Alex Jones is a fool. He has always been a fool. That is no reason whatsoever to censor him. There are a lot of fools around, after all. The people who defend censoring ideas are also fools (that goes for government censorship and corporate censorship). All of them. From Marxist dictators right down to the rich Hollywood elites who like to wine and dine Marxist dictators.

True democratic choice depends upon the free flow of information and ideas. Censorship is always and everywhere an attack on both human dignity and democracy itself. How then could silencing dissidents be defending democracy, as many mainstream media talking heads claim?

If you are not exposed to different ideas, even wrong ideas, even stupid ideas, you’re not really free to choose your own destiny as an individual or as a people. Knowing what other options there are is a prerequisite to selecting them. The largest threat to American democracy is not Russia and never has been. The largest threat to American democracy has always been the threat posed to American democracy right here at home, by special interest groups which manipulate information to the benefit of their clients/co-ethnics (mostly but not exclusively left-wing special interest groups), Big Tech oligarchs who systematically silence their political opponents, corporate puppets in the media, and media executives who arrogantly believe they should get to dictate to common people their preferences, their values, and their future.

There is no such thing as “hate speech” or a “hate group”. These are not legitimate intellectual concepts. They are concepts specifically created to marginalize the entirely legitimate ideas and arguments of people on the political right, the political opponents of the Marxist radicals who spun these illegitimate intellectual concepts out of whole cloth a few decades ago.

It has never been “hate speech” to denigrate whites or Christians or conservatives or straight people. Indeed, at many universities there are whole academic departments devoted to these activities. Folks on the left will trot out a host of different reasons as to why philosophical consistency doesn’t matter when it comes to slandering and sidelining their adversaries, but anybody with an IQ over 80 can see through their duplicitous propaganda.

“Bigotry”, another favorite leftist buzzword, was traditionally defined as the intolerance of differing viewpoints and/or the intolerant devotion to one’s own opinions or prejudices. If that’s the definition, and it is, then censorship is the height of bigotry. Defenders of censorship aren’t just bigoted, they want the whole world to be bigoted with them! It isn’t enough for these bigots that they won’t hear their opponents out, they want to prevent anyone from hearing their opponents out! You might even say censorship is “bigotry plus power”. Yet the media, the supposed guardians of democracy and the great enemies of bigotry, have celebrated both the digital and the physical excommunication of Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos and Jared Taylor and many, many other right-wing dissidents.

So, how can we reconcile these glaring inconsistencies? How do we make sense of this madness? Well, it’s quite simple really. Bigots are bigots. They are incapable of appreciating the depths of their own bigotry and hypocrisy. Racism is when white people do what non-white people do regularly, namely try to advance their own group interests. Hate speech is when righties defend themselves from callous attacks by the left, and never when lefties attack righties callously and without provocation.

Bigotry is assaulting someone over their ideas or refusing to serve someone because of their politics. Hate is how the media feels about President Trump and the source of Trump Derangement Syndrome. When you apply the purported values of the political left consistently and nonselectively, what you quickly discover is that the political left is comprised of the biggest bigots and haters of all. They just don’t count their own bigotry as bigotry, because, well, they’re bigots.

Truth be told, the only thing really separating the Bolsheviks of old from the leftists of today has been a reluctance by modern leftists to adopt and embrace full-blown economic socialism. The rest of the Marxist ideology is already in place. And anyone paying attention to recent events within the Democrat Party knows that reluctance is fast slipping.

Graphic credit: Charles Fettinger via Flickr