A Great Example Of Coyote’s Law in Action

The current version of Coyote’s Law is something like this:

Don’t give the government a power that you would not like your worst political enemy to wield

The reason for this should be obvious — unless you intend to be the last one in power, ie your goal is to initiate a totalitarian coup with yourself left in charge — then in the normal course of the political cycle in democratic countries, your group will eventually be out of power and your hated political enemies ensconced in your place. From today’s example below, it appears that this is NOT obvious to many politicians.

A decade ago I wrote this about hate speech restrictions:

So you think that “hate speech” or speech that makes someone uncomfortable or mocks someone or criticizes some particular group should not be protected under the First Amendment.  For those on the Left (who seem to disproportionately hold this opinion), I ask you to define anti-hate-speech laws in a way that you will be entirely comfortable if, say, President Lindsey Graham (God forbid) were to inherit the power to enforce them.

A President Graham might consider speech mocking Christianity or Jesus to be hate speech.  And if mocking Christianity is hate speech, wouldn’t support for gay marriage or abortion be as well?  What about mocking the military, or police — isn’t that hate speech?

If you ban some speech but not other speech, someone has to be in charge of what is in the “ban” category.  When most people advocate for such a ban, they presume that “their guys” are going to be in charge of enforcing it, but outside of places like Detroit and Baltimore, sustained one-party rule in this country just does not happen.  That is why most calls for speech restriction are so short-sighted — they assume that people of a like mind will always be in charge of wielding these restrictions, and that is a terribly historical assumption.

The recent chaotic transition to the Trump Administration would, in a rational world, give a lot of opposing politicians second thoughts about setting precedents and creating powers that were then ready for Trump to wield and expand. Heck el gato malo discussed this very topic in the context of a future Trump Presidency back in 2023.

Robby Soave of Reason brings us a great example today, Senator Amy Klobuchar’s attempt in 2021 to give the Department of Health and Human Services the power to regulate speech that touched on health:

By the summer of 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic had entered a new phase…. [and] The frustration from the public health establishment was palpable, and top policymakers within the Biden administration blamed vaccine hesitant individuals for exacerbating the pandemic. In July, President Joe Biden said, “the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.” Among government health advisors, a consensus quickly formed that the main culprit was medical misinformation on social media.

Biden asserted that Facebook had blood on its hands and implied that regulation would follow if moderation did not improve…

The anti-misinformation efforts were not just talk: They had a legislative component as well. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) was particularly animated on this issue. On July 22, 2021, she introduced the Health Misinformation Act, which would have granted broad new powers to the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). These powers would have included the ability of the secretary to reduce online platforms’ protection from liability under Section 230, the federal law that immunizes websites from liability for users’ speech. In effect, Klobuchar’s bill would have established that the federal government could use a public health emergency as a pretext to erode vital free speech protections at the whims of HHS.

It is clear whose speech Klobuchar was interested in censoring: The press release accompanying her bill explicitly mentions the so-called disinformation dozen. Klobuchar and her fellow Democrats sought to empower the HHS secretary to censor COVID-19-related speech with which they disagreed.

Needless to say, the Health Misinformation Act never became law, which might be a relief to Klobuchar at present. That’s because the secretary of HHS is now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the very social media users accused of being a misinformation super-spreader. If her bill had been enacted, it would have eventually empowered Kennedy—someone who has been accused by Democrats and the mainstream media of encouraging vaccine hesitancy by promoting the idea that vaccines are dangerous—to make determinations about what counts as misinformation online.

It would be hilarious to ask Ms., Klobuchar if she intended to reintroduce her legislation in this session.