It should be a patently obvious truism that experts can, in fact, be wrong. It is precisely for this reason, which the Founding Fathers understood well, that no experts should be given the power to determine what other people are allowed to say.
Again, every man will be mistaken at some point, and that is why it is so dangerous for anyone to claim his ideological opponents must have their free speech violated for disagreeing with him. It is one thing to try to spread truth and counteract falsehood — that is necessary and admirable. It is entirely different to “spread truth” by demanding that anyone who disagrees with you have his voice silenced and his comments deleted. Indeed, I would argue that it is a good rule that anyone who argues for censorship is not interested in truth.
Truth can stand on its own merits, and truth-tellers are not worried about disagreement, because they know they can counteract that disagreement. Anyone who demands censorship is more interested in enforcing his selected narrative and hiding some flaw with it than he is in actually establishing facts. This, I would say, is true of all the so-called “experts” hysterically demanding more censorship, in dangerous and blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon summed up the self-defeating nature of would-be censors’ arguments in an April 17 Twitter/X post. “Whenever we learn that censorship has blocked something true (like the Hunter Biden laptop story), we always hear the same excuse: ‘We censored it based on what we knew at the time,’” he wrote. “This is not a defense of censorship. In fact, it's a knock-down argument against it. If knowledge changes over time, then the last thing we should ever do is pretend it doesn't by preemptively shutting down the debate. If it's even possible that the ‘experts’ and authorities are wrong — and we know they often are — then dissent must not only be allowed, but encouraged.”
In fact, the Hunter Biden laptop is just one example of experts urging censorship of content that was accurate. For instance, in 2022, after it was unavoidably clear how disastrous COVID-19 policies were, YouTube quietly changed its COVID-19 medical misinformation policy in major ways, especially in regards to wearing masks, social distancing, and the COVID vaccines. Yet a YouTube executive had proudly bragged in 2021 that the Google-owned platform removed over a million pieces of content related to COVID! So much for trusting the experts.
But the censorship was never about elevating facts; it was always about control. The Biden administration and Big Tech built up the censorship industrial complex to crush political dissent, not to champion truth.
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In November 1737, Founder Benjamin Franklin, who was at that time the publisher of The Pennsylvania Gazette, printed an essay titled “On Freedom of Speech and the Press.” In that essay, the young Franklin argued that “…abuses of the freedom of speech are the excesses of liberty. They ought to be repressed; but to whom dare we commit the care of doing it?”
Franklin went on, “An evil magistrate intrusted [sic] with power to ‘punish for words’, would be armed with a weapon the most destructive and terrible. Under pretence [sic] of pruning off the exuberant branches, he would be apt to destroy the tree.” That is what censors do. While claiming to target “lies” and “disinformation” and “extremism,” they are not pruning the tree of liberty; rather, they are brutally destroying that tree.
