Free Speech – Death by a Thousand Cuts

This isn’t a political battle as such. It’s a spiritual battle to remove the rule of conscience – the hammer used on the anvil of any good.

Free speech is the essential liberty, the cornerstone without which every other human freedom becomes merely a whim or exists as a weapon of official coercion.

Because it is essential, freedom of speech is constantly under assault. It is one tyrant away from extinction. It is always one more law closer to forced restraint or legal irrelevance. This new year opens with a clear wake-up call for Americans and perhaps a last call for Europeans. Free speech has been hobbled and weakened, and the radical left of every stripe is moving in for the kill.   

If the post-World War II liberal world order has finally shattered under the weight of its contradictions and political malpractice, nowhere is the evidence more apparent than the dying embers of free speech in Europe and the UK, which grow dimmer by the year. Never codified and held as an immutable and God-given right, free speech was never as vibrant as in the United States. Now, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the EU seem to be in a mad dash to surrender even that weakened right to the atheistic ideologies, which at their very core are antithetical to all individual liberties.

Nearly twenty years ago, I wrote about the “lights going out in Europe” and the legal struggles of Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Party for Freedom, and his vigorous defense of freedom of speech (read the full text here). Mr. Wilders grim prophecy is now tantalizingly close for the radicals. All across Europe and in the UK, Scotland, and Ireland, extensive police resources have been devoted to tracking down unapproved speech – including praying silently to oneself! – up to and including police arriving at the doors of offenders and arresting them for “further questioning” about something posted or said aloud. Hardly a week passes now without a story from Europe about some other hard-to-believe story about censored or illegal “speech.” 

Not to be outdone, the US government has been deeply involved in dismantling free speech under the rubric of controlling “misinformation,” ironically ignoring the Constitution they are sworn to defend.

What began as circumstantial suspicion of extensive illegal government activity to manipulate the 2016 election using wiretaps, the fake Russian dossier “pee-pee” hoax, and directly managing the news by the FBI and CIA is now a fact.

Thanks to Twitter and other platforms, the Nunes Committee, and court documents, there are now emails, texts, testimony, and “whistleblowers” proving, through the agencies’ own words, the Federal government’s involvement in curtailing or creating the news and restricting individual free speech, is far worse than anyone imagined. The FBI, CIA, DOJ, DHS, CDC, and other agencies have effectively (and unconstitutionally) “deputized” organs of the national media and internet platforms to do what they cannot do – mold and censor the news to fit an agenda. Worse, they effectively carried out a “color” revolution (pioneered by the CIA in foreign elections) on the homeland in the 2020 election with the Hunter Biden laptop story and the COVID crisis.  

Matt Taibbi, a liberal journalist, has provided extensive context for the massive email dumps by Twitter in the last several months. These emails provide real-time back-and-forth proof of the extensive government involvement in the platform’s content and operation. Mr. Taibbi summarized the government’s illegal activity after the tenth email dump released late in December. “The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which also facilitates requests from a wide array of smaller actors – from local cops to media to state governments. Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track. Is today the DOD, and tomorrow the FBI? Is it the weekly call, or the monthly meeting? It was dizzying.”

But free speech isn’t the only liberty in jeopardy. When you crush free and open debate, it’s a “two-for” for the bad guys. Free speech’s firstborn – religious freedom – can then be dismantled piece by piece using “hate speech” laws, a scheme already used with success in Europe and Canada. This will target, at first, faithful Christians. The new world order will not tolerate a competition of ideas – especially His ideas. The Ten Commandments will become the prima facia evidence of the faith’s intolerance and the legal standard to eliminate it from any public place.

In fact, the process is already well in motion. Author Scott Greer, “No Campus For White Men,” explains that a whole new form of non-Biblical morality has been installed on American campuses, a hotbed of free speech restrictions. Mr. Greer argues that the standards of righteousness and sin – “good” and “evil” – have been replaced with the enforced standards of “oppressed” and “privileged.”

The attacks against free speech have three distinct forces arrayed against it.

First, the Gramscian revolution is, for all intents, accomplished in the Western and English-speaking world. The great institutions that undergirded the freedoms that flowered for 400 years have succumbed to the long march. They are captive of the hard political left, from the Marxists and the Leninist’s, Stalinist’s, and Maoists, to the other assorted radical variations, including anarchists and such. The radical socialists, regardless of their differences, understand that taking down the existing order depends on expunging freedom of expression.

Meanwhile, the oligarchs and international corporatist class, using the levers of government, law, political bribery, and public plunder to bankroll their various trade machinations and crony deals to eliminate competition, are not big on individual liberty. Using the various world forums, such as the World Economic Forum, the UN, The Bilderberg Group, and other organizations, they no longer try to hide their Globalist intentions from public view. The WEF and others now regularly broadcast floor speeches and are stunningly brazen in their vision of the global world order. The clear message is that the individual will be tomorrow’s fodder for the new world order of global collectivism. And trans-humanism – science – will be the Golden Calf to be worshiped.     

[No serious inquiry into today’s economic, legal and organizational chaos is complete without revisiting the classic essay, The Law, written by the Frenchman Frederic Bastiat and published in 1850. It remains the gold standard for understanding how various forces codify and legalize looting the government and establishing market manipulation.]

Finally, the elephant in the room is the communist empire of China. The old saw, “play with the bull and you’ll get the horn,” applies here. With its purloined wealth handed over, stolen, and enabled by foolish Western politicians and corporatism, the Chinese war machine and its cash-fueled foreign policy, slave labor, military ownership stakes in foreign ventures, and intense civilian control through financial and social media surveillance, stand as a lure to wobbly societies. The Chinese make no secret of their intention to displace the “democracies” as the guiding world model. By force, if need be.   

All of this sounds gloomy, of course. But perhaps the citizens of the West needed to be pushed into a corner to see the reality of where we are. The very freedoms that have produced the greatest equality, prosperity, and security in human history is in peril. And there is no one left to save us. Those in the Western democracies surely know now that they can’t rely on our governments or politicians. They’ve proved as useless as pocket change at a nudist resort. Our schools have become corrupted and turned against the moral order which birthed them. Our churches have become enfeebled and distracted by shiny things in the culture.  

Thankfully, this isn’t a political battle as such. It’s a spiritual battle waged by the bidding Darkness to extinguish the rule of conscience – the hammer used on the anvil of any good. That means the story isn’t finished. It’s only begun.

It means we have to rely on God and ourselves. But that’s all we need. It will take uncomfortable and difficult work by millions, not thousands, of men and women who are not finished with the idea of human freedom. Citizens who are willing to do the hard praying and the hard work required to preserve liberty for another generation.