With Dissent Now Criminalized, Free Speech Faces a Big Chill
Plus: New revelations on the Biden DOJ's targeting of parents as domestic terrorists
With Dissent Now Criminalized, Free Speech Faces a Big Chill
Americans’ right to think and speak freely has for years been under heavy assault.
The propagators of political correctness slowly but surely chipped away at open discourse, pressuring dissenters from prevailing ruling class orthodoxy to speak in euphemism and self-censor lest they be branded uncouth if not bigoted.
Apparently not content with the results of this “soft power” campaign, illiberals in recent years resorted to more coercive methods to compel ideological conformity, or at minimum, submission.
Speech police entered the scene, deputized under something of a society-wide diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) administrative state fixated on imposing Wokeism, and a mass public-private censorship regime that suppressed unauthorized opinions and their holders at scale.
Now, censorship and cancellation are giving way to criminalization.
The War on Wrongthink has escalated to the point that authorities are literally prosecuting Wrongthink—bludgeoning the First Amendment.
We would appear to be in for a big chill in America, and with incalculably terrible consequences.
In a new piece at the Epoch Times, I recount the recent ways in which the authorities have escalated and intensified their targeting of wrongthinkers — from political memesters, to parents, and pious Catholics — in the process systematically eroding the most fundamental protections of the First Amendment, and assess the costs.
Read the whole thing here.
Check out my related video commentary at Straight Arrow News below:
The Biden Administration’s War on Parents
In a related piece at the Epoch Times, I write about a report you might have missed from the House Judiciary’s Committee’s Weaponization Subcommittee on the Biden administration’s related War on Parents.
That report demonstrates the extent to which the Biden administration targeted as domestic terrorists moms and dads concerned over heavy-handed Chinese coronavirus policies and radical curricula.
The deeper takeaway from the subcommittee report is that our current rulers clearly believe it to be a strategic imperative that parents have no influence over classrooms, and therefore are willing to go to the most extreme lengths possible to persecute those who would try and do so, as an example to others to shut up and remain docile. Why? Because by maintaining control over schools as Woke indoctrination centers of the next generation, the state perpetuates its monopoly over the narrative, and therefore its monopoly on power.
The greater its control over the minds of kids—and the more it can cleave them from their parents, as in all tyrannical regimes—the better from its perspective.
As I detail:
According to the Subcommittee’s report, “There was no compelling nationwide law-enforcement justification” for the DOJ’s memo, and, “It is apparent that the Biden administration misused federal law enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes.”
The FBI acknowledged that after dedicating resources to creating a telephone line for the reporting of alleged threats, it “has not observed an uptick of threats directed at school officials.”
Apparently, it did no due diligence about the purported threats prior to hastily issuing the memo.
The Subcommittee reports that the FBI opened 25 “Guardian assessments”—tips logged in the FBI’s Guardian database—and that the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division ran six of the associated investigations. A single case warranted a full investigation. Most were referred to state and local authorities.
“These admissions supplement whistleblower disclosures,” the report notes, that “the FBI investigated a mom because she belonged to a ‘right-wing mom’s group’ and ‘is a gun owner’ and a dad because ‘he rails against the government.’”
Not one of these investigations resulted in federal arrests or charges—this, despite a narrative that parents were domestic terrorists emphasized by our nation’s preeminent law enforcement apparatus in the throes of a 2021 election season in which public schools were on the ballot.
Read the whole thing here.
Check out my related video commentary at Straight Arrow News below: