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rOne issue above all should motivate your vote this election season: preserving free speech. 

It’s not even close in my book. Sure, economic policy is what will likely win Trump the election, and voters are right to be angry about the Biden/Harris policies that are harming us all. Immigration is obviously important. Fighting gender ideology is equivalent to fighting for our children. And, of course, abortion policy is the moral issue of our time. 

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But freedom of speech is the tentpole freedom. Without being able to make our opinions heard we will lose on every other issue. 

Democrats–in fact, the entire transnational elite–are at war with what Jonathan Turley calls ‘the indispensable right.”

Almost nobody on the left isn’t hell-bent on taking away our free speech rights. They aren’t even interested in defending free speech except in the most abstract and dismissive terms. “Sure, free speech is important, but ‘hate speech’ and ‘misinformation’ must be suppressed.”

Clinton wants to put people in jail for saying things she disagrees with, which is now a common sentiment among Western elites. In the UK, they are actually doing it, so this is no idle threat. 

Clinton is one of the architects of Europe’s war against free speech, using the EU’s lack of a First Amendment as a tool to suppress free speech not only in Europe but in the US through the Digital Services Act. 

We have been discussing how Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton called on foreign countries to pass censorship laws to prevent Elon Musk from restoring free speech protections on Twitter. The EU has responded aggressively to warn Musk not to allow greater free speech or face crippling fines and even potential criminal enforcement. After years of using censorship-by-surrogates in social media companies, Democratic leaders seem to have rediscovered good old-fashioned state censorship.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) declared Musk’s pledge to restore free speech values on social media as threatening Democracy itself. She has promised that “there are going to be rules” to block such changes. She is not alone. Former President Obama has declared “regulation has to be part of the answer” to disinformation.

For her part, Hillary Clinton is looking to Europe to fill the vacuum and called upon her European counterparts to pass a massive censorship law to “bolster global democracy before it’s too late.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern recently repeated this call for global censorship at the United Nations to the applause of diplomats and media alike.

EU censors have assured Democratic leaders that they will not allow free speech to break out on Twitter regardless of the wishes of its owner and customers.

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Advocates of liberal values and Western norms scored a modest victory after E.U. Commissioner Thierry Breton abruptly resigned as the speech czar in Europe. Apparently, threatening Elon Musk for having the chutzpah to talk to a Republican candidate on Twitter/X riled up some free speech advocates enough to make life uncomfortable for him. 

Good. Not nearly enough, but good nonetheless. 

But, as you can see from the Clinton MSNBC clip, the war for free speech is not going well. Even with the First Amendment protections here in the US, Democrats are carving out exceptions that could render it moot. 

Both Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have come out for speech restrictions, creating exceptions to the First Amendment, and this is now a common position on the left. My own Attorney General and leading candidate for US Attorney General, Keith Ellison, THANKED Brazil for banning Twitter/X and seizing its assets. 

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We can’t fight for any of our important policy points if we can’t even say what we think, and that is the right that is most under threat. As bad as inflation is to our pocketbooks, good policies can restore prosperity in the future. 

But if we lose the right to free speech we have lost everything.