The Hurricane Speech Panic is Here – by Matt Taibbi

We learned with Covid that health officials issuing wrong or contradictory dictates about everything from masking to social distancing to mortality rates to vaccine efficacy inspired enormous distrust in the population. Officials decided the fastest route to regaining the public s confidence was to deprive people of alternative sources of information, claiming a health emergency as their censorship casus belli. Now, weeks before an election, they re trying to use hurricanes to shut down critics of the White House again.

It s been clear for a while that the goal of the anti-disinformation crew is an American version of the Digital Services Act, which conceptually is just what yesterday s congressional letter asks for. Keep the quasi-monopolistic platforms private, so they can legally violate rights, but make companies de facto subordinates to state guidance. Officials will keep drumming up panics, and keep asking for the same review power. Sooner or later and it might be sooner, sadly they ll get it.

via www.racket.news

If the First Amendment is, uh, substantially modified (i.e., gutted), it obviously won’t be in a Constitutional amendment. It may not even be by a SCOTUS opinion. It will probably just be by a bunch of uninterpretable word gunk in the Federal Register. Legions of young law professors will step bravely forward to interpret them anyway, mostly to say, as the song goes, Hooray for Our Side. When words aren’t speech, but action. When incitement means that some yahoo might have heard you say something intemperate. The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law . . .”– well, we’re not Congress are we? Nobody elected us! And so on. One hopes it won’t happen this way. Everybody hope real hard.