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Throughout this election season, Democrats have insistently and hysterically labeled Republican candidate Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement A Threat to Democracy™. In fact, while there are numerous legitimate threats to democracy today, arguably the greatest is the Left’s concerted assault on the most important foundational freedom America enjoys: the First Amendment.

The freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition guaranteed by the First Amendment (and guarded by the Second) are, of course, the most daunting obstacles to the imposition of tyranny in America. We are uniquely, in world history, blessed with this Constitutional protection; without it, we are at the mercy of the power-mad. But with a progressive administration in power and seeking not only a second term but a permanent one-party hegemony, the drumbeat to flip the narrative and demonize the First Amendment as a supposed threat to democracy is gaining volume among government leaders and their allies in the Left-dominated media.

University of Michigan Law School professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade, for instance, declared recently that free speech is “our Achilles’ heel.” In another example, Columbia law professor and former Biden aide Tim Wu wrote a New York Times op-ed this July titled, “The First Amendment Is Out of Control.” In it he fear-mongered that free speech threatens “essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.” Another New York Times op-ed headline fretted, “As Election Looms, Disinformation ‘Has Never Been Worse,’” a problem for which the writer blamed Republicans.

Yet another example: independent journalist Glenn Greenwald reported on a recent Harvard faculty event titled “Breaking Free of the First Amendment” in which free speech was described as “not about consistent or noble principles” but about the convergence of power and “racial patriarchy.” Greenwald, who can hardly be dismissed as Right-wing, called the event “the perfect expression of dominant left-liberal sentiment.”

Tech billionaire Bill Gates, who is reportedly not Democrat or Republican but whose globalist, big-government vision aligns the Left’s, recently spoke about wanting to create Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs that would restrict what he considers objectionable speech. He asked, “How do you balance free speech versus crazy stuff that got people not to take vaccines, for example?”

A week later, the Biden administration’s “climate czar” John Kerry stated in frustration at a World Economic Forum panel on Green Energy development that social media has made it “really hard to govern today” and that “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer [disinformation] out of existence.”

Then, in an October 5^th interview with CNN host Michael Smerconish, failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton warned that “if [social media platforms] don’t moderate and monitor their content, we lose total control.” [Emphasis added] She had previously told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that “a better deterrence” against Americans who are “engaged in propaganda” would be to be “civilly or even criminally charged.”

Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger responded online to Hillary’s most recent interview: “Bill Gates two weeks ago, John Kerry last week, and Hillary Clinton today — all demanding government censorship of X. Hard to see this as a coincidence. They appear to be laying the groundwork for totalitarianism. Our democratic republic is in danger.”

Indeed, and some on the Left are even more explicit about their ultimate aims. Media critic Carlos Maza, who describes himself on X as a “Marxist pig,” recently shared on X an Atlantic article about our “misinformation crisis” and tweeted, “‘Free speech’ was, and is, an unmitigated disaster. I know it sounds inflammatory, but every piece of evidence points to the fact that we need really aggressive government regulation of speech platforms. The free market doesn’t work and it never will.”

That “aggressive regulation” includes surveillance of private citizens’ accounts. New York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul announced late last year that the state would boost the surveillance of social media accounts and that law enforcement would take proactive measures to combat “hate speech.” She explained,

…we’re very focused on the data we’re collecting from surveillance efforts — what’s being said on social media platforms. And we have launched an effort to be able to counter some of the negativity and reach out to people when we see hate speech being spoken about on online platforms…

If anyone thinks that they can get away with spreading hate and harming other New Yorkers and violating the law, you will be caught. You will be caught here in the State of New York because we are ramping up our resources to ensure that everyone can live freely.

This will lead ultimately to the sort of intimidating government invasiveness one sees now in Britain, which has no First Amendment. There, police routinely knock on the doors of citizens who commit the crime of posting social media content that gives “offense.” Conservative activist Robby Starbuck responded about Gov. Hochul on X: “She might as well tear up our constitution, it would be a faster way to get the point across that she’s violating it.”

Hate Speech

The concept of hate speech, by the way, has proven to be an ingenious tool for driving a wedge into the First Amendment and then widening that fissure to assert greater and greater restrictions on speech. As Kim Holmes of the Heritage Foundation explains it, “the new purveyors of intolerance” have exploited this concept to “sublimate their prohibitions on speech, expression, and thought into more popularly accepted channels”:

One of the most popular strategies is to carve out a special category of speech that, in theory at least, leaves the rest of free speech alone. If this can be done, speech can be regulated and criminalized without involving a direct assault on the First Amendment.

A prime example of parsing good speech from bad is the notorious notion of “hate speech,” which involves designating certain kinds of remarks, gestures, expressions, and writings as intentionally hateful and thus worthy of regulation and even criminalization.

The term “hate speech” is a clever weaponization of the language; after all, who would stand up and defend “hate”? The glaring flaw in the concept is, of course, Who gets to define “hate”? In America today, the Left not only treats any speech critical of its ideology as hateful, but claims that hate speech can literally be violence; this makes it a moral and national security imperative to shut down the purveyors of such speech – i.e., the Left’s political opponents – even using violence if necessary. After all, if you consider your opponents to be Hitlerian fascists, what measures aren’t justified in order to prevent them from spreading their “hateful” influence or seizing power?

The general social acceptance of the concept of hate speech has led directly to the rise in recent years of another serious onslaught against freedom of speech: Cancel Culture, a singularly Left-wing phenomenon which targets individuals for expressing opinions or holding political views at odds with the progressive ideology of our reigning elites and their bullying foot soldiers online, on college campuses, and among the activist educators in K-12 classrooms. The goal of Cancel Culture is to impose such a heavy personal price on its victims – the loss of employment, social ostracization, a ruined reputation, and sometimes even violent assault – that others will fall in line and self-censor.

The Biden-Harris Regime

Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University and free speech advocate, has said that the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration is the most anti-free speech administration in two centuries. He calls it “the dream team for the anti-free speech movement.” As if to prove his point, presidential candidate Harris’ running mate Tim Walz recently went on MSNBC to support censoring disinformation and falsely stated, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

In the vice presidential debate on October 1, Trump running mate JD Vance cited the sort of Big Tech system of censorship supported by his counterpart Walz and Harris. He called it “the greatest threat to democracy that we’ve seen in this country in the last 40 years.” Walz defended the Democrat position by quoting the familiar but misunderstood line from a 1919 case in which Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said no one has the right to falsely yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

In a USA Today opinion piece called, “Vance is right. Harris and Walz are a threat to Americans’ free speech,” Turley calls the Holmes line “fundamentally wrong” and notes that it is “the favorite mantra of the anti-free speech movement”:

For example, when I testified last year before Congress against a censorship system that has been described by one federal court as “similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., interjected with the fire-in-a-theater question to say such censorship is needed and constitutional. In other words, the internet is now a huge crowded theater and those with opposing views are shouting fire.

Elon Musk, Public Enemy #1

In a stunning revelation, independent journalists Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi recently published leaked memos from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a Left-wing organization that targets media outlets it claims spread “online hate” and “disinformation.” The CCDH memos contained bulleted lists of goals from March to October 2024, the top priority of which was to “Kill Musk’s Twitter,” referring to tech billionaire Elon Musk and his purchase a couple of years ago of the social media platform he renamed X, which he vowed to maintain as a bastion of free speech online.

Thacker and Taibbi also revealed that CCDH’s founder Morgan McSweeney serves as a campaign advisor to Kamala Harris. Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration has launched a full-court press of investigations into Musk-owned companies, The New York Times reports. In response, Musk tweeted, “This is war” and labeled CCDH “a criminal organization.”

Speaking of which, podcasting pundit Keith Olbermann, whose unhinged political rants would warrant ignoring him except for the fact that he has a million followers on X, tweeted, “We need to arrest and detain @elonmusk immediately. He is operating on behalf of Russia. Cancel all contracts, seize his facilities, lock him away in a military facility. Now, @potus. Not tomorrow.”

His ridiculous claim that Musk is a Russian operative aside, Olbermann is unequivocally calling for his political opponents to be imprisoned by a totalitarian police state. This is the uncensored impulse that lies behind complaints by politicos like Hillary Clinton that social media platforms must be state-regulated.

Carlos Maza’s and Keith Olbermann’s vicious rants are the Left’s raw, unfiltered view of our most important constitutionally protected right: that free speech is not merely problematic but a “disaster” that threatens their “total control” of the flow of information and their ability to suppress dissent.

At Stake in This Election

Every presidential election in the 21^st century, if not before, has been labeled the most consequential election of our time. But it’s not simply a cliché; in fact, every election has been the most consequential, because our political landscape has become increasingly fractured by an increasingly radical far-Left movement which dominates the Democrat Party, a movement which now wields both political and cultural dominance, and which threatens to steer the country irreversibly farther Left under a potential Harris/Walz regime.

As of this writing, Donald Trump seems to be riding a wave of growing support while Harris’ campaign is imploding, but the outcome of the election is far from certain thanks to such unknowns as voter fraud and the voter registration of possibly millions of illegal immigrants. Even if Trump wins, the Democrat Party has vowed to do everything in its power to disqualify him or otherwise prevent him from taking the Oval Office.

As Jonathan Turley notes,

We are living through the most dangerous anti-free speech movement in American history. We have never before faced the current alliance of government, corporate, academic and media forces aligned against free speech. A Harris-Walz administration with a supportive Congress could make this right entirely dispensable.

Americans seem to recognize the looming threat. A new survey reveals that free speech ranks as second only to inflation and rising costs as the most important issue for Americans in the upcoming election — more important than health care, crime and immigration.

If Harris and Walz take the White House, they will have free rein to intensify censorship and other assaults on free speech as far as they can be taken, including the prosecution of thought crimes.

In Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 dystopian political novel It Can’t Happen Here, totalitarianism comes to America in the form of a fascist dictatorship. But as Ronald Reagan once noted, “If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism.” Nearly 90 years after Lewis’ novel, fascism is on the march in the form of a purportedly liberal (but distinctly illiberal) political party obsessed with diluting, if not overturning, our First Amendment freedoms in order to eradicate what the party deems to be mis- and disinformation – i.e., inconvenient truths about its agenda – and to crush dissent.

This is the real threat to democracy. As journalist Michael Shellenberger put it, our democratic republic is in danger. Once the First Amendment begins to be dismantled or rolled back, and tyranny expands, the Land of the Free could very well be lost forever.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior