Hillary Clinton is continuing her global efforts to get countries, including the United States, to crackdown on opposing views. Clinton went on CNN to lament the continued resistance to censorship and to call upon Congress to limit free speech. In pushing her latest book, “Something Lost and Something Gained,” Clinton amplified on her warnings about the dangers of free speech. What is clear is that the gain of greater power for leaders like Clinton would be the loss of free speech for ordinary citizens.
Clinton heralded the growing anti-free speech movement and noted that “there are people who are championing it, but it’s been a long and difficult road to getting anything done.” She is right, of course. As I discuss in my book, the challenge for anti-free speech champions like Clinton is that it is not easy to convince a free people to give up their freedom.
That is why figures like Clinton are going “old school” and turning to government or corporations to simply crackdown on citizens. One of the lowest moments came after Elon Musk bought Twitter on a pledge to restore free speech protections, Clinton called upon European officials to force Elon Musk to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). This is a former democratic presidential nominee calling upon Europeans to force the censorship of Americans.
She was joined recently by another former democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, who called for government crackdowns on free speech.
Other democrats have praised Brazil for banning X. For her part, Clinton praised the anti-free speech efforts in California and New York and called for the rest of the country to replicate the approach of those states.
Clinton added a particularly illuminating line that said the quiet part out loud. This is all about power and the fear that she and others will “lose control” over speech:
“Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, 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.”
Clinton continues to offer a textbook example of the anti-free speech narrative. While seeking sweeping censorship for anything deemed disinformation, Clinton cites specific examples that are already barred under federal law like child porn.
Despite the amplified message on sites like CNN, most citizens may not be as aggrieved as Clinton that she and her allies could “lose total control” over the Internet. The greater fear is that she and her allies could regain control of social media. The Internet is the single greatest invention for free speech since the printing press. That is precisely why figures like Clinton are panicked over the inability to control it.
If citizens remain true to their values and this indispensable right, Clinton will hopefully continue to face “a long and difficult road to getting anything done” in limiting the free speech of her fellow citizens.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
I have an idea. After Trump is inaugurated he should open a Department of Progressive Disinformation and censor the MSM and Kerry and Hillary and Obama, etc. Let’s see how many nanoseconds it takes for them to discover the First Amendment and the “Indispensable Right”.
Shadow,
But then they would scream and yell about how totalitarian Trump is.
* if Trump won they’d burn the place down.
Hillary Clinton’s views on free speech shows us her leanings towards Orwellian totalitarianism. We rejected having an Orwellian totalitarian as President in 2016, can we reject Kamala Harris, who appears to be a much worse Orwellian totalitarian, in 2024?
And there we have it…she let the truth be spoken. Every part of the prog/left democrat agenda is about CONTROL.
Upchuck Farmer enjoys rights that he didn’t fight for himself.
I have my DD214 under Honorable conditions.
Do you?
UpstateFarmer: those are the Lies Of Insinuation.
The only service Anonymous can point to was his heroism in the black mask and man-jammies of the Democrat stormtroopers during the 2020 Mostly Peaceful Insurrection.
Are children allowed to support a war that their fathers fight in without having to fight in it themselves?
Sure.
And as soon as they are 18 years of age, graduated high school, they should be at the recruitment center, enlisting in a combat MOS and volunteer for the next combat unit to deploy.
Biden/Harris/Waltz gets us into another forever war, those children will get their chance to fight and die.
UpstateFarmer: Biden/Harris/Waltz gets us into another forever war, those children will get their chance to fight and die.
All those ‘forever wars’ that go on because politicians who sent the troops to war, then push the military professionals aside to run the wars for their political benefit back home. And at the UN.
Why do we let them escape accountability by calling them “forever wars”?
How long did the prior Gulf War take, in either hours or days of ground fighting?
How did we go in Afghanistan from the hajjis running and hiding in terror in caves, just trying to stay alive another day rather than die a martyr the first two years… to ISAF and NATO combat troops doing “democracy projects” and UN NGO groups doing “nation building”?
It wasn’t American and other NATO generals that laid out and implemented the battle plan of having a “forever war” in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Brits were able to fairly easily defeat a communist insurrection in Malaysia while Lyndon Johnson and MacNamara held our first “forever war” in Vietnam. Followed by Nixon attempting to appease the path to peace.
We had no problem winning the Gulf War in the span of a few days of ground war when Schwartzkoff was allowed to run the war.
But a few years later, politicians push generals aside to pursue 15+ years of running and commanding a “forever war” in Afghanistan.
Time to call “forever wars” what they actually are, not give the politicians that replace military leadership a pass for their responsibility for those wars becoming that way.
Shortly after TV became ubiquitous in most households, it was used to turn public opinion against Joe McCarthy. The elites learned a valuable lesson from that exercise in the power the media held. They liked it that there were only three government licensed broadcasters whose interests aligned with elite corporate sponsors. It was a one way messaging system: they send the message and the viewer receives it – with very little feedback.
What Clinton and the other anti-free speech nuts don’t like is a competitive marketplace for ideas offered by a two way communication system, where the receiver of the message (the hoi polloi) can actually criticize the sender of the message (the powerful elite). That threatens their power. Even newspapers were essentially one way in that the editors decide which “letter to the editor” to publish and which to ignore.
They are rightfully afraid of the democratization of communication systems because it holds them accountable and potentially threatens their power.
I do not believe in free speech. It should be illegal to say anything against free speech!
One of the reasons that I stopped watching MASH was their sanctimonious undercurrent of progressivism. Their episode against McCarthy was truly revealing.
In my mind, I think of MASH as basically two different series, MASHI and MASHII. MASHI is when McLean Stevenson and Wayne Rogers were part of the cast. Then it was more interested in being a comedy and less concerned about promoting liberal social issues. MASHII is when Stevenson was replaced by Harry Morgan and Rogers was replaced by Mike Farrell. MASHII still had a comedic tilt, but the comedy was framed around promoting liberal social themes and narratives. I know Alan Alda wrote and directed several episodes in the MASHII era.
Going to war with Germany was good because it helped to topple Hitler.
Going to war with Russia would be good because it would help to topple Putin.
What are they waiting for?
What are you waiting for?
I knew it!
I predicted the same old predictable, fallacious response from Upchuck Farmer!
Why aren’t you in Ukraine fighting the Russian and directly toppling the Russian dictator, instead of insulting someone who has actually served this country min war, or are you just another keyboard warrior? I agree with Upstate, you need to sign up for a combat MOS, or better, go to Ukraine and volunteer to fight the Russians, or are just another armchair warrior. Put you money where your mouth is.
Why does toppling a dictator fill you with dread? Do you like dictatorships?
Why don’t we start with Saudi Arabia. Should be a pushover.
Why don’t we begin with Zelinskyy? He was illegitimately installed after a coup (the so-called “Orange Revolution”) engineered by Victoria Nuland and her NSA/CIA/Deep State cronies. He has since suspended elections required by the Ukraine constitution. I think that puts him in the same class as Nicolas Maduro, and should satisfy any reasonable person’s definition of “dictator”. Does that work for you? If not, why not?
Because toppling a dictator – one who has been chosen in elections that are more trustworthy than ours, requires killingh large numbers of people. Todate probably more than 1M people have died in this fight.
There are dictators all over the world -many are our allies – such as MBS or erodigan – we are not toppling them.
The US is not the policeman for the world.
We are NOT here to impose our will and values on the rest of the world
“Why does toppling a dictator fill you with dread? Do you like dictatorships?”
Commie useful idiots don’t believe there’s second and third order consequences for empowering and enriching Iran’s ayatollah, deserting Afghanistan to Islamic terrorists, preventing Israel from destroying Muslim terrorist groups that are also screaming Death To America. Or any possible second and third order consequences to declaring war on Russia to take out Putin.
Perhaps because by avoiding actually enlisting and going to war, they know more than those who did. Just as Obama, Biden, and Harris do who also never dared to wear a uniform.
Upstate for the WIN!
Why Animny continues to use Putin as the Boogie man as China pushes towards world domination?
Why exactly has Putin threatened nuclear war against other nations in their proxy war? Why would any American life be worth it for that fight that would lead to a nuclear war and kill millions? Unless they want millions dead of course! What an idiotic thing to say!
Traveler,
This is a war that should of never happened in the first place. Others have written papers going back over a decade describing what is happening now is due to NATO expansion Eastward. All of this could of been avoided. And if it were not for Biden the butcher who sent Boris Johnson to squash the peace deal the Ukrainians and the Russian put together in the spring of 2022 in Istanbul, all that death and destruction could of been prevented.
We are on the verge if not already in WWIII and we have some dumb fools who want to escalate to full out war, even risking a nuclear exchange. Of course they are the ones always clamoring for war, when they wont do it themselves or send their kids and family into harms way.
Talk of war leads to war.
Promising you’ll be peaceful and won’t oppose “minor transgressions” leads to war.
If you want peace, show adversarial nations you’re more than prepared to wage war.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
Anyone advocating for actions that would likely lead to nuclear war should be forced to watch a documentary film titled “White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” about the aftermath of the atomic bombing of those cities. I have a pretty strong stomach, but that film was very difficult for me to watch. The weapons that would most likely be used today in a nuclear exchange make those bombs seem like Tinker Toys. Regardless of where anyone stands on the justification for those bombings, we should make common cause to do our very best to ensure that it never happens again.
What should be even more upsetting to your stomach would be watching the death and destruction that would have resulted if the Allies had instead had to fight the entire Japanese nation, inch by inch, house to house, ditch by ditch, to defeat the Japan.
Don’t just imagine and tell one small slice of that story – tell the entire story and what the alternative would have led to.
UpstateFarmer: This is a war that should of never happened in the first place. Others have written papers going back over a decade describing what is happening now is due to NATO expansion Eastward.
Why the desire to blame “NATO expansion” and citing others who also blame what is happening now on “NATO expansion”. That claim is beyond sophomoric. Doesn’t help that Putin makes that claim to justify his invasions.
Can’t use that excuse for Putin’s invasions of Georgia and Chechnya. Can’t use that excuse for Putin behaving himself while Trump was president – unlike his aggression while Obama/Biden and then Biden/Harris were president.
Why not admit that if America and Britain had leaders that told Putin they would follow through on their promise to defend Ukraine from aggression in exchange for Ukraine surrendering their deterrent nukes, this wouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Or if Ukraine had rejected our pleas to surrender their nukes in exchange for us providing them security and deterrence, those nukes still in Ukraine hands would have deterred Putin from invading Ukraine.
If America having a president like Reagan or Trump wouldn’t have.
My husband is always saying the Putin is more of a reactionary conservative than most leaders of Western Europe because he abhors the sort of social dissolution that their open borders/multiculturalism have posed as an existential threat to Western Culture far more than Lenin/Stalin ever did. I am sure that if Putin ever gained control of Western Europe so many non-European-based groups and ideologies would be removed from within. I know it sounds goofy, but roll it around in your head and think about it. He is smart enough to see just where Europe is headed.
Listen to the Colonel Douglas Mcregor podcasts for a full understanding of Russian war history and their current concerns. He’s a military strategist and historian as well as extremely well versed in what is going on in the region. You won’t see them on the MSM.
Also very enlightening as to early 20th century maneuverings is Arthur Herman’s “1917” which depicts, in parallel chapters, the ever developing moves towards, during, and after WWI. You learn just what seeds of progressivism were planted by our first progressive president – woodwrow wilson.
As is an in-depth understanding of the Red Terror and the assassination of the Russian Czar and his family. Out of this arose Hitler and his Nationalist Socialist Party, the Democratic are eerily similar.
Putin is genuinely fearful that NATO can convince countries like Canada and Sweden to willingly commit their troops to a ground war in Russia via a NATO invasion?
What Lieutenant/Captain/Major/Colonel military expert believes that is real?
They’ve had access to Hunter Biden’s crack pipes if they believe the US that can’t get them to pay their fair share of NATO funding can get them to agree to do that.
Whimsicalmama,
That is a different way of looking at it.
That sure doesn’t sound like the old USSR, a vast majority of differing demographics and ethnic backgrounds.
Exactly; Putin understands the devastation that decades of absolute communism had on all of Russia. I’m not saying that he is not a despot at heart , but he understands that cultural cohesion is far more important than the delusional rantings of progressives in search of the delusional siren of utopian, multicultural perfection.
Yes, it is out there, but if you track just what Putin is doing – he wants to reunite the Russian People and create a great Russia (albeit that it will be as authoritarian as Csarist Russia but without all the trappings of the old aristocracy (not that there isn’t an aristocracy inherent in every government – just look to our own nation).
The Dem Media is in power and are desperate to stay in power. Their power is narrative control, and they see their power slowly slipping from their grasp. So, they are doing the only thing they can do – double down and double down in increasingly desperate efforts to stay in power.
The Left wants to de-humanize us into electronically controlled robots by putting constraints on thoughts and human choices. The election of Trump over Hillary unleashed the epitome of evil and catalyzed the Spirit of Stalin to expand its fury with fear. By pushing porn and the mind control of children even toddlers are pushed to deny their identity created in the image of God.
Like a robot, we have no stable identity but simply a machine that can alter reality by mechanics called surgeons who take off an old part and make a completely new robot. Robots have no eternal rights but are just another machine waiting to be controlled by the AI masters. Jesus said, “Let the little children come unto me and enjoy the Kingdom of God.” That kingdom includes all its freedoms.
The ‘Kingdom of evil has no freedom for the robots just the master mechanics who promise to control them.
Why are journalists considered untouchable, but no one is untouchable to journalists?
Child porn? It is leftist Democrats who want pornography in elementary school libraries! Then they accuse Republicans of banning books!
Your leftist Dem ‘good professor’ voted for ‘them’, too. Fun Fun Fun!
* men are marrying men. The game is utterly over. Finished.
“[I]f they don’t moderate and monitor the content *we* lose total control . . .” (HC, emphasis added)
Among that “we” are: Goebbels, Gian Ciano (fascist Italy’s propaganda minister), Dmitri Shepilov (Stalin’s), Huang Kunming (communist China’s).
And now that “we” includes Clinton.
When Leftists declare that they desire total power over the individual’s life, believe them.
(Sand thrown in your eyes coming in 3, 2, 1 . . .)
“if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control”
This pretty much sums it up. You and your ilk are the people the Founders worried about .
I am convinced that Hillary is the most dangerous politician since Huey Long, maybe even Aaron Burr and perhaps the most dangerous ever. Obama may have been the most damaging and Nixon the most paranoid, but she was and remains the greatest threat to Liberty. (and Dick, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you)
The Witch Queen, pure and simple. She aspires to total control
“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?” (Democracy in America, Vol. II)
er, Hillary and her ilk, not the Professor and his. My bad
Sir, you nailed it when you referred to the printing press. As I recall, the printing press during the Reformation, meant to the Catholic Church the direct fragmentation of knowledge, i.e. now anyone could learn. To the Jesuits, this was the greatest danger of their time. The result was an explosion of learning and knowledge, catalyzed by books. Today, the elite (Obama, Clinton, Kerry, et al) “suffers” a similar debacle with their future control stymied by free speech.
The unfortunate fact is that most Americans are unaware of the attack on free speech. I think they have the idea that “it won’t affect me”, until it jumps up and bites them on their asset. Americans today are so badly in need a of 1930’s European history lesson. We have to recognize that media we previously depended on to alert us of threats to freedom have morphed into that threat. The country really needs more Elon’s, RFK’s, Gabbards, Vance and yes Trump’s to step up alert all Americans.
“…by their fruits you will know them.”
J
She and her World Economic Forum buddies are angry that the traditional news organizations are falling apart and losing viewership, audiences and readership. ABC recently laid off 75 employees. Journalists who wish to jump ship are in a tight fix, there are no jobs.
It has become expedient for the news consumers to educate themselves, to recognize propaganda, how it works and how it is currently being deployed against the citizens. They must (and are) find alternative sources for news and information.
She and her buddies are losing their grip on the flow of information. What are they hiding? If it is the truth, it will stand on its own and will withstand scrutiny and debate.
She needs to ride into the sunset and sing good night, sleep tight, may we never meet again.
“They’ve made their viewers dumber over the years”
https://x.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1841960488403423691
J
E.M.
Well said.
They are in a panic. They are desperate. They thought they had control with their compliant, advocacy, DNC MSM. But then free thinking people, real objective journalist formed alternative media. Free thinking American’s are flocking to alternative media as we see them gain viewership, paid subscriptions that MSM is losing. The elitists like Clinton, Kerry etc. are all in a panic. Their narrative is failing.
How marvelous!
You forgot to mention Judge Judy and your sister.
The Left’s push to censor ‘politically incorrect’ speech is the electronic version of book burning.
Political correctness is the evil spawn of NeoMarxist critique of Western Civilization. The Democrat left has swallowed this pernicious ideology hook, line and sinker, and is part and parcel of their need to satisfy their addiction to political power.
As French writer Raymond Aron said: Marxism: the opium of intellectuals.
Democrats, Main Stream & Social Media Mantra: Lie, cheat, steal, blame someone else, deny, deny, deny, and repeat!!!
Everything the Democrats touch turns to kah kah…
Every Program the Democrats create is always too expensive, poorly managed, and only helps the Democrats.
Democrat Motto: We’re not happy ‘till you’re not happy…
Biden’s Admin Motto: We’re all here because we’re not all there…
Please share with us one problem Biden has solved…
The Words Democrat and Hypocrite are Interchangeable…
The Democrats love their Double Standard…
Democrats Believe that ALL Americans are uninformed…
What has the Biden Administration done that’s improved your life?
Kamala Harris fails to meet the low standards she sets for herself.
Kamala Harris is absolutely the worst Vice President in U. S. History.
Kamala Harris doesn’t have the minimum skillset to be President.
Thank you, as always, for your great work on the first amendment. I will always urge you to use the word fascist for these people, because that’s what they are, because once they take your free speech, they can sense you and jail you. Jail you. And that includes you. We have to let people know that they’re freedom is at stake.