The Case Against Socialism

by Rand Paul

  In November 2018, Twitter permanently banned Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy for asserting that “men are not women.” According to Twitter, such statements “violate their rules against hateful conduct.”

  “What is insane to me,” Murphy wrote in response to her Twitter ban:

  . . . is that while Twitter knowingly permits graphic pornography and death threats on the platform (I have reported countless violent threats, the vast majority of which have gone unaddressed), they won’t allow me to state very basic facts, such as “men aren’t women.”

  This is hardly an abhorrent thing to say, nor should it be considered “hateful” to ask questions about the notion that people can change sex, or ask for explanations about transgender ideology. These are now, like it or not, public debates—debates that are impacting people’s lives, as legislation and policy are being imposed based on gender identity ideology. . . . 3

  God forbid anyone on Twitter have the audacity to refer to the name Bruce Jenner, which is verboten and considered “deadnaming,” using a transgender person’s legal or birth name. Murphy was guilty of this crime also.

  In contrast, consider Democrat Pennsylvania state representative Brian Sims, who aggressively yelled at and filmed three girls, ages thirteen and fifteen, who were quietly praying on the sidewalk outside a Planned Parenthood. This forty-year-old man, a hulking former football player and elected official, tweeted video of the girls while saying, “I’ll give $100 to anyone who can identify these three.” He verbally attacked the girls for both their faith and their racial ethnicity in the video, while encouraging his followers to dox them. How was this not considered a threat to the safety of these young girls?

  Doxing individuals with whom you disagree on social media is threatening behavior, pure and simple. It is potentially a dangerous call to action for unstable and violent people. Sims’s attempt to dox was especially outrageous considering that it was against children. Twitter did nothing. The mainstream media was completely silent, despite hundreds of tweets at CNN to report on this elected official’s disturbing behavior.

  The next month the bearded brute was back, proudly tweeting video of himself stalking and intimidating an elderly lady praying the rosary outside of the same building. For over eight minutes Representative Sims bullied and castigated the diminutive woman, repeatedly insulting her as “an old white lady” while she tried to get away from him, shoulders hunched and head lowered against his assault. The video is truly painful to watch. Again, deafening silence from Twitter on whether Sims violated rules against hateful conduct.

  Twitter prefers to only censor speech it disagrees with while ignoring egregious, threatening speech and stalking behavior that supports its political point of view. While most of us recoil at any censorship of free speech, Nicole Russell, writing at the Federalist, points out the problem: “Of course, Twitter is a private company and can do whatever it likes. But they have billed themselves as an open platform, one that welcomes debate, ideas, and sharing. In an April article about how Twitter turned toxic, Fast Company reported that Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s first general counsel, used to say, ‘Let the tweets flow.’”4

  What ever happened to the “live and let live, speak and let speak” attitude of the wide-open public forum of the Internet?

  Russell informs us that “[e]ven Amnesty International voiced real disgust with Twitter’s lack of policing actually awful tweets: ‘Twitter’s inconsistency and inaction on its own rules not only creates a level of mistrust and lack of confidence in the company’s reporting process, it also sends the message that Twitter does not take violence and abuse against women seriously—a failure which is likely to deter women from reporting in the future.’” To which I would again point to its lack of response to the threatening, ageist, racist, misogynist, and anti-Christian tweets by Brian Sims, despite thousands of complaints demanding action.

  Even Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, admits that social media has a “left-leaning” tendency and he acknowledges that conservatives at Twitter “don’t feel safe to express their opinion.” The question remains: What, if anything, should government do to protect speech on private platforms?5

  Some Republicans, like Ben Sasse of Nebraska, confuse Internet bans of conservatives by private companies as equivalent to university bans of conservative speakers. Jack Shaffer at Politico points out the improper analogy:

  In an unfortunate analogy . . . Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) compared [Twitter banishing conservatives] to the “de-platforming” in vogue on many liberal campuses these days. There is a huge difference between protesters driving an invited speaker off-campus, which is what happens in de-platforming, and a publisher deciding what content he chooses to print. In the former example, an invited speaker is silenced through coercion. In the latter, a proprietor makes his editorial decision about what he will print. The Washington Post can’t be accused of de-platforming me just because it won’t publish my letter.6

  Ergo, campus de-platforming is far more concerning than the decisions of private platforms about whom they will host. Conservatives, though, want something done. Isn’t there something we can do?

  My answer has typically been that government should assiduously remove any governmental barriers to entry for the next “Twitter” and make certain that there are no governmental protections of monopoly in the social media arena.

  Some conservative Internet voices have asked that we reconsider granting legal immunity to social media giants like Facebook and Twitter. The legal immunity prevents users from suing Facebook or Twitter for allowing users to post something that might be libelous. This protection makes sense in that social media could not exist if Facebook or Twitter had to defend a lawsuit every time a poster told someone to “STFU.”

  However, the legal immunity should not protect Facebook or Twitter from lawsuits concerning their breach of the user agreement. This aspect of legal immunity is currently being examined and may be the cudgel necessary to prevent the situation that Russell believes exists now: “Instead of the ‘Thought Police’ and ‘Big Brother,’ now we have Jack Dorsey and Twitter.”

  Even under current law, it may be possible to file a class action suit against Facebook if they breach their user agreement by sharing information the user never agreed to. If the user agreement were indeed breached, imagine a billion-person class action . . . 7

  It’s not just Twitter; Facebook has also jumped on the bandwagon of censoring conservative speech. Michael Nunez at Gizmodo writes:

  Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.8

  Facebook is not only blocking conservatives, it is also advancing stories that fit its management’s liberal bias.

  Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.9

  But before we empower big government to police private venues of speech, conservatives should examine the issue carefully.

  I remember when I was sixteen—a long time ago (1979)—I wrote to the matriarch of the conservative movement—Phyllis Schlafly—opposing the fairness doctrine. Schlafly and other conservatives were mad that the three main television networks were heavily liberal in bias (they were). Conservatives wanted the government to enforce a “fairness doctrine” to guarantee equal time for a conservative point of view
.

  I remember typing the letter on a typewriter (if you’re under age forty-five, Google it). I think I quoted Mises. I never heard back from her, but I still think it’s important that conservatives not get so carried away that we throw out the First Amendment rights of companies in the fury over private censorship.

  Meanwhile, au courant socialists like Representative Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Chellie Pingree don’t seem overly concerned about protecting the First Amendment rights of private companies with whom they disagree. Flexing their power and position as new members of Congress, the two sent a letter to Facebook, Microsoft, and Google criticizing their sponsorship of LibertyCon, a conference hosted by Students for Liberty. The event featured speakers and panels discussing libertarian ideas on a range of topics from the pros and cons of regulating the Internet to universal basic income.

  So what was the terrible offense that motivated these Democrat representatives to dash off letters of complaint? LibertyCon featured a presentation by a retired statistics professor from American University who had the audacity to argue that perhaps “there should be a more dispassionate review of the data surrounding climate science, and more room for debate about causes and effects.” This idea is, of course, tantamount to “climate change denial,” according to Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk, and therefore must be roundly condemned—no, silenced at all costs.

  In an article for the Federalist, Jason Pye and Daniel Savickas wrote, “It’s quite upsetting that two members of Congress would take time to send a letter making sure private companies get back in line after they sponsored a conference at which one presentation among dozens did not align with these politicians’ opinions on the climate. The conference also featured a debate on the merits of a carbon tax, and included a speaker who made the libertarian case in favor of such a tax.”

  Calling the Ocasio-Cortez–Pingree letter a “veiled form of intimidation,” Pye and Savickas rightly make the point that members of Congress have absolutely no business condemning private companies for sponsoring events that encourage young people to think for themselves about politics, current events, and the role of government. They wrote:

  The 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill stated that if an idea “is not fully frequently and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.” If members of Congress take issue with certain opinions, they should be willing to fearlessly discuss them in a public forum, as the attendees of LibertyCon did. They should be confident in their convictions and trust the merits of their arguments. Our leaders who swore an oath to defend the Constitution should not only defend free speech, but be the foremost advocates for open discussion wherever possible.10

  It is disturbing that, not two months into her official government position, Democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez was already muscularly engaging in the foremost behavior of historical socialist dictators: the intimidation of private citizens who express viewpoints that government officials do not agree with in order to silence speech.

  Liberals like to portray themselves as champions of freedom. However, from economic liberty to freedom of speech, the first individuals to stifle freedoms are usually those same liberals. Just take a look at what is happening on college campuses where conservative speakers and groups are being deplatformed, protested, and intimidated in an effort to silence their viewpoints.

  I personally dealt with this when I was a professor for a semester at George Washington University. When my deputy chief of staff, Sergio Gor (who had attended George Washington), helped arrange my class with the administration, many on the faculty vociferously complained that I wasn’t qualified to teach an entry-level undergraduate class. The Political Science department didn’t want me, and neither did the English department. Finally we settled on my dystopian novel course being an elective without a department. I found it intriguing, however, that the student body was much more receptive, as my course was completely filled and had a lengthy waiting list within a couple of hours.

  Our friends Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump Jr. often appear on college campuses and have dealt with protests and hateful vitriol. Going a step further, liberals now want to stifle speech online. On his social media, Don has highlighted many examples of followers being muted or blocked by major social media companies in order to suppress conservative speech. Followers have sent screenshots to Don showing that their accounts had automatically unfollowed him without their consent or knowledge.

  Instagram even blocked Don Jr. from posting about the Jussie Smollett hoax—which they later claimed was “an error.” It takes someone like Kimberly or Don, with over five million followers between them, to raise awareness before accounts get restored.

  The visceral hatred on social media contributes to this madness. And when suppressing dissent through the usual channels doesn’t work, some resort to more extreme methods. We have seen this poison erupt in both threats of violence and actual violence. I was at the baseball field practicing for the charity congressional baseball game when the shooting occurred in June 2017. I was ten feet from a young staff member as a madman shot him on the right field warning track, just seconds after Steve Scalise was shot in the hip at second base. For a few seconds, I couldn’t tell which direction the shots were coming from. I had been standing in the right field batting cage adjacent to the field but separated by a twenty-foot fence.

  When the first shot rang out, I thought it might just be an isolated shotgun blast. At home in Kentucky, it’s not uncommon for us to hear people hunting or shooting for target practice in the bottomland surrounding our neighborhood.

  There were about twenty congressmen and senators present and a half-dozen staffers helping. Seconds after the first shot was fired, I heard the sounds of rapid fire as more than a hundred shots rang out. I escaped the batting cage and found cover behind a large willow oak next to it.

  As I crouched among the large roots of the tree, two staffers were running from left field close to the shooter toward me as fast as they could. The shooter fired at them the entire way as they ran along the warning track to right field. One of them was hit as he dove into the dirt just on the other side of the twenty-foot fence dividing us.

  The other young man scaled the fence in less than five seconds amid gunfire. The staff member who had been shot in the calf made his way toward the first base dugout.

  Finally, after what seemed like eternity but was likely only about three or four minutes, the heroic Capitol Hill police and Alexandria police began to return fire. The three of us behind the willow oak made a dash for it over a fence, across a soccer field, and into the street, where by chance a Capitol Hill staffer on his way to work stopped in the middle of the road and picked us up.

  I consider myself to be in good shape, but I was struggling to breathe to the point that they all asked if I was okay. As our nerves thawed and our hearts quit beating out of our chests, I realized that I was still wearing my batting helmet. One of the staffers said that he heard the shooter yelling, “This is for health care.” Later we would find out that the shooter had a history of anger and violence, including bashing his neighbor in the face with the butt of a rifle. We also learned that he was a rabid Bernie Sanders fan.

  I don’t point that out in any way, shape, or form to blame Bernie or folks on the left for inciting the shooting that nearly cost Steve Scalise his life. (His entire blood supply was replaced in the first twenty-four hours after the shooting and it is a miracle he is alive. He does, however, live with very significant permanent injuries.)

  I refer to this terrible episode not because it is the fault of the left or the right but because both sides need to acknowledge that in a country of 330 million citizens there are unstable, violent people among us and we must all consider our rhetoric when debating what we believe is best for the country.

  I was the victim of politically motivated violence not once but twice in 2017. I was viciously and cowardly attacked from behind while working in my yard wearing nois
e-canceling headphones to protect my hearing from the mower. The assailant was a vocal Internet hater of President Trump who also was known about town as a critic of my opposition to socialized medicine. Despite the fact that my attacker admitted to the police and the courts to having zero communication of any kind with me or any member of my family for more than a decade (other than a casual wave from the car when we rarely spotted him), his legal team’s spin that we were in an “ongoing lawn care dispute” was repeatedly stated in the media as fact.

  I suffered six broken ribs, three of them displaced fractures. In a displaced fracture, the ends of ribs grind upon each other until they began to fuse. I won’t go through the gory details of two pneumonias, a pulmonary contusion, and fluid and blood leaking around my lung. Add to that my cell number and home address being doxed during the Kavanaugh hearings, and a California man threatening to kill me and my family with an ax, and I had a bad year.

  I don’t blame anyone on the left for the violence of the man who attacked me. I actually blame the media for stoking and exaggerating the country’s differences and making them personal, even more so since the election of President Trump.

  Today the media feels justified in accusing the president’s supporters of hatred, violence, and bigotry, to the point of blind acceptance and false reporting of hoax hate crimes such as the staged “lynching” of actor Jussie Smollett, a fake attack that left the “victim” with no injuries and yet was described as “brutal,” “harrowing,” and “chilling” for weeks in the media. Before the truth was revealed, Ocasio-Cortez actually criticized some in the media for referring to the hoax as only a “possible” hate crime. Representative Rashida Tlaib, the poster child for hostile incivility when she shouted that we should “impeach the motherf***er” in reference to President Trump, wrote, “the right wing is killing and hurting our people.” Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker both called the attack “an attempted modern day lynching” while simultaneously pushing for their new antilynching legislation.