The modern Democrat Party is many things. But an ardent defender of Americans’ First Amendment right to free speech is not one of them.
This theme was front and center during a sit-down interview former President Barack Obama participated in at The Connecticut Forum earlier this week. At one point in his conversation with historian and author Heather Cox Richardson, America’s 44th commander-in-chief broached the subject of “propaganda” and how “[t]hose in power, those with money, exploit [the information] space in which nobody knows what’s true.”
“Vladimir Putin and the KGB had a saying that was then adopted proudly by Steve Bannon, which was if you want propaganda to be effective, you don’t have to convince people that what you are saying is true,” Obama said. “You just have to flood the zone with so much poop. They use a different word. But you have to flood the zone with so much untruth, constantly, that at some point people don’t believe anything.”
The former president went on to take an indirect shot at President Donald Trump’s contesting of the 2020 election results, saying, “it doesn’t matter if a candidate running for office just is constantly, just hypothetically, saying untrue things, or if an elected president claims that he won when he lost and that the system was rigged, but then when he wins, then it isn’t rigged, because he won.” Tying it back to his remarks about “propaganda,” he noted, “It just matters if everybody starts kind of throwing up their hands and saying, well, I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“And that’s what’s happened. That’s what’s happened in one of our major political parties. You have a whole bunch of people who know that’s not true, but we will pretend like it is. And that is dangerous,” Obama said.
The most sinister part of Obama’s commentary, however, came during his subsequent discussion about the role of government and Big Tech in the information sphere.
While claiming to support “diversity of opinion,” the former president argued that “we’re going to have to … start experimenting with new forms of journalism and how … we use social media in ways that reaffirm facts, separate facts from opinion.” To help accomplish this, he advocated for the government to step in and enact “regulatory constraints” around such a venture.
“We don’t want diversity of facts. And how do we train and teach our kids to distinguish between those things? That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media,” Obama said. “By the way, it will require … some government regulatory constraints around some of these business models in a way that’s consistent with the First Amendment, but that also says, look, there is a difference between these platforms letting all voices be heard versus a business model that elevates the most hateful voices or the most polarizing voices or the most dangerous, in the sense of inciting violence, voices.”
Try as he may, Obama’s “consistent with the First Amendment” qualifier isn’t fooling anyone. What the former president is not-so-subtly pushing for is exactly what his buddy Joe Biden undertook during his presidency: government policing of speech.
For years, the Biden administration worked relentlessly to pressure social media companies into censoring Americans whose posts contained views that went against the federal government’s preferred narratives — irrespective of whether such posts contained accurate information. Particularly during the Covid era, the Biden White House often justified these authoritarian practices by claiming that Big Tech’s failure to abide by its coercive tactics was “killing people” and “costing people their lives.”
In essence, Team Biden offered the same rationale for its censorship regime that Obama is now using to push for the state to have a greater role in policing what the left often classifies as “misinformation.” That is, allowing Americans to exchange thoughts and ideas on social media free of government oversight is “dangerous” and risks elevating what the former president believes are society’s “most hateful voices.”
But exactly what is Obama’s standard for what is factually true?
Many deranged leftists, for example, believe that there are infinite genders, and that men can “transition” to become women and vice versa. Would social media posts correctly noting that there are only men and women and nobody can “transition” from one sex to the other be censored under Obama’s proposed “government regulatory constraints”? Of course, the former president doesn’t say.
Neither did the former president specify who in this new state-Big Tech partnership gets to decide what voices are silenced because they’re deemed to be “hateful,” “polarizing,” “dangerous,” or “inciting violence.”
Radical leftists on American college campuses often espouse the belief that conservative views that contradict their own constitute acts of “violence.” It’s not hard to imagine how individuals with this warped worldview would treat conservative-aligned posts under Obama’s proposal — especially given that Big Tech companies have previously shown how they’d handle such postings.
While Obama’s tacit embrace of state-enforced censorship isn’t new for Democrats, it speaks to the desperation of a political party that cannot survive without uniform control of the information space.
For years, the left has maintained dominance over many of the institutions (media, Big Tech) responsible for the dissemination of information, allowing them to wield a significant amount of power over what facts and views the American people were permitted to see. With Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) and the public’s trust in legacy media in freefall, the party that depended so heavily on this information monopoly is steadily losing its ability to manipulate the country.
The more everyday Americans are allowed to see the Democrat Party and its destructive policies without the lens of manipulation foisted upon them, the more they recognize the left for what it has become — a godless, pernicious entity whose worldview is wholly antithetical to the American way. And it is that increasing reality that terrifies Democrats the most. The party simply cannot survive when true free speech is allowed to prosper.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
