As a modern tyrant attains power, he won’t just push back against opposing ideas; he’ll say they shouldn’t be voiced at all. Once he holds some power, he’ll work with friends in the government, the media, and corporations to silence opposing ideas. Finally, once he gains complete power, as his ideas invariably fail when put into practice, he must use the government’s police power to silence those who challenge him lest he be toppled. That trajectory is why it’s noteworthy (in a scary way) that, once in 2019 and again today, Kamala has stated explicitly that she believes that if she controls the government, she has the right to use its vast power to silence critics.

In 2019—that is, even before the great silencing of 2020, when speech challenging COVID policies or raising the Hunter laptop was stifled—Kamala was already mourning the fact that social media companies weren’t silencing ideas with which she disagreed:

Five years later, Kamala is singing the same song, which is that the government and social media companies must determine what is right think and what is wrong think—and then use the state’s police power to end all “wrong think”:

The fact is that we already have several mechanisms that operate within constitutional parameters to limit factual lies or other narrow categories of speech:

The government can prosecute criminal speech, such as direct incitements to imminent unlawful activity, true and imminent threats, and certain types of fighting words. However, it should not be prosecuting so-called “hate” speech because that falls into the category of the government deciding what is good speech and what is bad speech. In a free country, no government should ever make those calls.

The government can prosecute speech that amounts to theft, which is the case with stealing intellectual property that’s been patented or copyrighted.

Private citizens can sue for defamatory speech.

Lastly, assuming a true free speech environment, those who disagree with speech can push back against it with their own speech. This free speech environment, incidentally, is impaired when the authorities allow a heckler’s veto. Thus, on a state-funded college campus, when the authorities allow mobs to silence conservative or pro-Israel speakers, this means that the government itself is engaging in censorship.

What Kamala wants to do is have the government decide what thoughts are allowed and what are not, a clear First Amendment violation. We’ve seen and are seeing this in other countries but we don’t have to look that far. This is what happened in 2020-2021 in America.

Across the country, federal, state, and local entities, as well as professional organizations (especially in the medical professions), silenced people who dared speak out against the COVID regime of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines. The greatest irony, of course, is that these silenced people were correct: None of the regime-approved COVID responses made a significant difference. Instead, COVID did what new viruses do: It mowed down the elderly and immune-compromised and made everyone else varying degrees of sick.

If it were me, I’d go in another direction entirely (as I explained in 2019) when it comes to social media companies. The last thing we want is for the government to dictate to social media companies what users can or cannot say. Instead, the more appropriate way to view the government’s role is to recognize that social media companies have become the modern public square. Thus, they are a form of public accommodation.

Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they should be barred by law from imposing on their users any form of viewpoint discrimination. Rather than the government pressuring them to censor content, the government should be suing them for civil rights violations when they do censor content.