In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.”

Does it?

Every two-bit authoritarian in history has justified censoring its citizens as a way of protecting them from the menace of disinformation.

But social media sites, contra the reliably illiberal Harris, aren’t “directly speaking” to anyone. Millions of individuals are interacting and speaking to millions of other individuals. Really, that’s what grinds the modern Left’s gears: unsupervised conversations.

Take the Brazilian Supreme Court panel that unanimously upheld the decision by one of its justices to shut down Elon Musk’s X over alleged “misinformation” fears.

We must assume that the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, who once promised to ban guns via an executive order, agrees with Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s decision to shut down a social media platform for refusing to bend to the state’s demands of censorship.

The Associated Press reports that the Brazilian high court’s decision “undermines the effort by Musk and his supporters to cast Justice Alexandre de Moraes as an authoritarian renegade who is intent on censoring political speech in Brazil.”

Really? Because it seems to me that the state shuttering one of the popular social media sites unmistakably qualifies as a ban on political speech, whether one person is responsible or an entire government.

And make no mistake, it is politically motivated. “Just because the guy has a lot of money doesn’t mean he can disrespect this [country],” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva argued. Well, the South American nation’s constitution, like ours, apparently protects free expression — making no distinction between the poor and rich: “Any and all censorship of a political, ideological, and artistic nature is prohibited.” You can tell Brazil is super serious about the matter because the bullet point appears in Chapter V, Article 220, or page 148 in my translated copy.

Let’s concede, however, that de Moraes isn’t any kind of renegade, merely a conventional Brazilian autocrat. In the same way, Musk isn’t merely another billionaire but a tech CEO who generally views free expression as a neutral principle.

I suppose the best evidence for this claim is the fact that even as Brazil bans Musk’s site, he allows the far-left Lula to have an account on X with 9 million followers.

In Europe, free expression is also ostensibly protected by the constitution. Well, the right is contingent on “national security,” “territorial disorder,” “crime,” “health,” and other highly malleable issues that ultimately allow police officers in the United Kingdom and Germany to show up at your door and throw you in prison for offensive posts.

As the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once pointed out, “every Banana Republic has a Bill of Rights.” The question is: How close are we to being one?

Uncomfortably close is the answer.

Because our Supreme Court still occasionally adheres to constitutional restrictions on state power, the Left has engaged in soft fascistic — and I don’t use that word frivolously — methods of manipulating speech codes.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that senior Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor” COVID-19 content, including “humor and satire,” during the pandemic. Zuckerberg vowed that would never let his company be pushed around again. I’m sorry if we don’t take him at his word.

Tech companies enjoy unencumbered free association rights and are free to keep or kick off anyone they desire from their platform, as they should. Before Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now known as X, contemporary left-wingers celebrated the independence of social media platforms. “If you don’t like it, build your own Twitter,” they would say.

OK. But when corporations, who often spend tens of millions each year in Washington rent-seeking and lobbying for favorable regulations, take marching orders from state officials and giant federal bureaucracies on the contours of permissible speech, we have a big problem.

If presidential candidates truly cared about “democracy,” they’d be advocating anti-cronyism laws and forbidding government officials from interfering with or pressuring private entities on speech.

These days, however, as more CEOs refuse to go along with political censorship, Democrats simply threaten them. “For too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability,” noted Russia collusion swindler Hillary Clinton wrote while pushing for a European-style censorship regime a few years ago.

“Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” Robert Reich, former labor secretary and serial misinformationist, wrote last week. The precedent for it, he argued, was the recent arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France.

Many on the Left rationalize this newfound zeal for censorship by cynically contending that free speech is being “weaponized” against “democracy.”

This formulation must seem Orwellian to the average person. Rest assured, though, the New York Times and other major outlets are constantly running think pieces lamenting the perils of unregulated expression and explaining why we need to “reimagine” free speech. The problem, as they frame it, is that a lack of gatekeeping has allowed foreign disinformation, extremism, and hate speech, often a euphemism describing long-held social conservative beliefs, to corrode our institutions.

Perhaps the establishment media would have a more convincing case for curating speech if they weren’t incessantly spreading their own misinformation. Most big-brand media have abandoned a commitment to upholding the ideals of open discourse. Instead, they’ve taken on the role of hall monitors and censors, as virtually all of them did when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden story before the 2020 presidential election.

They did that for Democrats, not your safety or for the good of the republic.

In any event, most of the modern Left’s censorship plans would likely be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But who will protect unpopular speech once the high court is decimated?

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), for instance, contends that Harris supports packing the Supreme Court — as do numerous high-profile Democrats. The point of judicial “reform” is not merely to decimate the slim and politically inconvenient originalist majority by stacking the court with “living constitution” leftists, but to transform the entire court into a partisan institution that bends to the vagaries, emotional appeals, and partisanship of the day. In other words, the pressures the court is supposed to be a bulwark against.

Can it happen? Of course it can.

There’s been an erosion of deference to free expression among voters. Not too long ago, a national consensus existed that government officials shouldn’t have any role in dictating appropriate speech or lecturing us on what we can or can’t say. In fact, they had a duty not to.

Not so much today.

Today, the Democratic Party’s vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, will argue that there was “no guarantee” for free speech when it came to “misinformation” or “hate speech,” “especially around our democracy.” This wholly concocted standard for protection is increasingly popular.

As it stands, free speech “around our democracy” is still protected. This is why Walz is free to mislead us about his military service or the conception of his children without facing legal jeopardy.

But an array of polls show an alarming decline in a belief in free speech, especially among younger voters. In one recent Foundation for Individual Rights in Education poll, 61% of Democrats and 52% of Republicans at least partially agreed that the First Amendment goes too far in protecting expression.

In another FIRE poll of college students, only a small percentage believed that someone who argued that transgenderism was a mental disorder or that “Black Lives Matter” was a hate group should be allowed to speak. At the same time, a large majority of them believed that a speaker who attacked religious freedom or the Second Amendment was fine.

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Of course, as “hate speech” has become meaningless, “misinformation” is often a word for perfectly reasonable inquiry into unresolved or contentious issues. Even if it wasn’t, the state is not the final adjudicator of the veracity of speech. We have a propensity to defend expression on legitimacy grounds, arguing that the state is often wrong or unequipped to dictate speech, which is a completely legitimate point. It is also true that even the most preposterous conspiracies and fabrications are protected speech. We shouldn’t forget it.

Because many people no longer view free expression as a neutral, liberal virtue worth defending if it undermines their political goals. Foremost among them, apparently, is the Democratic presidential ticket.