We’re Waiting for Democrats To Step Up. First Amendment Can’t Be a Partisan Issue
March 29 | Posted by mrossol | 1st Amendment, Democrat Party“One thing they can do, and I think this is happening, is work with the Trump administration to go through the federal budget and scrub any expenditure. There were 15-20 departments involved in this and the money is all hidden. It wasn’t just Facebook; it was these groups like NewsGuard and that other one from Britain that the State Department was sneaking money to. They went after everybody. They went after us,” RCP Washington bureau chief Carl Cannon said. “To me, it is one of the greatest scandals in American history. It was an organized effort, and the Democratic Party lined up behind it.”
“You ask what the Senate can do? They ought to starve this thing of all the money. They ought to shame these people. I don’t think it’s legal. I think it’s clearly unconstitutional,” Cannon said. “The one thing I would say in favor of Mark Zuckerberg, though, is they were clearly under pressure from the FBI and the Justice Department, the Biden administration. There were these overt threats from the government to shut down speech. It happened at NIH, it happened at the FBI, it happened all over the government.”
“I think there’s been a sea change here. I’m waiting for Democrats to step up and do this. The First Amendment can’t be a partisan issue, and the Republicans are leading the way—they need some help from Democrats,” he said.
“What I worry about is that the sea change that Carl talked about coincided with the election of Donald Trump,” RCP co-founder Tom Bevan added. “That’s when you saw Mark Zuckerberg sort of suddenly see the light.”
“Well, okay, there’s going to be a Democrat in office at some point, maybe three years from now, maybe eight years from now, whatever it’s going to be,” Bevan said. “There’s going to be another pandemic, which is what a lot of this was around. These narratives that were coming out of the public health establishment, that’s where a lot of the coercion happened.”
“These kinds of things are going to happen again, and my fear is that we might revert to a situation where free speech is impinged upon. We have to be really, really vigilant about it. It is essential to the functioning of our democracy that people are allowed to say what they think and have a discussion and debate among different points of view, even if those views are ones that people don’t like or the government doesn’t like,” Bevan said.
“I think we’re all in agreement on this,” Andrew Walworth added. “The other thing it shows is that these tech titans are completely mercenary. I don’t think we should be surprised by that. They will go in whatever direction suits their bottom line and their ability to build their business. It’s important that the government and the courts and everyone stand up and regulate in a way that — we can’t count on them, I guess is what I’m saying. We can’t count on them.”
“Tom mentioned the lab leak theory,” Cannon said. “If you wrote that the coronavirus started in a lab with this gain-of-function research and escaped, which is not unanimous now but is the consensus view, you could lose your job. If you said that on Twitter, you would be censored. It turned out to be right. It was a lab leak. But even if it wasn’t, these people had no right to shut down that conversation. Americans should have a right to say whatever they want. It doesn’t have to be proven right. This makes the case easy, but that’s not necessary.”
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