Who Cares About Censorship?

Social media apps are displayed on a smartphone on May 28, 2020. Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

My name is Jeffrey Tucker and it’s my honor to be a daily contributor to Epoch. This is my first newsletter to subscribers. Thank you for being here. In addition to writing here, I serve as president of Brownstone Institute, founded two years ago to confront the crisis of our times.

The topic today is censorship. Essentially, if the Biden administration had its way, this newsletter would not have hit your inbox. That’s how grim matters have become.

Did you know that in the last three years, and probably dating back some years before, all the mainstream social media platforms were spying for the government and curating what posts you see based on regime priorities? I certainly did not. Like most people, I trusted that the platforms were here to serve you and me, not deep-state bureaucrats.

And yet the judge in the case of Missouri v. Biden has documented to a very painful degree that government was muscling Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and all the rest, through the pandemic years to take down posts (tens of millions of them) and delete the accounts of repeat offenders. No skepticism about lockdowns, masks, and vaccines were permitted.

That helps explain why you felt so alone in your opinion. They manufactured a fake reality and a false consensus.

The judge issued an injunction for them to stop. Then all hell broke loose. Every mainstream platform from the Washington Post to Slate came out blasting away at the order. They denied that any censorship was taking place. Then they further said that if it was taking place, it was essential that it do so. The First Amendment rights of government (which do not exist) must trump your First Amendment rights.

Amazing, isn’t it? All these platforms live because we enshrine free speech as a first principle. And here is the mainstream press defending government’s control of social media to stop your rights to free speech. There’s no question about why: they want monopoly control of the public conversation because they want to be in charge of what you think.

Then the Biden administration appealed the injunction. But that wasn’t enough. They stayed up into the wee hours of Friday evening last week to issue a plea for an “emergency stay” of the order. The stated reason: the government must continue “working with social media companies on initiatives to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.”

Do you think that exercising your speech rights represents “grave harm” to the public? Probably not. We are adults. We can be trusted with normal human rights. I simply cannot believe that we live in times when this is gravely in question, when the government itself so plainly admits that its ambition is to trample on our own Constitution. Reading their frenzied articles, it seems clear that they don’t believe in free speech at all.

In my philosophy class in college, the professor had all of the students read John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” I recall wondering why. It’s nothing more than an eloquent statement of what everyone surely already believed. As a piece of history, it was fine but that’s all it was. We live in enlightened times, I believed, and no one really questions speech rights anymore. That was in the 1980s, a simpler time.

Little did I know in those days that there was a different movement growing beneath the surface. It was led by the Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse in particular. In 1965, he wrote an essay called “Repressive Tolerance.” His theory was that a ruling class (rich, white, connected) ruled the roost in Western societies. All the slogans about freedom, the rule of law, and human rights were nothing but a language dance to cover up underlying oppression.

The only path to real freedom, in Marcuse’s view, was to rebalance the scales: the oppressors have to be oppressed. The people claiming freedom needed to have it taken away. The marginalized voices needed not freedom but dominance if we were to have justice.

In his theory, nothing is as it seems. Equal treatment under the law is a lie. Free speech is a lie. Everything is a lie. So it all needs to be thrown out and replaced by total control by the people who have not benefited from freedom. Essentially he had mapped out a social and political plan to make Orwell’s “1984” real. It was a plan for a totalitarian tyranny marketed under the slogan of creating a new freedom entirely.

It all sounded bonkers to me when I read it, nothing more than the screams and cries of a psychotic intellectual who hated authentic freedom. Surely no one would take this seriously. And yet, looking back, what is affirmative action but the first steps toward implementing this vision? We cannot have merit-based hiring since that would only privilege the privileged more. We need hard-core efforts to replace merit entirely with another standard based on political priorities.

The whole thing was the beginning of a purge. Based on what? Based on race, sex, religion, region, and you name it. The standards used were always rooted in political priorities. Marcuse’s system was nothing other than a template for a bloody purge to rob some people of all rights and give all power to people of his choosing. It was a Bolshevik Revolution for the West.

Over the decades, as the classics stopped being taught in school and kids were indoctrinated in woke blather from elementary school through college, these ideas have taken hold. They are firmly entrenched in the Biden administration today. These people think nothing about demanding endless power for the state and an end to freedom for the rest of us. From their perspective, you and I are the enemies.

I’m still gobsmacked that we are having a debate about free speech. I never thought it would come to this. And yet it oddly makes sense. A political purge of the sort we’ve seen gathering over the last three years requires absolute control over the public mind.

The purge takes many forms. This was the real point of the vaccine mandates, for example. Once the Biden administration figured out that Trump voters were less inclined to get the shots, imposing city-wide segregation was a no-brainer. Just keep the Trump voters out of New York, Boston, Chicago, D.C., and New Orleans, and we are good to go. It was the same with masks: they were never more than an attempt to impose population-wide subjugation and tell resistors who was boss.

It was never about public health. It was always about political control, which means people control. The last three years have been a test of how far they could go. It was a coup d’état against freedom. The courts are now pushing back.

I will end my first newsletter with a tribute to The Epoch Times. Do you know just how fortunate we are to have this stellar platform? It took real vision to found it and tremendous business savvy to keep it going to the point that it thrives today. It’s something of a miracle that it exists at all. No question that the powers-that-be despise it. They despise its excellence, its objectivity, its fearless reporting of real news, and its tools that allow you the opportunity to gain another point of view.

We really are on the precipice. We need courage and commitment to get through our times. The struggle is not easy and I’m sure that many more terrible things are on the way. But let me just state outright what I believe. I believe that real freedom is worth saving. The West is worth saving. The Constitution is worth saving. So are human rights. Doing so will require all our efforts.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.