Freedom of speech is constantly embattled.
Just one example: government-instigated stomping on social-media speech in recent years, proof of which has been revealed thanks to litigation, freedom of information requests, and the purchase of Twitter by a friend of free speech.
But the embarrassing revelations have not caused our censors to retreat.
They’re not trying to censor people, they suggest, just trying to stop lies, hate, misinformation. And now Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, wants to arrest Elon Musk for resisting censorship as Twitter’s new owner.
Reich says: “Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”
Reich has also said that we must regulate speech to “direct people’s attention … to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.” As Jonathan Turley observes, “the ‘healthy public conversation’ with Robert Reich increasingly appears to be his talking and the rest of us listening.”
Would “regulators around the world” include U.S. regulators? Since the First Amendment has yet to be rescinded, perhaps Reich would prefer other countries to handle imprisoning Elon Musk for letting people speak “too” freely. But I’m guessing Reich would be fine with a U.S. arrest.
Reich would fit right in with a Harris administration, if we get one, led by a woman who calls the First Amendment a “privilege” and has lamented that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight and regulation.” Which, she declares, “has to stop.”
Something has to stop.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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6 replies on “Say No to Reich-Harris Reich”
As an undergraduate taking a history course on American commercial enterprise, I was supposed to offer my opinion of a book by Reich. I identified his prescriptions as fascistic. I’m sure that the instructor didn’t recognize Reich’s fascism then. Sadly, I doubt the instructor does now; lacking any principle to stop them short of totalitarianism, most of the left have shed their pretenses to liberalism, even as they still fling the old insults at their opponents.
The war between governments and free so speech is never ending, and perhaps exacerbated in systems which allow citizens to vote for their representatives.
Regulated speech is NOT free speech, it is controlled and much more dangerous.
We are on an uncharted course of post-subsistence society which never base isted in human history. Freedom of speech together with open public discourse is now more important than ever before.
Healthcare, housing, food, transportation, and cell phones now are necessities, entitlements, to be provided by the government.
The economy and society and resulting governmental systems are no longer a means of allocating scarcity but rather a system to redistribute the surplus. Never before has humanity had to deal with these issues. History provides no guide except a religious (and therefore diminished) prohibition of covering.
Much of our beloved land has become a morass of stupidity and laziness. If one is to read or hear anything and take it as gospel at first without prior knowledge of the topic and accept it as fact, then you would qualify as a moron. Intellectual curiosity is all but dead in this country and thereby the informed voter and our representative republic with it.
Reich would have made a good NAZI. Actually he is one.
Yes. Something has to stop. We have to stop her and them.
You, however, should never stop. Keep it up. Fight for our freedoms!
Rebecca Hurst
Merrick Garland and Robert Reich would work well together. Both are against all purveyors of speech they don’t like.