Al Gore: Ban Free Speech, Just Like Guns, To Save the Planet
by Daniel Greenfield – December 22, 2023
While most people forgot about Al Gore a decade ago, the 75-year-old environmental tycoon with a net worth in the hundreds of millions (also a former vice president) has doubled down on his flavor of green fascism in the name of saving the planet from everyone but himself.
Gore is making $2 million a month from his “green investment firm” which has been having some problems. Its assets fell from $39 billion to $30 billion and its biggest fund suffered a 28% decline. And investors may be rethinking whether a firm that pays Gore $2 million a month so it can claim it’s saving the planet by buying Microsoft, Amazon and Adidas stocks is worth it.
But Gore is keeping busy. At COP28, the UN climate summit, he demanded that voting rules be changed so that a majority of countries, rather than a full consensus of nations, could impose mandates on the United States and oil-producing nations. That means a bunch of third world countries would have veto power over our entire economy. Good for them, really bad for us.
Fresh off insulting the Saudis and the UAE ($100 million of Gore’s money came from Qatar, a foe of both, linked to Hamas which used his failed leftist cable network, Current TV, as a springboard for its failed terrorist cable network, Al Jazeera America), he decided to also go to war against freedom of speech and the internet.
Despite inventing the internet, Gore showed up to a Bloomberg Green event to rant about “algorithms”. Algorithms are not, despite what some Gore fans (all 12 of them) think, named after him, and it was pretty clear that the elderly belligerent massage enthusiast was not too clear about what they were either. But in the traditional fashion of leftists wanting to ban something by comparing it to Hitler or AR-15s, he went with the assault algorithm analogy.
“If you have social media that is dominated by algorithms that pull people down these rabbit holes that are a bit like pitcher plants, these algorithms, they are the digital equivalent of AR-15s,” Gore ranted. “They ought to be banned, they really ought to be banned. It’s an abuse of the public forum.”
(But not the kind of rabbit holes that convince people that the planet is going to blow up unless they invest a lot of money in Al Gore’s fund to save the planet by buying Amazon stocks.)
Gore was blathering about algorithms because they provide a legal argument for censorship. Conservatives are concerned about social media algorithms censoring them while leftists complain that social media algorithms aren’t doing enough censoring. When taking Chinese money during his vice presidency, Gore had claimed that there was “no controlling legal authority”, but like most leftists, he’d like there to be a controlling legal authority for speech.
Toward the end of his spiel, the old tobacco salesman turned planet-saver got to his real point.
“These devices are the enemies of self-government, and they’re the enemies of democracy. We need reforms for both democracy and capitalism, both sets of reforms are possible,” he said.
Leftists have spent 7 years howling that democracy is under threat. Everything they do is in defense of democracy. When they rig elections, criminalize political dissent and terrorize opponents, it’s because they’re trying to save democracy from “authoritarianism”.
(And sometimes you have to ‘authoritarianize’ the global village in order to democratize it.)
On stage at a forum funded by a billionaire and to an audience of like-minded elites, Al Gore argued that democracy, like capitalism, needs to be reformed. There’s something wrong with democracy, much as there is with capitalism, and the thing that’s wrong with it is that there’s too much of the wrong kind of speech. The First Amendment needs to go, just like the Second Amendment, because we can’t just have people owning AR-15s or opening their mouths.
Al Gore’s fortune came from promising to reform capitalism by making it “sustainable”. What he actually did was be a very well compensated front man for an ex-Goldman Sachs exec named David Blood (he has joked about naming the firm ‘Blood and Gore’, but that might have been too much on the money in more ways than one) to put a green label on noted environmental stocks like Microsoft and Amazon. Instead of people just buying whatever stocks they wanted, they would invest in an ESG fund that would promise the stocks are politically the ‘right kind’.
Speech works the same way. Making speech sustainable will require ending this anarchic situation where anyone can say whatever they think. There will be guidelines and an approved list of things you can say. Perhaps there may be a 7-day waiting period for some kinds of controversial speech. The really dangerous forms of “assault speech” will have to be banned for the good of the public and the planet. The Founding Fathers had never owned an AR-15 or had access to the internet and so the 1st and 2nd amendments were never meant to apply to them.
If people are free to say whatever they want, they might recollect the time that the noted doomsday prophet for profit warned that “there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
That was in 2009.
Al Gore may have a poor grasp of ice and the internet, but he does understand crisis. The power to denounce something as dangerous invents a crisis that allows the government to step in, gate it off and limit access to the right sorts of people. Like Al Gore and his political allies.
And there’s nothing Al Gore knows better than how to pound the podium and declare a crisis.
The ‘Al-gore-rithms’ that Al Gore would like to see imposed would replace the AR-15s of free speech with the water guns of approved speech, and the pollution of popular speech for the unpopular sustainable green speech certified by the experts and the elites of the ruling class.
Free speech is the enemy of self-government and democracy, Gore claims. And so the salvation of self-government and democracy must be totalitarianism. We can’t have democracy or self-government with free speech. Only when the emissions from our mouths are as closely regulated as Gore would like to regulate the emissions from our kitchens and our cars will our self-government be saved from our selves and our democracy from the ‘demos’.
Al Gore wants to save democracy the way he saved the planet. But who will save free speech and the planet from totalitarians who promise to save the things that they want to control?
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
