Hail to the censor! Hillary Clinton's long war on free speech.

• Author: Welch, Matt

ON DECEMBER 6, after delivering an address about Israeli-American relations at the Brookings Institution's Saban Forum, Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton was asked how she would deal simultaneously with the bloody dictatorship of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the terrorist menace of ISIS. After spending three minutes talking about Sunni insurgents and diplomacy with Russia, Clinton pivoted to a solution she has proposed for several disparate policy challenges across her decades in public life: censorship.

"We're going to have to have more support from our friends in the technology world to deny online space," Clinton warned, citing the deadly terrorist attack in San Bernardino four days earlier by a U.S.-born Muslim and his Pakistani wife. "Just as we have to destroy their would-be caliphate, we have to deny them online space."

But doesn't that go against the American cultural and constitutional tradition of free speech? Clinton anticipated the argument: "You're going to hear all of the usual complaints--you know, 'freedom of speech,' etc.," she said. "But if we truly are in a war against terrorism and we are truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow of foreign fighters, then we've got to shut off their means of communicating."

This was no heat-of-the-moment hyperbole. Earlier that same day, the former secretary of state was even more explicit about what she would demand from American technology companies: "We're going to need help from Facebook and from YouTube and from Twitter," she declared on ABC's This Week, announcing a strategy of fighting terrorists "in the air," "on the ground," and "on the Internet." "They cannot permit the recruitment and the actual direction of attacks or the celebration of violence. They're going to have to help us take down these announcements and these appeals."

You would think that a leading presidential candidate rolling her eyes at "freedom of speech" while advocating content-based takedown orders for U.S. media companies might generate a news cycle or two worth of raised eyebrows. But Clinton's illiberal proposals were drowned out within hours by the furor over Republican frontrunner Donald Trump calling for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." (Not to be outflanked on tech-toughness, the populist mogul also proposed "closing that Internet up in some ways," and scoffed even harder at potential critics: "Somebody will say, 'Oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.' These are foolish people.")

But long before Donald Trump became a one-man media-distraction machine, Hillary Clinton had mastered the art of pushing maximally against free expression without being tagged as a foe of the First Amendment, unlike her friend and anti-media collaborator Tipper Gore. Clinton has crusaded against not just "gangsta" rap (the scare quotes are hers), but also the "poison" spread by movies, television, and video games. Her record includes not just Gore-like Capitol Hill condemnations of content and agitation for parental warning labels, but also unconstitutional legislation mandating federal punishment for those who sell and market controversial entertainment.

She has consistently backed government intrusions into communications devices, from content-filtering Vchips on television sets to anti-encryption back doors on iPhones. She has established as her litmus test for Supreme Court nominees a commitment to overturn 2010's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which a 5-4 majority overturned on grounds that "the censorship we now confront is vast in its reach" a federally enforced cable TV ban of a documentary film attacking a certain politician named Hillary Rodham Clinton. Several other laws that Clinton championed, including the Communications Decency Act (CDA) and the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), were opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and struck down by the Supreme Court as violations of the First Amendment. And she has grasped the flimsiest reeds of evidence to lay at least partial blame on artistic expression for everything from playground fighting styles to the Columbine massacre to, most infamously, the murder of four U.S. personnel in Libya.

How has Clinton preserved a solid reputation among creative professionals despite such a shaky record on speech? Largely because the industries in her critical crosshairs--Hollywood, Silicon Valley, gaming--lean overwhelmingly Democratic, and Democrats care more about defeating Republicans and defending core progressive issues than having to fend off sporadic state meddling into their workplaces. On November 19, the same day the technology-policy website Techdirt complained in a headline that "Hillary Clinton Joins The 'Make Silicon Valley Break Encryption' Bandwagon," The Washington Post reported that the presidential candidate's two biggest sources of campaign cash thus far were the technology and communications industries. And Clinton's biggest donor over the years? Haim Saban (after whom the Brookings forum at the beginning of this article is named), an Israeli-American rock musician who made his first billion from co-creating Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a children's series that the then--first lady lambasted in 1996 as "one of the most violent television programs on television today."

The political press, which itself leans heavily left of center, often glosses over Clinton's more controversial free speech remarks and initiatives in favor of focusing on the political context in which they're made. During her October 2015 testimony in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, for example, she issued the remarkable claim that the murdered cartoonists of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo "sparked" their own assassinations by drawing caricatures of Mohammed--the free expression equivalent of blaming rape victims for wearing short skirts. Yet the ensuing news coverage was almost all about how the presidential contender stoically parried gotchas from a hostile GOP. "Hillary's Best Week Yet," ran the next-day headline in Politico. "The once-beleaguered candidate looks like a frontrunner again."

Clinton's wary approach toward free speech is based on three long-held beliefs, each of them highly contestable. The first is that media consumers, especially children, are hapless vessels into which manipulators pump propaganda, thereby dictating behavior. As she asserted to public radio broadcaster Diane Rehm in 1996, "The media, more than any other single institution in our society, has affected how children are raised and how they see themselves and what they think of their futures." The second is a lack of faith that the marketplace, in the absence of government pressure, is capable of solving, or even rendering obsolete, the problems she finds so vexing. The third is that the government itself can find--or order the private sector to develop--magic-bullet solutions to complex technical challenges. At the December 19 Democratic presidential debate, for example, Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like project" to give law enforcement the ability to penetrate encryption, two decades after her husband's very similar effort to mandate an encryption-defeating Clipper Chip in electronic devices was revealed to be (in the recent words of one of its designers) "an expensive, embarrassing fiasco."

Online bettors continue to treat Hillary Clinton as the overwhelming favorite to win the presidency; she's at 56 percent to Donald Trump's 16 percent as of late December, according to Predictlt. At a time when 51 percent of college students favor speech codes (according to an October Yale poll) and when noted law professors such as Eric Posner are writing columns with headlines like "ISIS Gives Us No Choice but to Consider Limits on Speech," it's worth examining how someone with Clinton's long and worrying track record might impact the legal and cultural climate for American free expression if elected to run the executive branch of the United States government.

'If I Could Do One Thing to Help Children in Our Country, It Would Be to Change What They See in the Media'

The most famous anti-Hollywood moment at a major-party political convention was Pat Buchanan's tub-thumping"Cultural War" speech of 1992, in which the Republican runner-up criticized among many other modern ailments "the raw sewage of pornography that pollutes our popular culture" and posited that "Clinton and Clinton are on the other side" of this fundamental divide. What's much less remembered is that Hillary Clinton herself slammed the entertainment industry in not one but two Democratic National Convention addresses.

"Right now there are parents questioning a popular culture that glamorizes sex and violence, smoking and drinking, and teaches children that the logos on their clothes are more valued than the generosity in their hearts," Clinton lamented in 1996. "I've listened to parents distressed about a culture that too often glorifies violence," she reiterated in 2000. "Why can't all of us--including the media--give parents more control over what their children see on TV, the movies, the Internet, and video games?"

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