So.
There is no less than Hillary Clinton - one time United States Senator, Secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee - out there in a tiny handful of media stories that are running headlines like this:
Hillary Clinton suggests arrest of Americans who share disinformation: ‘Chilling' Constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley joined 'America's Newsroom' to discuss Hillary Clinton's 'chilling' remarks on censorship and the broader effort to stifle free speech across the globe.
The Washington Times:
Hillary Clinton triggers irony alert in calling for arrest of those spreading election ‘propaganda’
The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board:
Hillary Clinton’s New Speech Code
The former Senator and Democratic presidential nominee says spreading what she calls disinformation should be a crime.
That Wall Street Journal editorial reported this, bold print for emphasis supplied:
Woke young people aren’t the only Americans who need a tutorial on the First Amendment. Consider Hillary Clinton, a Yale Law grad and former presidential nominee, who wants to make spreading disinformation a crime.
Mrs. Clinton on Monday went on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow, the hothouse for false information about the Russia collusion narrative, to indict all and sundry she disagrees with. “It’s important to indict the Russians, just as [Robert] Mueller indicted a lot of Russians who were engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016,” Mrs. Clinton said.
“But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly, or even in some cases criminally, charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States,” the former first lady added.
There’s a novel legal concept. Because Russians can’t be punished in the U.S., she wants Americans to be arrested for their political speech if they happen to utter arguments also uttered by Russians.
Clinton also tweeted out this on our European Union allies:
For too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability. The EU is poised to do something about it.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 21, 2022
I urge our transatlantic allies to push the Digital Services Act across the finish line and bolster global democracy before it's too late.
Got that? One “bolsters global democracy” by shutting down free speech, enforcing censorship and, yes indeed, arresting free speech dissenters if needed.
Jonathan Turley, the professor at the George Washington University Law School and a staunch defender of America’s free speech founding constitutional right has spoken up. (Turley is the author of The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage) has headlined this warning over in The Hill:
Europe’s plot to regulate political speech in America
Turley writes:
…there is now a massive censorship bureaucracy in Europe and the desire to silence opposing voices has become insatiable.
Some in this country have the same taste for speech-regulation. After Elon Musk bought Twitter and dismantled most of the company’s censorship program, many on the left went bonkers. That fury only increased when Musk released the “Twitter files,” confirming the long-denied coordination and support by the government in targeting and suppressing speech.
In response, Hillary Clinton and other Democratic figures turned to Europe and called upon them to use their Digital Services Act to force censorship against Americans.
The EU immediately responded by threatening Musk with confiscatory penalties against not just his company but himself. He would have to resume massive censorship or else face ruin.
It was a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The anti-free speech movement had finally found the one man who could not be bullied, coerced or threatened into submission.
But there is something of considerable curiosity going on here.
Imagine for a moment that there was one change to those stories. Replace the name “Hillary Clinton” with “Donald Trump” and you know the smallest ant in the crevices of earth would never have missed the blizzard of appalled and terrified media coverage that would have been freaking out over the news that would-be “dictator” Trump was hell bent on unleashing an iron curtain of censorship on the American people. With Trump having every intention of effectively shutting down the First Amendment and silencing - when not arresting - those dissenting from the World of Hillary and the Left in general.
The problem? Trump said none of these things. Hillary has quite plainly and repeatedly done just that and more.
But if you blinked and missed any of those three Hillary stories from conservative media outlets and a small handful of others, there is a reason.
The liberal “mainstream” media has given Hillary a pass in her war for censorship. There are those on the Left who have generated headlines like these:
From NPR:
Group aiming to defund disinformation tries to drain Fox News of online advertising
Three years ago, longtime CBS and Fox correspondent Bernard Goldberg headlined this in The Hill:
House Democrats want to silence opposing views, not ‘fake news’
Goldberg led off by reporting:
Since nobody’s for disinformation and extremism in the media, what could be wrong with such a congressional hearing?
For one thing, despite its noble-sounding title, the hearing is just the latest item on the progressive agenda — an agenda to stifle or flat-out shut down conservative voices in America.
In other words, the Left’s obsession with supporting censorship, silencing conservatives’ free speech and shutting down conservative media has been around awhile.
The only thing new that is surging now is Hillary Clinton, of all people a former United States Senator and Secretary of State as well as a Democratic presidential nominee, using her name and prestige to push censorship in both America and the European Union - which is to say silencing free speech across the West. With the “mainstream media” letting Hillary’s anti-free speech, pro-censorship aspirations skate.
Shocking. Not.
But dangerous, for sure.
