Vance Calls Out Democrats’ First Amendment Crackdown: ‘Harris Is Engaged In Censorship On An Industrial Scale’
Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, called out Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., for wanting to implement a mass censorship regime, blocking Americans from practicing their First Amendment rights.
“I believe we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country. Unfortunately, it’s not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It is the threat of censorship,” Vance said at Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate. “It’s Kamala Harris saying that rather than debating and persuading fellow Americans, she would like to censor people who engage in misinformation. That’s a bigger threat to democracy than anything we’ve seen in the last four years or 40 years.”
Walz, ironically, was spouting falsehoods himself, attempting to make the argument that a peaceful transfer of power was nearly not accomplished after the 2020 election and connecting deaths of Capitol police officers to the January 6 riot, despite the fact that they were entirely unrelated.
Harris and Walz have a long track record of anti-free speech rhetoric and actions, and, like many Democrats, have tried to justify their crackdown as simply protecting Americans from “misinformation.”
Walz has said in the past that “there’s not guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy,” despite the fact that both “misinformation” and “hate speech” are entirely protected by the First Amendment.
“We are united behind a basic American First Amendment principle, which allows us to debate our differences fairly, argue about them, and persuade our fellow Americans,” Vance said at the debate. “Harris is engaged in censorship on an industrial scale. She has done it over a number of issues. That’s a bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said protesters should peacefully protest on January 6.”
In recent years, the federal government successfully pressured social media sites to quash users from questioning government guidance on the Covid pandemic, such as masking, social distancing, and shutting down schools (none of which were rooted in any scientific reality whatsoever), as well as block major stories like the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
Similarly, the Biden administration has used government agencies to combat so-called “misinformation.” The Federalist has extensively reported on how the Biden administration used the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), known as the “nerve center” of the federal censorship regime, as a political cudgel against the American people.
In 2021, the Biden administration explicitly requested that platforms take down posts they deemed to be politically inexpedient, court documents revealed in Missouri v. Biden.
A group of Democrat senators last week demanded once again that the top 11 largest social media companies censor Americans ahead of the upcoming election, seemingly in an attempt to protect their candidate and regime from criticism.
But Harris’ speech-sanitizing tendencies go further back than her time as vice president.
Speaking to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 2019 —before the pandemic — Harris said she wanted to crack down on online hate speech, saying that if she were president, she would “hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms.”
“If you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare, if you don’t police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable,” she said.
In October of the same year, while former President Donald Trump was still in office, then-Sen. Harris demanded that former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey boot the sitting president off the platform
“No user, regardless of their job, wealth, or stature should be exempt from abiding by Twitter’s user agreement, not even the President of the United States,” she wrote in a letter.
Attacking one of the key protections in the First Amendment, Harris introduced a bill that would ban religious institutions’ abilities to stay true to their beliefs. The law was introduced as a response to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, where the Supreme Court held that corporations could not be forced to provide health care plans that include contraception if it is against their religious beliefs.
Harris said that the First Amendment’s religious freedom guarantee should “never be used to undermine other Americans’ civil rights or subject them to discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”
During the debate exchange, Walz shot back, saying that true censorship is “book banning,” which is a reference to a Democrat talking point that conservatives are attempting to ban books from schools. The only books conservatives have targeted are those with highly sexual, pornographic, and even pedophilic materials that left-wing teachers and activists seem intent on putting in front of young children.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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