It has been a lousy week for free speech.
It has been an even worse week for anyone who simply appreciates the clean and accurate use of the English language.
The news and tech industries have spent the past couple of days censoring speech and redefining words, and all for the benefit of the Democratic Party. We are not in a good place as a republic when the meaning of words can be abused regularly depending on the whims of politicians. We are in an even worse place when the politicized effort to twist, cannibalize, and stifle speech is spearheaded by multibillion-dollar conglomerates.
Things started out poorly enough this week when certain members of the press adopted the Biden campaign’s strategy of simply redefining what it means to “pack the court.”
“The GOP is packing the Supreme Court in slow motion,” reads the headline to a Washington Post opinion article by columnist Ruth Marcus.
The author herself asserts with total confidence, “Republicans stole one seat when they refused to let President Barack Obama fill a vacancy created nine months before the 2016 election. Now they are poised to steal another, rushing through President Trump’s nominee with Election Day less than a month away.”
None of this is true. The Republican-controlled Senate is not “packing” anything. It is not adding seats that it can then fill with judges of its liking, which is what the very definition of “court-packing” has been for 83 years. Instead, the Senate is filling existing vacancies. It also did not “steal” anything. As a co-equal branch of the government, the Senate need not consent to the president’s judicial nominations. Lastly, if one knows anything about the history of Supreme Court nominations, there is nothing particularly “rushed” about the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
For Marcus and her editors at the Washington Post, who are not alone in pushing the absurd redefinition of “court-packing,” the actual meaning of words is apparently irrelevant.
Later, on Tuesday, something different but equally disturbing happened. Merriam-Webster amended its entry for the word “preference” to align specifically with a disingenuous and contrived attack against Barrett. On Tuesday, during Day Two of her Senate confirmation hearings, Barrett used the term “sexual preference,” which the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg used in 2017 and Democratic nominee Joe Biden used in May of this year. Neither Ginsburg’s nor Biden’s use of the term provoked criticism. But an MSNBC producer and a U.S. senator decided this week that Barrett’s remark deserves the label “offensive,” and, right on cue, Merriam-Webster updated its definition to reflect this newfound distaste for the terminology. Even the dictionary is getting in on the game of weaponizing the language on behalf of politics.
Elsewhere that same day, the New York Times Magazine published an explicitly anti-free speech treatise titled plainly enough, “The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation.”
Age of disinformation? As opposed to when? The war on terror? The Cold War? World War II?
The author, Emily Bazelon, writes:
The First Amendment can withstand the torrent of disinformation that comes naturally with fighting global wars. It can withstand several decidedly anti-free speech presidents. But the First Amendment apparently cannot withstand online trolls, according to Bazelon.
Later, on Wednesday, Big Tech ganged up on the New York Post after it published a report purporting to show that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then the vice president, “to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
Facebook restricted its users’ ability to share the story. Twitter did the same. Both companies defended their actions by pointing to a set of standards that have not been enforced for any of the erroneous Trump White House “scoops” based on faulty anonymous sources and even apparent Kremlin propaganda. (See: the press’s multiyear coverage of the so-called Steele dossier).
All this, and it is only Thursday.
As disturbing as tech’s and media’s headlong rush toward illiberalism this week is that it took practically nothing to get here — just the slightest nudge. It took for Democrats to lose a single presidential election, after enjoying control of the executive branch for 16 of the last 28 years, for the Left and its allies in media and tech to decry free speech and rally behind authoritarian efforts to control and stifle the First Amendment. Disinformation, lies, and conspiracy theories predate Trump by a long while, but it was not until after 2016 that the slightly deranged and impossible crusade to purge society of all perceived falsehoods, even if it means curbing or crushing free speech rights, became a downright obsession in tech and news media.
Imagine what they will do should the Republican incumbent win reelection this fall.
