The Global War on Free Speech

Sep 06, 2024

Issue #187

One of the political values I picked up from my father was respect for free speech. Occasionally he would say, “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The fact that he had already put his life at risk to defend that right by serving as an Army officer made me realize how vital it was, and I later followed in his footsteps.

Free speech is a natural right, so the First Amendment doesn't provide the right but instead is designed to prevent the government from taking it away. The First Amendment—together with the Second—is the ultimate guarantor of all other rights. If you aren't free to say that “A is A,” then none of your other natural rights are enforceable.

Free speech is the verbal (or written) pursuit of the Scientific Method. It's what allows us to search for and come closer to the Truth. It allows us to find error, uncover falsehoods and discover new ideas and better ways of doing things. Without free speech, our civilizational progress could come to a halt, and we could waste our precious lives for decades laboring under false information, incorrect assumptions or bad ideas.

Even if what people say is a lie or not entirely correct, it makes it more likely that we'll come closer to the Truth because it provides a crucible in which theories and hypotheses can be tested, which (if they survive the scrutiny) makes them more robust.

For example, have you ever played one of those team building games with a group where you're told that you were just in a plane crash or stranded in the desert, and you're given a list of items you have (or would like to have), and as a group you have to decide what to do and which items to take with you? What if the leader of the team said, “OK guys, we're not going to talk about X because it's been debunked by fact-checkers, and you can't mention Y because that would make you a Climate Denier, and you're not allowed to say Z because that might hurt someone's feelings.” Would the team do better or worse than a team without that gag order?

Where would the world be if the ideas of the following people had not been able to overcome censorship and persecution: Jesus, Copernicus, Galileo, Luther, Paine, Gandhi, the White Rose, Bonhoffer, Assange, and Greenwald/Snowden.

Only tyrants, liars and those who know that their schemes and arguments could not withstand scrutiny want to censor the speech of other people. Those who mean no harm and are confident in the validity of their ideas and reasoning have nothing to fear from criticism. Consequently, it should be no surprise that throughout history, the greater the censorship, the greater the tyranny. For example, this 2019 article by the Committee to Protect Journalists lists the ten most censored countries, which include North Korea, China, Vietnam, Iran, and Cuba.

BTW, I recently came across the Justitia Free Speech Index, which measures the support for free speech in 33 countries. I have added it to my country scores, as I'm sure that countries that have the most support for free speech will tend to have the highest equity returns over time.

Even in the Land of the Free, free speech got off to a very rocky start less than seven years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights when President John Adams signed the Sedition Act into law in 1798, which criminalized criticism of him. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln waged another war on anti-war, anti-administration and anti-recruitment newspapers. Soon after the U.S. entered World War I, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917, “one of the most blatant assaults on the First Amendment in our nation’s history.”

So this is an ancient and never-ending battle.

In recent years, censorship exploded during the COVID-19 “pandemic.” The government and its Legacy Media and Big Tech partners in crime told us that all of the following were true:

COVID was not a man-made disease that had been developed in a lab.
COVID was extremely dangerous, including for children.
Masks and social distancing would help stop its spread, and these recommendations were based on science.
COVID gene therapies were “vaccines,” which were safe and effective and would prevent infection.
No other treatments were effective, especially ~~Ivermectin~~ horse paste.

Anyone who questioned or disagreed with these claims was shadow banned, demonetized, deplatformed, censored, “fact checked,” “debunked,” fired, or stripped of their professional license. Recently Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg admitted, “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”

Of course, we now know that all of the claims above were brazen lies. If dissenters had been allowed to ask questions and present their information (which was usually based on sound reasoning and actual scientific research, as opposed to the social distancing mandates that were forced on Americans, which Dr. Fauci now admits “just sort of appeared” and were not based on science), it would have prevented the deaths of millions and the destruction of the lives and livelihoods of millions more.

Just before the 2020 election, the New York Post was locked out of its Twitter account for reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop, which 51 former U.S. intelligence officials said was a Russian disinformation campaign. The rest of the Legacy Media refused to report on the laptop story. We now know that that letter itself was a disinformation campaign orchestrated by Biden campaign advisor (now Secretary of State) Antony Blinken. I still need to do a deep dive into this, but the Twitter Files exposed collusion between the federal government and Twitter to censor critics of the regime.

After the January 6 protest, Big Tech apparently colluded to suddenly take down Parler, a social media app that was popular with conservatives. I know that a number of very curious facts about that day have since been revealed, though I still need to read a book or two about it.

In recent months, Britain has been arresting, prosecuting and jailing citizens who criticize the government for its mass importation of immigrants from countries that have nothing in common with British citizens, or who complain about the many violent crimes these foreigners have committed. This is unprecedented for the country that served as the cradle of liberty when the Magna Carta (or Great Charter of Freedoms) was signed there over 800 years ago. It is also alarming since Britain is usually about a decade ahead of the U.S.

In recent weeks, the global push to censor critics of tyranny, war, inflation and mass immigration has gone into overdrive. Pavel Durov, the CEO and co-founder of the popular secure messaging app Telegram, was arrested in France and essentially charged with insufficient moderation, which could land him in prison for up to a decade. Ironically, in 2014 he fled his native Russia “after refusing to cave to the Kremlin’s censorship demands at his previous company.” His real crime is providing a way for people to communicate without the government being able to see what they say.

As an aside, I believe that Europe is finished. For years now it has been committing cultural (in addition to financial) suicide by deliberately importing many millions of people who are truly alien to the European way of life. I spent well over three years of my life defending western Europe from the Warsaw Pact, thus ensuring their right to liberty, including free speech. I put my life at risk and endured many hardships that civilians will never know. If I knew that Europe would later voluntarily and inexplicably self-immolate like a Buddhist monk at an anti-war protest, I never would have done so.

The censorship push has also targeted Elon Musk and his X platform. The EU warned Musk about the “amplification of potentially harmful content” before his interview with Trump. In less than 24 hours, 25 million people had listened to the entire interview. Now that's a lot of harm!

A Brazilian judge shut down the X platform—the most downloaded app in the country—after it refused to censor or “disclose private information regarding users that are political enemies of the judge.” Michael Shellenberger wrote, “The censorship and totalitarianism happening [in Brazil] is a trial run for what they want to do [in America].” Keith Ellison—the former Deputy Chair of the DNC and Governor Walz's Attorney General—sent a thank you message to Brazil. Former Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich has called for Musk's arrest, which is like something out of Atlas Shrugged.

In 2019, Kamala “famously branded social media companies as purveyors of 'hate,' and 'misinformation,' vowing to hold them responsible for content posted on their platforms.” Tim Walz recently said, “There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” Of course, he will volunteer to define what those terms include. As David Sacks wrote, “Donald Trump has declared his support for free speech whereas Kamala Harris has said nothing and can be expected to continue her administration's policy of tacit approving of creeping censorship.”

Since Musk bought Twitter, the platform has exploded into a fun and freewheeling haven for free speech where you can find information that you'll never see in the Legacy Media. Much of the content is humorous or satirical, which is extremely effective criticism, since in order for something to be funny, it must contain an element of truth. This is why Leftists from Hillary Clinton to Xi Jinping despise satire and humorous memes, which can be posted by anyone at any time and spread to millions around the world in minutes.

In conclusion, RFK Jr. once again found himself directly over the target when he noted that this election is about free speech. If we lose the right to say that the empress may have some Chuck Taylors but she has no clothes, we will be doomed to a dark age of tyranny.

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The Global War on Free Speech

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