All repressive and authoritarian regimes, from Caracas to Pyongyang, suppress speech. Rulers like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or China’s Xi Jinping cannot tolerate truth, as it can threaten their hold on power.
Today, free speech is under attack even in the “free” world, and those attacks are undermining democracy at its core. An informed electorate will not always make good decisions, but an uninformed electorate is much easier to manipulate into making bad ones.
Western “progressives” see their desired progress as threatened by “mis”- or “dis”-information, which is speech they consider false or motivated by malice. They consider suppression of that kind of speech to be allowable. Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota summed up that attitude in 2022 when he said, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.”
But there is. Under our…
