The CEO of a popular satire site summed up exactly why no expert should ever have the ability to determine what free speech is allowed.
Private experts, Big Tech employees and government officials alike have all appointed themselves arbiters of what speech should be censored and what speech will be allowed. This anti-constitutional attitude is also totally out of touch with a basic fact, one which The Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon highlighted as a “knock-down argument” against censorship: experts can be wrong. Because of this fact, “dissent must not only be allowed, but encouraged,” Dillon posted on X (formerly Twitter) on April 17.
Dillon included a clip of his 2023 testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee besides his written comment. “Whenever we learn that censorship has blocked something true (like the Hunter Biden laptop story), we always hear the same excuse: ‘We censored it based on what we knew at the time,’” he wrote. But, according to Dillon, “This is not a defense of censorship. In fact, it's a knock-down argument against it.” Media Research Center poll data previously illustrated that censorship of the Hunter Biden scandal swayed the 2020 presidential election in then-candidate Joe Biden’s favor.
Related: ‘A Knock-Down Argument’: Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon Calls Out Hypocritical COVID-19 Censorship
Dillon explained further, “If knowledge changes over time, then the last thing we should ever do is pretend it doesn't by preemptively shutting down the debate.” He concluded, “If it's even possible that the ‘experts’ and authorities are wrong — and we know they often are — then dissent must not only be allowed, but encouraged.”
The X post also included a clip of Dillon, responding to a question about censors’ objectivity during the 2023 congressional hearing.
In it, Dillon referred to censors’ supposed credibility as a “pretty good joke” and added, “In the whole fact-checking apparatus … there’s unbelievable hubris in the whole project. You know, this idea, especially when we’re talking about medical information too, I often hear people going back say, ‘Well, it was based on what we knew at the time.’” Again, Dillon emphasized, this simply highlights that one’s knowledge can alter over time. He then stated the “knock-down argument” against censorship which he also wrote in his post. Indeed, America has a First Amendment to protect free speech and open debate.
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The Babylon Bee is a member of the Free Speech Alliance.
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