Hillary Clinton and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have stirred up another hornet’s nest on the fundamental issue of free speech. In doing so, the two superstar Democrats have once again exposed the Achilles’ heel of the progressive ruling establishment: its inability to abide being mocked.
On Sept. 16, with remarkable nonchalance, Clinton told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow that American citizens should face civil and criminal penalties for “parroting Russian talking points.” The first question that instantly comes to mind is, who gets to decide what opinions expressed by American citizens amount to foreign agitprop? Supporting Donald Trump is the first big clue.
Fighting Russia Tops Your Constitutional Rights
“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 Maddow, harking back to the feverish days of a thoroughly discredited federal Russiagate campaign against her Republican opponent.
“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.”
With breathtaking honesty, Clinton acknowledged that she can’t stop Americans from voting as they see fit, but she does want to prevent them from exercising their right to free speech if that crosses a line drawn in her mind.
“I think we need to uncover all the connections and make it very clear that you can vote however you want, but we are not going to let adversaries, Russia, China, Iran or anybody else, basically try to influence Americans as to how we should vote in picking our leaders,” Clinton stated.
Too Clever to Be Free Speech?
Meanwhile, on the West Coast, Newsom signed three bills into law on Sept. 17, each ostensibly meant to crack down on AI “deepfake” videos.
“The California ban on campaign deepfakes will allow courts to issue injunctions blocking people from distributing intentionally deceptive political content during election season, and it exposes people who share deepfakes to civil penalties,” Politico reported.
But while Newsom stressed he seeks to eliminate deception, he was spurred to immediate action on the issue by a video shared by X owner Elon Musk that is clearly a parody.
In July, Musk posted a video featuring the AI-generated voice of current Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, calling herself a deep state puppet and diversity hire. No sensible person could possibly be confused into thinking the audio is genuine.
Newsom then called out Musk, vowing to sign a bill “in a matter of weeks” prohibiting such material.
Now, he has done so. The law will go into effect before the November election, meaning Californians who violate it face prosecution this autumn.
That may turn out to be an awful lot of court cases. On Sept. 18, Musk fired back at Newsom.
“The governor of California just made this parody video illegal in violation of the Constitution of the United States,” Musk wrote in an X post, again sharing the Harris video Newsom explicitly sought to criminalize. “Would be a shame if it went viral.”
Soon after, the video was trending on X. Musk’s post had 24 million views and more than 120,000 reposts and climbing as of the afternoon of Sept. 18.
Beyond infantilizing Americans as morons wholly unable to detect satire without the watchful eye of big government to guide their way, Clinton’s words and Newsom’s actions bring another disturbing factor into the free speech debate: selective enforcement of the law.
“I could [not] care less if it was Harris or Trump,” Newsom told Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff about the new laws, Politico noted. “It was just wrong on every level.”
A notorious Biden administration lawfare assault on an online prankster reveals the hollowness of this claim.
During the 2016 presidential election, Douglass Mackey, who ran the popular Twitter account Ricky Vaughn, posted a series of memes mocking Clinton and progressives.
“The memes he generated included #draftourdaughters, a satirical campaign identifying Hillary as a warmonger who would put the country’s young women in fatigues to fight her foreign military adventures. Another suggested people could simply text in their vote for Clinton instead of visiting the polls,” Liberty Nation News’ Scott Cosenza related.
Again, no reasonable person would find either meme to be authentic. Nevertheless, as soon as Joe Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland took over the Justice Department in 2021, he went after Mackey, who was eventually convicted “for spreading falsehoods via Twitter,” as the Associated Press reported it, and was sentenced to seven months in prison for the text-your-vote meme.
Democrats were obviously nursing a grudge against Mackey throughout the four years of Trump’s presidency. They sure don’t like being laughed at.
Being convicted for parody is bad enough, but Mackey was not the only Twitter user to make the joke. “Hey Trump Supporters! Skip poll lines at #Election2016 and text in your vote! Text votes are legit. Or vote tomorrow on Super Wednesday,” Kristina Wong posted on Election Day 2016. Garland has still not gotten around to Wong, who has more than 26,000 followers today.
This is just one aspect of the slippery slope invoked when the government is deployed to police the free speech of American citizens. Murky interpretations of what is and is not a violation of an ill-defined, politically motivated law inevitably lead to selective enforcement based on bias.
And partisan enforcement of the law is the epitome of tyranny.
