Abolish the Speech Police

Our fellow Americans may hold bad ideas, but the worst idea of all is that government should be the arbiter of what we’re allowed to speak and hear

Yesterday I had the honor of testifying before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability.

The subject of the hearing was “Censorship Laundering: How the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Enables the Silencing of Dissent.”

I had recently written about this topic for Newsweek, arguing that not one penny of taxpayer dollars should be used to silence ourselves.

My reward — or the price for that work, depending on your perspective — was that the Subcommittee saw fit to call me before it to lay out the sordid story of how a DHS sub-agency tasked with cybersecurity and protecting critical infrastructure somehow became a “nerve center” in America’s mass public-private censorship regime, and what Congress can and must do about it.

This is one critical piece of a broader puzzle that we must solve if we are to save our cherished and utterly indispensable First Amendment.

I am most grateful to the Subcommittee, led by Chairman Dan Bishop (R-NC), for giving me the opportunity to contribute to its efforts in connection therewith.

You can watch my opening remarks — or read them, as prepared — below, and catch the full hearing here.

I will share my full prepared testimony, which goes into vastly greater detail about DHS and sub-agency CISA’s role in suppressing our speech, in a subsequent post.

Chairman Bishop, Ranking Member Ivey, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify.

Government’s first charge is to defend the life and limb of the governed.

DHS and CISA have vital roles to play in this regard.

Because their mission is so critical, we’re compelled to scrutinize them in good faith.

I offer today’s testimony in this spirit.

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Our republic rests on the inalienable right to free speech.

That right is under assault by those working to toss their political foes into the digital gulag, in defense of “our democracy.”

Disturbingly, the federal government itself appears to be a key culprit.

Overwhelming evidence suggests federal agencies, top White House officials, and lawmakers, colluding with Big Tech, and often government-coordinated and -funded “counter-disinformation” groups, have imposed a mass public-private censorship regime on the American people.

This regime has suppressed opinions that diverge from its orthodoxy and even facts inconvenient to its agenda, on an ever-growing number of topics -- starting with elections, moving to COVID-19, and now covering many other contested issues, all under the guise of national security and public health.

CISA is core to these efforts.

CISA has served as a censorship conductor, driving regular meetings between security agencies and social media companies aimed at encouraging the platforms to combat purported mis- and dis-information – that is, to censor speech disfavored by the government that regulates them. And they have.

CISA has served as a censorship “switchboard,” collecting purported misinformation from government and non-government actors in the form of tweets, YouTube videos, and even private Facebook messages, and relaying the flagged content to the platforms to squelch it.

And CISA has served as an architect of the broader public-private censorship regime, helping originate, consult, network, and partner with often government-linked third parties to themselves serve as First Amendment-circumventing, mass-surveillance and mass-censorship enterprises.

These systematic speech-stifling efforts, often targeting core political speech, and intensifying during elections, seem tantamount to a conspiracy to violate the First Amendment, and running domestic election interference.

In short, we’ve unwittingly been paying unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats to silence ourselves.

We’re told these speech police are pursuing thoughtcrimes for our own good.

Authorities say MDM – mis-, dis-, and mal-information – fuels violent extremism, and therefore that it must be purged. They ask us to ignore the selective and cynical linking of speech they disapprove of, to terror. And they elide their mandate to suppress truth -- malinformation being “based on fact” by CISA’s own definition, but the intent or impact of which our betters disapprove of.

Never discussed are questions like:

Who determines what constitutes MDM?

Should it be the state – which itself has cast as MDM that which it later acknowledged was settled Science – or we the people?

If the state justifies speech regulation on national security or public health grounds, what are the standards for determining when Wrongthink is sufficiently dangerous to rise to the level of censorship?

If skepticism about mail-in balloting – which Jimmy Carter and the New York Times once shared; or skepticism about COVID policies that if more widely heard might have saved lives and liberties – amount to violent extremist threats to critical infrastructure, as DHS has indicated, making such speech ripe for suppression, what about anti-cop sentiment; or pro-abortion sentiment; or radical environmentalist sentiment?

And if Wrongthink must be verboten, why stop at censoring it on social media?

Why not pull every TV network that propagates Wrongthink off the air?

Or review every text in every library and bookstore for Wrongthink, and burn the offending titles?

Why not censor Wrongthinkers’ chats and emails?

Why not ban them from the internet and suspend their mail service altogether?

And while we’re at it, why not make it illegal for Wrongthinkers to possess pens and pads too?

Would proponents of the censorship regime trust their worst political foes with these powers?

We may believe our fellow Americans hold bad ideas, if not ideas that are plain wrong.

But the worst idea of all is that government should be the arbiter of what we’re allowed to speak and hear.

We are a free people capable of judging ideas on their merits – citizens, not subjects.

Eviscerating the First Amendment will neither make us more democratic, nor more safe.

It would be the stuff of tyranny.

Congress has a responsibility to stand athwart History yelling “stop.”

With another election season looming, censorship tools likely becoming more powerful, and the censorship regime’s ambitions only growing – while it stonewalls and scrubs evidence of its past doings – this Subcommittee’s oversight efforts are most urgent.

This body should endeavor to fully expose DHS’ role in censorship past and present, and directly and by proxy, curtail funding, implement legislative remedies, and hold accountable all those who engaged in unconstitutional acts in connection therewith.

Thank you and I look forward to taking your questions.

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Finally, here was my rapid response to the hearing (click the image to see the full thread):