To hear prominent leftists tell it, we’re just days, if not minutes, away from jackbooted, MAGA hat-wearing thugs breaking down the doors of valiant leftist truth-tellers at 4 a.m., and hauling them off to the gulag for daring to criticize the Führer Trump. Yeah, I’m mixing my totalitarian metaphors, but you get the idea. If you believe Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, and a host of others, “our democracy” is hanging by the weakest, thinnest of threads, and here comes Orange Man Bad with a pair of scissors. Yet the people who have really been shredding the freedom of speech in America are the ones who are now crying the loudest.
Hillary Clinton wrote on Friday: “In America, we defend free speech in terrible times. We defend free speech even when it’s offensive. We defend free speech.” That sounds stirring, all right — does she still have her presidential campaign speechwriters on the payroll? Yet for all her stirring verbiage, Hillary’s commitment to free speech didn’t even extend to X commenters, as she restricted comments on her post.
Was she afraid that someone might bring up the fact that she blamed the Benghazi jihad attack on an obscure filmmaker who had dared to criticize Muhammad, and had him jailed despite the fact that no one had ever heard of him or his Islam-critical film until she started talking about it? “We defend free speech” indeed.
Barack Obama likewise struck a pious pose, writing that the “freedom of speech is at the heart of democracy and must be defended, whether the speaker is Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel, MAGA supporters or MAGA opponents.” Hey, yeah, Barry, right again!
Obama, however, unlike Hillary, left the comments on, and some of them were pure acid. One X user wrote: “Where were you when they banned President Trump and millions of conservatives from social media platforms? When DHS and CISA set up a private-public partnership with universities and tech companies to censor millions of social media posts on COVID and the 2020 election? You were giving speeches about the importance of censoring ‘disinformation.’”
Another asked Obama: “How is this different from the ‘cancelling’ of Roseanne Barr or Gina Carano? Did you wax poetic about freedom of speech when conservatives were being deplatformed and fired left and right for not supporting your policies?”
Then there was Kamala Harris, who wrote Thursday: “What we are witnessing is an outright abuse of power. This administration is attacking critics and using fear as a weapon to silence anyone who would speak out. Media corporations — from television networks to newspapers — are capitulating to these threats. We cannot dare to be silent or complacent in the face of this frontal assault on free speech. We, the People, deserve better.”
She was referring, of course, to Jimmy Kimmel’s show getting canned for low ratings, which supposedly means that Hitler is back, and he’s mad. However, Fox News pointed out on Saturday that Harris is being juuuuuuust a trifle hypocritical.
Fox noted that none other than Elon Musk brought to public attention a tweet (as they were known then) that Harris published on Sept. 30, 2019, saying: "Look let's be honest, @realDonaldTrump's Twitter account should be suspended." Ultimately, the pre-Musk Twitter top dogs took the advice of this champion of the freedom of speech.
Clinton, Obama, and Harris are by no means unusual. In the wake of the Kimmel cancellation, videos have been circulating of leftists including Jen Psaki, Tim Walz, John Kerry, AOC and even Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, along with Hillary and Kamala, calling for restrictions on speech.
Related: Okay, Now Leftists Are Posting Hit Lists of the People They Want to Murder Next
The fact is that the left is intolerant of dissent, and has been at war with the freedom of speech for years. Leftist leaders’ newfound love for this freedom is purely tactical, and will melt away as soon as the Kimmel story leaves the news cycle: it’s just their latest weapon against Trump. It wasn’t their first, and it won’t be their last.
Nevertheless, the hypocrisy, it burns. If there is any rank-and-file leftist out there getting all riled about a supposed threat to the freedom of speech because Jimmy Kimmel lost his show, he or she or xe should take a long look in the mirror and realize that he is on the side of totalitarianism and thought control. The loudest and most insistent advocates for the freedom of speech at this moment are actually its foremost enemies, and they’ll revert to showing their true colors again before too long.
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