Free speech and the woke mob
We live in The Age of Orwell: The woke cancel culture mob has claimed a new fundamental right: The right to not be offended. But how can we know when we are about to cause offense? How can anyone really know what is in the mind of another? This presumed new right of the woke assumes that anyone speaking must be able to telepathically see into the mind of the listener. He would therefore have the power to know when he offends any and listener among the many millions of humanity. To upset even one person among the millions is now forbidden.
To the woke mob, who have assumed the existence of this telepathic ability, it follows that the offending speaker must deliberately be intending to harm the listener. He is therefore engaging in violence. Naturally, the speaker must be punished for his deliberate aggressive attack. This newly defined right is the logical end point of Political Correctness.
Think about what this means. It means that any neurotic individual, just one such individual, has an absolute veto power over the speech of each and every person in our society. What an absurdity! But it is the logical conclusion of wokeness.
The First Amendment is our bulwark against this destructive nightmare. The whole point of having free speech is to have the freedom to offend the listener. Only in this way can there be a healthy exploration of ideas — ideas which may be essential for the very survival of our society.
The woke left will have none of this. They already know the right answer and they are determined to impose their answer on the rest of us — even if their right answer should whimsically change every few days. In effect, the relatively small cancel culture mob, now has the privilege of dictating what we, the overwhelming majority, are permitted to say, and even what we are allowed to think.
If you look at typical members of this violent cancel culture mob you find most of them appear to be young adults. Many of these youths are currently embedded in the universities, or have recently graduated. It is there that they may have picked up this ideology. These people are over-schooled and under-educated.
When you drill down into the woke mob’s real intentions you find three streams of self-aggrandizing, and highly neurotic, fascist ideology: LBGTQ, Post-Modernist Marxism and anti “white privilege” racism. It is no surprise that these people are ideologically fascist, since the principle tool of fascism is the suppression of free speech. If you have any doubt about this just look at what is currently happening in Hong Kong.
This small, psychologically disturbed, minority has put us the on the path of tyranny — tyranny by a minority, the diametric opposite of the tyranny of the majority. Overthrowing a tyranny of the minority is precisely why this nation was founded in the first place. Conversely, it is to avoid falling into the trap of the tyranny of the majority that we established a federated republic of the states instead of a pure democracy, as advocated by the Left.
The Left well knows that if you capture the schools you will have captured all future generations. Unfortunately, too many of our K-12 educational institutions are staffed by low quality, and ideologically Left, teachers and administrators. Since teachers, and administrators, receive their so-called education in universities the real source of the problem lies there.
Many universities are corrupt. They are running a cultural and financial Ponzi scheme against their students. We know this because of exorbitant student costs, and because the existence of nonsense courses and majors tell us so. In addition, many leftist university administrators and professors are active opponents of the free exchange of ideas. Without this free exchange there is no real education — just indoctrination.
Ideally, universities should be bastions of free speech though many no longer are. Fortunately, really bright students tend to be cantankerous. If one mob of students is acting badly, or if a professor is spouting nonsense, the more intelligent students will tend to react strongly against these morons. It is these talented free thinking youngsters who will eventually grow into positions of leadership in society. So, we can have hope that, in the long term, the problem is self-correcting.
Today, universities could easily regain their free speech charter by the simple expedient of expelling those students and professors who disrupt the exchange of ideas and by arresting and prosecuting troublesome trespassers.
The strategic objective of the tyrannical minority is to abolish all free speech and, with it, all individual freedom. The Left means to enslave us. The tactic they employ is mob intimidation and extortion. But this tactic only works against cowards.
As well as the academic world, the collection of institutional, speech suppressing, cowards includes servile local politicians, and, sadly, far too many leaders of big business. Most of these cowards believe they can buy off the mobs and thereby take the easy way out. Unfortunately, experience has shown that this doesn’t work, it only encourages more bad behavior.
Actively allied with the mobs, and assisting them in every way that they can, are various leftist politicians and judges, government bureaucrats, and most of the liberal legacy media. In addition, through their attempted suppression of conservative speech, the tech giants have become powerhouses of the dark side. Seduced by the prospect of gaining even more power, all of the above elites have shown themselves to be revolutionaries dedicated to overthrowing our civil liberties.
Unfortunately for the future of these elites, the path they are on leads to the destruction of the very institutions for which these leaders are responsible. They will be put out of business by their own folly.
If it were possible, suppression of free speech would lead inevitably to the desolation of our Constitution and, with it, all the rest of our constitutionally protected freedoms. Censorship is the road to chaos. But such proscription is no longer technically feasible. Thanks to modern technology we can now take a different road — indeed, many different roads. All the king’s horses cannot completely control the infinitely complex internet and the flow of our speech. The internet is our samizdat. And samizdat brings down tyrannical empires.
Image credit: Pixabay public domain