Words are dangerous, but it's much more dangerous to allow words to be controlled. Don't fall for the trap, MAGA.

It’s common these days for parts of the political “left” in America to demand heavy restrictions on the First Amendment. They demand restrictions on “hate speech”, on “inflammatory speech”, on “dangerous speech”, on speech that spreads “misinformation”, “disinformation”, or “malinformation”.

The use of the scare quotes above is to frighten you into not letting the government define these terms and use them to throttle your right to free speech. You might have noticed the government likes to do this. See Covid. See the 2020 “election”.

You might have also noticed that for the last 8 years, many leftists have used their free speech to insist that Donald Trump is a racist, homophobic, puppet of Vladimir Putin, who conspired with the ex-KGB agent to steal the presidential election in 2016 and that he’s going to do it again.

They’ve said Trump is a “threat to democracy”. They’ve said if he becomes president again, there will be no more elections, and instead he will preside over an eternal dictatorship. They’ve said (over and over and over and over again) that (and I quote), “Donald Trump is literally Hitler” and that his supporters are “literal Nazis”.

You might be of the opinion that inflammatory lies of this kind, spread by prominent politicians, talking heads, and “journalists” might be the kind of reckless speech that would, on the margin, incite lefty kooks to try to assassinate Trump.

I sure am. I’m quite positive this rhetoric was swirling around the diseased brains of the two nuts who tried to murder Trump this year.

The left obviously doesn’t care, though. They haven’t changed their tune one bit. It’s “Russia, Russia, Russia, threat to democracy, racist, literally Hitler, blah blah blah”, all day, every day. The only change they’ve made to their rhetoric is to say, “Violence has no place in our society.” exactly once after each bullet is fired.

So, the left has lost (if they ever had it) the moral authority to demand that we allow the government to throttle speech in the name of “safety” or “preventing violence”.

But I worry that the political right (or whatever Trump-worshipping “MAGA” represents) might be triggered by the attempts on Trump’s life to fall into the left’s trap.

I really hope they don’t. If they try to legally blame Joy Reid, Joe Scarborough, Rachel Maddow, etc for stirring up public sentiment in a dangerous way, or try to pass legislation banning such “dangerous speech”, they will have fallen directly into the left’s trap.

We must never allow a monopolistic government the power to define what dangerous speech is. We must not allow them the power to define what misinformation or disinformation or malinformation is. We must not allow them the power to ban such speech.

And to the extent we have already given the government this power, we must claw it back.

Speech is too important. It’s literally how we think.

Words (and ideas) are powerful and can be dangerous, of course. But handing over the authoritarian power to a monopolist to define and regulate words and ideas is much much more dangerous.

It’s kind of a “systems over goals” thing. You might like the “goal” of using the government to silence people who annoy you and say things you think are dangerous. But if you grant “your” government that power, it will inevitably be used one day to silence you — and to silence any and all speech that threatens those in power.

A much better “system” is complete free speech. It’s messy, but freedom is supposed to be messy. Freedom requires that individuals use their own minds to evaluate truth-claims made by others. We can’t off-load that responsibility to government.

If we do, we are totally screwed. Don’t fall for it, MAGA-folk.

Naturally,

Adam

And if you want to learn about all the times in history that government has suppressed speech as it’s doing hideously evil things, consider Liberty Classroom. You’ll be shocked. You’ll be amazed. You’ll be educated!