Another constraint on Big Brother’s grip
This week, I’d like to look at a poll that indicates another constraint on Big Brother’s control. A Rasmussen poll recently found that 63% of Americans want the FBI’s social media activities investigated. Only 22% of those polled opposed such an investigation.
What’s most interesting to me is that “Majorities of every political category – 52% of Democrats, 75% of Republicans and 63% of unaffiliated voters – believe Congress should investigate whether the FBI was involved in censoring information on social media sites.”
In many ways, the censoring of social media sites benefitted Democrats – most particularly by deep-sixing the Hunter Biden Laptop story prior to the 2020 election. The fact that a majority of Democrats want an investigation of the FBI’s censoring of social media indicates there is a red line here that transcends partisan politics.
I think many Americans have a strong value that police and law enforcement should be scrupulously non-partisan – in particular, that the power of the state’s legal apparatus should never be used to limit free speech – at least, not in peace time.
I can remember seeing countless media stories growing up about how the Stazi or the KGB controlled what appeared in the media in Communist countries. Such interference in press freedom was always presented as one of the great moral failings of Communism. I have to think most Americans have internalized the contrary principle: that in America, the State, and law enforcement in particular, must never interfere with freedom of the press. To do otherwise would be un-American.
There have also been a surprising number of FBI whistleblowers on this issue – which to me says that many in law enforcement also see this as a sacrosanct principle.
Granted, the FBI, the CDC and Democrat House Leader Adam Schiff got Twitter to do their bidding for a long time before Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter opened up that organization to external scrutiny. But now that the extent of that censorship has been revealed, I suspect there will be a reckoning.
With luck, any investigation will also look at FBI and Government interference in Youtube, Facebook and the various search engines.
Social media is not without value. When not under Big Brother’s thumb, it gives us a sense of what others are thinking, and introduces us to other points of view. It can be a useful forum for debate.
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