Despite all the soothing talk from the Harris campaign about the country’s future if she takes the White House, sensible people understand that we would endure further expansion of the federal leviathan and concomitant restriction of liberty in many aspects of our lives. None of those is more important than freedom of speech. “Progressives” like Harris don’t think speech should be free. They believe it needs to be controlled by the state so that people don’t get any wrong ideas in their heads, such as that government does more harm than good.

Writing on Liberty Unyielding, Hans Bader surveys the prospects for free speech under a Harris administration. The picture is ugly.

Bader writes,

Kamala Harris will make campus censorship worse, through her judicial appointments as president. Progressive judges appointed by Joe Biden have upheld punishment and investigation of moderate, conservative, and libertarian faculty and students. Harris is politically more extreme than Joe Biden, supports restrictions on hate speech, has attacked the free-speech rights of conservative non-profits, and wants to restrict speech that she and other progressives view as inaccurate. In the U.S. Senate, nobody was to the left of Kamala Harris, according to Newsweek — not even Bernie Sanders. Kamala Harris is also hostile to religious freedom.

Oh, but can’t we rely on the judiciary to stop the leftist attack on our constitutional liberties? No, because, Bader points out, Harris, like Obama and Biden, will only appoint judges who share the “progressive” view that the First Amendment is antiquated and must be reinterpreted in view of current realities. There are lots of eager jurists who absorbed that idea in law school who want to be appointed to the bench so they can do their part to speed along Obama’s “transformation” of the United States.

Contrary to what VP nominee Tim Walz says, the First Amendment contains no “hate speech” exception, but to leftist judges, that doesn’t matter. Harris and her controllers are intent on using federal power to squelch as much speech as they possibly can if it undercuts Democratic narratives about race, the environment, the need for government economic controls (can you imagine federal censors insisting that a National Review article attacking, for example, a Harris law against “price-gouging” be taken down as “misinformation”? I can), and so forth.

Freedom is dying the death of a thousand cuts, and Kamala Harris has a large set of knives at the ready.