“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou said. “They know themselves much better than you do.” The quote has been taken to mean many things over the years – some of which may even have been antithetical to her initial meaning. But it serves to illustrate – with no twisting or spin necessary – that you can often get a pretty good idea of what someone is going to do based on what they have already said and done. Take the current vice president and presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris, for example. She has been telling America for years her plans for free speech if only she can win what she seems to think is the authority to do so. But Has America been listening?
Kamala’s Missing Free Speech Message
With the election just around the corner, we aren’t hearing much right now on First Amendment rights from Kamala Harris or Tim Walz. But rest assured, that’s likely just because they’re actively running for office and they realize that their formerly stated views may not sit well with most people. That’s alright, though; the internet, as they say, is forever.
In 2019, Kamala told Jake Tapper of CNN that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.” She called for Donald Trump to be removed from social media platforms at around the same time. And before that, she promised at a Democrat fundraising event to “hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms, because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.”
And it goes so far beyond mere words; on this issue, at least, Vice President Harris walks the walk, as well. The Biden- Harris administration created their own “Ministry of Truth,” which they called the Foreign Malign Influence Center. The White House pressured social media platforms to flag and remove posts and accounts the government felt “spread disinformation,” or, in layman’s terms, anything the government didn’t agree with – especially when it came to the COVID pandemic or the Hunter Biden laptop.
As California attorney general in 2016, Harris enforced a law that required religious pregnancy counseling services to give their clients information offering state-funded abortions. She also tried to make conservative nonprofits release their donor names – a move that unsettled even her own progressive financial backers who, no doubt, didn’t want to see their own names revealed to the public should the tables one day turn.
Finally, she chose Tim Walz of all people as her running mate. This is the man who, during the pandemic, maintained a state hotline – called by many the “COVID snitch line” – where people could report their neighbors for failing to follow the lockdown rules. In an interview just a couple of months ago, Walz defended the practice, saying that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech,” Walz said during a notable MSNBC interview, “and especially around our democracy.” Of course, the Supreme Court traditionally disagrees and has ruled more than once – Virginia v. Black in 2003, Snyder v. Phelps in 2011, and Matal v. Tam in 2017, for example – that there is no hate speech carve-out from the First Amendment.
The Candidates Are Quiet – But the Surrogates Still Sing
Hillary Clinton – another who has in recent years aimed for that coveted “first female president” title and missed – said on Saturday, October 5, that social media companies must moderate content lest “we lose total control.” The former senator, secretary of state, and first lady told CNN that “we need national action, and sadly, our Congress has been dysfunctional when it comes to addressing these threats to our children.”
Specifically, Clinton calls for the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Act, which protects online platforms from liability over third-party content – like the user content on social media sites like Facebook and X. Last month, she suggested to MSNBC that Americans accused of spreading “propaganda” in support of former President Donald Trump should face punishment.
“I think it’s important to indict the Russians, just like [special counsel Robert] Mueller indicted a lot of Russians who were engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016,” Clinton told Rachel Maddow. “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.”
She’s not alone.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law last month to crack down on AI deepfake videos – though it didn’t last long. Evidently, a clearly marked parody video in which Kamala Harris appears to disparage her own qualifications for president in a campaign ad is not election interference. Rather, it is constitutionally protected free expression of political speech, according to US District Judge John A. Mendez. Who would have guessed a law banning political parody would be unconstitutional?
Another former secretary of state and failed presidential candidate, John Kerry, also recently roasted the First Amendment. “You know, there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb these entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” the aide to the Biden-Harris administration said at the World Economic Forum on October 2. “So what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”
What that “change” might be remains unspoken.
The truth of the matter is that all these people have shown America time and again who they are. Whether it’s Kamala Harris and Tim Walz atop the presidential ticket or elite supporters like Newsom, Clinton, and Kerry, they’ve clearly told us just how little their positions on free speech and the First Amendment in general. The question is – will people believe them?
Dig Deeper into the Themes Discussed in this Article!
Liberty Vault: Federalist Papers No. 10
Liberty Vault: United States v. Alvarez
Liberty Vault: 303 Creative L.L.C. v. Elenis
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