In October 2019, then-Sen. Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that President Donald Trump’s Twitter account should be canceled.
“As far as I’m concerned and I think most people would say, including members of Congress who he has threatened, that he has lost his privileges and it should be taken down.”
Harris was interviewed as part of CNN’s analysis of the just-concluded Democratic primary debate.
“There has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation,” Harris said, “and that has to stop.”
A couple of months later, the 2020 Kamala Harris presidential campaign sank below the waves like the Titanic, the main difference being that the Titanic is still at the bottom of the ocean while the Harris campaign has resurfaced in 2024 to float silently in the water behind Joe Biden’s lifeless presidency.
Harris’s recorded and transcribed words from 2019 are speaking for her now, even as she studiously avoids reporters who are waiting on the airport tarmac to ask a few questions before she boards her plane. You may have seen the clip of Harris wearing wired earphones plugged into her phone and simultaneously holding the phone up to her ear, pretending to have a conversation as she rushed past reporters without stopping.
Comedian John Cleese once observed, “Fear makes you stupid.”
So that’s one explanation.
In her 2019 conversation with Jake Tapper, Harris said, “Anyone who wants to say, well this is a matter of free speech, you are not free to threaten the life of a witness. That is a crime.”
“But how did he threaten the life of a witness?” Tapper asked.
Harris insisted that Trump’s crime was “the way he has talked about this — the whistleblower.”
Tapper asked whether everyone criticizing or questioning the credibility of a whistleblower would also have their statements or articles taken down from Twitter. Harris brushed off that concern as “a fine conversation for a law school debate” and repeated that she was only discussing the “unfiltered” words of President Trump.
And now, here is the quickest civics class you’ve ever taken.
The United States was founded on the idea that the purpose of government is the protection of individual rights: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” reads the Declaration of Independence.
The U.S. Constitution limits the power of the federal government, emphasizing the protection of individual rights in the first ten amendments, also known as the Bill of Rights. It’s a long list of specific things the government is not allowed to do.
Some of the Constitution’s framers doubted that a Bill of Rights was necessary. “Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” asked Alexander Hamilton.
“Trust, but verify,” President Ronald Reagan might have answered, had he been there.
So if you want to live in a free country, you must accept that there are some things the government cannot do. For example, it can’t stop social media platforms from “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation.” That is called freedom of speech, and the First Amendment protects it from abridgement by the government.
We know now that the Biden White House did not accept the limits on power listed in the First Amendment. Instead, the administration pressured and coerced social media platforms to censor the constitutionally protected free speech of Americans on subjects including COVID and mail-in ballots.
We know this because Elon Musk paid $44 billion to buy Twitter and then exposed the communications between Twitter executives and government officials who were trying to control content. We know this because of documents and testimony extracted during the discovery process in lawsuits filed by people who were censored, smeared and deplatformed. Three of those legal actions are Murthy v. Missouri, Kennedy v. Biden, and Berenson v. Biden.
The people who want to censor or have other people censored do not want to live in a free country. They want to live in a country in which the leaders with whom they agree are able to use the power of government to smite their political opponents like a special effect in a Cecil B. DeMille movie.
This censorship impulse stems from a belief in collectivism, which holds that individual rights must be set aside for the benefit of “society.” It is always the path to economic stagnation and widespread misery.
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Collectivism is the idea that everything produced in a society kind of belongs to everybody, and the government’s job is to distribute it. The first thing this destroys is the incentive to take on the long-term challenges that make prosperity possible. Who is going to spend years learning, training, working, inventing, innovating and investing if the end result of all that effort is government confiscation and redistribution?
Newly established collectivism can float for a short time on the surplus created by those who previously spent years learning, training, working, inventing, innovating and investing. But then, as productive people gradually give up on long-term efforts, while others line up to have their needs met by the products of someone else’s work, the new normal turns out to be economic decline and endless shortages.
Who benefits from collectivism? Midwit government officials. They become the most powerful people in society by controlling someone else’s productive enterprise, and then distributing the spoils to their favored recipients.
But we don’t have to live like that. We can learn to recognize collectivism and reject it. Start by always standing up for individual rights. Be intensely skeptical of claims that it’s okay to violate individual rights for the “greater good.”
Be even more skeptical if the “greater good” was defined by midwit government officials.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley