The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship
American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by “liberals, I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).
For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of “hate speech to mean “views that make us uncomfortable, and then demand that such hateful views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech does not protect hate speech.” Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.
Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the hate speech framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading misinformation or disinformation. These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term terrorism, it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.
It really is astonishing. SCOTUS will have to weigh in on the First Amendment issues sooner or later, presumably later as it will take a special sort of plaintiff to show that the private entity really was pressured by government to get the sympathetic plaintiff to shut up. Perhaps it will be some left-winger who is quashed by eager censors of the Right.