We’re told the pen is mightier than the sword. We’ve known, for as long as we’ve had the concept of “sticks and stones,” that words can make people uncomfortable should they have to defend their ideas about how others should be made to behave.
Those cultural memes make our chief sword wielders nervous. And present an opportunity to manufacture a crisis that should not be wasted. The technological advances in speech clearing houses make it (momentarily) feasible for the whole country to become a State safe space, where never is heard a regime discouraging word.
Four concepts, three of them false, are necessary to this goal.
1-The defining characteristic of the modern Nation State is a monopoly on physical violence.
-Encyclopedia Britannica
2-Social (racial, sexual, etc., etc.) equity (identical outcomes) cannot be achieved without identity group targeted State intervention. Otherwise, the best we could hope for would be a necessarily imperfect equality before the law (identical opportunity). Ironically, identical outcomes will require a great deal of policing. The State is proposing to swear in our speech clearing houses.
3-Words are violence.
How the Left Turned Words Into ‘Violence,’ and Violence Into ‘Justice’ -Quilette
Brandeis ‘Word Police’ Highlights the Absurdity of Modern Progressivism -Newsweek
Words are apparently killing people as I write. The President has said of Facebook, “They’re killing people!”
After some Facebook pushback, he’s waffled a bit on who exactly are the murderers. Maybe it’s just a few Facebook users committing capital crimes. Well… a few would be the speakers… unclear if the apparently myriad listeners are just accessories after the fact. IAC, if we didn’t have Facebook there wouldn’t be any Facebook speakers or listeners. The regulatory threat exists despite Mr. Biden’s walk back.
Besides, the people getting killed would be those deplorables who read Facebook based on algorthims designed to “engage.” So, who cares?
No matter how you cut it, the question is free speech. In summary, the President can say ‘they’ are killing people. ‘They’ can’t say he is.
The official position is that we cannot depend on individuals to decide what they want to read or hear.
We have the technology to give the State the the pen control it needs to secure our right to think correctly. Still, it is not enough that the State possesses all the swords and all the pens. To ensure equity in ideation it follows that we cannot depend on individuals to decide what they want to say.
4-In some cases silence is violence.
How “Silence is Violence” Can Become Compelled Speech -Johnathan Turley
‘Silence Is Violence’: D.C. Black Lives Matter Protesters Adopt Strategy of Intimidating Random White People -Reason Magazine
This fourth item may seem over the top. But how are we going to enforce equal outcomes if private conversations are not controlled? How could they be controlled? The Lives of Others makes a suggestion. Watch it if you haven’t.
Mr. Biden’s press secretary assures us the State is just making suggestions about who Facebook should allow to speak, even as she suggests “banned on one should be banned on all,” and even as messaging apps are being eyed for government filtering: White House May Work With Carriers To Screen Anti-Vax Messages
The advantage to the State? No one will have the slightest skepticism about Dr. Fauci’s pronouncements, inflation, CCP virus lab leaks, penises in female shower rooms, Iranian nuclear ambitions, or immigration policy. The risk of regime change will drop precipitously. I don’t mean a mere embarrassment at the ballot box, but the risk of violent overthrow by bare chested people in furry hats, overtly parading in the halls of Congress based on the intel from unassembled Lego models of the building.
The people who told you the Steele dossier proved Donald Trump was a Russian agent, that Hunter Biden’s laptop wasn’t his (and if it was, the contents were faked), that Hillary Clinton’s private email system wasn’t a security risk, that coronavirus could not possibly have escaped a lab (which they absolutely did not fund), that it is anti-scientific to keep penises out of female shower rooms and off the women’s Olympic medals platform, that it’s Republicans who want the police defunded, that Kamala Harris had visited the non-existent border crisis two and a half weeks before she got within 800 miles of it (close enough for government work), that a Lego kit is evidence of insurrection, that starving Cubans are protesting because they lack CCP virus vaccines – which is the fault of the United States (protestors waving American flags notwithstanding) … have stepped up to the task of identifying speech they call ‘disinformation.’
They are saying “Trust us.”