President-elect Joe Biden risks forfeiting the United States’s global leadership on behalf of free speech.
Biden’s choice of a transition team leader for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Richard Stengel, former Time managing editor, is an advocate of laws limiting free speech. He has written that “the intellectual underpinning of the First Amendment was engineered for a simpler era” that the world now has moved beyond. That amendment’s broad protection even for unwelcome speech is now, he wrote, “a design flaw” in “an age when everyone has a megaphone.”
“All speech is not equal,” he wrote in the Washington Post. “And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails.”
Specifically, Stengel calls for laws penalizing what he calls “hate speech,” which he defines as “speech that deliberately insults people based on religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation.” As an example, he explained, “Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran.”
Set aside the hypocrisy of denizens of the political Left insisting they have a right to burn the American flag, but now wanting to penalize the burning of a Koran. This is dangerous stuff. Who in government, pray tell, gets to decide what sorts of “deliberate insults” are punishable, and how? If I say I find some parts of the Koran offensive, is that hate speech? If you categorize illegal immigrants as “aliens” or if, Lord forbid, you describe homosexuality as a “preference,” rather than whatever the newest politically correct lingo dictates, should you be fined or jailed?
What Stengel advocates isn’t just a slippery slope toward authoritarian thought control; it creates the conditions for a horrid mudslide. Stengel writes that hate speech “diminishes tolerance. It enables discrimination.” Yet, what about tolerance for those who disagree about what constitutes intolerance in the first place? Colleges with “speech codes” across the country already threaten to punish students merely for wearing the wrong Halloween costume or for daring to criticize the radical organization, Black Lives Matter. The “tolerance” Stengel preaches is the tolerance of the boot heel and the Inquisition.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other such entities is tasked, officially, “to inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” To have somebody of Stengel’s views heading the presidential transition team overseeing the agency should be anathema. Rather than exporting the single most basic ideal of American freedom, namely free speech and thought, Stengel would have the U.S. kowtow to foreign notions of what sort of speech is permitted.
This isn’t exporting ideals of freedom; it is importing the seeds of repression. It would completely obliterate Thomas Jefferson’s clarion call of having “sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
Biden and his Amen Chorus in the media keep claiming the president-elect is a “moderate,” but he keeps doing things such as naming Stengel to this transition team and a prominent racial reparations advocate to his Treasury Department transition team while insisting he will suspend all deportations of illegal immigrants for 100 days and renew the government’s harassment of the Little Sisters of the Poor.
This isn’t moderation; it’s radicalism. And it’s the type of radicalism we all should hate.
