05/05/2022 / By JD Heyes
You would think that someone who literally makes his or her living thanks to the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and freedom of the press would defend it to the hilt, but you’d be wrong.
Not all journalists look at the First Amendment the same way. In fact, an alarmingly high number of them look at it as a coveted political privilege available only to those who agree with them.
Still others see advocates for free speech in a racial light because they are left-wing gaslighters whose No. 1 priority in all instances is the destruction of our society and culture.
Take Charlotte Alter, a national correspondent and white woman who seeks favor from the left by being an apologist and self-loather presuming to speak for all other white Americans.
In a column attacking billionaire Elon Musk’s attempt to purchase Twitter and his vow to return it to a “free speech platform” where all views (not violence, ‘views’) are welcome, Alter goes after the South African native over the color of his skin.
“Why does Musk care so much about this? Why would a guy who has pushed the boundaries of electric-vehicle manufacturing and plumbed the limits of commercial space flight care about who can say what on Twitter?” she wrote recently.
As noted by constitutional law expert and professor Jonathan Turley:
The answer, not surprisingly, is about race and privilege. Alter cites Jason Goldman, who was an early figure shaping the Twitter censorship policies before he joined the Obama administration. Goldman declared, “free speech has become an obsession of the mostly white, male members of the tech elite” who “would rather go back to the way things were.”
Alter also cites professor of communication at Stanford University Fred Turner who explains that free speech is just “a dominant obsession with the most elite… [and] seems to be much more of an obsession among men.”
Mind you, ‘the way things were’ haven’t been ‘the way things were’ for decades. While there are pockets of racism throughout our country — there always will be in a multiracial, multi-ethnic society — the widespread overt racism of the mid-1900s, with the segregated water fountains, schools, public transportation and housing, have long vanished. So this modern-day attempt by the loony left to claim that ‘nothing much has changed’ or that things only recently got better is a flat-out lie.
Worse, it’s destructive for our country. The left has always championed multi-ethnicity and a multi-racial society, but then they use it to racially gaslight the country at every opportunity. Barack Obama was an expert at it, and the left continues in his mold to this day, as Alter proves.
Worse, these inane, perpetually grouchy, lecturing leftists are also not fans of our Constitution. They have no problems with the First Amendment until a guy like Musk wants to buy a platform that has been taken over by the left and used as a mechanism to censor and ban right-leaning views and speech.
“In arguing in favor of censorship, Alter engages in a heavy use of historical revisionism, claiming that ‘free speech’ in the 21st century means something very different than it did in the 18th, when the Founders enshrined it in the Constitution,” Turley writes.
“The right to say what you want without being imprisoned is not the same as the right to broadcast disinformation to millions of people on a corporate platform. This nuance seems to be lost on some techno-wizards who see any restriction as the enemy of innovation,” he adds.
Later, Turley skewers Alter for claiming that Musk doesn’t have the proper ‘education’ to decide who should and should not be able to speak freely.
“Tech titans often have a different understanding of speech than the rest of the world because most trained as engineers, not as writers or readers, and a lack of a humanities education might make them less attuned to the social and political nuances of speech,” Alter lectured.
In fact, she has a degree in English and literature; Musk has degrees in economics and physics. As Turley noted, “no degree offers such determinative authority.”
“Some of the most anti-free speech figures in our history have law degrees. A degree guarantees neither wisdom nor understanding. Many of the Framers were not legally trained but they had an innate sense and commitment to free speech,” he wrote.
Bottom line: Alter the leftist doesn’t believe in free speech for those who disagree with her ideology. That’s what her complaint is really about. She’s a tyrant and an anti-libertarian. The fact that she makes her living under a right she seeks to limit others from fully enjoying makes her a gargantuan hypocrite as well.
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Tagged Under:
Big Tech, Charlotte Alter, Elon Musk, First Amendment, free expression, free speech, freedom, Glitch, hypocrite, Jonathan Turley, Journalism, Liberty, limited speech, speech police, tech giants, Twitter
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