It was a normally slowish June 1994 Saturday morning at KMOX radio St. Louis. The regular listener call-in show “The Morning Meeting” was chugging along uneventfully.
But then the host got a shocking note; the next call was coming in from a passenger on a jet flying at 30,000 feet.
That jet was Air Force One, and the caller was the President of the United States.
Yes, it was President Bill Clinton on the presidential jet on his way into St. Louis to do a fundraiser for longtime Democrat Rep. Dick Gephardt. But Clinton wasn’t calling in to tell Missourians to vote for Gephardt; his re-election that fall was never in doubt. He was calling in to try to fight against the tide of a severe drop in his own popularity that began almost the moment he took the oath of office 17 months earlier.
His anger was so palpable that it suddenly became even more surprising than the surprising fact of the call happening in the first place. For 23 remarkable minutes, the most powerful man on earth openly complained about all the “misinformation” against him and his policies. While that may have been simply a bit unseemly on its own, Clinton’s rant took a new and worse turn when he began to focus his anger on specific targets: the religious right and conservative talk radio. Then he named his targets more specifically, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh.
After assailing Falwell and questioning the sincerity of his Christianity, the president moved on to attacking Limbaugh and the “lies” the talk radio host was saying against him daily. Clinton even decried the fact that there was no “truth meter” that could ring out live on the air every time Limbaugh said something untruthful about him.
Again, Clinton’s emotional frustration about his self-described plight were evident as he raised his voice louder and louder. It was so noticeable that White House aides felt compelled to explain his volume away by saying he was just trying to speak over the sound of Air Force One’s engines.
The incident is notable now for many reasons. First off, one can only imagine what a major national stir it would have set off in today’s social media and crowded TV news channel landscape. Thirty years ago, the story barely scratched the national surface. Even if you ask the most politically astute people who were old enough to know about it then, they will tell you they either forgot it or they never knew it happened in the first place.
But if you listen closely to Clinton’s rhetoric, you can’t help but think something indeed sounds familiar. The reason it does is because that day – June 25, 1994 – was the day the seed was sown for the Democratic Party and the American left to shift from the camp of personal and cultural liberty, to a movement imbued with a ravenous disdain for the First Amendment and support for widespread censorship.
To be sure, it took many years for those seeds to blossom. After taking an historic whipping in the 1994 midterm elections 5 months after his radio call-in incident, Clinton actually re-adjusted his presidency cleverly by embracing more centrist economic and social policies. The wise instincts he had had in his successful 1992 presidential campaign kicked back in as he successfully appeared to be more conciliatory with conservatives and less radical on policy. By 1996 Clinton’s popularity, which had been at a low ebb in June of 1994, had recovered and he won a second term in November of that year by a healthier margin than his 1992 victory.
But many other Democrats, and the left in general, were not on board with Clinton’s very public political calming exercise. Moreover, as Limbaugh’s continued success began to inspire dozens of popular radio copycats, FOX News, and much more, Clinton’s 1994 concepts of “truth monitoring” and even outright censorship only became more and more popular with leftists nationwide.
Also in the interim, Democrats joined with Republicans in the overwhelming congressional support for and passage of the Patriot Act. Something civil libertarians immediately decried but seemed to be doomed in their protests thanks to the newfound powers the political class was bestowing on itself.
Though while there was always a will for more and more censorship and surveillance, there seemed to be less and less of a way. At first, the rise of the Internet presented only more apparently uncontrollable targets for leftist silencing campaigns. Perhaps it was this new landscape that persuaded Democrats and leftists to try to fight fire with fire with radio networks like the ill-fated “Air America” and the leftist bastion that MSNBC became as a counter to FOX News (after a few years of that channel starting out as a less partisan entity).
Another speed bump on the left’s path to becoming pro-censorship was the election of Barack Obama and the Democratic congressional supermajority, both in 2008. Just as Bill Clinton was most desirous of some kind of curbs on his critics’ rights when his polls were in the dumps, the Democrats were less interested in pursuing censorship when the polls were going their way. Of course, none of that stopped them from constant boycott campaigns against Linmbaugh, FOX News, and their existing and potential advertisers.
Then a perfect storm occurred, one that can be simply summarized by three things: social media, Big Tech consolidation, and China.
With the emergence of Facebook, Twitter X, and Instagram, suddenly a new version of the old philosophical question “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really happen?” has emerged. It is now restated as: “If you say something but no one on social media sees it, does it really matter?” This scenario has presented censorship regimes with a much easier ability to at least silence the most effective speech in the world today.
Big Tech consolidation, most specifically the fact that Google’s search engine domination has made it the Western world’s de facto only publisher, has also been incredibly helpful to those who wish to destroy the effective power of the First Amendment. Similar to the above rhetorical question about social media, one can ask if anything really exists if it’s not easily found in a Google search. Once again, this monopolization of content mapping makes it plausible to effectively silence that content as long as that monopoly is willing to cooperate.
Then came China to show America and everyone else just how cooperative Big Tech could be.
That trend began in the late 1990s with the infamous incident involving Yahoo’s collaboration with the Chinese government as it looked to use Yahoo’s user information data to find dissidents in hiding. Yahoo indeed cooperated, as a congressional investigation concluded years later. During a 2007 hearing about Yahoo’s actions, the now-deceased Rep. Tom Lantos (D-California), who was a Holocaust survivor, famously castigated then-Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and the company’s then-chief counsel Bill Callahan.
Yet it appears many of Lantos’ Democrat colleagues were learning the wrong lessons. As Google grew to become more than 10 times more dominant in Internet search, Democrats began to realize the potential involved in working with the company to advance efforts to restrict speech it found politically threatening.
Of course just such a collaboration took place during the early days of the Biden Administration when it came to COVID policies and vaccine efficacy. That came after the collaboration of the Democrats, intelligence services, the Biden campaign, and Big Tech to suppress and discredit true reports about the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden laptop. All of the above is no longer a matter of debate.
But China’s role in this often is overlooked. Without the Beijing regime’s successful beta testing of a social media/Big Tech-based surveillance and censorship of the world’s largest population, perhaps America’s censorship demons wouldn’t have tried to emulate it.
For a hint of just how much the left wing intelligentsia has long admired China’s ability to enforce policies they like, remember the argument promoted by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman years ago when he waxed jealously about how Beijing didn’t need to win over any voters to do good deeds like banning plastic bags.
Of course, the elephant in this censorship room is Donald Trump. While the 2000 election dispute and the post-Abu Ghraib Iraq War triggered the left in this country, nothing has caused leftist heads to explode more than Trump’s entrance to the political scene, election as president, and enduring political capital. Trump is the devil incarnate to the left, and all respect for the law has been tossed out in its pursuit of him, reminding many of this exquisite exchange in the play, (and then film), A Man for All Seasons:
SIR THOMAS MORE: And go he should, if he were the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
ROPER: So! Now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: Yes! I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
While the above exchange feels most germane to the lawfare attacks on Trump in New York, Georgia, and Washington, D.C., it’s also sadly applicable to the rest of us when it comes to the erosion of our First Amendment rights, whether we support Trump politically or not.
A solution to this mess exists in our laws, if only we could find someone in government to enact them. You don’t need to be a Harvard Law School professor to see that Google, Amazon, and other key Big Tech players are ripe for hardcore antitrust action that should result in breakups.
But speaking of Harvard Law professors, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is one Democrat who has often proposed breaking up Google and other Silicon Valley giants. Yet she has conveniently clammed up at times in this crusade, in a way that begs suspicion that Warren chooses to publicize her breakup arguments based on when and how Google et al are cooperating with Democratic Party schemes.
Would the Republicans or the right be just as willing to jump on the censorship bandwagon when and if they achieve power again in Washington? Undoubtedly, many members of the GOP political class would. But Trump’s embrace of the First Amendment rights movement, coupled with his new allegiance with Robert F. Kennedy Junior, has made widespread Republican complicity in this censorship trend less likely.
That may or may not mean there are any consistent “good guys” in this war to restore basic liberties. It does mean there’s a sliver of hope. But as long as we have tens of millions of Americans on the left who believe censorship is an attractive tool to address their obsession with the ultimate evil they see in Trump and his supporters, this will be a very uphill battle indeed.
