The public is fighting back against censorship imposed by elites in a conspiracy

A global offensive has been launched to strangle digital speech. The censors aren’t Chinese Communists or Iranian theocrats but members in good standing of the progressive elite class in democratic countries.

To save democracy, the elites claim, they must reduce to a minimum the public’s access to information and communication. Because ordinary people are easily duped by the truth-telling guardians, superior to this weakness, must control and detoxify the flow of digital content.

I won’t pretend to be shocked by this surge of oppression, which merely expands the scope and intensity of a process that has been accelerating for some time.

Thanks to Twitter Files, we know the Biden-Harris administration erected an elaborate digital censorship apparatus that silenced disfavored individuals like Donald Trump and took down millions of offending posts.

Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent letter to Congress, we know that, starting in 2021, the Biden White House pressured him successfully “to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire” on Facebook.

To begin with, however, the trampling on the First Amendment was perpetrated surreptitiously, as if with a bad conscience, betraying at least the pretense of a sense of shame.

That has changed. The assault on speech has come out of the closet. To a remarkable degree, the censors have grown brazen and righteous: Their mission, they tell us, is to prevent a populist dictatorship, and to do this they have no choice but to apply dictatorial methods.

The itch to throttle digital platforms is universal among the ruling classes of the world. The European Union, for example, has wielded hate-speech laws and privacy concerns to leap far ahead of the US in the race to subdue the Web.

In Britain, social-media influencers are being prosecuted for fomenting riots — and have been told by the authorities that they should “know they are not safe and there is nowhere to hide.”

But no one embodies the elite’s revaluation of democratic values more egregiously than an unelected Brazilian judge, Alexandre de Moraes. His rise to celebrity status as supreme censor of that country deserves attention for a number of reasons.

Accountable to none

First, he has been granted autocratic power over Brazil’s information sphere, not by the president or by law but by another unelected tribunal. He seems accountable to nobody.

Second, his explicit objective is to save democracy from itself, by controlling electoral outcomes. The populist revolt that gave us Brexit and Trump, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, must be crushed under the weight of arrests, prosecutions, and exorbitant fines.

In the world according to de Moraes, elections are valid only when the progressive left wins: hHis maneuvers are a sideways stumbling towards one-party rule.

Third, the judge clearly regards social media as nothing more than a vector of populist disinformation and manipulation, to be brought under his benevolent control.

To that end, de Moraes has relentlessly hounded Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), the most unbuttoned social media forum. The running quarrel between de Moraes and Musk — two
attention-hungry men — has been loud and very public. The conclusion was foreordained.

On Aug. 30, de Moraes banned X in Brazil, citing “anti-democratic discourse” as the reason. He imposed a daily $8,900 fine on anyone who accessed the platform by way of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs); this was later grudgingly walked back. The attorney representing X was threatened with imprisonment. So was Musk himself.

At one stroke, 20 million Brazilian tweeters were silenced and disconnected. There can be no doubt that de Moraes considers this to be a good thing.

Other countries that have blocked X include China, Russia, Iran and Burma. All are ruled by dictatorial regimes afraid of the aspirations of their own people. Judge de Moraes wins points for originality: He’s the first to pose as a fearless champion of democracy while booting the voters out of the information sphere and locking the door behind him.

He will not be the last.

A final point concerns the US reaction to this incident — by which I mean, of course, our utter nonreaction.

Though an American company had been targeted for arbitrary persecution and expulsion in Brazil, and basic rights seemed to be under attack there, the Biden administration said or did nothing. The same holds true for the Harris campaign. The silence, we can be sure, connoted satisfaction, not indifference.

Biden and Harris share a deep and sincere loathing of Musk. His elimination and the reconquest of control over X has been a priority among the progressive elites who dominate the Democratic Party. In part, this is due to partisan rancor but, as with Trump, it’s also a strongly personal feeling –— both men are traitors to their class.

Playing the hero

To Democratic grandees, de Moraes is less a tyrant or a bully than a heroic role model of governance in a revaluated democracy. Some Democrats openly applauded the judge’s takedown of X in Brazil.

Others, like former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, urged “regulators around the world” to arrest Musk “if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”

In the world according to Reich, opposition to progressive ideas counts as a criminal offense.

Progressive fantasies aside, will we come to see governments of the left, in democratic nations, prosecuting tech lords like Musk for the content of their platforms?