Censorship: It’s Not Just For Government Anymore

“The Constitution? I’m pretty sure the Patriot Act killed it to ensure our freedoms.” – The Simpsons

When you do push-ups, are you just bench-pressing the Earth?

The First Amendment to the Constitution was pretty important to the Framers.  That’s why they put it first.  Duh.  In a move that I think would irritate the Framers, this one has been pretty twisted over time.

Like any of the Amendments, when it twists, it’s twisted Leftward.  I’ll give an unrelated example. Abortion was made to be legal by somehow twisting the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution:

Ninth:  The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Fourteenth:  . . . nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

In reality, the Ninth Amendment is probably one of the most ignored Amendments.  Why?  Because government wants power, and people having rights is the opposite of state power.  But under the logic of Rowe v. Wade I should be smoke all the crack I want to and not be arrested.  Oh, wait, Hunter Biden already did that . . . .

Okay, I didn’t have a great tag line, but I have a second meme:

The First Amendment packs a big punch, it secures the rights of American citizens for a whole bundle of things, but the one I’m focusing on today is that the government can’t abridge the rights of people to speak freely.  You know, share ideas?

Leftists used to be all-in on the First Amendment.  They used it to weasel in Marxist concepts into schools and other institutions.  People on the Right ignored them.  For (what they thought) was a good reason:  every person with common sense could easily see that Leftism didn’t work.  Besides, they had to go to work and not argue with smelly Leftist college hippies.

So, Leftism crept in, and eventually took over institution after institution, as we’ve talked about before.  The response of the Right was always the same, “Oh, we lost colleges?  College kids!  They’re so fickle.  They’ll come around when they get older.”

What’s the name of the statue in the Temple of Regret:  the Coulda Would Buddha. 

That’s a shortsighted argument.  Where do teachers come from?  Oh, yeah, colleges.  Who do teachers have access to?  Oh, yeah, all the kids.

One thing that has been shown throughout history, however, is that the soft lies and false promises of Leftism are mainly only useful against weak, wishful, and self-hating minds.  The rise of talk radio after the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the prompt failure of nearly all Leftist radio hosts proves the point:  they can’t win in a fair fight of ideas.

So, what should the Left do after taking over the various institutions in the United States?

Pull up the ladder.

Get rid of free speech.

But there’s that pesky First Amendment.  What can you do?

What does free speech online and the square root of -1 have in common?  They’re both imaginary.

The answer in 2021 is rather simple:  use private companies to stifle speech that the Left disagrees with.

If I were to travel back to 2000 and tell myself that in 2021 we’d see:

  • A sitting President would be censored from the Internet,
  • Private companies would create systems to track your every move,
  • Google® (2000: Don’t Be Evil®) would suppress ideas, and
  • Differing opinions would be branded as false
  • The government would openly lie . . . oh, wait, they always do that.

I’d think that we were living in some sort of dystopia.

The Left always sold dystopias with these sorts of characteristics as the result of a religious-Right dictatorship.  But, no.  This is entirely Leftist.

The most recent example is the White House has “reached out” to Facebook® to have them censor content about COVID-19®.  I would like to point out that time after time after time, the “official” narrative has been wrong.

I got an email saying I got a job at Facebook.  No interview, they had all my details.

Horribly wrong.  Remember the videos of those people dropping dead in China?  Remember the videos of the apartment doors being welded shut like some kind of intro to a zombie movie?  Seem silly now?

Yeah.  Remember the “don’t wear masks” leading to “wear masks” to “maybe wear two or three masks”?  Yeah, me too.

It’s obvious that the one thing missing during the entire ‘Rona event has been good information.  Every bit of it has been bleached, sanitized, and become subject to partisan polarization.

But “CDC Accepted Facts®” have been proven wrong again and again.  So, why is sharing an opinion that differs from the Currently Accepted Truth™ subject to censorship?  Because it is clear that Leftists are quite willing to shut down meaningful conversation in this country when it goes against whatever it is that they believe today.

That’s the plan.  The plan is not just for COVID-19©, but for every fact, forever.  And the “fact checkers” are people who hate the Right with every fiber of their being.  Just go to Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia® page, and do a search for “laptop.”  One entry.  No mention of, you know, the pictures of him zonked out smoking crack.

That’s another form of censorship, one Winston Smith would be proud of.  And, sure, Wikipedia© isn’t the government, and Facebook™ could ignore it when the President asks them to effectively censor people the government doesn’t like.  It’s okay when a private company does it, right?

The Constitution isn’t magic.  The only way that it works is if people actually demand that the government follow it.  If not?  Bit by bit it will be twisted into (sometimes) the opposite of what it says, in plain language.

If a deaf person goes to court, is it still a hearing?

There isn’t anything magical about the Supreme Court, and nothing in the Constitution gives them the right to be the ultimate decision makers as to what it means.  It was written in plain language for people like you and me.  Thomas Jefferson felt that every branch of the government was co-equal in being able to decide that an act of government was un-Constitutional.

Not saying that I’m the expert, but I think Thomas Jefferson just might have been in the room when some of the important decisions were being made.

The Constitution is a piece of paper, but it’s also a contract, a contract among men for the way that they will be governed.  I’d add that the ultimate decision makers on the Constitution aren’t the Supreme Court, but the Several States, and, ultimately, the People.

And that’s what scares the Left.  If they have to shut the People up, it’s because they’re scared.

Which is just what the Framers expected.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

42 thoughts on “Censorship: It’s Not Just For Government Anymore”

  1. Censorship is necessary for any healthy society. The only group that ever pushed for truly unfettered speech was the Leftists committing lawfare and cultural warfare against America. And they only push for free speech for themselves, not for anyone else.

    In other words, if you want to prevent “Tranny Story Hour”, you must limit both speech and conduct.
    Our land for our people. Our laws for our people. Our rights for our people. Our privileges for our people. Our responsibilities for our people.

    1. There is a lot of difference between free speech in a public venue, and “tranny story hour” in a government funded school.
      The First Amendment starts with “Congress shall make no law…”. Once that is ignored, all bets are off.

      1. Pubkic libraries are public venues. But let’s talk about people marching outside a private bookstore to protest sex-offender drag-queen storytime.

        Congress makes no law, but the show is lauded in every venue, shared on YouTube’s children’s space, and the protesters all have their social media locked down and lose their jobs.

        You are looking in the wrong direction. I used to as well.

    2. Great point. Too many on the right try to “own the libs” by adopting their talking points, like unfettered free speech.

      1. You’ll notice that the Leftists only supported “unfettered free speech” until they seized power. Now none may dissent!

    3. In a properly functioning culture (which we are not now) Tranny Story Hour won’t occur because the culture won’t allow it. Politics is downstream of culture, and (relatively) free speech in a functioning culture as ours was would never allow it.

      Culture.

  2. Jefferson astutely observed, “ When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. But when the government fears the people, there is freedom.”

      1. And openly calling to ban guns afraid. They are up to evil.

        The Demoncrat Infrastructure bill was an empty piece of paper per a couple of R senators. So plenty of evil there.

  3. The French have a saying which applies. “Constitutions are paper, bayonets are steel.”

    1. The German verson:

      “The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions, but by blood and iron.”

      -Otto von Bizmarck

  4. It is always worth reminding ourselves that neo-Bolshevism in it’s various iterations that we lump together as the Left is a religion to these people and when you are sure you have The Truth, you are often willing to do some ugly stuff to “protect” it. For many centuries if you crossed the Roman Catholic church they would torture you to death in the most gruesome ways imaginable, for the sake of your soul of course. The final assault on Western civilization is underway in earnest and it is being waged on multiple fronts. Censorship, creating a culture of compliance via masks and “vaccines”, moves to disarm the citizens, endless cultural gaslighting. We are fast approaching the endgame and there is no arguing or convincing our way out of this.

      1. Thanks for the link. GIFCT provides cover for the rights abridgers like the Southern Poverty Law Center did until the level of corruption was shown finally. Of course, the usually control freaks are on the list of subscribers: There are 17 current GIFCT Members: Airbnb, Amazon, Discord, DropBox, Facebook,
        Instagram, JustPaste.It, LinkedIn, Mailchimp, Mega.nz Microsoft, Pinterest, Tumblr,
        Twitter, WhatsApp, WorPress.com and YouTube.

    2. the Roman Catholic church they would torture you to death in the most gruesome ways imaginable, for the sake of your soul of course

      Like the Branch Covidians, it was to save *other people’s souls*. The R.C. was quite decent about allowing personal heterdoxy as long as one did not set oneself up as a teacher of same. Were the Covidians correct on the facts, much of what they have done would be sensible. Ditto the R.C.

      At least until Luther attempted a reformation and other protestors tried to make the Gospel accessible to all via vulgate translations*. Then it broke down to powerful pols using the source of dissention as an opportunity for power-grabs, and to hell with the peasantry.

      Also a bit like Branch Covidia.

      *Gross generalisation: The Protestents then and now and the RC ditto have both honor and dishonor to claim. No shade meant to either.

    3. I don’t keep repeating the mantra of, “The future is mountains of skulls, rivers of blood, and oceans of tears.” because I like hearing the sound of my own voice, as it were.

    4. We are. And it’s moving faster by the month. How many million FedGov employees will be forced to take “the jab” or quit?

  5. The censors always consider themselves as on the right side of history but true believers will come up with anything to justify their evil Long March to burn it all down mission.
    Eventually there will be a social credit score and thumb reader to logon for the good of the unity in the Wokekanda collective.
    Drooling safety über alles dullards will accept every usurpation with a happy poop emoji face.
    Maybe one day it will be so dumbed down emojis will be the mode of communication.

    1. That’s the Plan. Go back and read a magazine from 1960. The vocabulary isn’t getting better.

      1. My apologies. You are correct and thanks for the link. I learned something today.

        1. Thanks for the response. Yeah, I had to research that one. Very, very murky as to the rationale.

  7. Not saying the 1st amendment isn’t important, but it wasn’t actually the first originally. The first two in the original list weren’t ratified:

    The original first amendment (not ratified) read:

    “After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.”

    My suspicion is, therefore, that they put together a list of amendments and did NOT rank them in order of importance but rather in order of coming up with them.

  8. You’ve had a little too much to think comrade, we have a vaccine for that.
    Official narrative is best narrative and spoiler alerts err I mean conspiracy theories are a construct of the white male backwoods militia which is either a bunch of rubes in real tree or the most ferocious fighting force in history depending on what is needed for the narrative.
    Don’t you want be with the in crowd taking a selfie as it hurtles over the cliff edge into the abyss with everyone thinking happy thoughts and consuming products from approved corporations in league with mommygov (fascism).
    Forward! To Wokekanda.

    1. Yes we can!

      As I’ve gotten older, the more I see where the Official Narrative on almost everything is, at least in some significant point, a lie.

  9. Good thing we have our keyboards and brave words.
    Living in fear of the feds who laugh at your irrelevance is why you have already lost.
    The rest of the world laughs at the big bad Wokegov and says…get some, Yankee.

  10. By my understanding, “censorship” is only unconstitutional if the government does it. They have the force of law, and punishment, on their side. “Congress shall make no law respecting”, etc. Private enterprise has every right to regulate what they write or allow in their publication, again, as the Press they are guaranteed that right. We might not like facebook and others and it is our right to organize a competing forum. It would then be our right to regulate what went into our own social media forum.

    1. so then if i don’t want to bake a cake for a poofter wedding, i don’t have to. right?

    2. That’s a fair telling of the standard libertarian/right position. I used to agree with it.

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