If you want to see the future of free speech in the United States, look to Brazil today. Speech that runs contrary to the existing regime of Brazillian President Lula da Silva is being criminalized. The restrictions grow tighter by the day.
I feel it in my own contacts with my friends there, with whom I’ve been in touch for many years. They fear even answering texts. This is because they cannot know from one day to the next which tech platforms are going to be cooperating with the regime and which are resisting. They fear even getting on the internet without a VPN.
Tragically, the tech platforms themselves have proven to be incredibly unprincipled throughout this entire period. In both the United States and Brazil, most have gone along with the censorship push, even to the point of cheering it on.
One of the few holdouts is the platform formerly known as Twitter, which is now X, managed by Elon Musk. He still believes in free speech as the foundation of all other freedoms. A justice of the Supreme Court in Brazil has sent the company notices to restrict certain accounts in Brazil or else face daily fines. Over the weekend, Mr. Musk flatly refused, prompting the judge to say he is guilty of criminal conspiracy.
The Lula regime is a close ally of the Biden administration, so of course the White House has said nothing about any of this. There is even some speculation—I don’t think we are at this point yet but who knows?—that the Biden administration would allow Brazil to extradite Mr. Musk in this criminal indictment. The only thing preventing that right now, in my view, is the bad public relations look for President Biden.
Goodness knows that the Biden administration loathes him that much. And it’s not just President Biden but the entire establishment that his administration represents, including the highest powers in corporate America from legacy media to big tech and pharma. Together, this tribe may only represent 1 percent of the people, but they constitute 90 percent of the financial and political power in this country.
Free speech right now stands at a precipice. No question that many powerful people want it shut down completely.
I listened hoping to discover some new arguments or facts of the case. She offered nothing new. What we got instead was a very long display of tribal loyalties. From her perspective, there is no principle at stake here. The plaintiffs are nothing but rabble-allied right-wingers who plotted with a Trumpish Fifth Circuit Court and barreled their way into the halls of justice where they do not belong.
She is somehow certain that the presumed bad guys are going to lose this struggle and that the Biden administration will win. After all, the government has to have the right to “jawbone” social media to get its perspective out there. She even raises the question of whether the plaintiffs in the case have any standing at all, since, to her mind, they didn’t really experience any authentic coercion at the hands of the government.
Listening to her interview, you would never know that most of the plaintiffs have no connection to anything “right-wing” at all but are rather just scientists trying to correct the record in times of extraordinary disinformation being dished out by the government. In this attempt, they ran headlong into a massive censorship industrial complex that involves a complicated web of control and influence, all being directed by the government itself.
We have tens of thousands of pages documenting this extensively.
Our learned professor cares nothing about this at all. For her, it’s all a matter of tribal relationships. The censors are the good guys, her team, a gang of credentialed experts who know what is true and are determined to see it prevail in public culture as the dissidents are shoved to the margins. Her condescension is as palpable as her loathing of the very idea that speech should be free from coercive control.
Sadly, she speaks for an entire class of rulers in many sectors of society today. They have sympathizers in the courts and every corporate boardroom. They are working to defend and celebrate the advent of totalitarian forms of governance in the West, all because they believe that they are and will be the ones in charge of it. The justification is to suppress the populist movements that threaten the entrenched power of global government elites.
A strange paranoia has struck elite circles in our time. They have convinced themselves that people such as former President Donald Trump, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the old days, El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and probably many others are nothing but enemies in the way of their plans for permanent global hegemony. So they have all been targeted as the enemy, along with all their supporters.
These struggles have existed for 10 years or longer, but they haven’t always been this out in the open. On the plus side, it is easy to tell who is who and what is what. There was a time when people trusted sources such as Slate, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Wired, and, of course, The New York Times. But now, they are very reliable tellers of ruling-class tales.
Frankly, they are difficult to take seriously. The chasm that separates the venues of honest journalism from the repeaters of regime propaganda is growing ever wider, even as the fictions of our rulers are getting ever more implausible. We do indeed seem headed for a breaking point.
But we should ask ourselves: How is it that we know all this? It’s because of the freedoms we have left to publish, speak, read, and listen. It’s these freedoms that they want to take away. This is because the controlled venues of legacy media are losing money, while alternative sources are growing in traffic, influence, and profitability. The only real option remaining for the plotters is to seek a full shutdown of the internet and the criminalization of speech.
That is exactly what is happening in Brazil and what many in the United States want in our future. And we are not talking about a far-distant future. The threat is present right now, coming to a head in the coming months.
If the plotters get their way, the First Amendment will be a dead letter. I have no prescient wisdom as to how all this will turn out. The battle is ongoing and taking place right out in the open. At least we are clear on the battle lines.
