Death of free speech in America: and how socialist tyranny in Latin America is making its

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Facebook, Twitter and Google chief executives go before a Senate committee this week to face questions about alleged censorship. The tech titans are in hot water with conservatives due to increasing evidence that screeners, assigned to block offensive content, use their power to advance a political agenda. The hearings may heighten the public’s awareness of the issue. But a cultural sore is festering in America and it cannot be healed with regulation from Washington.  The problem, which is familiar in Latin America and now seems to be coming to a theater near you, is a new “hyper-intolerance” on the part of the upper classes, academics and the media. This is scary because where efforts by elites to silence dissent have succeeded, things haven’t ended well, even for those who instigate them. What starts with canceling an opponent for some heresy almost inevitably leads to gagging civil society.  Full-blown censorship is associated with totalitarian regimes using military enforcement. But dive into the tragedy of tyranny in the Americas and you often find, long before the consolidation of power, insidious support from public intellectuals for controlling thought and speech. Over and over again their role in the “revolution” has been to define virtue and justice, and unleash the mob to denounce and condemn the unrepentant. 

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Castro understood that free speech wouldn’t fly in the police state he envisioned, but in his first months in power he continued to pay lip service to democracy and knew better than to march into newsrooms with bayonets and jackboots. He didn’t need to. At his disposal were useful journalists ready to do his dirty work by attacking their own colleagues.  A combination of broad and arbitrary economic and regulatory powers beyond the scope of government in a true democracy were used to force compliance with the regime’s agenda. Those who did not get in line were ruined through the cancellation of broadcast licenses, the denial of newsprint, the collapse of private-economy advertising and the blocking of access to government press briefings.  The last refuge for free thinkers is electronic and social media. In Cuba and Venezuela it is also censored. In dictator Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua, where the media is now mostly controlled by the state or the businesses of the Ortega family and friends, the regime is set to approve new cyber legislation that will criminalize whatever the state decides is fake news on the internet. Journalists working for the regime are defending the gag law.  One is left to contemplate what might have been in any of these countries had open minds been ready to defend open society. And to further contemplate what is to become of open societies where minds close.

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