Earlier this month, CNN and other networks announced they would no longer broadcast in Russia after Russia passed a law threatening fines and jail time for anyone who intentionally spreads “fake” news.
Despite the obvious punchline, it actually is a rather serious story, as this is really an assault on free speech. Those accused of spreading misinformation face fines and, potentially, jail time. According to Reuters, anyone who calls for sanctions against Russia for the Ukraine invasion faces potential fines.
But I can’t help finding the outrage over this law by our friends on the left to be rather ironic. For years now, we’ve seen the free speech of Americans trampled on by powerful leftists.
For example, in 2017, California passed a law making it illegal for health care workers to “willfully and repeatedly” refuse to use a transgender patient’s “preferred name or pronouns.” Those who violate the law face fines or possibly even jail time. Even when PolitiFact came to the bill’s defense, they conceded that “Violations of the bill could, under limited circumstances, be treated as a misdemeanor with punishment of up to one year in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.”
We’re all familiar with Big Tech censorship. If you go against the approved narrative, you might as well say goodbye to your social media accounts. For example, if you shared an article on Facebook saying that masks aren’t effective at protecting people from COVID or expressing skepticism about COVID vaccines, you risked getting suspended or banned. Is that the same as the government passing a law outlawing “fake news”? Not yet. But last year, we learned that Facebook was working with the Biden White House to identify “problematic” posts that allegedly contained “misinformation” that needed to be censored.
While Democrats haven’t accepted a presidential election defeat since George H.W. Bush in 1992, anyone who questions the results of the 2020 presidential election can expect those views to be censored. Just this past week, YouTube removed an episode of the NELK Boys’ podcast featuring Donald Trump, citing misinformation because he said the 2020 election was fraudulent. There is no denying that there was fraud in the 2020 election, but the radical left wants to criminalize speech that insists there was, and prevent Republican elected officials from running for office if they question the results of the 2020 election.
Prominent Democrat lawyer Mark Elias indicated last year that lawsuits were coming to target Republicans who questioned the results of the 2020 election, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. One such lawsuit targeted Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) in the hopes of keeping him off the ballot this year. A federal judge blocked it, but Elias promised that the fight to get “insurrectionist” Republicans off the ballot this year would continue.
So, is Russia’s law criminalizing “fake news” that much different than the radical left’s efforts to stifle speech here in the United States? The radical left’s goals are the same as Putin’s regime: protect the preferred narrative, punish those who don’t comply. If they could pass a law threatening fines and jail time for questioning the 2020 election results, they would.
In fact, Washington Governor Jay Inslee, for example, supports a law in his state that would make it a misdemeanor for elected officials and political candidates to “lie” about election outcomes. “It should not be legal in the state of Washington for elected officials or candidates for office to willfully lie about these election results, and unfortunately they are doing that,” Inslee said. “This needs to be made illegal.”
Under Inslee’s proposed law, elected officials who challenge the results of an election could face a year in jail and a $5,000 fine.
So really, is your typical Democrat that much better than Vladimir Putin? Russia’s “fake news” law is everything the left wants here.