Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) may have been a social studies teacher, but he would have failed Constitutional Law 101, especially the part about the First Amendment.
“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy,” Walz said on MSNBC in December 2022, which would be news to the Supreme Court, which unanimously held as recently as 2017 that “speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground” is still protected by the First Amendment.
Walz’s impulse to censor speech he does not like is most definitely shared by his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, who pushed for Twitter and Facebook to censor then-President Donald Trump even before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. In Iowa, on Oct. 19, 2019, Harris told Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, “This is not a matter of free speech. … This is a matter of holding corporate America and these Big Tech companies responsible and accountable for what they are facilitating.”
Harris’s anti-free speech position was so extreme that even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pushed back, saying she wanted to kick Trump only out of the White House, not off social media. But politburo secretariat officer Kamala did not back down. “I’m calling on everyone to join me,” she said.
By 2019, Harris already had a well-established history of using government power to silence voices she does not like. As attorney general of California, Harris demanded that select conservative nonprofit organizations turn over sensitive IRS documents that revealed the identities of their donors. She claimed she needed the information to combat fraud in the nonprofit sector, but she failed to identify one case in which the collection of data assisted an actual fraud investigation.
In a complete “coincidence,” Harris’s office then posted the private data online, an incident that she claimed was purely accidental. The Supreme Court ruled against Harris, holding that her efforts to intimidate conservative voices by abusing IRS power violated the First Amendment.
Harris’s war on the First Amendment does not end there. As a senator, she attacked judicial nominees for mere membership in the Catholic fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus. “Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?” Harris grilled Judge Brian Buescher. The implication of her line of questioning clearly was that merely being a member of a charitable organization that has conservative views disqualified one from public service.
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When Democrats such as Walz and Harris use the word “misinformation,” what they really mean is any information that Democrats don’t like. When the Global Disinformation Index made up a list of conservative websites that advertisers should avoid because they spread “misinformation,” included on that list was this very publication. Our crime? Accurately reporting on an American Family Survey poll that found conservative women were happier with their family life than liberal women. That’s it. The Global Disinformation Index labeled that claim “misogynistic disinformation.”
If elected, a Harris-Walz administration would declare all-out war on the First Amendment under the guise of fighting “misinformation.” It would browbeat social media platforms with the threat of antitrust enforcement to censor any information that was inconvenient for Democrats. It would weaponize the Department of Justice to go after not just pro-life demonstrators but any organization, such as the Knights of Columbus, that believes abortion is murder. And finally, a Harris-Walz administration would use and abuse the full power of the IRS to harass conservative organizations and bully conservative people.