Why is Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, governor of Minnesota right now?
Perhaps because government censors — functioning through agents like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook — made it harder to hear his opponent, Dr. Scott Jensen, during Walz’s 2022 re-election campaign.
A shift in a few percentage points would have tilted things in the challenger’s favor. But Jensen had made the government’s response to the pandemic — including the tyrannical policies of Walz’s state government — a central theme of his campaign.
And in those days (as in these), all-out censorship of various deviations from the government line was de rigueur. Disagreement about COVID-19, both the nature of the infection and the wisdom of the government’s response, was among the targets.
Jeffrey Tucker asks “Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess” to the fact that Facebook had done so little, in Zuckerberg’s words, to resist repeated pressure “from the Biden administration, including the White House … to censor certain COVID-19 content”?
The answer to the uninteresting question “why now?” is standard CYApolitical calculus. In any case, the confession isn’t quite exhaustive; Zuckerberg doesn’t acknowledge the extent of the censorship. As Tucker notes, “every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels.”
The single COVID-contrarian piece by Tucker himself that slipped through the social-media censorship net “by mistake” got an atypical tsunami of response. So what if Dr. Jensen’s message and arguments had not been perpetually smothered by government-pressured social-media companies?
Jensen may still have lost (Walz got 52 percent) but the point of elections goes further than a horse race. Where there is free speech, voters can learn something.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
2 replies on “The Ignorance of Censorship”
2016 was supposed to be the year in which a President was placed in office who would appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who would form a majority effectively to remove the Constitution as the constitution. That didn’t happen, and so the ruling class began pulling-out the stops.
Challenges to the COVID-19 narrative were suppressed
• to protect that narrative as a tool for the expansion of state power,
• to normalize censorship for future application,
• to crush the spirits of resistors to the expansion of power.
Harris and Walz would be bad enough as tools for the change that they envision effecting. But they are really just tools — полезные идиоты — for sociopaths of the sort who actually take power when liberal values are swept aside by the leftist impulse.
Meanwhile, unfortunately, the Republicans are offering us a right-wing populists who’s convinced that he’s so brilliant that he needn’t think very much nor very hard and a post-liberal.
What’s the penalty for refusing to register as a PAC for every Democrat candidate in the United States?
I understand that there would be criminal as well as financial penalties.