NO MORE SPEECH POLICE
WE’RE finally getting to a point where Americans have had enough of woke speech policing and censorship. Someone just needs to tell the Biden administration.
Last week, Netflix issued a long memo detailing the company culture it hopes to foster: The streaming service lays out that it produces a variety of content and won’t allow its employees to cut programming.
Netflix lets “viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.”
And if the employee doesn’t like it, there’s the door. “Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.” Netflix employees famously protested Dave Chappelle’s stand-up comedy special last year.
The Netflix memo made news because it’s now seen as bold to stand up for free speech and open discourse. It seems so novel, letting viewers, and not 23-year-old gender-studies majors in their first job, pick what to watch.
The “Words are violence” crowd had been winning for so long that it seemed inevitable their conformist demands would continue to be met.
Over the weekend, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was in Houston and posted a picture of herself reading “To Kill a Mockingbird,” adding, “In Texas, reading any damn book I choose. No banning of books or thought. Ever.”
The irony is that it’s Lightfoot’s own progressives in places like Seattle and Burbank, not righties in Texas, who want to ban Harper Lee’s classic for racial slurs and a “white savior” character.
But the fact that someone as ultra-left as Lightfoot finally realizes that we shouldn’t be shutting down “thought” is a step forward for our culture.
Coupled with Elon Musk’s potential purchase of Twitter with his stated goals to allow free and open speech, what we’re seeing is a backlash to the strict language compliance the left has demanded from us all.
Yet the Biden administration continues to plow on with its Disinformation Governance Board. Nicknamed “Ministry of Truth,” from George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” the DGB is folded under the Department of Homeland Security. Wrongthink is a threat to our national security, you see.
Nina Jankowicz, President Biden’s pick to run the ministry, is particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories, having herself fallen for several.
As Benjamin Weingarten described in The Post last week, she’s “an unrepentant Russiagate collusion-monger who praised the former British spy behind the discredited Steele dossier. Jankowicz also amplified the ultimate in election-interfering disinformation — that the New York Post’s censoredbut-true Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.”
She also suggested that verified users of Twitter should be able to “edit” other people’s tweets for “context.” Even more alarming, Jankowicz thinks that some people shouldn’t be “verified” on Twitter because they’re “untrustworthy.” And who decides who is “untrustworthy”? Take one guess. “Unpersoning” was a concept in Orwell’s “1984” too.
It is creepy and dangerous to have someone with censorious ideas like these in charge of anything, much less an agency purporting to battle “disinformation.” Jankowicz seems ready to label as misinformation anything she doesn’t like.
Free speech has long been one of America’s strengths. We live freely and say what we want. Over the last few years, we’ve let ourselves be limited in what we say in the name of some vague “safety” introduced by leftist activists who gain politically when we shut up. Free speech is good, and we need more of it not less.
About Musk taking over Twitter, Jankowicz said, “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms.”
Make speech free again. Let’s make Jankowicz shudder.