tyranny even if such reduction was not accompanied by new regulations on business. We are allowed to solve one problem at a time.

      1. An employer can fire an employee for something that he expressed, even in his free time.

        2. No need to work for and much easier to quit a tyrannical employer than a tyrannical government

        3. But your use of the term “hypocritical” suggests that employers are pushing for more freedom of speech. In fact, the employees are, in your scenario, victimized by both the employer and the government. So it’s the “little guy” in both cases that wants more freedom of speech. That means there is no hypocrisy involved.

          1. The tyranny isn’t just in the form of censorship. An employer doesn’t want to experience the tyranny of taxes and red tape from the government, yet the employer wants to be tyrannical towards the employees in other ways.

            1. Professor Turley’s proposal is for “a federal law that would ban any federal funding of any offices or programs (government, academic, or corporate) that rate, target, censor, throttle, or seek to take adverse action against individuals or groups based on their viewpoints in public forums or social media.”

              He is proposing the rein in both governmental and corporate censorship. Again, this is not a case of corporations complaining about the lack of freedom of speech. You start from a false premise that it is corporations that are seeking relief from censorship. That is how you get to the “hypocrisy” conclusion. At this point, I believe you are just sea-lioning me.

              1. Thanks. Is this to avoid lawsuits? Where could it go wrong? Seems a good idea.

    2. So private entities can tyrannize their employees, but they don’t want to be tyrannized by the government? This seems hypocritical.

      Seems rather infantile to have a belief there’s no difference between a personal employer/employee relationship and government. Sort of like the mumbling of a Soviet Democrat proud that they skipped civics in high school.

      You accept your employers rules of conduct for employees when you sign on to do work in exchange for pay. If you don’t like those rules interfering with your side hustle grooming children and advancing the cause of pedophilia being legal, you have every right as an employee to go find a job that doesn’t mind having their business associated with your activities when engaged in your side hustles.

      Nobody gets to opt out of the government of the day to go pay takes to another government in this country.

  10. Suggestion of funding ->

    Any funding for a limitation of free speech as in the first is attackable itself. Shall pass no law means funding and any other such law. I suppose that reason for newsguard? A rating system 😂 can be employed.

    Any law..

  11. H*ll, if we want a totally freer and better life, limit the fed to printing money and foreign affairs (that includes the military). Nothing else was ever considered their purview. Think of the budget reductions we would have if we fired all those bureaucrats in DC and required our congressmen to do their own jobs.

    1. Yeah, let’s de-orbit and crash those U.S. Weather Bureau satellites — a clear violation of the 10th Amendment! The same with those GPS satellites! Each State should develop and launch their own friggin’ satellites. Ditto CDC and FDA. Let each state fight epidemics on their own. Let each state try to regulate the food and drugs coming into their states.

      1. ” Let each state try to regulate the food and drugs coming into their states.”

        Yet the federal government destroyed intelligent management of Covid. You can stretch everything to pure black and white to show an outlier, which is what the left does. Example: One valid voter out of millions couldn’t get a voter ID; therefore, all voters should have their votes diluted. It’s not an intelligent way to approach problems.

      2. Yeah, let’s de-orbit and crash those U.S. Weather Bureau satellites — a clear violation of the 10th Amendment! The same with those GPS satellites!

        Says a lot that California product pbinca would zero in on those satellites, especially GPS, that are critical to the military having the information they need to be able to defend this country with minimal loss of American soldiers’ lives.

        Should we find it odd that he didn’t instead zero in on all the spending done in the Biden/Sanders/AOC Inflation Reduction Act?

        pbinca: if gaslighting and astroturfing won’t get him where he wants to go, he runs around trying statements about satellites to showcase his ignorance and/or contempt normal American taxpayers.

    2. Good comment! When the government runs out of money, and it will, these layers and layers of hapless red tape and incompetence will hit a brick wall. Those who possess real skills, people that make things, can fix things, do something useful will manage to survive. For the rest, it will be chaos.

      Presently, much of the government is hopelessly inefficient and incompetent. One of our family is working with a subcontractor for a government agency. They are on a project that in the private sector would have been one year to complete. The movie “Office Space” hits the nail on the head. They are now going into the fourth year, behind budget and the project is less than half complete. That is what you get with government bloat and incompetence.

      I will be happy to see much of it disintegrate and go away.

      1. E.M.
        I worked with some government types before. Inefficient and incompetent is right.

    3. Yeah, cuz the human beings that run things at the state level are way different than the human beings who run things at the federal level.

  12. “censorship by surrogate”

    I wonder if the factors enunciated in Skinner v. Ry. Labor Execs.‘ Ass’n, 489 U.S. 602, 613-14 (1989) as to whether a private party should be deemed an agent or instrument of the government for Fourth Amendment purposes, could be applied in a First Amendment case. Professor?

    J

  13. Censorship is but one technique of manipulative opinion-shaping. If you study PsyOps, you’ll find that pushing out well-crafted false narratives into sympathetic media is even more effective — instead of trying to rope off information you don’t want to be heard, you push out a competing whopper that it is in your interest for people to believe.

    Isn’t that exactly what Mike Morell helped Tony Blinken do when Hunter’s laptop appeared in the NY Post, threatened to derail Biden’s 2020 run? Calling that “censorship” is highly inaccurate — and self-defeating. Why?

    It’s misdiagnosing the problem. Let’s say this bill JT is championning passes Congress. And let’s assume it works in precluding government officials from blocking the publication of content they find undesirable. Don’t get me wrong, I support the intentions driving this bill.

    But, it leaves the barn door completely open for government to use proactive PsyOps tools of opinion-shaping. It steers the govt. toward use of public frauds, which are the stronger tools of mind-control than censorship. The govt. will use these tools, and when caught, claim 1st Amendment free speech rights to use them. But, was the right to intentionally deceive the electorate from an elected “office of trust” established in the Bill of Rights?

    How can it be that the authority to govern flows from “the consent of the governed” if that consent is obtained through trickery and deceit? Both cannot be the case. Therefore, the use of deception must be denied to government officials, and the only mechanism open to the People would be lawsuits equipping us with the power of subpoena and compelled discovery.

    And it’s not just government actors who aspire to duping the public to get their way. Foreign governments are using infowarfare PsyOps on Americans — isn’t this what the battle over TikTok is all about? Doesn’t that describe Islamist terrorists reaching out to radicalize our youth through social media? If you cede them 1st Amendment rights to wage deceptive infowarfare on impressionable youth, you’re surrendering to our enemies.

    Let’s take a broader, more comprehensive approach to the topic of militant, manipulative opinion-shaping. If we’re not careful, the changes to law narrowly targeting govt. censorship could backfire by further emboldening PsyOps mind-control methods — both in the hands of the USG and foreign adversaries.

    The problem we’re facing with manipulation of the infospace is much more complex than the way JT is defining it in terms of govt. censorship. Let’s take our time and think it through. Because the deep state would gladly give up censorship if allowed a free hand to legally engage in more potent forms of opinion-shaping you.

    1. There it is!

      The answer to EVERY problem is more tort!

      The answer to too much government is more government!!

      Brilliant!

      1. only pbinca does it in 1000 words. Likes to hear herself/himself/itself talk.

      2. If you’re trying to confront an overreach of government power, what are you going to do?…prosecute? The prosecutors ARE the government. Civil lawsuits are the Constitution’s blueprint for direct citizen legal action.
        Be thankful we have such an alternative to prosecution.

      1. Yes, the war of words. Look what’s been done with the 2nd. We just need a background check? Did that include a registry? If a criminal does his time then all freedoms are restored. Perhaps there was an arrow sentencing if not?

        The there was the child porn “rating system” for sentencing justice Jackson used at the request of Obama. Maybe newsguard can help the courts!

        To deny a moral authority, deny principles, lands law with more laws. Dismal

    3. In silence, a small lie carries much weight. However, in a society that values free speech, the big lie is open to scrutiny and can be dismantled. This is the power of free speech, a right that we must fiercely protect.

      Today, we are witnessing a fracture of silence, and people from the left are beginning to comprehend the leftist horrors. This awakening is leading to a shift towards the right, but it’s also intensifying the left’s efforts to censor. The urgency of this situation cannot be overstated.

      But that is not enough for the leftists as they also try to control the voting process with mass cheating as they did in 2020. The media and government withheld information, and now that we are coming to the next election, we find that voting machines still are not secure. The left will not stop until all independent ideas are removed.

      https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/hackers-conf-reveals-vulnerabilities-election-machines-amid-testing?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

      Hackers’ confab shows vulnerabilities in election machines amid testing concerns ahead of November.

      To better understand things, all we have to do is look at how Covid was managed. We experienced such diseases in the past, but some of the best minds were silenced based on government censorship. They have since turned out to be correct. The government used Covid to reduce the independence of its citizens. Even the Covid “czar” didn’t follow established medical principles that he believed up to the time of Covid.

      Censorship is the most dangerous thing our government has to offer. If you need proof, look at Stalin, Mao or any present-day authoritarian government. Without free speech, the only way to turn over the government is by spilling blood.

    4. But, it leaves the barn door completely open for government to use proactive PsyOps tools of opinion-shaping. It steers the govt. toward use of public frauds, which are the stronger tools of mind-control than censorship.

      Like criminally hiring one of Putin’s FSB agents and a failed British spy to write the Soviet Democrat party’s “Russia Dossier” without using a dollar of public funds. Then government use of taxpayer funds to have the Obama/Biden FBI use that ‘dossier’ they knew was false as well as who wrote it, to get illegal spy warrants to use to attempt to criminalize Trump and take out him and anyone near him to try and win an election. All while inadvertently “leaking” to sympathetic news media that Trump was a Russky spy in proactive PsyOps acts of voter opinion-shaping.

      pbinca is terrified that government would do stuff like that if they were prohibited form engaging in censorship by proxy – at the same time.

      It seems all that normal Americans get from California and its’ finest like Pelosi, Harris, Newsom and pbinca is street feces, right out there, obvious in the open for all to see.

  14. What if I started selling plastic ears with bloody holes in them, marketing them as “Trump Ears”. What if Trump didn’t like it and tried to stop me?

    1. Consult your business and copyright attorney.

      Nobody here gives a shit what you do.

    2. The ears would be beige-colored plastic, but the part around the bullet hole would be of red plastic. A mold for powdered plastic could be made.

    3. What if I started selling plastic ears with bloody holes in them, marketing them as “Trump Ears”. What if Trump didn’t like it and tried to stop me?

      What if you’re a far greater financial success due to a bigger audience, selling blow up Daddy-Daughter Inappropriate Sex Showers intimate dolls to your fellow Soviet Democrats?

      Will you be sued by Ashley Biden as she attempted to sue those who published the contents of her diary that she left behind while on a drug binge?

      Or maybe sued by Biden?

      I’m surprised every time a Soviet Democrat Marxist Useful Idiot posts as though they would surrender dependency on government to engage in free market capitalism. Marxism rewards failure; capitalism does not reward failure.

  15. More freedom of speech? How about holding those accountable that use speech as a weapon?

    “Even after Merchan’s gag order, Trump’s surrogates still included Loren Merchan — who is a minority partner in Authentic Campaigns, a political consulting firm that helps Democratic candidates – in their attacks on the judge and the legal system itself. Now, MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin is reporting that Loren Merchan and her business partner have been receiving consistent death threats following the months of invective from the ex-president and his allies.”

    1. ‘Donald Trump was targeted for assassination following YEARS of invective from elected Democrats and their allies.’

      1. True, but wasn’t Thomas Crooks also looking at other targets? From what’s been gathered so far from his phone and computer, it seems he was seeking a way to prove to those who bullied him that he was a “player”….a “somebody”. Do you have to overlay a left-right narrative on everything that happens in this world?

        That said, spewing hateful invective in the public square does have consequences, which is a hardening of positions, a digging in of heels, and drifting further from dispassionate discussion of the full range of our public policy choices. Incivility is the poison that bodes for policy blunders — public decisions taken in haste and panic that later prove regretful. A good example is the 8-year Iraq War. The US public was duped and fear-mongered into agreeably toppling Saddam Hussein. His arch-enemy Shiite rivals led by Ahmad Chalabi orchestrated a brilliant PsyOps campaign about Saddam’s WMDs, and his secret pact with Al Qaeda to vaporize NYC. It was fed into back-door intelligence channels, and sympathetic media.

        What did we learn about the use of PsyOps deceptive infowarfare from that episode? Nada. What have we done to counter it?….zilch?

        Who is even willing to use the term PsyOps to describe the outrageous distortions of our own domestic politics?
        The way Hunter Biden’s laptop was covered up with CIA-retiree expertise? The way Trump attempted to discredit Obama via his “birther” fraud, and later to claim to have won the 2020 election “by a landslide” in order to remain in office beyond his term?

        Wake up, America. Your thought process is constantly being shaped by people who understand how to bend it though informatics. This is the challenge of our era to figure out how to tame. The first step is learning to recognize PsyOps techniques being utilized in the public square, and not “taking sides”, because ALL knowlegeable actors are seeking power through infowarfare (left, right, Islamist, CCP, Russia, Iran, corporations, media). If you only recognize it when as something your opponents are doing, you’ve been co-opted into servile compliance with its use by those you naively trust.

        1. The US public was duped and fear-mongered into agreeably toppling Saddam Hussein. His arch-enemy Shiite rivals led by Ahmad Chalabi orchestrated a brilliant PsyOps campaign about Saddam’s WMDs, and his secret pact with Al Qaeda to vaporize NYC.

          Some of us are old enough to remember that their were EIGHT different points provided – and accepted by both parties in Congress – regarding Hussein’s violations of the Ceasefire Agreement and RESUMING military action against Hussein. WMDs were merely one of them. ONE OUT OF EIGHT.

          We’re also old enough to remember that weeks before the war with Iran resumed, the UN weapons inspector reported to the UN and NATO that Hussein would still not allow them to inspect many sites, that there was anthrax and aerial delivery systems missing, etc. We remember various intelligence agencies repeatedly warning that there was a lot of sudden truck traffic from suspected NBCW sites in Iraq to Syria. And magically, a short time later Syria had Sarin and other blood and nerve agents to unleash on their own people.

          Some of us even remember fellow vets who served in Iraq (and allied troops from Britain and Canada) being disabled with injuries that were diagnosed as being from those same NBCW agents that apparently didn’t exist. We don’t mistake poorly directed wars with Democrat propaganda media claiming Iraq was all a Bush NBCW lie.

          None of the brilliant analysts who scream about the reasons for resuming the war in Iraq (while criticizing Bush as it being his fault) ever mention any of that – or explain how Syria magically built and hid the facilities to manufacture their own NBCW weapons.

          All of that got Democrat Memory Holed when the job was to take out Bush and his re-election effort and resuming the war with Iraq was supposed to be based on a lie created by Bush (and supposedly heroically opposed by his Soviet Democrat opponents like Pelosi, Biden, Clinton et al).

          If pbinca wants to talk about psyops and a sympathetic news media, when he/she/it gets out of high school, they could talk to some of those vets. Or go back to when Biden, Pelosi, et al were aware of all of that and endorsed resuming the war with Hussein and Iraq. They haven’t been able to hide the media archives from what the remnants of news media was reporting back then in the months before hostilities with Iraq resumed.

          pbinca may eventually realize that expecting history to fall into the Soviet Democrat Memory Hole doesn’t work with many people who were adults at that time. Especially those of us who did multiple tours over there between the Gulf War and Afghanistan/Iraq years later.

          pbinca isn’t a Deep Fake American; he/she/it is just a Cheap Fake American.

  16. I looked at the crowds of adoring Democrats at Kamala’s rallies. I was reminded of Walt Kelly’s Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” I saw thousands of people cheering for a person who has, by her own admission, been at the center of Biden’s disastrous presidency, actively concealed his mental deterioration, and who, when she ran for President, enthusiastically embraced a series of far left ideas dealing with energy, the border and a host of others. But during the rallies, these thousands of people cheered as she just as enthusiastically embraced the opposites of those ideas. And then there is her running mate, who appeared to drive the Democrats wild even though his embrace of even further left ideas makes Kamala seem like William Buckley. The truth is the cheering Democrats have no idea what she is or who she is, and know even less about her running mate. They just don’t care. As best I can tell, all they really care about are two things: first, she is not Trump, and second, she and her running mate are Democrats. This is why Democrats are easy fodder for the party, the media and the “elite”. Democrat voters do not spend much time in critical thinking or self-reflection and ironically care very little about preserving the essence of this country that gives them the freedom– license– to be as stupid as they are.

    2. Honestlawyermostly,
      It is a cult. They could put a ham sandwich up there and they would blindly cheer for it.
      At least JD Vance, and that one Google exec (sorry, dont recall his name) looked at Trump’s admin and objectively came around his first term was not at all bad.

  17. The twitter files did not show any government involvement to censor the laptop story. They did show the difficulty of moderating content that could have profound effects if not handled correctly. What was interesting is that Elon released the files only to two journalists who shared HIS views and did not share the files with everyone. He wanted to control the narrative as a free-speech absolutist which is odd. He was limiting the content he was sharing and not being very transparent about it. Essentially moderating the content he was releasing.

    1. —-Kind of like Democrats trying to control upcoming debate by demanding it be hosted on ABC and refusing to debate on FOX network?

    2. “The twitter files did not show any government involvement to censor the laptop story. “

      That evidence was given in testimony from Jack Dorsey And mark Z.

      Maybe a little more time on C-Span and less on Jimmy Fallon will help you with your problems.

      Yesterday you ignorantly claimed that the NY post story was “withheld” for 24 hrs. Wrong.

      You went on to claim that it was “withheld” to “verify its authenticity”. Another LIE

      Read more. Type less.

      1. Imagine if the government came in here to censor all of Svelaz’s disinformation.

        It would leave like 2 sentences in each of his posts.

      2. Quote Dorsey and Zuckerberg saying government told them to censor the laptop story.

        “ Yesterday you ignorantly claimed that the NY post story was “withheld” for 24 hrs. Wrong.

        You went on to claim that it was “withheld” to “verify its authenticity”. Another LIE”

        Show evidence that it’s a lie.

    3. In reality, the way the Hunter laptop crisis was managed by Tony Blinken, Mike Morell, CIA retirees, and sympathetic media shows a deep level of government involvement. Government employees who retire take with them their training, and professional networks. Mike Morell was trained in PsyOps at Langley. You don’t think that training played a part in crafting the “Russian hacking” explanation for Hunter’s laptop? He knew that the social media platforms can suppress information thought to be hacking, and provided them the perfect rationale for blocking the New York Post, a reputable, conservative-leaning media org. There is even evidence that a current CIA employee assisted in gathering the 51 signatures for Morell’s infamous letter.

      How can you say government’s fingerprints were missing in that highly-effective PsyOps campaign to tilt the election in Biden’s favor?

  18. Reducing the size of government is simple — abolish failed departments such as the Dept. of Education, which has the US near the bottom among first world countries — and slash funding for executive agencies such as the State Dept, which has 75,000 employees for a couple hundred embassies, and the DHS, the home of the descendants of Nazis brought over here by the Dulles brothers in Paperclip. The various appropriations committees can go through the budget with a meataxe. There are 2.4 mil federal employees but there are over 10 million private contractors. Set up a working group to examine bloated, inflated giveaways and cut them out. Then there would be enough money to rebuild our infrastructure and prevent a wasteful, corrupt government from leaching $4.3 TRILLION from what’s left of the private sector economy every year.

    1. Cute, but… R’s first have to win the next election. Any thoughts about that?
      Its stunning how commenters here spout off ideological rummaging but have no idea that what they state is empty rhetoric.

  19. Why are you okay with private entities punishing people for what they express?

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