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Free Speech Is Cancelled

In the circles I run in online, it was pretty big news this week that Western Rifle Shooters was unpersoned by WordPress.

The “reason” was an unspecified violation of the terms of service. The TOS for most sites is so broad and vague that you can be sent into outer darkness for any or no reason at all. John Wilder has a pretty solid post on the latest act of censorship by Big Tech: Free Speech: Endangered Species – WRSA is Down. You can still find WRSA on Gab.

Make no mistake, this is censorship. WRSA mostly re-posted stuff from other sites, some was a little naughty for sure but so what? WordPress has an enormous marketshare of the online blogging content and it turns out that as we all got sucked in to “free” platforms, we were really ensuring that our free speech can be held hostage in the future. As WordPress, Blogger, Facebook and Twitter took over the public square and did so for “free”, we all got sucked into this new world of “social media” that replaced the traditional forms of media.

Then we found out that when we turn over the public square to a handful of politically monolithic giant tech companies, those companies get to decide what speech is allowed or not. As a bonus they get libertarians running cover for them trampling the First Amendment with their “muh private company” rhetoric. As the story of Gab has proven, these monopolies work in concert to suppress any competition. That is not “free enterprise”, it is a hijacking of the free speech that is necessary to a free people.

The 2016 election proved one thing to the Left: letting the American people discuss and debate ideas in the public square means people making decisions they don’t like. The last four years have seen a steady erosion of the ability of normal people to engage in open and free expression of ideas. While a handful of leftist channels have been axed, for the most part what we have seen is one right-wing voice after another silenced.

It is clearly accelerating as we approach the election. While most people are focused on the “pandemic” and the rioting in our cities, the Left remembers that we have an election coming and they intend to win with a dementia-riddled pervert who isn’t going to last his full term and a far-left VP who will become President. Facebook won’t even let you share articles from Vdare and Unz.com. Even the share button gives you this message

There is lots of stuff on Facebook I find abusive but Facebook isn’t banning those links. What is “abusive” about Vdare and Unz is content that questions the prevailing narrative. When people are permitted to ask questions, they annoyingly tend to come up with answers that the Powers That Be don’t like and then they do stuff like not vote for who they are supposed to vote for.

The push to suppress free speech is not restricted to social media. In neighboring Ohio, the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus proposed a resolution to declare the wrong opinion to be a disease.

Ohio Democrats push to declare racism a public health crisis

As usual the Republicans in Ohio are tripping over themselves to not appear racist and GOP Senate President Larry Obhof is going to have an actual meeting with the Black Caucus and treat their suggestion as if it is serious.

If you have a couple of synapses firing, there is an obvious question here. How is “racism”, an amorphous term that means something different to every person you ask and at best measures an attitude, a “public health crisis”? How is it a health issue at all?

It isn’t and no one is pretending it is. It serves a different purpose that has nothing to do with the public health.

What it would do is provide a pretext for stifling free speech and neutering the First Amendment by labeling speech that runs counter to the accepted narrative as no longer free expression but a matter of “public health”.

We have already seen this used to great effect by declaring that we have a public health crisis in the form of a pandemic, that while it is a serious virus worthy of serious precautions, it is not the Black Death. The truth of the coronavirus is somewhere between “It’s just the flu” and “It’s the end of the world”. That hasn’t stopped the Powers That Be from declaring that Americans cannot be allowed to attend church. The freedom to worship is central to the American character, so much so that it is codified as inviolable in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That has been understood for over 200 years of the United States as a nation.

Now we have a “pandemic” and that part of the First Amendment goes out the window. Of course you can loot and riot because that is “speech” that is protected by the First Amendment. Church? Nope. According to Hizzoner, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, you don’t get to go to church or open the business you have spent a lifetime building but you sure can go march in the streets to eulogize a drug-addled career violent criminal, and engage in a little “justice” in the form of stealing Air Jordans and iPads.

After explaining the phase rollout of New York City’s reopening, he continued, “When you see a nation, an entire nation simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seeded in 400 years of American racism, I’m sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services. This is something that’s not about which side of the spectrum you’re on. It’s about a deep, deep American crisis… Sorry guys, there’s a world outside New York City. So we’re dealing with this.”

See how this works. The First Amendment can be selectively set aside based on a “health crisis”. We have a “pandemic” so you can’t go to church to worship. 

Now think about how that would apply to free speech. Apparently it is “racist” to point out that in spite of the marchers and signs and vandalism, blacks are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violent crime and especially where white people are the victims. Sure it is an easily verifiable fact that this is true but it is “racist” to mention it. For now, you can still say that sort of thing in public. You might lose your job (thanks once again to the noble private free enterprise system) and you might get unfriended on social media but you can say it.

But what if “racism” is a “public health crisis”? Now all of a sudden, saying “racist” stuff isn’t free speech anymore. We already established that the First Amendment can be set aside in the case of the freedom of religious worship because of a “public health crisis”, so why not free expression on political matters? Who is to say that engaging in First Amendment protected speech can’t be suppressed for the greater “public health”?

See where this is going? Deciding that you can keep people from worshiping as they see fit for the sake of the “public health” sets the groundwork for telling people they can’t engage in certain kinds of free speech for the sake of the “public health”.

Sure, but who is going to enforce it? The cops aren’t going to go around arresting people for saying naughty stuff. Right?

Think again.

The death of George Floyd, a drug-addled career violent criminal who died in police custody while resisting arrest as he was being arrested for engaging in his only marketable skill, criminal behavior, has morphed into both general chaos and increasing calls to defund and essentially eliminate the police as they exist and function today. Only in America in 2020 would the response to lawlessness, violence, murder, vandalism, arson and looting be to reduce policing. The Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, has decided to slash $150,000,000 from the police budget and “reinvest” that money in the “black community” and “communities of color”.

That is a fancy way of saying: taking the tax dollars of working white people in L.A. and instead of using it to protect the citizens and property, giving it to “the community”. How would that look in practice? We already know. Investing in the “community” typically means giving money to racially based social activist groups so they can sponsor midnight basketball leagues no one attends but more importantly provides employment to blacks and mestizos who are clever enough to figure out how to monetize white guilt. Those community funds never actually help the community apart from lining the pocket of a few black clergy and “community activists”. Why would they want to fix anything when they depend on social collapse in their community to keep the gravy train rolling?

Meanwhile more and more leftist activists are calling for the police to be “defunded”, police departments disbanded and the police replaced with some new enforcement agency. Somali Ilhan Omar, longing for her own homeland where warlords “police” the country, is leading the charge….

Remember that Omar fled from a nation without a functioning law enforcement system to come here but she seems hellbent on transforming America into the same sort of place her family fled from.

For reference, this is what community policing looks like in Ilhan Omar’s country…

Our new America is gonna be great!

A lot of people are like “Yeah, the cops are all pigs! We need to replace them!”. I am not a “thin blue line” guy either, and I have spoken out against militarizing the police, realizing that the police will be the ones sent to disarm us if/when it comes to that. I recognize that the police force is made up of people and like all people there are good ones and bad ones. Not to mention that because of the nature of the work, the police tends to attract people who are inclined to use violence when needed. Really meek people don’t become cops.

On the other hand, we send the cops to do the ugly work that unfortunately has to be done. These guys are risking their lives every time they clock in for the day because we have an awful lot of people in this country who are violent and inclined to criminality. Sometimes you can solve a conflict with talk and patience but sometimes the situation requires a forceful and violent response. People are violent, people are crazy, people are a threat to others, people are hopped up on drugs.

Some well meaning but confused people think that we will disband the police and create a new community based model and everything will be better because they think the police are the main problem.

They are not.

The main problem can be found in the millions of people in America who would rather steal or sell drugs instead of getting a job, the people who lack the self-control to not start shooting over a disagreement, the people who deal with relationship issues with violence. Just as you will find a certain percentage of cops who are bad people in a pool of 700,000 cops, you are going to find bad people in the general population. If one half of one percent of people are bad people (and that is being generous) in a nation of 350 million people, that works out to almost 2 million bad people. Those millions of bad people are what make the police necessary.

People don’t commit crime because we have police, we have police because people commit crimes.

Minus the police we will not have a peaceful utopia. In fact, we will still have an armed civil authority with the power to arrest people. They just will have a different focus. James Kirkpatrick of Vdare puts it succinctly….

The Left doesn’t find the police useful because most cops are too concerned with things like law and order, and not with the real problem in America of racism and white supremacy. They want police more like what they have in England where the cops ignore rampant and systemic rape of white teen-aged girls by Muslims and instead kick down the doors of people saying naughty things on the internet or teaching their girlfriend’s dog to do a Roman salute.

Their strategy is the same as with the American people. If the American people are too much trouble and won’t do what they are told, you simply replace the American people with new “Americans” who are easier to control. If the cops won’t enforce speech codes, just get a new kind of cop. Some are calling for requiring all cops to get a 4 year degree, for no reason other than to marinate them in leftist propaganda for four years.

This is what libertarians cheer-leading the disbanding of the police don’t seem to get. They aren’t going to get less government intrusion, they will get more. As usual, libertarians live in a fantasy world. A nation without cops is chaos. Maybe not where I live but I can’t keep the urban diversity from reaching where I live so it becomes my problem.

On our current trajectory, the First and Second Amendment are going to be meaningless no later than halfway through the 2020s. Free speech is going to be a relic of the past and speech codes will be the norm with new and improved police departments staffed by gender studies majors with badges and guns.

The problem with free speech is it allows people with unapproved opinions to express those opinions and that leads to interruptions in the glorious path toward a perfect future. Obviously only certain people have opinions that are worth hearing so the solution is to make unapproved speech illegal and give the oddballs and weirdos in our society badges and guns to enforce these new benevolent laws.

Men will always have authority over men, it is simply a question of who controls the authority. In the near future it will be the fruitcakes who censor people on social media. You are going to have a choice to make, keep your mouth shut and hope they ignore you or refuse to be silenced and prepare for the consequences.

6 Comments

  1. Anonymous

    You tell it like it is, Arthur, but you must know where that is going to land you. I hope that when the re-education camps are populated, I get to meet you and shake your hand, one last time, before we are both 'assimilated'.

    Good work, my friend.

  2. Pingback:Gulags Are A Go – Dissident Thoughts

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