Why should Americans trust anyone who believes Orwell’s 1984 was an ode to servility?
“You could drop Hillary into any trouble spot, come back in a month and… she will have made it better,” former president Bill Clinton declared in a 2016 speech championing his wife’s presidential candidacy. But Hillary’s entry into the brawls surrounding the 2024 presidential election will leave many Americans wishing to drop her elsewhere.
As the race enters the home stretch, Hillary Clinton is riding in like Joan of Arc to rescue truth – or at least to call for hammering government critics. But Hillary has been a triple threat to American democracy for 15 years.
Last week, Hillary declared on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC talk show that the federal government should criminally prosecute Americans who share “propaganda” – which she made no effort to define.
Hillary has long been one of America’s foremost censorship advocates. In 2021, she announced that there must be “a global reckoning with the disinformation, with the monopolistic power and control, with the lack of accountability that the [social media] platforms currently enjoy.” Hillary made her utterance at a time when freedom in much of the world had been obliterated by governments responding to a pandemic that occurred as a result of U.S. government funding reckless experiments in Chinese government labs. The U.S. denial of its role in financing coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of the biggest deceits of the decade. But Hillary never kvetched about that scam regarding a debacle that contributed to millions of deaths. The Obama administration sought to prohibit U.S. government funding for such wildly risky research but Fauci and other officials evaded the restrictions.
In 2022, Hillary wailed that “tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability” and endorsed European Union legislation to obliterate free speech. But “disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.
That awkward fact didn’t deter Democratic Vice President nominee Tim Walz from declaring last month: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Who knew the Minnesota version of the First Amendment has a loophole bigger than Duluth?
After the New York Post shot down Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board in 2022, Biden appointed Vice President Kamala Harris as chief of a White House disinformation task force to find ways to protect women and LGBTQI+ politicians and journalists from vigorous criticism on the Internet (“online harassment and abuse”). Harris declared that such criticism could “preclude women from political decision-making about their own lives and communities, undermine the functioning of democracy.” But when did criticism of female politicians become irreconcilable with democracy? Most politicians deserve all the grief they get.
Five years ago, at a NAACP Detroit “Freedom Fund” dinner, Harris proclaimed, “We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.” She did not specify the precise degree of alleged rancor required to nullify a speaker’s constitutional rights.
Biden administration censorship schemes have been denounced by federal courts and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), chair of the House Cybersecurity Subcommittee, sent the White House a letter last week noting that the Biden administration always “advertised its willingness to manipulate the content of social media sites” and called for a cessation of all federal censorship tainting the 2024 election. Mace requested copies of all official “communications with social media companies… concerning the concealment or suppression of information on their sites.” At last report, nobody on Capitol Hill is sitting on the edge of their chair awaiting an informative White House response. .
Hillary’s own career exemplifies a political elitist righteously blindfolding all other Americans.
When she was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, Clinton exempted herself from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), setting up a private server in her New York mansion to handle her official email. The State Department ignored 17 FOIA requests for her emails and said it needed 75 years to comply with a FOIA request for Hillary’s aides’ emails. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shrugged off Hillary’s aides using a program called BleachBit to destroy 30,000 of her emails under subpoena by a congressional committee. Federal judge Royce Lamberth labeled the Clinton email coverup “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.” An Inspector General report slammed FBI investigators for relying on “rapport building” with Team Hillary instead of using subpoenas to compel the discovery of key evidence. The IG report “questioned whether the use of a subpoena or search warrant might have encouraged Clinton, her lawyers … or others to search harder for the missing devices (containing email), or ensured that they were being honest that they could not find them.” The FBI’s treatment of Hillary Clinton vivified how far federal law enforcement will twist the law to absolve the nation’s political elite, or at least those tied to the Democratic Party.
During Clinton’s tenure, the State Department gave grants to promote investigative journalism in numerous developing nations as part of its “good governance” programs. But exposing abuses was only a virtue outside U.S. territorial limits. Clinton vigorously covered up debacles in the $200 billion in foreign aid she shoveled out. From 2011 onward, AID’s acting inspector general massively deleted information on foreign aid debacles in audit reports, as The Washington Post reported in 2014. Clinton’s machinations helped delude Washington policymakers and Congress about the profound failures of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.
Pirouetting as a champion of candor is a novel role for the former Secretary of State. Shortly before the 2016 election, a Gallup poll found that only 33% of voters believed Hillary was honest and trustworthy, and only 35% trusted Donald Trump. The Clinton-Trump tag team made “post-truth” the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year.
Hillary believes that the lesson of George Orwell’s 1984 is that good citizens should shut up and grovel. In her 2017 memoir, Hillary claimed that 1984 revealed the peril of critics who “sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.” Did Hillary think Orwell dedicated the novel to Stalin? Hillary’s book noted that the regime in Orwell’s novel had physically tortured its victims to delude them. Hillary is comparatively humane, since she only wants to leave people forever in the dark – well, except for the scumbags who undermine the official storyline.
Hillary was a key player in the Obama administration that believed that Americans had no right to learn the facts of the torture committed by the CIA after 9/11. When she was Secretary of State in 2012, she declared, “Lack of transparency eats away like a cancer at the trust people should have in their government.” But the more secrets politicians keep, the less trust they deserve.
To sanctify censorship, Hillary is again invoking the Russian peril. A 316-page report last year by Special Counsel John Durham noted that in mid-2016, after the shellacking she suffered from her email scandal, “Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” President Barack Obama was briefed on the Clinton proposal “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” FBI officials relied on the “Clinton Plan” to target the Trump campaign even though no FBI personnel apparently took “any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence,” the Durham report noted.
The first three years of Trump’s presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. In 2019, an Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made “fundamental errors” and persistently deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign.
Hillary’s scams were even too much for federal scorekeepers. The Federal Election Commission in 2022 levied a $113,000 fine on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee for their deceptive funding to cover up their role in the Steele dossier, which spurred the FBI’s illicit surveillance of Trump campaign officials.
In Hillary’s new improved version of the Constitution, there is no free speech for “deplorables” – the vast swath of Americans she openly condemned in 2016. But this is the same mindset being shown by the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. Harris has scorned almost every opportunity to explain how she would use the power she is seeking to capture over American citizens. Instead, she is entitled to the Oval Office by acclimation of the mainstream media and all decent folks – or at least those who drive electric vehicles and donate to her campaign.
Is “disinformation” becoming simply another stick for rulers to use to flog uppity citizens? Denouncing disinformation sounds better than “shut up, peasants!” Will Americans’ rights and liberties be caught in a federal thresher? One blade is the Iron Curtain of secrecy about government policies, including denying almost all the crimes the government commits. The other blade will be vigorous prosecution of anyone who exposes official wrongdoing. But if politicians have no obligation to disclose how they use their power and can persecute citizen who reveals their abuses, how in Hades can liberty survive?
Hillary’s latest victory lap is also a reminder of the profound changes in American politics since her husband took office in 1993. For most of the late twentieth century, liberals championed free speech with few quibbles or asterisks. Hillary would not be tub-thumping for censorship unless there had already been a sea change in attitudes among her target audience. Or do Hillary’s supporters retain more devotion to free speech than she presumes?
An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute.
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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.