Many on the American left share Putin’s attitude toward free speech

The news that Elon Musk had acquired 9.2 percent of Twitter triggered outrage notable even for a platform that seemingly exists for no other reason than for people to express their outrage. People who have spent much of the past few years demanding that those they disagree with be booted from various social media suddenly discovered a commitment to free speech and a threat to this from Musk:

In fact, it wasn’t ‘free speech’ these hypocrites feared for, but speech they approve of. Max Boot — reliably one of the wrongest men in America — stated this explicitly:

Strangely perhaps, considering his habit of branding anyone who disagrees with him an apologist for Vladimir Putin’s regime, Max Boot’s view on free speech is indistinguishable from that held by the regime of Vladimir Putin. Take a look at the video below:

The whole bit is worth watching, but this passage is especially pertinent:

We had two periods in our history with limited or no censorship; from 1905 to 1917 – we remember how that ended – and during perestroika and the following 90s – we remember how that ended, it ended with the country’s collapse. No big nation can exist without control over information. Those who made us add to our constitution that censorship is prohibited, they understood that very well.

Even while accusing all and sundry of being operatives for or sympathizers with Putin’s regime, many on the American left — and I include Max Boot in that, as he may well himself these days — would wholeheartedly agree with Margarita Simonyan‘s take on government control of information. Is this ‘horseshoe theory‘ in action?