Turley Is Right: Free Speech Should Be One Of Trump's Central Themes

Jonathan Turley is back at it—urging Trump to make the unprecedented Prog censorship regime the centerpiece of his campaign. Turley labels the Zhou admin as the most hostile to free speech since that of Ur-Prog Woodrow Wilson:

Jonathan Turley @JonathanTurley

From moves to amend the First Amendment to mocking those being targeted, academics and entertainment figures are pushing back at polls and efforts to restore free speech values.

Some citizens seem sufficiently afraid or angry to surrender their free speech rights. They have lost faith in free speech. For the rest of us, their crisis of faith cannot be allowed to become a contagion.

5:13 AM · Jul 12, 2024

According to Jon Stewart, how can there be a problem if you are able to still object? The suggestion is that there can be no threat to free speech unless people are completely silenced.

It is not clear what Stewart would accept as sufficient censorship. What appears to be a punchline to Stewart is a bit more serious for others who have their livelihoods threatened by the anti-free speech movement.

The Hill is out with my column on a new House report disclosing yet another component of the massive censorship system under the Biden Administration, targeting revenue sources for Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and others

Musk is right in describing this as a “racket.” There is now a disinformation cottage industry where a wide array of groups are raking in a fortune targeting individuals and other groups for blacklisting, banning and censorship. It is time to end the censorship racket.

Turley’s article at The Hill is a total must read. If he wanted to write an article about why it’s important to vote—and to vote for Trump, warts and all—he couldn’t have done better. I’ve included just a short excerpt as a teaser. Follow the link:

Elon Musk is right: End the online censorship racket

It is now the left that has constructed a global censorship system that exceeds anything that Joe McCarthy even dreamt of in the control of news and commentary.

Through the years, I have testified repeatedly in Congress on this system supported enthusiastically by President Biden and his administration. It has proven to be a frustrating game of whack-a-mole for civil libertarians. The Democrats in Congress have uniformly opposed any investigation or action on censorship while denying for years that there was a coordinated effort between government and corporations. When we were successful in uncovering components of this system, they were often quickly shut down as the work shifted to other components and assets.

One of the most insidious efforts has been to strangle the financial life out of conservative or libertarian sites by targeting their donors and advertisers. This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns.

Years ago, I wrote about the Biden administration supporting efforts like the Global Disinformation Index to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the 10 riskiest sites targeted by the index were popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. That included Reason.org and a group of libertarian and conservative law professors who simply write about cases and legal controversies. The Global Disinformation Index warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” At the same time, HuffPost, a far-left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.

Once that index’s work and bias was disclosed, government officials quickly disavowed the funding. It was a familiar pattern. Within a few years, we found that the work had been shifted instead to groups like the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which is the same thing on steroids. It is the creation of a powerful and largely unknown group called the World Federation of Advertisers, which has huge sway over the advertising industry and was quickly used by liberal activists to silence opposing views and sites by cutting off their revenue streams.

Now, on a totally related topic—the dumping of Chevron Deference by the SCOTUS. I tried to convey just how important this is, and why it cements the Trump Court as a central part of Trump’s legacy. Trump appointed judges who were known to be hostile to the Admin State. I’ve been occupied with other things, but I bookmarked Jeffrey Tucker’s article that really hits the nail on the head:

The Paradigm Shift Of The New Populism

The Supreme Court last week reversed a decision from 1984 that was responsible for a dramatic turn in American life. The precedent was called Chevron deference. It said that judges should allow executive-department agencies to make rules that affect commercial and civil life, effectively giving them broad discretionary authority that displaced Congressional and judicial oversight.

The previous rule was designed to unclog the courts from endless litigation over legislative interpretations that was making life difficult for business. The unintended consequence of the shift in 1984 was to increase interventions but not from Congress or judges but from agencies, which blew up in size and authority over the course of 40 years. This was ripe for a hard challenge, and the Supreme Court certainly stepped up.

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The implications are profound.

Above all else, it means transferring responsibility back to the people and their representatives. It is part of a new form of populism that has come about in response to obvious calamities.

Think back to four years ago when agency deference was riding high, imposing an astonishing number of instant laws about medical matters, social distancing, business closures, masking, and even mail-in voting. It was all pushed through by agency authority having nothing to do with Congressional mandate.

Americans suddenly found themselves ruled by a system of government they did not know they had. Consider the declaration that essential workers could work but nonessential workers would need to stay home. Was that a law? Not really. It was more like an edict. No one knew who would enforce it or what the penalties were for noncompliance.

We know now that the declaration came from the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency, a division within the Department of Homeland Security created in 2018. Its declaration was even more powerful and decisive over national life than the Department of Labor, which was never even consulted.

Again, this was not law and not legislation. It was edict and no one really knew how it came to be that this agency, about which no one knew anything, possessed this kind of power. The offending legal basis was precisely this Chevron deference, which tempted every agency just to go rogue and test out its powers whenever it wanted to.

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All of this was generally celebrated by most large media outlets, endorsed by academia, and cheered by all respectable opinion. But this was not actually “common-sense public health.” It was radical and far-reaching, and there never was a clear statement of the end goal. Many jurisdictions locked us down until vaccination became available, and then made an effort to innoculate most everyone in the population.

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This is the reason why the new populism is strongly committed to free speech. Without the opportunity to discuss and consider the evidence, we miss important truths and find ourselves blindly following the opinions of the most powerful.

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