Kerby Anderson

All factions, at some time, can succumb to the impulse to censor, but liberals have almost made it a religion. That’s the argument Glenn Greenwald makes as he talks about the attempt by the left to remove podcaster Joe Rogan from Spotify. Greenwald would likely describe himself as a liberal, but he is talking about people on the left who don’t believe in free speech. He says they “are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, or otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard.” The picture that accompanies his commentary is of Joe Rogan interviewing Senator Bernie Sanders a few months before he endorsed the Vermont independent for president. Now the left is attacking Joe, a podcaster who endorsed the socialist for president. As I say so often on my radio program, you can never be liberal enough for the left. In the past, the left’s “preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of ‘hate speech’ to mean 'views that make us uncomfortable.'” They even falsely claimed that the First Amendment doesn’t protect “hate speech.” But the “hate speech” argument isn’t broad enough, so now they want to also censor “misinformation” or “disinformation.” That is apparently Joe Rogan’s supposed “crime,” for allowing a doctor to present some unpopular information about Covid. But if you think the information presented is erroneous, criticize it. Don’t censor it. Lest you think that the censorship impulse only affects leaders on the left, Greenwald mentions that polls of Democratic voters show they overwhelmingly favor censorship of the Internet by Big Tech and even by the government itself. It’s time to acknowledge that the censorship impulse infects large parts of the American electorate.