Like most politically active conservative voters, I’m concerned about a number of issues: abortion, immigration, inflation, taxes, DIE, “transgenderism,” antisemitism, and foreign policy, just to name a few.

The Democrat candidate for president, Kamala Harris, does not share my views on any of those issues.  Philosophically, I’m much more closely aligned with the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, although we certainly don’t agree on everything.

But that’s not why I’m voting for Trump.  I have in fact become something I never thought I would: a single-issue voter.

That one issue is freedom of speech.  Whatever my differences with Trump, I believe that with him as president, I will at least be allowed to speak my mind — at this site and at others like it as well as on social media.

In contrast, I believe that if Kamala Harris becomes president, people who think as I do will find it more difficult to express our views, especially on platforms like X.

Why would I say that?

Let’s start with the fact that, a couple of weeks ago, Brazil’s socialist government banned X in that country.  In so doing, that supposedly “democratic nation” aligned itself with dictatorships like China and Iran while thumbing its nose at our American value of free speech, as enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Yet we have heard no condemnation of this blatant government censorship from those self-anointed “protectors of democracy,” Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.  Indeed, Harris is on record demanding that social media platforms be “held accountable” for spreading “hate“ and “misinformation.”

That’s tyrant-speak for “If you say things we don’t like, or even allow others to say them, we’ll shut you down.”

Would Harris actually try to ban X in this country, if she had that kind of power?  Yes, I believe she would.  Based on her rhetoric, there is no reason to believe otherwise.

Or perhaps I should say “based on her rhetoric and her administration’s record.”  Because however much she tries to distance herself from Biden’s policies, the fact is, she was by her own admission an integral part of his administration.  His record is her record.  And on free speech, that record is abysmal.

According to two lawsuits currently working their way through the courts — Kennedy v. Biden and Berenson v. Biden — the administration actively pressured social media platforms to censor speech they disapproved of on issues like COVID and the Hunter Biden laptop.  Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much in a public letter just last month.

Harris’s running mate, the execrable Tim Walz, is if anything even worse on speech than she is, having stated publicly that “there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.”  As I’ve written before, under our constitution, “hate speech” as a category does not exist, and the nebulous “misinformation” label implies that the government gets to decide what is and isn’t true.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that is the exact antithesis of the First Amendment, which guarantees that, with very few exceptions, We the People have the right to say what we want.  And if our government overlords don’t like it, they can lump it.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, despite what his detractors say, has never shown any inclination to police speech.  Sure, he regularly says mean things about news organizations and even individual journalists.  But as president, he never actually tried to shut any of them down.  You don’t hear him talking about “misinformation” and the need for social media sites to be “held accountable.”

What he did say, in a recent speech in Wisconsin, is this: “I will bring back free speech in America.  I will sign an executive order banning any federal employee from colluding to limit speech, and we will fire every federal bureaucrat who is engaged in domestic censorship under the Harris regime.”

That’s all I need to hear.  As long as we can speak freely on public platforms, we have a chance to influence policy and perhaps effect change.  But if those platforms are shut down, or “controversial” content is censored, then it doesn’t matter what you believe.  It’s game over, and the totalitarians win.

Image: Ilmicrofono Oggiono via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.