One side hoists the American flag and attacks the Capitol. Another side appears stronger, more insistent, and altogether willing to tar its opponents with charges of racism. “Silence is violence,” they say. Once you feed that dog, you cannot stop feeding it.
If you convince people that government and large tech platforms need to police information in order to guarantee its accuracy, then you have control. Then you can decide what information remains in the public arena, and what information does not. Then you have the anti-democratic ideal of restricted speech.
I used to think that efforts to restrict free speech in politics were fated to fail in the United States, ending in the same trash bin as socialism, communism, and free love in the Senate washroom. To propose ideas like regulation of speech was part of our free expression. You could criticize these proposals, but you could not object to their existence, or to their publication. You could only explain why they were bad ideas. When government officials propose bad ideas, however, you have to speak up, strongly and immediately.
Yet for its victims, the law presses its knee on your neck until you die. It threatens your life – no one cares to be equal before that.
Plainly they do not want to protect society, or enforce laws for society’s benefit. They want to dominate society and intimidate citizens. Access to private information helps them do that.
Even if you do not own a gun, or do not want to acquire one, applaud Cody Wilson’s resolve and vision. He needs backing from every one of us.
The difference between an intelligence apparatchik and a member of a crime syndicate is that the former draws pay from the public treasury, while the latter steals it. Secrecy is essential either way.
Propaganda wars have always been nasty. We are in the middle of another one.
Government officials who want to act in secret, also want to arrest and imprison whistle blowers and publishers. The rest of us would like a little more transparency.
Their inability even to perceive or understand the concept of a double standard suggests they must be cynical, or stupid. Either way, you wonder why they expect anyone to listen. They waste our time.
Tinker is the lodestar for free speech in public schools.
We cannot connect with each other when we have lost freedom of thought or speech. We are lonely, isolated, and at loose ends – as sociologists like to say, atomized.
