I have never spoken to someone on the radio, concerned that what they were saying would jeopardize their personal safety, until Tuesday.
My co-host Alex Nester and I interviewed a young Venezuelan man, Christian Coruzo, who currently resides in Venezuela’s capital city, Caracas. After I read an intriguing article he published on the conservative news site Breitbart, titled “My Socialist Hell: 20 years of Decay in Venezuela”, I reached out to him on Twitter and invited him on to our radio show, “American View.”
Though criminal charges for political speech may seem rare in America today, Coruzo warns Americans of what can happen when a nation embraces collective government action.
At the time of the call, Coruzo didn’t have running water. Rather than take a risk and use the unreliable phone lines, he called us via Skype after he manually wired his Internet to ensure a safe connection.
Coruzo was just eleven-years old when Hugo Chavez and the socialists came to power. Since then, he watches his home transform from a wealthy, oil-rich South American country into a tyrannical impoverished nightmare.
His mother, once a doctor easily capable of providing for her family, died in 2018 of cancer as she did not have the means to seek treatment. Chemotherapy, he explained, was simply unattainable in their socialist medicine system, even for a doctor to receive.
Today, Coruzo takes to the Internet to mock the system that robbed him and his family of their livelihood. It doesn’t come without risk. Hate speech laws, Coruzo explained, are often used to jail suspected critics of the regime. But Coruzo takes to Twitter anyway.
His Twitter bio self-describes him as a “professional breadline doer.” He, like countless other Venezuelans I found through his profile, write and retweet sly memes that criticize the government without overtly drawing attention to themselves.
“I always say that all my jokes are cries for help,” Coruzo told me in our radio interview. “I suppose the last thing I have that the government can’t take away from me is my sense of humor. It’s the only way I can cope. It’s been a quite difficult 20 years.”
When not online, Coruzo raises his younger brother because his mother no longer can.
“I just want this all to be over and for my brother to have a normal life,” Coruzo said, “because that’s the last thing I promised my mother I would do.”
Coruzo’s words naturally evoke empathy but for Americans, they can also evoke a sense of thankfulness that the same oppression does not exist in this country.
Unfortunately, oppressed political speech is no longer touted exclusively by a ruling class thousands of miles away.
In recent weeks, advocacy for censored speech continue to gain momentum. Democratic presidential candidate and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., led the call for Twitter to shut down President Trump’s Twitter account. Another candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., did not join Harris’ call for a ban of Trump on Twitter. Instead, she has repeatedly called for Facebook to censor the President’s campaign advertisements.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page defended Mark Zuckerberg amidst the widespread attacks he has faced for announcing he will not selectively ban campaign advertisements, and would instead strive to make Facebook more politically impartial.
Facebook, Twitter, and Google have all been accused by the right of censoring conservative voices, such as PragerU, which has had over 80 videos removed from Facebook and YouTube — owned by Google — in recent years.
In the most recent Democratic presidential debate, Harris accused the President of motivating mass shootings through his tweets:
“Look at the fact that the shooter in El Paso was influenced by the words that the President of the United States, unfiltered, uses through this medium on Twitter. He has 65 million followers,” Harris said.
Harris did not call for the removal of her Democratic colleague, Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., from Twitter or Facebook, despite the fact that a Facebook follower, supporter and volunteer of his 2016 campaign shot a Republican congressman and four others at a Congressional baseball game in 2017.
The hypocrisy of Harris’s statements reveals what is evidenced around the world where countries censor speech: No arbiter of speech can fairly regulate censorship because speech is far too powerful a force not to be exploited.
Earlier this week in Australia, several major newspapers, tabloids, and magazines ran blacked out front pages to illustrate their disapproval for a government they believe has gone too far in censoring speech on the basis of national security.
In the United Kingdom, the New York Times reported that in 2017, the government arrested nine people a day for speech violations.
The United Kingdom has several codes that prohibit speech. The Public Order Act of 1986 states illegal speech includes “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior that causes, or is likely to cause another person harassment, alarm or distress.”
In other words, any language considered offensive by a third party could be criminal.
Other European countries have their own codes. Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland, are just a few of the many countries in Europe that have speech restrictions. While most of them target hate speech, no two countries agree on the exact same definition.
For instance in Poland, the government considers it illegal and hate speech to suggest that any Poles were remotely responsible for the Holocaust.
Those that support speech censorship as a way to better their democracy, including Harris, suffer from one of two ills: Either they fail to understand human nature’s universal capacity for self-interest or they know censorship’s true purpose but just don’t want to admit it.
In Venezuela, despotism has come to fruition. There, the ends of censored speech are obvious. Americans should pay attention to how their rulers surmounted their power and continue to sustain it.
“I understand that things aren’t perfect and might never be perfect, but be careful what you wish for,” Coruzo told me on the radio. “Just look at what happened to us: We were sold this socialist dream of things being better – a utopia, and look at what evils have been wrought upon us. We have lost so much, it’s incalculable.”
When I asked Coruzo what message he wished to convey above all else, he offered a warning.
“They will try to sell it to you as democratic-socialism, or your own version of socialism, but it’s always deep down it’s the same thing.”
Ben Dietderich is a George Washington Fellow and a senior studying political economy.