The Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has threatened to sic the Justice Department on social media platforms that “profit off hate.” That was in 2019. Her vice presidential running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, has said that “there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” That was in 2022.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has said that the government needs to figure out how to “rein in the media environment.” That was in 2021. Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, has suggested that Americans who share misinformation should be criminally charged. That was a month ago. The former Secretary of State John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, has worried about the First Amendment being a “major block” to stopping “disinformation.” That was two weeks ago.
When you bring up top leaders in the Democratic party openly calling for government censorship to the average Democratic voter, you usually immediately hear about the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s many affronts to free speech. Trump has threatened to jail those who burn the American flag. He has threatened to deport pro-Palestinian protesters. Trump recently said that CBS News should lose its broadcast license for biased and deceptive reporting.
You can find Republican voters and some leaders who might agree with Trump’s anti-free speech stances. It’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court agreeing with any of them. Still, it’s Trump at his worst, and his critics are right to highlight his attacks on the First Amendment.
But there’s also this Trump, who said in September, “I will bring back free speech in America…. I will sign an executive order banning any federal employee from colluding to limit speech, and we will fire every federal bureaucrat who is engaged in domestic censorship under the Harris regime.”
He was describing precisely the kind of government censorship that Harris, Walz, Ocasio-Cortez, Clinton, and Kerry say is now needed. Trump campaign surrogates and former Democrats, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, have made pushing back against the Democrats’ much-desired censorship regime a primary part of their efforts. The former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and X’s billionaire owner Elon Musk have said they joined Team Trump in part over the same free speech worries.
In the only 2024 vice presidential debate, Walz doubled down on his stance that “misinformation” or “hate speech” is not protected speech, comparing it to shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), the Republican vice presidential nominee, replied, “Governor Walz mentioned yesterday you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater. That line is from a disgraced Supreme Court opinion, one that has been overturned.”
“It’s used to justify censorship,” Vance correctly added.
“I genuinely think this is one very big difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump,” Vance said. “I will die fighting to defend their right to speak their mind, even if I disagree with it. Every single person in this room agrees with that because we believe in free speech.”
“A lot of Americans are sick of the censorship,” Vance continued. “They’re tired of being told by their government to shut up. We believe in persuading our fellow Americans, not silencing them.”
Vance’s remarks and sentiments in defense of free speech do not exist in today’s Democratic party. If progressives of old once prided themselves as “card-carrying ACLU members,” most mainstream Democrats today either are trying to find workarounds to the First Amendment or simply pretending that its protections somehow don’t apply to their more recent imaginings of “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “hate speech,” despite the Court ruling that such speech is protected.
Somewhere between Trump’s victorious campaign in 2015 and 2016 and now, Democrats decided that the old liberal concept of free speech was too dangerous in the age of MAGA. They quickly switched gears, and today you won’t encounter many Democratic leaders or voters who find the notion of the government censoring speech they don’t like bothersome. Columns are now regularly written by left-wing writers and intellectuals disparaging free speech as “right-wing” and condemning the Constitution and the First Amendment as “dangerous.”
Despite Trump’s anti-free speech rhetoric, which deserves attention and condemnation, his 2024 Republican coalition is largely a pro–First Amendment bulwark against a Democratic party eager to erase that particular constitutional protection.
Not perfectly, but institutionally, today’s Republican Party is the free speech party.
Institutionally, today’s Democratic Party is the party that is against free speech in the way Americans have historically understood it.
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It’s not me, a writer, telling you this. Democrats themselves, from the very top of their party, as cited here, keep telling us this, over and over, and few to none in their constituency find this position the least bit controversial. It’s been normalized.
That’s scary.
All attacks on free speech should be taken seriously. But particularly those made by those in power, with the will to wield it, and little concern for the most basic precepts of American liberty.
