During an Oct. 6 CNN interview with host Michael Smerconish, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was talking about social media. She stated flatly, “If the platforms, 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.”

This horrifying confession comes immediately on the heels of equally egregious comments at the World Economic Forum in late September by former Secretary of State John Kerry. He described free speech as a threat to global democracy, advocating for stronger government control over information.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who is campaigning to be our nation’s vice president, said in an interview with MSNBC’s Maria Teresa Kumarin, “There’s no guarantee of free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has said almost exactly as much in several interviews, speaking about shutting down or punishing social media platforms that do not moderate users’ speech. . This came up in a 2019 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, in which Harris said “misinformation” could lead to “tangible harm.” (Her support for limiting constitutionally guaranteed First Amendment rights are less easy to pin down, simply because Harris almost always speaks unclearly.)

This list (just a small sampling) of Democrat standard-bearers who vehemently and publicly demand the violation of citizens’ First Amendment rights shows that we are now past “catching” public figures through leaked documents, hot mics, or accidently “saying the quiet part out loud” to unmask their sinister schemes to concentrate power, censor dissent, and establish state tyranny. No one needs to “catch” anyone at anything. One merely needs to turn on the television. Assault on our freedoms, which are the very reason for America’s founding, are now adorned with pride and a putrid veneer of virtue.

The Last Bulwarks of Freedom

Normal Americans view plots to remove or violate citizens’ God-given First Amendment rights as a form of evil. Bald-faced demands to censor, deplatform or debank citizens and forcibly close social media platforms or other environments where they may express opinions freely are all things normal Americans reject. This is why shocking interviews such as those given on Clinton’s lament over “losing total control” are met with commentary laced with wide-eyed bewilderment.

“They don’t even try to hide it anymore,” we say.

Normal Americans easily recognize the First and Second Amendments as the last stand of free people, and the final bulwark between democracy and tyranny.

Democrat stalwarts taking open aim at our God-given rights arouse a revolutionary spirit in freedom-loving Americans. (Note that I did not say Republicans or conservatives; I said freedom-loving Americans. By that I mean black people, Hispanics, every hard-fighting naturalized citizen from every corner on earth, every last one of us.) We fight too hard and work too hard. We play by the rules. We pay our taxes. We try to raise our children right. And here are paragons of a political party shamelessly pronouncing their unvarnished intent to deprive us of our rights.

Changing Sides

A life-long Democrat and two-time Obama voter, Elon Musk, has come to see the light. In his recent appearance at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Musk addressed the sea of red-hatted attendees with the simple statement, “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. That’s why it’s the FIRST Amendment. Without free speech, all is lost.”

Because conservative and MAGA people tend to be polite, and respectful of order and norms, we tend to behave as though we are in a fair fight. This is a disadvantage, but we have no choice. Such behavior is the necessary foundation of decency and civility. It’s hard, but this is what we do.

For this reason, the response to the overt calls for steps toward tyranny that we are hearing from Clinton, Kerry, Harris, and Walz are met with efforts to defend our Constitution and Bill of Rights through historical research and reasoned argument.

Analysts trace this evolution through important historical and legislative watershed moments such as the treacherous manipulation of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which was initially enacted to help combat Cold War-era Soviet propaganda by enabling the U.S. government to disseminate information abroad about the United States. This was part of broader public diplomacy efforts to explain U.S. policies and culture to foreign audiences.

But the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 repealed the domestic dissemination ban of the original Smith-Mundt Act, essentially turning the original purpose on its head and opening the door to Soviet-style indoctrination of US citizens by our own government.

Throwing Off the Covers

In an ideal world, the positive hopes for modernizing Smith-Mundt, increasing transparency, and rising to meet the complexities of the digital age could well have been a good thing. The tragedy, however, was that the modernization happened during the rise of the nefarious pursuit of a permanent one-party state by the party in power (at that time the Obama Democrats). This same pursuit remains today: state control of citizens by removing God-given human rights guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — in other words, tyranny.

Usually, totalitarian control of populations is conducted in secret. Government repression of populations is ordinarily achieved and sustained by military coups or foreign conquest. How have we come to a place where advocacy for authoritarian control became a blanket, universal, and open effort by a major US political party and its surrogates in the regime media?

Leftists in America openly call for and militantly invest in censorship, surveillance, and legal and physical repression of US citizens — not only its leaders but up to half the population, and every institution.

What is more important to study is not the Left’s legislative creep and tactical genius to secure the means to impose totalitarianism on Americans, but rather the evolution of US culture that makes it possible for these leaders to openly call for totalitarian structures with an aura of prideful virtue, and then to be supported by millions of consumers who’ve been brainwashed by the media.

Virtuous Censorship

The Right mistakenly sees this censorship protocol as the Left pursuing evil tactics to permanently retain power. This may be the case, but what the Right misses is that those on the Left do not see it as evil tactics, but virtue.

The Left believes that the State’s job is to “protect” people (the correct groups, the disenfranchised) from “harm.” Once this becomes the view of self-pitying and fearful people, they shout, “YES, remove free speech! It might ‘harm’ us. Remove free enterprise. It might cause someone ‘harm.’ Shut down any platform that does not ‘censor its users by ‘moderating’ their speech.”

The fearful cry to be “protected from harm” confers on the State God-like powers to define what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong. The State knows all. It shelters us from the storm, keeps us from “harm,” and shields us from “hate.”

For this reason, when Clinton longs for “total control,” she does so without shame. When Kerry, Harris, and Walz call the First Amendment a “block to global democracy,” they also do so without shame.

This is not a group sneakily planning to control us. They are the full fruits of an America that has lost God in the formation of culture; one that has lost truth and is losing faith. The Hillary Clinton who pines for “total control” is a champion to millions swimming unknowingly in a secular culture awash in the “need for the government to protect us from harm.”

Hopefully the lengthening shadow of repression will awaken the masses, and as light dawns we see again the dream of freedom, which has been preserved for us through the centuries at such a great price.

Frank Kaufmann is the founding director and editor-in-chief of the Wikipedia alternative New World Encyclopedia. In 2020, he founded The Settlement Project in response to a spike in clear and open attacks on America, especially from within. Through The Settlement Project, he organizes, writes, travels, eats, and sleeps the mission to protect, honor, and rebuild a strong and healthy America.