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Winston Churchill said, "Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."
What has made America great are our basic tenets of individual rights which cannot be taken away by the state, and foremost among these is freedom of speech. Authoritarian regimes always try to control speech. This was true in the Soviet Union, and it is true today in Russia, China and Venezuela.
Mr. Scott Kalb, an elected Democrat on the BET, the town's finance board, has been circulating a letter in support of the newly proposed Greenwich Speech Police, known by the rather malaprop name of The Greenwich Antisemitism and Anti-Hate Task Force (GAATF?). Presumably they mean the Greenwich Task Force to Combat Hate and Antisemitism. Of course, to deal with actual hate crime we already have the Greenwich Police Department, the State Police and the FBI, so the GAATF is not about crime, it’s about speech, and in this case, it’s about speech Mr. Kalb, Mr. Camillo and members of GAATF don’t like, sometimes found in these pages.
Speech suppression involves deciding what is hateful, and then banning it either directly or surreptitiously with indirect political pressure, “shadow bans” and online “blocking,” as we see in the case before the Supreme Court.
Mr. Kalb in his letter misleadingly cites the rise in antisemitic acts since the October 7th massacre of Israelis as a reason for instituting what amounts to a Speech Tribunal whose role must be to decide what is hate speech and what is antisemitism. Mr. Kalb and the DTC have been at it before, trying to stifle dissent by claiming that identifying Mr. Kalb as a “globalist” was antisemitic, though even the ADL acknowledges that “In some cases, its use [“globalist”] is more or less mainstream.”
Such accusations are invariably attempts to silence opposition.
GAATF is a continuation of Mr. Kalb and the DTC’s ongoing attempts to cover and deflect the actual hate and antisemitism coming from of the left, the evidence of which is incontrovertible and has led to the resignation of college presidents. But the hate from the left is also palpable, and unlike the occasional, laughable Nazi march, the hate from the left is massive and spreading.
The globalist (in the mainstream meaning) World Economic Forum in its 2024 Global Risk Report, a survey of “1,490 experts,” assess disinformation as the number one risk to the world.
Ironically, they decry elsewhere that freedom of speech and of the press are decreasing apparently without seeing the connection.
Salman Rushdie said, "Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself." A fatwa was issued for Rushdie’s death by officials who found his book hateful.
Frederick Douglas said, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
The antidote to bias is free speech. The antidote to disinformation is free speech. You can’t cure either bias or lies with legislation or government action, not least because government is the biggest and most dangerous offender. Attempts to have the government decide what speech is hateful is always tyranny. As a Republican, Fred Camillo should know this.
I have never heard of a ‘laughable Nazi march’. What a disgusting thought.
People who believe in free speech should stand up for it rather than hiding behind “staff writer”.
We are still a democracy, and so can air our views now. Let’s not give that up by writing despicable things that we won’t acknowledge as our own.