Dan Crenshaw SLAMS Democrats for abandonment of free speech

"We don’t agree on the virtue of free speech anymore, and that’s a problem," Crenshaw began.

The article comes as big tech companies have launched a coordinated campaign of censorship against right-wing accounts and websites. While conservatives have been alleging bias from social media companies for years, a more intense campaign of censorship began in the wake of the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington DC by pro-Trump rioters, resulting in Twitter and Facebook banning then-President Donald Trump from their platforms, followed by various other accounts.

Shortly afterwards, Google, Apple, and Amazon coordinated to block access to the social media website Parler, which went offline after being removed from the application stores of the former two companies and being removed from the web servers of the latter.

Crenshaw has been a notable critic of big tech companies since joining Congress in 2019, along with other Republican newcomers such as Senator Josh Hawley.

Crenshaw hailed freedom of speech as "a key principle of the American founding," while also lamenting that it has not always been well-protected by the government, especially during war time. He specifically pointed the finger at Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, the latter of whom he described as "outwardly hostile to the Constitution," who used their wartime powers to imprison people who challenged government policy.

He also noted that the problems facing freedom of speech today are different than in the past as large private corporations with major influence over public discourse, rather than the government, are now the main entities threatening it.

"But the biggest problem of our time is this: Democrats and Republicans don’t even agree on free speech as a principle anymore," Crenshaw wrote. He described the Democratic and Republican split on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, with representatives from both parties seeking to repeal it for different reasons. Democrats "demand that big tech censor more, not less," as opposed to Republicans, Crenshaw explained.

Crenshaw points to the dominance of progressivism over liberalism in the Democratic Party as the main driving force behind this hostility towards freedom of speech. "[The] goal of progressivism is progress, specifically toward utopian ends. At their core, progressives believe that such universal principles can only be tolerated to a point, that is, until they prevent the deliberate and intentional molding of public opinion that is necessary to achieve progressive ends," Crenshaw asserts. "Those ends tend to change as the whims of the progressives change, but the disposition is the same: a prioritization of outcomes, not of principles."

He notes that free speech is a "classically liberal" value which has become deer to conservatives on the principle that it is a fundamental and inalienable right of being human. Progressives, in the pursuit of "equity," according to Crenshaw do not have principles regarding the process of political change, and seek to use social engineering to derive a specific outcome.

"Free speech is a universal principle, perhaps one of our most important. We better figure out a way to protect it," Crenshaw finishes.

Crenshaw did not offer any specific legislative or executive proposals to handle the problem he described.