Warren would like to be the arbiter of truth

A recent proposal by the senator would decimate the First Amendment

Elizabeth Warren has proposed repealing the First Amendment. Per CNBC: “Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren ... released a plan to fight disinformation to hold tech companies accountable for their actions in light of the 2016 election.”

That’s one way of putting it, certainly. Another would be: Having bought into the conspiracy theory that the 2016 election was meaningfully affected by people arguing stupidly online Ms. Warren has released a plan for the federal government to regulate the press, the publishing industry and the internet.

Why? To save democracy, naturally:

“Warren proposed to combat disinformation by holding big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google responsible for spreading misinformation designed to suppress voters from turning out.

“‘I will push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote,’ Ms. Warren said in a press release.”

It is difficult to know where to start here. No such “democracy” exemption exists within the First Amendment, and no such exemption should exist within the First Amendment.

Ironically enough, Ms. Warren’s proposal would represent a boon to precisely the sort of corruption and entrenchment of power that she insists she wishes to fight. In the vast majority of cases, it would be wholly impossible for the government to determine what sort of speech served to “undermine the basic right to vote” or to “to polarize and disenfranchise particular groups” or to “disempower voters,” such that any concerted attempt to do so would necessarily be driven by partisan interest and little else besides.

In effect, Ms. Warren is seeking the power to decide what is true and what is not — and what may be disseminated and what may not — and to apply this power to the elections in which she herself takes part. That she is chasing this authority while accusing the incumbent president of seeking to use his office for personal political gain (which he did) is startling.