Arizona House Democrat Cesar Aguilar called free speech “very dangerous” at a legislative hearing Tuesday when confronting an expert witness about why the First Amendment doesn’t allow censorship.
As the Gateway Pundit reported, the new Arizona House Ad Hoc Committee on Oversight, Accountability, and Big Tech held a hearing on September 5, to investigate free speech violations by big tech companies and government officials like former Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.
This new committee was formed after illegitimate governor Katie Hobbs was caught censoring her critics and accurate reports of fraud in the 2020 election on Twitter. This is just one of the many ways they cheated in all recent elections!
Psychologist and founder of the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), Dr. Robert Epstein, and Senior Counsel for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, James Kerwin, both gave presentations to the House Members during the Comittee’s investigation to develop legislation to hold these crooks accountable.
Epstein gave a presentation to the Committee titled “The Impact of Big Tech’s Election Interference and How We Can Stop It.”
As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, The Maricopa County Republican Committee (MCRC) announced a partnership with Dr. Epstein’s AIBRT nonprofit, which is undertaking a massive investigation into Google’s election interference through biased search algorithms and content promotion. Arizona was one of the states where his team researched election interference by “Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and more,” Epstein said in an interview, leading up to the 2022 midterm election. These platforms likely influenced millions of voters in the 2022 election.
In the summer of 2020, Epstein also testified as an expert to Congress that Google was manipulating voters “on a massive scale.” He is renowned for his research into search manipulation, government collusion, and election interference by tech companies.
The Gateway Pundit reported that Kari Lake later gave a powerful speech to the Committee about her stolen election, where 60% of voting machines failed Republican Election Day voters, and demanded they take action to protect free speech.
While giving expert testimony on the subject of “Free Speech Rights and Government Influence over Social Media Platforms,” James Kerwin was confronted with very leading questions by Democratic State Rep. Cesar Aguilar. Aguilar seemingly tried to get Kerwin to admit that government censorship is necessary to prevent what he believes is “false information,” which he later called “dangerous.”
Kerwin, a First Amendment rights attorney, exposed the obvious stupidity of his question and the unconstitutionality of speech censorship. “I’m worried that that’s the direction that you’re headed with that question,” Kerwin said of Aguilar’s idea that the government should censor speech they decide is false.
This is where Aguilar showed his true colors and said, “I think free speech gets very dangerous.” He argues this because people believe things that he disagrees with. The room laughed at him as he argued for this tyrannical agenda.
They want to censor what they consider “dangerous” free speech, which is really speech they don’t like, under the guise of combatting misinformation.
Arizona House Democrats endorsed this idea on X.
And now we’re listening to an eloquent defense of lying and misinformation on social media as “free speech” and it’s public officials who report the lies who should be in trouble. https://t.co/8ErpzgUroh
— Arizona House Democrats (@AZHouseDems) September 5, 2023
Watch below:
Aguilar: Are you and your organization okay with elected officials giving out false information as freedom of speech?
Kerwin: Elected officials giving out information that’s false? What are you talking about?
Aguilar: false information.
Kerwin: I don’t know what you mean by are we okay with it. I think you might be asking me the question, “if an elected official says something in a speech, maybe on a stump speech, that somebody believes may be false, does that elected official have a free speech right under the First Amendment?”
Aguilar: Yeah.
Kerwin: Well, yes. The United States Constitution does not have an exception for mistaken statements. It does not have an exception, even for lies. That is the case. It is the price that we pay for a free society that sometimes there’s information that goes out that you know, with the omniscience of knowing what exactly is true, what is false, you might say, that’s false. This points out a real problem with this kind of question, I think, is that you are presupposing in this question that you know what is true and what is false, and you’re putting yourself in a position as a government official, deciding what that might be. Especially in the context of something said by a politician or representative of the people, that’s extremely dangerous, and it’s also often mistaken. So not only are you putting yourself in the position of somebody who knows what’s true or false, you wouldn’t be putting yourself in a position of saying, “we can’t trust the American people to take the evidence before them. Rather than countering what I believe is a false statement with what I believe is a true statement, and I’m trusting the American public to figure that out for themselves, we should censor them.” I’m worried that that’s the direction that you’re headed with that question. You can correct me if I am wrong.
Aguilar: So, I sit on the Elections Committee, and this year, there was a number of bills that we produced based on misinformation, and I’ll give you an example: One of the bills was that they wanted to put on a ballot a disclaimer that said that if you turn your ballot in the Friday before election day, it could result in a delayed election, which is completely—it could, I mean it could, which is very possible, but it has not happened in the state of Arizona. In the state of Arizona, the reason why we had a delayed election was because counties did not certify elections. And there was some Republican colleagues of mine who thought that that was true that that’s why we had delayed elections, and there still are people in the public that believe that. And so that’s why I think free speech gets very dangerous.
Via MAAP Real Talk Show on Facebook: