DOUBLESPEAK: New York Times Magazine Says The Biggest Threat to Free Speech…is Free Speech

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Oct 15, 2020

In another showing of proof that the fake news is in fact the enemy of the people, the New York Times Magazine has published an article arguing that the biggest threat to free speech…is free speech itself.

Feminist author Emily Bazelon believes that government and corporate censorship must be used to save free speech, and she made her case very poorly in an op/ed riddled with Orwellian doublespeak.

“It’s an article of faith in the United States that more speech is better and that the government should regulate it as little as possible. But increasingly, scholars of constitutional law, as well as social scientists, are beginning to question the way we have come to think about the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech,” Bazelon wrote, effectively arguing for an end to the Bill of Rights.

“They think our formulations are simplistic — and especially inadequate for our era. Censorship of external critics by the government remains a serious threat under authoritarian regimes. But in the United States and other democracies, there is a different kind of threat, which may be doing more damage to the discourse about politics, news and science. It encompasses the mass distortion of truth and overwhelming waves of speech from extremists that smear and distract,” she wrote, using left-wing blather to justify shredding the U.S. Constitution.

Bazelon is arguing that since freedom of speech allows people like Trump and his supporters to speak freely, it must be sharply curtailed. This way, her liberal agenda can be protected from any dissent or challenge that is allowed under the evil 1st Amendment (which, after all, was written by slave owners!).

“This concern spans the ideological spectrum. Along with disinformation campaigns, there is the separate problem of “troll armies” — a flood of commenters, often propelled by bots — that “aim to discredit or to destroy the reputation of disfavored speakers and to discourage them from speaking again,” Jack Goldsmith, a conservative law professor at Harvard, writes in an essay in “The Perilous Public Square,” a book edited by David E. Pozen that was published this year,” she wrote.

Goldsmith, who Bazelon inaccurately describes as a conservative, is actually a prominent anti-Trump writer. He even wrote a book, “After Trump,” calling for wholesale changes to the U.S. political system in order to make sure nobody like Trump can ever get elected again.

Bazelon argues that “critical voices” need to be protected from free speech in order to save free speech, or something.

She wrote: “Either way, it’s often grimly effective at muting critical voices. And yet as Tim Wu, a progressive law professor at Columbia, points out in the same book, the ‘use of speech as a tool to suppress speech is, by its nature, something very challenging for the First Amendment to deal with.'”

“As we hurtle toward the November election with a president who has trapped the country in a web of lies, with the sole purpose, it seems, of remaining in office, it’s time to ask whether the American way of protecting free speech is actually keeping us free,” Bazelon wrote in her concluding paragraph.

She was pilloried in the reply section to her drivel on Twitter, in which she was correctly identified as a monster:

https://twitter.com/Gitabushi/status/1316584679831728128

It’s worth nothing that this is the type of speech that Bazelon wants to have censored. This “empowered woman” cannot handle being subject to scrutiny from outside of her privileged echo chamber. Bazelon is another shining example of why ratifying the 19th Amendment may not have been such a great idea.