Elon Musk haters pretend to celebrate a whole week against censorship

Censorship is bad, for about seven days a year… and only if you try to restrict books the left loves. Welcome to Banned Book Week (Sept. 22-28), when politicians, journalists and academics pretend to support free speech, while simultaneously trying to restrict what billions of people say on the internet. 

They should just call it Hypocrisy Week. It would be more accurate and fit in headlines a bit easier. 

BBW supporters whine that parents oppose leftist indoctrination in schools. Then they turn around and attack billionaire Elon Musk because he runs a social media site that supports free speech. 

Elon Musk is seen during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus address to a joint meeting of Congress in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol on July 24, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Leftists don’t stop there. Censorship is on the ballot just like everything else in our presidential campaign. The left and their legacy media allies want to use the government to attack any online free speech that isn’t theirs. They hate Musk. With. A. Passion. Because he won’t go along and he recently endorsed former President Trump.

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Leftists have openly discussed censorship in ways that would make a third-world dictatorship stand up and cheer. Twice-failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was the latest to declare war on speech. Clinton raised the idea on MSNBC about those who promote "propaganda" and "whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged."

She isn’t alone on the left with a disregard for free speech. Democrat vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has pretended, "There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy." 

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"Hate speech" has always been a catch-all term for the left that includes everything they hate. It lets the far left criminalize anything they don’t like. So, the next time Walz throws his arms wide open in game show cosplay, someone shove a copy of the Constitution in his hand. 

His potential boss, Vice President Kamala Harris, along with President Biden, pushed hard to control speech on COVID-19. Facebook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a tell-some letter to the Senate where he admitted the administration "repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree."

Zuckerberg is trying to walk a fine line this election. He knows conservatives hate him because Facebook censors them, but he’s not afraid of the right. Hill Republicans never retaliate against Big Tech. The only ones he has to fear are Harriz-Walz. If they win, Facebook, Twitter and the others would face pressure to censor again. 

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Remember, Harris wanted Trump removed from Twitter in 2019. She criticized how some social media sites control speech and others do less of it. And that was before Musk bought Twitter. "They are speaking to millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation. And that has to stop," she said. 

That’s a big part of why Musk turned political. He warns that Democrats want to silence people. "Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and the Democratic Party (Kamala is just a puppet) wants to destroy it."

And journalists still pretend she supports the First Amendment because of marketing. Harris-Walz are campaigning under the line about how, "We choose freedom." Of course, the press wouldn’t care if they had chosen the George Orwell line from "1984" saying, "'War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." They could celebrate it every September during Hypocrisy Week.

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As Musk tweeted, "Censorship everywhere in America." And not just in America. The left doesn’t operate alone. Politicians have pushed for Orwellian speech controls in other countries, too. The French government arrested Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov. The Irish just canceled part of a proposed hate speech bill because Musk vowed to sue about it. And the rest of the EU keeps talking about targeting Musk, as well.

Then there’s Brazil, where Musk has fought open warfare trying to stop government control of his site. But that fight appears over for now. According to The Washington Post, "Elon Musk blinks first, bowing to pressure in Brazil to reopen X." He reportedly is doing as the Brazilian judge demanded and blocking content. A social media company is not more powerful than a nation.

That places U.S. social media sites in a dangerous position of censorship here and abroad. Before we know it, the whole online world could be run by the left just like Banned Books Week. 

Before you say that’s not so bad, understand it’s just propaganda pretending to support "the freedom to seek and to express ideas." As long as those ideas promote the far left, especially to young children. The operation’s website lists "The Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2023." Those include the wildly controversial "Gender Queer," "This Book Is Gay" and eight others, all of which have been challenged by parents as "sexually explicit." 

That’s the kind of speech the left protects. Not conservative ideas. Apply that strategy to the internet and the only speech that would be protected would come from the left. Just like what happened before Elon Musk took over Twitter. 

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Dan Gainor is a freelance opinion editor for Fox News Digital.