Free Speech in 2024?

Freedom would become a relative matter of compliance, not a right.

So far, 2024 has had a really gnarly start for democracy and the foundational character of human freedom in the Western world.

From Pope Francis and the EU President Ursula von der Leyen and The World Economic Forum to the halls of parliament in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, among others, “disinformation” and “misinformation” have been the highest priority to war against.

Not to be outdone, in the US, colleges, and universities, Congress and the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the intelligence industry (including the English-speaking nations’ “Five Eyes” intelligence apparatus) are knee-deep into the manipulation of online platforms and other broadcast media to protect “democracy” and order public understanding and reactions to events and politics.

In other words, they are rapidly and openly working to control all public information. Free speech is the enemy, and censoring speech in every communication forum possible is the goal. The truth is the enemy.   

[Don’t miss Mike Benz, the founder of Foundation for Freedom Online, and Tucker Carlson (here) in a fascinating interview – a primer actually – about the mechanics and principal actors for censorship in our government.]

Of course, it’s not democracy they are concerned with – even though they claim that is what they want to save. “Democracy and “democratic” institutions and “values” are code words for maintaining and protecting the ruling class. They have no interest in preserving your freedom, only their power and authority.  

The premise upon which the battle for freedom of expression and free speech must start is missing in the debates – by design. How can you start regulating what someone believes, thinks, and says until you decide if individuals have those rights in the first place?

Where do individual rights come from? Do they pre-exist from a fixed, universal Moral Order? Or are rights merely whatever a despot, dictator, Congress, parliament, corporate oligarchy, or armed mob says they are at any given time?

So, the practical debate about free speech and censorship throughout the Western World, at least, is utterly butt-backward in logic. Left dangling is the execution of policy without the premise resolved.  

A sticky wicket, no?

Today, in the Western World generally and the United States specifically, societies born from the womb of the ancient Judeo-Christian ethos find themselves naked in this all-out war over individual freedom. It’s a battle for the crown jewels of that secure freedom: the right to worship God and freedom of speech, conscience, and peaceful assembly.

If freedom lovers, believers in absolute values, conservatives, orthodox Jews, and Christians are to make a difference in our time, then this is where the battle must start and end.  

They must present the binary argument. Either you believe in a transcendent, unchangeable Moral Order or subscribe to manufactured human-made disorder. There is no middle ground. No gray. No in-between.  

Great minds in antiquity debated the question, and every generation since has had a bite at the apple. In every age, great philosophers and academics have written endless tomes on arranging human affairs just so or building their concept of utopia. Untold, hundreds of millions of men and women have been slaughtered by their government along the way, a ghastly tribute to that hubris.   

The timeless Moral Order shrugs its indifference to their grand theories and ideas of what morality is or isn’t – in the earth-bound battle between good and evil, freedom or servitude.         

In the United States, stunned citizens discovered during the supposed pandemic that the most profound constitutional rights had unwritten limits. Their right to speech, association, worship, and even their livelihoods were subject to the opinion of a handful of unelected medical bureaucrats in something called “public health.”    

The crisis unleashed the worst, not the best, instincts across the globe, but more unexpectedly in the West. Petty bureaucrats, imperious scientists, buffoons and grifters in political office, and think tanks turned on their populations like wolves on a downed elk, tearing at the fabric of freedom with seeming exuberance.

It has led to public discussions where many world “leaders” and wannabes openly promote a “great reset” without blushing. They propose to replace democratic principles with the “expert classes” to build a new world order and remove the masses’ burden or expectation of autonomy.    

Freedom would become a relative matter of compliance, not a right.

If you will, the new world order – globalism, corporate fascism, and such – would reflect the ideologies of raw power espoused by Marx, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, not the God-ordained virtues of human liberty championed by Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Washington.

The difference between the two seems subtle at first. Totalitarians have always proposed ubiquitous positive “rights” such as security, health care, food, shelter, and education. It’s alluring to many, but since these proposed “rights” are rented in return for individual fidelity, they are transient, depending on who has the most power or dominance at any given moment.

However, the ancient Biblical Ten Commandments pointed humanity towards an entirely different predicate for considering and establishing human affairs, which found its way into contemporary times with the American experiment in 1787. It presents “restrictive” rights inherent in individual responsibility and accountability. Personal sovereignty.      

In the American Declaration of Independence, the Founders, following the great thinkers before them, resolved the premise – the central idea that men could not give rights that were “natural.”

Influenced by the English Bill of Rights from 1689 and primarily drawn from Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason in 1776, the Bill of Rights became the untouchable cornerstone supporting the right of liberty for a free people in 1791 and the maturation of those protections over the life of the nation in many ways.

(The Bill of Rights should be the number one export for the United States!)

The preamble to the Bill of Rights states its purpose unambiguously, “…in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added [to the Constitution]: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.”

So free speech, freedom of religion, association, assembly, and the right to petition for redress of grievances are natural rights, not at the whim of a bureaucracy, a court, or a politician. They are God-ordained and God-given.

The battle is on now. It should be the core message of every candidate for public office. It should be the rallying cry of every sitting “conservative” member of Congress. It should be the primary focus of every alleged conservative organization and religious body. Save freedom of conscience – save free speech. Save liberty.

This battle can’t be lost. Or freedom may go dark for millennia.