Image Credit: Kevin Dietsch / Staff / Getty 
One of my great personal frustrations, having covered the filthy world of politics and punditry for years at this point, is that so precious few actors in this arena seem to sincerely believe in anything.
They’ll pay lip service to whatever cause when it’s convenient, only to renege on their professed commitments when it’s not.
Out of necessity, having been burned by misplaced trust far too often, my default assumption is that a politician, journalist or commentator is insincere in any principle they feign adherence to until they prove otherwise — usually, by applying those principles in cases where doing so is disadvantageous to their interests.
The most egregious hypocrisies and betrayals always concern free speech.
When one faction occupies power — or at least is seen to occupy power, politics mostly being kabuki theatre while the true seat of power never changes — it engineers new excuses to censor the other side, which in turn adopts the mantle of free speech as it is censored.
Related: German Minister Announces Pre-Crime Surveillance, Prosecution of ‘Far-Right Extremists’
Every few years in the political melodrama, the roles reverse, but few if any of the newly minted censorship tools under whatever pretext are relinquished; they are simply aimed at a new ideological faction.
The net effect is that everyone who doesn’t enjoy special privileges slowly loses their free speech rights.
Related: MAGA Influencer Accuses AG Pam Bondi of First Amendment Violation on X
The government, irrespective of ideology, does not miss opportunities to revoke civil liberties of the peasants, which are inherently and irrevocably in opposition to the interests of the governing authorities; there is no upside to them allowing the rabble to express their grievances, only headache and threat to their rule.
A few examples of apparent justification for censorship and other unconstitutional abuses of power from just the first quarter of this century include 9/11, COVID, and January 6th — and, now, the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Less than 24 hours after the bullet ripped through Kirk’s carotid artery in 4K, Rep. Clay Higgins issued this anti-free speech fatwa on X that, in fact, went far beyond mere censorship and called for the revocation of business licenses and school expulsions:
“I’m going to use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk. If they ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man who dedicated his whole life to delivering respectful conservative truth into the hearts of liberal enclave universities, armed only with a Bible and a microphone and a Constitution… those profiles must come down. So, I’m going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that big tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content, the user to be banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER. I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I’m starting that today. That is all.”
These are the guys who swear an oath to the Constitution as a job requirement.
Similarly, a bipartisan pair of Swamp creatures, Sen. Chris Coons and Sen. James Lankford, appeared over the weekend on legacy media to promote a social media censorship bill, the Orwellian S.1748 – Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) — the naming of which is a transparent and cheap trick to appeal to the natural human instinct to protect children.
Related: British PM: We Censor Anti-Migrant Protests ‘For the Children’
Understanding how these people operate, I anticipated the punchline as they began with standard niceties about “coming together” and whatever bullshit, wondering when they’d get down to brass tacks, which they finally did after several tortured minutes of banal talking points.
Via Electronic Frontier Foundation (emphasis added):
“At the center of the bill is a requirement that platforms “exercise reasonable care” to prevent and mitigate a sweeping list of harms to minors, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance use, bullying, and “compulsive usage.”…
Its core function is to let government agencies sue platforms, big or small, that don’t block or restrict content someone later claims contributed to one of these harms….
To avoid liability, platforms will over-censor. It’s not merely hypothetical. It’s what happens when speech becomes a legal risk. The list of harms in KOSA’s “duty of care” provision is so broad and vague that no platform will know what to do regarding any given piece of content. Forums won’t be able to host posts with messages like “love your body,” “please don’t do drugs,” or “here’s how I got through depression” without fearing that an attorney general or FTC lawyer might later decide the content was harmful…
KOSA will not make kids safer. It will make the internet more dangerous for anyone who relies on it to learn, connect, or speak freely.”
Just yesterday, Attorney General Pam Bondi — the highest law enforcement official in the country, answerable (at least in theory) only to the president — came out to brazenly declare war on the formless phantom of “hate speech”:
“We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything, and that’s across the aisle. There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society.”
Demanding censorship in Charlie Kirk’s name is a cruel irony and heinous desecration of his legacy.
Kirk explains, in his own words, that so-called “hate speech” — a term that objectively means nothing — is fully covered by the First Amendment:
“Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”
Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
Follow AP on X.
Subscribe (for free) to Armageddon Prose and its dystopian sister, Armageddon Safari.
Support AP’s independent journalism with a one-off, hassle-free “digital coffee” tip.
Bitcoin public address: bc1qvq4hgnx3eu09e0m2kk5uanxnm8ljfmpefwhawv
