Democrat vice presidential hopeful and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz believes speech the government dislikes is not protected by the First Amendment.
Walz joined MSNBC’s “The Reid Out” in 2023 and was asked how he would “ensure” there would be “penalties” for spreading so-called “disinformation” such as incorrect polling locations or times.
“Yeah, years ago it was the little things — telling people to vote the day after the election — and, you know, we kind of brushed them off. Now we know it’s intimidation at the ballot box. It’s undermining the idea that mail-in ballots aren’t legal. I think we need to push back on this,” Walz said in the clip, which recently recirculated on social media.
“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy,” Walz continued. “Tell the truth where the voting places are, who can vote, who is able to be there. And watching some states continue to weaken the protections around the ballot I think is what is inspiring us to lean into this.”
Kings of Misinformation
The irony is that the biggest purveyors of election lies are Democrats. They are the ones who called Georgia’s election integrity law, which led to historic early voter turnout, “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” They are the historic “election deniers,” the ones who pretend black Americans don’t know how to acquire IDs, and the ones who claim voter roll maintenance is “disenfranchisement,” among many other false claims.
But for Democrats, “misinformation” means any speech that threatens their political goals. And they don’t let it go unpunished.
That’s why Democrats and their friends in Big Tech and the deep state made sure the Hunter Biden laptop was censored during the height of the 2020 presidential election. Fifty-one former “intelligence” officials signed onto a letter characterizing the laptop and its contents as Russian propaganda. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who signed onto the infamous letter, later told New York Magazine that “it looked like disinformation.”
Big tech and corporate media took their cue and began throttling the reach of the story and downplaying the contents of the laptop, with NPR’s Managing Editor Terence Samuels saying the outlet wouldn’t “waste” readers’ time on the story.
The New York Post and prominent figures were punished for free speech — which also happened to be true speech. Their Twitter accounts were locked without explanation for sharing a story that partisan hacks falsely labeled as “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Notably, federal authorities have now used the very same laptop as evidence against Hunter Biden in a federal gun case.
But their tactics worked.
A report from the Media Research Center later found that roughly 1 in 6 Joe Biden supporters would not have voted for him had they known about the laptop.
Censorship-Industrial Complex
Walz said the quiet part out loud, just reminding anyone who’s listening about the Democrats’ censorship-industrial complex that seeks to suppress information that threatens their power.
Look no further than government-funded NewsGuard, which portrays anti-establishment media such as The Federalist as unreliable even though we’ve been right on all the major news stories that corporate media have botched. And how about the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or the Biden administration generally, which have both colluded with Big Tech to censor speech they pretend is “disinformation”?
Russia hoaxer Adam Schiff once demanded that WhatsApp Channels censor so-called “election misinformation” ahead of the election because if it didn’t, “democratic processes in the United States and across the globe” could be threatened.
The chairman of the sham Jan. 6 committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, said Meta should create rules against disfavored election speech “to protect democratic institutions, especially the right to vote and have confidence in election results,” according to Politico. Because, as I previously wrote, “nothing screams ‘confidence in election results’ like censoring speech about them.”
It’s simple. Democrats and their media cronies can spew lies all day, every day, about elections, viruses, abortion, immigration, the economy, Republicans — you name it. But when you say something true that threatens to loosen their grip on total power, protections for speech are over.