Power is a drug that doesn’t sate. – Me.
It’s frustrating, having to make the same point over and over. Still, needs must.
[W]e are told that there is no need to fear the concentration of power in government so long as that power is checked by the electoral process. We are urged to believe that so long as we can express our disagreement in words, we have our full rights to disagree. Now both freedom of speech and the electoral process are important to liberty, but alone they are only the desiccated remains of liberty. [Emphasis added]
…he was saying more than most of his readers grasped. Remains, as in human remains, are… drum roll, please… what’s left of something when the rest of it is gone. The soul has departed; the mind no longer functions; the corpse is all that remains. Dr. Carson’s phrasing perfectly captures the relationship of freedom of expression plus the vote to true liberty. When he wrote those words, they were all that remains of the liberty the progenitors of this nation bequeathed us.
Today, both are under sustained and severe attack.
As long as freedom of speech and of the press were respected, there was a chance that the country might rally, might right itself and demand the rolling-back of government’s usurped powers in a voice too loud to be ignored. If matters as of Tuesday [i.e., December 9, 2003, when President G. W. Bush signed the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act] are permitted to remain as they are, that chance is gone.
…I was concerned with the denial of Americans’ right of free expression by the American federal government. The McCain-Feingold Act was eventually struck down, though Washington continues to probe for ways to silence those who oppose it. However, today, outsourcing that activity is the prevailing practice. Moreover, our would-be censors are reaching out to the governments of other nations:
The globalist tyrants in control of the European Union sent a letter to Elon Musk on Monday demanding the X owner censor President Donald Trump during their interview tonight.
The letter was sent by Thierry Breton and was dated August 12, 2024.
Thierry Breton is a French business executive, politician, writer and the current Commissioner for Internal Market of the European Union.
In the letter, Thierry warns Elon Musk, “You have the legal obligation to ensure X’s compliance with EU law and in particular the DSA in the EU.”
Laughably, Thierry-Breton claimed that censoring Musk’s interview of a former president is compatible with ensuring “freedom of expression and of information, including media freedom and pluralism.” His beef is with “harmful content.” Harmful how? Harmful to whom? Silence.
Don’t imagine for a moment that the mandarins in D.C. aren’t fully in accord with this. They may even have stimulated it.
It enrages the political Establishments of the West that Elon Musk has cleansed Twitter / X of the censorship and suppression policies that prevailed before his acquisition. A free medium of personal expression is the deadliest of all dangers to them. They must bring it to heel, or destroy it.
Now that electoral processes have been so thoroughly corrupted, freedom of expression is all we have left. It’s always been a threat to Establishmentarians here and elsewhere, but their successful use of gradualism has eroded away all the rest of the liberty we once enjoyed. That frees the tyrants to attack freedom of speech, and they’re wasting no time in going after it.
Elon Musk, a notably independent-minded man, will probably defy the EU. That doesn’t mean the threat can be dismissed. He’s under attack from several directions. Any one of them has the potential to bring him down. At any rate, it’s unwise to repose one’s hopes for freedom in a lone individual, however worthy or wealthy.
Use your voices while you still have them. It may all too soon be time to use your guns…a right those of other lands surrendered long ago.
