Liberals, having lost the battle of ideas because their crummy, corrupt collectivist ideas suck, want to ban our ideas because people are naturally going to choose our ideas over theirs. Well, normal people are, because we know we would pick up the tab for their Utopia. The thing about leftists is that their ideas about the need for command and control over every aspect of human life always presume they will be the ones personally commanding and controlling. You will never meet a young socialist who looks forward to a proletarian career picking up garbage or cleaning toilets.
Here’s the undeniable fact: Liberals are actively pro-censorship. They scoff at this fact because everyone knows that it’s the liberals who are open-minded and us conservatives who seek to muzzle the yearning voices of the masses. But, as you should presume about absolutely everything a liberal says is, this too is a lie.
Liberals love censorship.
They already practice it in Europe. In Britain, you can be arrested for tweeting things, which is yet another cautionary example of why we citizens should never, ever give up our guns.
Liberals still pretend to be for free speech here, but whenever some conservative gets silenced, there’s always a reason why, at the end of the day, it’s okay.
“Oh, it makes the weird, sexually-confused freaks with daddy issues that are the loudest segment of our fourth-tier college’s student body feel unsafe.”
“Oh, it’s okay to ban this because we need to get whatever dark money is out of politics unless it is donated by leftists.”
“Oh, it’s okay because it’s a private company so it can do whatever it wants as long as it’s to our conservative opponents. After all, it’s not like we’re trying to amuse ourselves by forcing some Jesus guy with a bakery to blaspheme.”
The result is always the same, every single time. The liberals will always support a result where the conservative is silenced. Ever. Single. Time. Only their lame excuse changes.
Remember: Controlling all speech – and therefore all thought – is not a sideshow; it is the show.
We need to fight back ruthlessly, because if they get their way they are going to ball-gag us for eternity and, as Pulp Fiction teaches, it never ends well for dudes who get involuntarily ball-gagged.
The free speech issue is huge, but let’s focus here on the tech dictators in Silicon Valley. The great Instapundit, Professor Glenn Reynolds, has a new book on this struggle, The Social Media Upheaval, that you need to read. Social media – the Facetwitstagrams – is today’s public square. More accurately, it is the battleground where the direction of our society will be decided unless and until we get kicked out of it, at which point the battlefield will shift from figurative to literal since perpetual serfdom to our leftist tech overlords is not an option.
These elitists and their minions are on a quest to banish us from our own society. Except there’s no reason why we should become second class subjects just because a bunch of Prius-driving jerks in Scat Francisco are mad at us for knowing which bathroom to use.
The social media folks need to understand that there are only two potential outcomes, and they can choose. Outcome A, our preferred outcome, is that they voluntarily provide open, free forums that everyone can partake of. Option B is that they provide open, free forums that everyone can partake of because we make them do it with litigation, boycotts and crushing regulation imposed via the political actors we control, like red state governments and the federal bureaucracy under President Trump.
Notice that Option C, that they allow us to speak only what is approved by the 23-year old SJW scolds in Twitter’s Department of Thought Policing, is not on the list of options. We should be absolutely willing to utterly destroy Silicon Valley and everything these people have built using every element of our power if they screw with us.
Now, a lot of True Conservatives™ will stand on the Lido Deck and whine about us militant Normals and our unseemly desire to remain free. But if you ask me, any purported “conservative principle” that results in us becoming less free is a pretty crappy principle, and I vote that we not do it.
There is no conservative principle that requires you to acquiesce to being silenced and disenfranchised, and the Fredocon saps pushing that nonsense are doing so because they want you silenced and disenfranchised so they can return to the old days when they enjoyed the measly perks and scraps the liberal elite gave them for being a loyal (and supine) “conservative” opposition that got fat pretending to conserve.
But the cheesy cruise ship of failure and collaboration that was the Weekly Standard has sunk, and we’re not playing that game anymore.
We need to defend all free speech, and we need to also do stop granting liberals exceptions to the free speech principle – a real principle, not an okey-doke. Laura Ingraham bravely and properly stood up against the blocking of several real and alleged conservatives, but got grief from cons like Erick Erickson for including that mouth-breathing dimwit Paul Nehlen. Erick, who I’m friendly with and like, wrongly thought Ingraham should not have stood up for his rights – ironically while on a fascist suspension by Twitter for daring to make a joke about lying fake Indian Elizabeth Warren.
Free speech is hard because some people are morons. Take Paul Nehlan – please. Leftists cry “Wolf!” about “white supremacists,” but that clown actually is one – while undercutting the very concept. One day he stopped pretending to be a conventional, if dull, conservative and started tweeting his moronic racial theories; imagine what the stupidest, lowest-class garbage person you ever had the misfortune to meet might say then multiple it by a factor of ten. I was proud that this un-Christian, un-American waste product “accused” my pal John Cardillo and me of standing with the Jewish people, an honor that makes me prouder than any of my medals.
So, I’m not a fan.
Yet Paul Nehlen must be allowed to speak. Ingraham was right to defend this dummy’s rights, because free speech is meaningless when everyone agrees with what the speaker is saying. Fight the battle over this jerk being banned, if only so you don’t have to fight it when they come to shut up Ted Cruz.
And we must fight by ruthlessly leveraging our power against the people ruthlessly leveraging theirs against us. Putting aside the promising avenues for legal action under existing laws, and the Trump administration’s coming agency actions, the legislatures in the various red states can act. They can start by including political discrimination as a category under their civil rights laws. If Facebook tried to ban you for being black, you could probably sue successfully. Why not for banning you for being conservative?
There are considerable legal challenges to doing that. Red states might have trouble regulating the tech company’s control of content thanks to federal laws preempting it, but our free states would have a much easier time imposing ancillary yet painful regulation. Why not apply consumer laws to social media and other tech platforms to enforce onerous disclosure rights when, say, YouTube bans someone or uses an algorithm that throttles followers or a post’s visibility? Call it the “Internet Sunshine Law” – a tech provider must provide a full and complete disclosure to every user of each and every limitation on said user’s account or posts. Make them provide a full and fair process regarding suspensions and expulsions, including a complete and clear report on exactly what acts underlie the punitive action as well as an appeal process and a requirement that similar acts be dealt with similarly – we’ve all seen libs do whatever they want while a conservative gets sent to Twitmo for nothing. And we should be able to enforce it via lawsuits with attorney’s fees for prevailing plaintiffs and the ability to get an injunction. As a lawyer, I can tell you that’s going to modify their behavior significantly. Or they could choose to stop screwing with us. Either way.
There are lots of things we can do – that is just a start. But start we must, because if we don’t make it clear that silencing us is unacceptable by refusing to accept it, we are going to wake up to find ourselves marginalized in our own country.
If you want a graphic portrait of the information monopoly the leftists dream of in full effect, check out my action-packed yet super-snarky novels about the United States’ split into red and blue countries, People's Republic, Indian Country and Wildfire. So many of what I initially thought were outlandish predictions in my books have come true already, and we can’t let this one become real too. Remember, you know my novels are good because the fascist liberals and the sissy castaways from the Weekly Standard called them “Appalling” and worse!
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