Progressives Are Mastering the Politics of Control

T here was a time, in the mist of the past, when the American Civil Liberties Union actually cared about civil liberties — so much so that it would defend those rights for people whose views they (and most Americans) abhorred. On occasion, that even included defending the protest and free-speech rights of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis.

Today, the ACLU’s commitment to that principle above all else has disappeared. Its mission has warped into something else. Rather than expanding access to the public square, the powerful progressive activist group regularly seeks to constrict it. It often couches its new illiberalism in the language of its old mission: “Far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties,” two of the group’s national leaders argued implausibly in a September essay for the New York Times.

But even the lip service it pays to liberty is increasingly half-hearted. In 2017, the organization updated its guidelines for free-speech cases, suggesting that cases should now be viewed with an eye toward “the impact of the proposed speech . . . on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed,” as well as “the potential effect on marginalized communities; the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values; and the structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur.” Some of its lawyers now argue in favor of censoring books that challenge the transgender narrative. “One hears markedly less from the ACLU about free speech nowadays,” the Times wrote last June. “Its annual reports from 2017 to 2019 highlight its role as a leader in the resistance against President Donald J. Trump. But the words ‘First Amendment’ or ‘free speech’ cannot be found.”

So it comes as no surprise that the contemporary ACLU is less than enthusiastic about Elon Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter. Despite the fact that Musk’s stated intention was to make the platform more hospitable to free and open debate — ostensibly a core ACLU value — the group released a statement expressing its concern about a “powerful central actor . . . having so much control over the boundaries of our political speech online.” That was echoed by numerous left-wing “human rights” groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. “The last thing we need is a Twitter that willfully turns a blind eye to violent and abusive speech against users, particularly those most disproportionately impacted, including such as women, non-binary persons, and others,” an Amnesty International USA executive wrote in a press release.

In many ways, Musk’s content-moderation philosophy is an echo of the old ACLU’s content-neutral civil libertarianism: As the South African–born billionaire tweeted on April 25:

But the prospect of those free-speech reforms was met with universal panic in elite progressive institutions. Essay after essay in outlets such as the New York Times condemned the Tesla CEO’s ambitions as dangerous and unhinged. A CNN analyst fumed that “you cannot let these guys control discourse in this country or we are headed to hell.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ubiquitously online Democratic representative from New York, slammed Musk for his apparent “ego problems.” Within Twitter itself, the leader of the content-moderation team reportedly broke down in tears.

The episodes were a revealing illustration of what is now an undeniable truth: Today’s elite progressivism — at least in its credentialed, self-referential, institutional form — is fundamentally about control. From Covid to Big Tech, the consensus that dominates academia, the mainstream media, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, corporate HR bureaucracies, and the Democratic Party itself is characterized by a fundamental distrust of normal people’s ability to govern themselves and think for themselves. Legacy progressive institutions such as the ACLU used to be left-liberal in a genuinely liberal sense — academic freedom, for example, was originally a left-wing initiative. Today, by contrast, they often act as the institutional expression of a specific class of highly educated progressive elites, and they wield their considerable power to defend those class interests by discrediting and actively suppressing any competing narratives.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the new progressive refrain about “dis-” or “mis-” information. In practice, this concept has a two-pronged function: Discrediting information that runs contrary to the institutional progressive narrative, and justifying progressive political failures in a way that exempts progressives from any self-reflection or accountability. That framework, in turn, has been weaponized to squash dissent — most famously with Big Tech’s censorship of the New York Post’s substantiated report on Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks before the presidential election, the refrain that the Post’s story was “Russian disinformation,” though never backed up by any evidence, was widely echoed by mainstream journalists, intelligence-agency “experts,” and Joe Biden himself.

In the war on “disinformation,” elite institutions work in unison: The recent news that Twitter is banning ads skeptical of climate change, for example, cites the “scientific consensus” as its standard for censorship. But while anthropogenic climate change is real, references to “the science” or an expert “consensus” are often a cover for progressive ideology rather than a reflection of dispassionate data. Anthony Fauci, for instance, has tellingly claimed that his critics are “really attacking science, because I represent science,” adding: “That’s dangerous.” And critics of gender transitions for children  often run up against the medical bureaucracy’s ideological “consensus,” as a telling recent paragraph in Fatherly illustrates:

The medical consensus is that puberty blockers are safe and effective for trans youth. In a February 23 statement, the Endocrine Society noted that it, along with the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, as well as clinical practice guidelines, supports “evidence-based medical care” for trans kids, which includes puberty blockers.

The media, academic “experts,” and powerful social-media platforms and tech companies all collectively work to define and police the limits of this “consensus.” And the Biden administration has made it clear that it wants the federal government to bolster those efforts: The Department of Homeland Security’s recent formation of the “Disinformation Governance Board,” announced just two days after Musk acquired Twitter, is one of the most blatant examples to date of how the new command-and-control progressivism functions as a unified machine, deployed across institutional lines.

The Disinformation Governance Board is undoubtedly an effort to operationalize progressive concerns about “disinformation” — concerns that only ever apply to the Right. And the formation of the board has been either downplayed or actively applauded by its allies in other progressive institutions. The New York Times, for one, just ran a three-part series on “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable,” but has yet to even acknowledge the existence of the disinformation board.

The discrepancy in coverage makes sense if you understand that elite journalistic outlets are not the independent reporting outfits that they used to be. They are now part of a broad effort to construct an informational police-state. “Why would the Times note the formation of a Disinformation Governance Board in the federal government?,” I wrote earlier today. Those are their people, and the conservative outlets that will be targeted are their competitors.

But not to worry: Concerns about the Disinformation Governance board are themselves “misinformation,” according to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. So Americans everywhere can breathe easy. Help is on the way.