National Public Radio, a government-funded outlet, is now shilling against free speech.

According to Matt Taibbi, who is himself on the left, via Substack:

The guests for NPR's just-released On The Media episode about the dangers of free speech included Andrew Marantz, author of an article called, "Free Speech is Killing Us"; P.E. Moskowitz, author of "The Case Against Free Speech"; Susan Benesch, director of the "Dangerous Speech Project"; and Berkeley professor John Powell, whose contribution was to rip John Stuart Mill's defense of free speech in On Liberty as "wrong."

That's about right for NPR, which for years now has regularly congratulated itself for being a beacon of diversity while expunging every conceivable alternative point of view.

The pampered princelings of the outlet featured no voices in defense of the First Amendment.

It's as if the First Amendment, which NPR's patron purportedly represents and defends, has now become an outdated, vexatious nuisance for the current ruling class.  Free speech is now a hoary notion from dead people they'd like to see stuffed down the memory hole.

Taibbi notes:

The show was a compendium of every neo-authoritarian argument for speech control one finds on Twitter, beginning with the blanket labeling of censorship critics as "speech absolutists" (most are not) and continuing with shameless revisions of the history of episodes like the ACLU's mid-seventies defense of Nazi marchers at Skokie, Illinois.

And here's a detail showing how sleazy they are:

Because, they say, we now know that people can be harmed by something other than physical violence, Mill (whose thoughts NPR overlaid with harpsichord music, so we could be reminded how antiquated they are) was wrong, and we have to recalibrate our understanding of speech rights accordingly.'

Eeew.  What a low blow, abusing harpsichord music like that.

Taibbi points out that essentially, these people at NPR badmouthing free speech are far from the modernists they claim to be with a hot, hip new idea.  As NPR plays its harpsichord music as its "subtle" means of belittling Mill as outdated, it's actually they who are the jurassics, not Mill:

Mill ironically pointed out that "princes, or others who are accustomed to unlimited deference, usually feel this complete confidence in their own opinions on nearly all subjects." Sound familiar? 

So now they want to censor and regulate free speech on the logic that some people get their feelings hurt, elevating the whole idea to a matter of saving mental health.

It's garbage, of course.  It's actually not very different from the leftist bid to use physical health as a means of extending government control over vaccine and mask skeptics, as well as alternative treatment advocates...because COVID.

And the problem magnifies itself as leftists seek to use the levers of Big Tech to engage in the censorship they can't otherwise do based on the First Amendment roadblock. 

Number one, it capriciously censored and shut down the man they hated more than anyone out there: President Trump.  They let the Taliban and the violence-laced rhetoric of Iran's mullahs flourish on social media, but they shut down the president of the United States.  These Big Tech companies did it in unison, all at the same time, all claiming the same thing, which points to cartel activity badly in need of an anti-trust investigation as well as likely Deep State government collusion.  Big Tech is useful, as it can call itself a private enterprise, but we already know that the relationship between Big Tech and the U.S. government Deep State is deep and intertwined.

In fact, that relationship is nothing short of intimate.

Big Tech does much of the CIA's surveillance via subcontract, for one.  It works hand in hand with the surveillance state, and the two are often the same thing.

There's also a revolving door of big-dollar employment for board seats and other do-nothing jobs (read: payoffs) for top Democrat operatives from the Obama, Clinton, and Biden administrations and Big Tech companies.  Kamala Harris and her relatives are one example, and there are many others.

We also know that Big Tech companies are working with impunity to suborn our laws.  Just take a look at Facebook with its loud advocacy for illegal immigration and amnesty and its bona fide enabling of human smugglers to advertise their wares on Facebook.

We know that at least in California, Big Tech is actually directed to censor political opponents by the political operatives in power from the State of California.  That government doesn't even try to hide it — Big Tech is its enforcement arm for shutting down anyone who could possibly challenge its power.

This kind of garbage serves as the backdrop for NPR's naked call to end free speech.  Is there a Mighty Integral (to use Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff term) commanding this call to end free speech altogether?  It's possible.  But it's also possible that there's an undeclared oligarchy out there that's acting in tandem to defend its ill-gotten, but perfectly real privileges.

The NPR call to end free speech actually amounts to an escalation (downward, of course) from the runaway train that is leftism.  The left did de facto censorship through its Big Tech proxies, and sure enough, now it's getting naked about its calls to end free speech entirely.

Leftists seem to be getting louder now, too, seeking to shut down conservative and dissenting liberal voices (such as that of Taibbi, most likely) as Joe Biden's presidency falls into a shambles.  Apparently, they know they're on a runaway train that's about to crash with voters in 2022 and are seeking to save themselves by shutting down opposition voices as fast and hard as they can.  We can already see that in the variety of tech innovations they are using: they shut down (and were forced to reopen) the credit cards of Gen. Michael Flynn, for one.  They shut down (and were forced to reopen) the social media accounts of Gold Star mother Shana Chappell.  They're getting mean in all kinds of ways and now don't seem to care who knows it.  They'll get even more aggressive before November 2022, given the pattern we see now.

Conservatives are in for some hard times as Big Tech runs rampant with far-left Castro- and Mao-admiring Democrats currently at the top of the princeling elite's hierarchy and crazed far-left lunatics such as Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez steer the Democrat ship.

If the next GOP Congress can survive the miasma of vote fraud in the coming election, Item A must be to shut this incestuous relationship between Big Government and Big Tech down immediately before they can destroy even our most elemental First Amendment constitutional right in the open and usher in a dark age of Bourbon-style "learned nothing and forgot nothing" stagnation and death for the entire American idea.

Image: Library of Congress via Picryl, public domain.

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