Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Totalitarians Try to Suppress Dissent
6th May 2019
The Other McCain is on the case.
Just as I finished my breakfast here at Burger King and was checking around the ‘net, Professor Glenn Reynolds called attention to the latest outrage from the Thought Police at Google: The Claremont Institute has been banned for “wrongthink,” as Ryan Williams explains:
What Google is really doing (like Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms) is policing the terms of American political debate to advance acceptable establishment ideology. In First Amendment parlance, Google is in the viewpoint discrimination business, and its target is heresies like ours against the prevailing orthodoxies of our time.
Indeed. Google, like the mainstream media establishment, has decided that President Trump’s election proves that freedom of speech is dangerous, and so anything that might conceivably prevent the election of a Democrat in 2020 must be suppressed as some form of “hate speech.” Remember that Google “blacklisted” The American Spectator last month, and of course I got banned from Twitter in 2016, so this increasingly totalitarian regime of online Thought Police affects me directly. As I have explained (“How Disagreement Became ‘Hate’,” March 18), the tactic of labeling conservatives as proponents of “hate” is being used by the Left in an effort to shift the Overton Window leftward.