Governor Tim Walz (Democrat, Minnesota) was a social studies teacher, but he would have failed the basic constitutional law exam, particularly the section on the First Amendment to the Constitution.
“There is no guarantee of free speech when it comes to misinformation or hate speech, especially as it relates to our democracy,” Walz said on MSNBC in December 2022, which would be news to the Supreme Court, which as recently as 2017 unanimously ruled that “speech that is degrading based on race, ethnicity, sex, religion, age, disability, or other similar grounds” is still protected by the First Amendment.
Walz’s impulse to censor speech he doesn’t like is certainly shared by his running mate, Kamala Harris, who was already pushing for Twitter and Facebook to censor then-President Donald Trump before the Capitol riots on Jan. 6. On Oct. 19, 2019, Harris told Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in Iowa, “This isn’t about free speech. … It’s about holding American business and these big tech companies accountable for what they enable.”
Harris’ anti-free speech stance was so extreme that even Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) protested, saying she only wanted to kick Trump out of the White House, not off social media. But Politburo Secretary Kamala did not back down. “I call on everyone to join me,” she said.
By 2019, Harris already had a long history of abusing government power to silence voices she didn’t like. As California attorney general, Harris ordered select conservative nonprofits to turn over confidential IRS documents revealing the identities of their donors. She claimed she needed the information to combat fraud in the nonprofit sector, but could not cite any case in which the data collection would have helped an actual fraud investigation.
In a pure “coincidence,” Harris’ office then released the private data online, an incident she described as pure coincidence. The Supreme Court ruled against Harris, finding that her efforts to intimidate conservative voices by abusing IRS power violated the First Amendment.
Harris’s fight against the First Amendment does not end there. As a senator, she attacked judicial candidates simply because of their membership in the Catholic brotherhood of the Knights of Columbus. “Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed women’s right to self-determination when you joined the organization?” Harris asked Judge Brian Buescher. Her questioning clearly implied that mere membership in a charitable organization with conservative views disqualifies a person from public service.
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When Democrats like Walz and Harris use the word “misinformation,” they actually mean any information that Democrats don’t like. When the Global Disinformation Index created a list of conservative websites that advertisers should avoid because they spread “misinformation,” this very publication was on that list. Our crime? Accurately reporting on an American Family Survey poll that found conservative women are more satisfied with their family life than liberal women. That’s all. The Global Disinformation Index labeled that claim “misogynistic misinformation.”
If elected, a Harris-Waltz administration would declare total war on the First Amendment under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” It would intimidate social media platforms under threat of antitrust enforcement to censor any information that is inconvenient to Democrats. It would weaponize the Justice Department to crack down not just on pro-lifers, but on any organization like the Knights of Columbus that believes abortion is murder. And finally, a Harris-Waltz administration would use and abuse the full power of the IRS to harass conservative organizations and intimidate conservative people.