Make no mistake. There is a war being waged against any and all who would stand up for freedom. America may have been the land of the free but it is rapidly becoming a totalitarian state where those who speak out against it are punished. Freedom of speech no longer applies to anyone who would stand up for our liberties.
Elon Musk bought Twitter, now X, to help maintain our freedom to speak our minds. A number of different approaches have been used by the oligarchs who pull the strings of the marionettes in Washington. Almost immediately our DOJ filed a number of cases against Musk and his companies. This was meant to be a warning shot across Musk’s bow to step back from the positions he was taking. Musk refused.
We have already seen what happens to people who stand up to the tyrants. Pavel Durov has been jailed in France for refusing to give the government a backdoor into Telegram so that the government can surveil its citizens. This would also allow our own government to surveil Americans through the Five Eyes partnership. This is an end run around our Bill of Rights.
Now Musk has committed a cardinal sin against those who would enslave us. He has come out in support of PDJT’s presidential run.
In a new chapter of the escalating authoritarianism around the world, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Moraes suspended Twitter/X in Brazil. The reason? Musk refused to comply with Moraes’ illegal orders to censor his political opponents. Sound familiar?
How did the political elites in this country react? Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, wrote an article for The Guardian, a left-wing newspaper in the UK. It is called “Elon Musk Is Out of Control. Here Is How to Rein Him In.”
Tom Woods had this to say:
This comes at a time when an authoritarian regime in Brazil has ordered Twitter taken down, given app stores five days to comply, and instituted an $8,874 daily fine for anyone using a VPN to access the site.
Instead of decrying this outrage, Reich thinks the thing to do is advise how further state pressure might be brought against Musk.
“Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”
Guess who will determine what constitutes “lies and hate”?
We all know the answer to that question. How long before lies and hate will morph into dis-information and mis-information? And then it will be anything that the people in power do not like.
Woods went on to note this from Reich:
“Musk’s free-speech rights under the first amendment [sic; not capitalized in original] don’t take precedence over the public interest.”
Oh, but they do. “The public interest” is a weasel phrase that can mean anything. Can you imagine early Americans insisting on a First Amendment but with a caveat like “As long as it doesn’t threaten the public interest, of course!”
Shame, shame! This is a former Cabinet member essentially calling for the suppression of speech he does not like.
As Woods points out, if our government was a true believer in freedom, it would have issued a statement like this.
“The United States has learned with sorrow and outrage of the arrest of Pavel Durov and the ongoing threats — from a former U.S. Secretary of Labor, we note with particular shame — to the liberty of Elon Musk.
“These measures are without excuse, and they should alarm and appall anyone around the world who cares about the cause of freedom.
“Claims of lies, ‘hate,’ or misinformation, or defenses of the alleged ‘public interest’ as reasons for censorship ought to be dismissed by a free people with contempt, for they are the standard excuses of tyrants.
“The United States will not extradite anyone for any alleged crime that involves the exercise of the freedom of speech, for we cannot betray who we are as a people.”
Of course, this administration will not go there since there are two communists running for President and Vice-President.