But the dirty little secret is that those who oppose Citizens United are the ones who crave more centralized control over our political process and discourse by powerful institutions.

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Should private citizens be banned from airing documentaries critical of Hillary Clinton before Election Day? 

To most Americans, that's a preposterous question that answers itself.  After all, there's nothing more central to our representative democracy than the 1st Amendment right to support or oppose candidates, or offer information and opinions about them. 

Liberals, however, take a radically different and restrictionist view. 

If that sounds unfair, look no further than how they distort the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision.  Here's how the Supreme Court officially framed the legal question presented: 

In January 2008, appellant Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, released a documentary (hereinafter Hillary) critical of then-Senator Hillary Clinton, a candidate for her party's presidential nomination.  Anticipating that it would make Hillary available on cable television through video-on-demand within 30 days of primary elections, Citizens United produced television ads to run on broadcast and cable television.  Concerned about possible civil and criminal penalties, it sought declaratory and injunctive relief. 

Considering the recent geyser of revelations surrounding Hillary Clinton and governmental endeavors to enable her in recent weeks, the issue seems even more grave in retrospect. 

Fortunately, the Supreme Court by a narrow 5-4 majority protected free speech rather than the bureaucratic desire to censor it. 

Liberals responded histrionically, and to this day employ the term "Citizens United" as epithet and shorthand for powerful corporate interests allegedly controlling our political process.  But the dirty little secret is that those who oppose Citizens United are the ones who crave more centralized control over our political process and discourse by powerful institutions. 

After all, when private citizens' freedom to engage in political speech expands, the power of mainstream media and politicians to control what enters the marketplace of ideas proportionally contracts. 

Sure enough, "curating" private political speech is exactly what Barack Obama advocated in a recent speech, as recounted by Yahoo News: 

Recalling past days when three television channels delivered fact-based news that most people trusted, Obama said democracy requires citizens to be able to sift through lies and distortions.  'We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to,' Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.  'There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world,' Obama added. 

"Truthiness?" 

A "curating function?" 

That's pretty rich from the man who was awarded PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" for his claim that under ObamaCare, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it."  Or how about his "not a smidgen of corruption" whopper regarding IRS targeting of conservative groups? 

There's also the obvious problem that the three television channels Obama fondly recalls included CBS's Dan Rather, who infamously peddled fake documents in an attempt to bring down President George W. Bush. 

Unfortunately, it's not just political authorities seeking centralization and homogenization of political discourse. 

Facebook, for example, apparently did exactly the sort of "curating" that Obama advocated.  It was recently revealed that it instructed so-called "news curators" to manipulate its "trending news" algorithms to stifle conservative perspectives and stories. 

And over at Google's YouTube, as just one other recent example, short educational videos by conservative commentator and radio host Dennis Prager were censored despite the fact that they contained no profanity, graphic violence or other offensive content. 

The simple fact is that powerful liberal political and social forces want fewer voices, not more.  They prefer more centralization and control, not less.  They want less diversity, not more.  They want a narrower marketplace of ideas, not a wider one.  They want to centralize speech, not democratize it. 

And as the ongoing revelations surrounding Hillary Clinton, her governmental enablers and media accomplices show, the last thing America needs is a narrow group of powerful interests "curating" our discourse, limiting our content and imposing their groupthink by limiting the marketplace of voices and ideas. 

So the next time you hear someone criticize Citizens United or attempt to dupe the American electorate with their false populism, keep in mind that they actually seek what they claim to oppose.