Yesterday, I read Bruce Bialosky’s article on Professor Jonathan Turley’s book on the state of free speech in America. This is such an important topic, I thought I would add a line or two about my experience in politics on the importance of free speech and free markets.
This topic has increased importance over the last week, in light of the recent decision by the California Coastal Commission to deny a permit to Elon Musk to allow him to launch rockets from Vandenburg Air Force Base. The Air Force has been launching from their location there for years, so there’s not a lot of issues about the effects of those launches on the coast or the environment. That leads to the question as to why the Coastal Commission would deny that permit. Interestingly enough, they denied it because Musk supports Donald Trump. On what planet where the protection of freedom of speech and association is an important value can such a decision be appropriate?
I will relate one short story about my political activities before I held office (an experience that drove me to seek office). I lived in a town I lived where I opposed the local mayor on a regular basis. I simply disagreed with her policies, and I spoke out about it. One day, I got a call from one of my clients saying he could no longer work with me. The next day I got a call from three other clients saying the same thing. I asked them why? They said this mayor said they would never get a project approved by the city council if I was their lawyer. Since their business was real estate development, that would bankrupt them. This mayor tried to destroy my business by using her power to approve projects because I opposed her.
A few months later, I was visited by the FPPC who wanted to investigate a city council campaign I had lost two years earlier. I found out that the mayor had called the local state senator, who happened to be chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee in the California State Senate, to launch that investigation. Now this mayor was threatening my freedom with government investigations because she didn’t like what I was saying. I had enough. I ran against that state senator in the next election. I lost that one, but ultimately chased him out of office 4 years later. I also helped a friend run against the mayor, and my friend defeated her. Thank God for a free society.
But it made me think, and the experience helped me develop one of my rules of politics: People will die in defense of freedom, but very few will go bankrupt in the defense of that same freedom. When you are dead, you don’t face the consequences of the fight for freedom. When you have to go home to explain to your family that you have to file bankruptcy because you believed that a politician was acting contrary to the good of society, and that politician used his power to destroy your business, your wife will look at you and say “Great, Thanks. Next time shut up.” Of what value is freedom of speech if the government can take away your business because they don’t like your political stands or the words you say to defend your country, state or local area. Quite frankly, very little.
This is what is happening to Musk right now. When Musk fought unionization at Tesla, Lorena Gonzalez, then a state senator and now the head of the California Labor Federation, said, publicly, “F**K Elon Musk.” California State Government has targeted him ever since, not because he is danger to society, but because he won’t kowtow to their power and control. The SpaceX decision is only the latest example of that authoritarian use of government power.
He’s not the only one. I once meet and talked with Reed Hastings, when he was just starting Netflix. At that time, he was a supporter of charter schools and school choice in general, and we had a common interest in that. He was brutalized by Democrats and forced to capitulate, or lose his business. He is now a servant of these masters and his business is no longer at risk, unless, of course, he steps out of line and donates to any school choice causes. Look at what is happening to Rudy Guiliani, Mike Lindell and John Eastman, all of their futures and their businesses being attacked because they support Donald Trump.
It is evil. It is undermining freedom in this country and it is all happening because we have increased the power of government over people’s economic lives for years. The more government intrudes on the private property rights and economic liberties of people under their control, the more those people shut up and become subservient to those in power.
The Democrats are the architects of this authoritarianism, yet too many Californians seem willing to hand these architects the power to destroy their freedom, simply because they disagree with the political opinions and speech of those that the Democrats in power wish to destroy. What the Democrats are doing is wrong and evil, but if we lose our freedom, we will have only ourselves to blame, because we are allowing to keep the power to destroy their opponents.