RFK got one thing wrong in this 2019 clip from CNN. Kamala Harris didn't demand that Twitter get silenced, or Elon Musk. In fact, what Harris wanted was even worse.

Let's go to the tape first:

Kamala Harris: "He [Musk] has lost his privileges."
Can someone please explain to her that freedom of speech is a RIGHT, not a "privilege"?

Kamala Harris: "There has to be a responsibility placed on these social media sites to understand their power."
Translation: "If they… https://t.co/BzuTYoJjuV

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) September 2, 2024

Kennedy may not have known the provenance of this clip, which began circulating on social media recently. It is not recent; it comes from an exchange between Harris and Jake Tapper during Harris' first presidential run, three years before Elon Musk had any more involvement on Twitter than any other user. (Any other multi-billionaire user, anyway.) 

But that doesn't improve matters. Harris aimed this at Donald Trump, then president of the United States and the candidate against whom Harris ended up competing as Joe Biden's running mate. Harris proposed that the government should censor Trump's speech as both president and candidate, and that government should dictate the terms of what kind of speech should be allowed on social-media platforms. 

The fuller quote has the proper context:

And when you’re talking about Donald Trump, he has 65 million Twitter followers, he has proven himself to be willing to obstruct justice – just ask Bob Mueller. You can look at the manifesto from the shooter in El Paso to know that what Donald Trump says on Twitter impacts peoples’ perceptions about what they should and should not do.

And the bottom line is that you can’t say that you have one rule for Facebook and you have a different rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply, which is that there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power… They are speaking to millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation. And that has to stop.

The bottom line is that we have one rule for speech in America, especially political speech. It's called the First Amendment, and it forbids precisely what Harris proposes. Government has no legitimate role in determining "truth" in debates and dissent, and our founders understood why. Debate and dissent threaten existing power structures, and the existing power structure would have too many incentives to censor anything that threatened their grip to be trusted with that power.

Harris essentially argues in this clip for the elites at the top of the power structure in the bureaucratic state. She's arguing that people cannot be trusted to discern truth from falsehoods, or bad arguments from good. And for some reason, Harris appears to believe that this is a new problem because of social media, when in fact falsehoods and 'misinformation' have had plenty of vehicles for mass propagation since the invention of the printing press. 

Harris wants to paint herself and her party as the defenders of "democracy." Well, democracy depends on trusting citizens to make wise choices for their own self-governance in an environment where free debate and dissent can be heard. For it to work, as our founders understood when ratifying the Constitution and its First Amendment prohibition against government interference with speech, all voices have to have access to the public square, where bad speech can be countered by better speech. And in those days, citizens didn't have nearly as much access to reference material to test claims made by partisans and politicians.

Harris proposes instead a paternalistic authoritarianism, where government becomes the arbiter of truth rather than the soveregn citizens in a self-governing republic. George Orwell warned about this very impulse in 1984, and Harris proposes a similarly paternalistic and self-protecting Ministry of Truth-type structure. Not only did Harris propose it in 2019, she and Joe Biden implemented it. Their explicit effort, the Disinformation Governance Board hesded up by Nina Jankowicz, fell apart after enormous scrutiny -- but they continued that effort sotto voce at DHS and State with the "Global Disinformation Index" and other mechanisms designed to force Big Tech platforms into silencing dissenters on a wide variety of issues, especially pandemic policies. 

And to a large extent, those worked -- at least until Elon Musk exposed the effort by buying Twitter and unveiling the correspondence between these agencies and previous ownership. 

Harris and Biden aren't interested in protecting democracy. They're interested in protecting Democrats -- from competition on ideas, from scrutiny and accountability, and mostly from the consequences of their corruption. The Protection Racket Media largely follows in lockstep for both ideological and financial reasons. The same mechanisms help suppress their own competition and critics, and to a large extent push them into financial collapse. We have seen independent voices disappear as GDI and other "disinformation" activists choke off BiG Tech platform access and advertiser support.

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It's not just Harris either, as Jonathan Turley reminds us today:

Harris’s views have been echoed by many Democratic leaders, including Hillary Clinton who (after Musk purchased Twitter) called upon European censors to force him to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA).

Other Democratic leaders have praised Brazil for banning X after Musk balked at censoring conservatives at the demand of the socialist government. Brazil is where this anti-free speech movement is clearly heading and could prove a critical testing ground for national bans on sites which refuse to engage in comprehensive censorship. As Harris clearly states in the CNN interview, there cannot be “one rule for Facebook and you have a different rule for Twitter.” Rather, everyone must censor or face imminent government shutdowns. ...

Harris often speaks of free speech as if it is a privilege bestowed by the government like a license and that you can be taken off the road if you are viewed as a reckless driver.

Trump and the third party candidates are clearly not forcing Harris to address her record on free speech. Yet, polls show that the majority of Americans still oppose censorship and favor free speech.

We do not have the luxury of waiting another four years to defend the First Amendment. We have to fight now to get Harris out of power, and with her the paternalistic authoritarians who plan to dictate limits on speech, assembly, and even our beliefs. 

Addendum: I had a great conversation about this with my friend Dr. Jeff Gardner while guest hosting on Relevant Radio™ and the Drew Mariani Show yesterday. Take a listen here; Jeff filled in for a guest who couldn't be contacted and called in halfway through my monologue on free-speech threats in the EU and here in the US.