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In the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, freedom of speech is listed second, immediately after the right to freedom of religion. I don’t think that is a coincidence. In my last blog I touched on the fragile condition of free speech in America. Free speech is perhaps our most important freedom. Without the guarantee of free speech the rest of our freedoms are meaningless. Therefore, I decided to dedicate this issue to the reasons I see it slipping away.

Notice I didn’t say our freedom of speech is being taken away. It is not. Our lack of vigilance is causing the erosion of our free speech. There is a movement afoot, led by the government, corporations, universities, and the press/media, to reduce, even eliminate, our right to speak without fear of reprisals. None of those entities can succeed in that effort if We The People are better informed and refuse to comply with their edicts. The sad truth is that too many of us are ignorant of these entities encroachment on our freedom to express ourselves. There is a certain peace that comes with ignorance. If we don’t know an evil exists we can excuse ourselves for doing nothing to stop it. Others don’t contemplate the potential damage that silencing parents at school board meetings today will have on their children in the future. Still others shrug off the silencing of a sitting President on social media platforms as none of their business. All of the above threaten the very foundation of our Constitution and therefore the freedom of American citizens.

In the 1960s UC Berkeley advertised itself as the “Bastion of free speech.” It has always bragged that “. . . Berkeley is a place where the brightest minds from across the globe come together to explore, ask questions and improve the world.” That may have been true once. It is no longer true today. Speakers whose ideology is distasteful to that of Berkeley’s professors or the far left wing of the student body are no longer welcome on their campus. In an effort to appear less hypocritical than they are, they feign concern for the safety of their student body if conservative presenters are allowed to speak. Berkeley is not the only university that is banning conservative speakers. It is happening all over the U.S. Institutions are stunting the intellectual growth of their students by limiting the kind of speech in which students may participate.

Freedom of speech is also under attack from corporations. The workplace is becoming a hostile place for those who dare express an opinion that differs from that of the ‘woke’ crowd. There is no shortage of incidents of employees being threatened, silenced, put on probation, even fired, for committing the unforgiveable sin of saying what they believe. Corporations all over America are forcing employees to go through corporate diversity training. After said training, employees have been fired for stating opinions outside of that training. It is okay to have an opinion about abortion, for instance. If that opinion is pro choice you are free to say so. If it is pro life, best keep it to yourself if you want to keep your job. If you are in the NBA you are a crusader if you denounce the terrible human rights record of the USA, the greatest nation on earth. You get fired if you dare mention the fact that the Chinese government uses slave labor, and harvests organs from healthy, unwilling, minority citizens. On the corporate front there is some good news. We the People are finally beginning to push back. Corporations pushing a form of ‘wokeism’ known as Environmental, Social, and corporate Governance (ESG), are experiencing a loss of business. BlackRock is the largest money manager in the U.S., and a leading proponent of ESG. For the six months ended 7/21 of this year, according to Bloomberg, BlackRock has lost over $1.7 trillion in assets. Pension plans who think that BlackRock is putting its ideology ahead of its fiduciary responsibility have been firing them as money managers. Disney has seen its stock price halved since March of 2021. That is when Disney decided to take a very public stand alongside those who were trying to sexualize our elementary aged children. These, and plenty of other examples, put on full display the impact that citizens can have when they unite. They prove the age old saying that money talks and b**l s**t walks.

It is illegal for the federal government to censor citizens. The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifically says so. The Biden administration has played fast and loose with the law, and our Constitution, since taking office in 2021. (President Biden, for example, has decided to move ahead with his student loan forgiveness plan after two federal judges have told him he has no authority to do so). While the government is precluded from silencing citizens, private organizations are not. So representatives from our government are regularly communicating with a complicit social media to “suggest” which postings they view as misinformation, or disinformation. That is all social media tech companies need to silence those who dared disagree with the Biden administration. Reputable doctors and epidemiologists were threatened with the loss of their licenses if they dared report about treatments, other than vaccinations, that were working with their patients during the COVID scare. Real doctors, those who cared about their patients, did it anyway. Those threats worked to silence many of our leading medical professionals. A month before the 2020 election, members of the government suggested to Twitter that an article about to be published by the New York Post (NYP) concerning Hunter Biden might be Russian disinformation. That led Twitter to freeze the account of one of the NYP, one of oldest newspapers in the U.S. It also froze the accounts of anyone who chose to comment on the article. This decision, along with the fact that Twitter had the audacity to freeze the account of the President of the United States, were leading factors in the defeat of President Trump. We now have proof that our government has colluded with Twitter, Google, and Facebook, to remove additional content that was/is not complimentary to the Biden administration. This is exactly how the government owned news outlets in Russia and China operate.

The Biden administration then got so brazen as to create the Disinformation Governance Board. Then, as if to pour salt into our wounds, they nominated a flighty airhead who had been guilty of pushing disinformation to be the head of the Board. To suggest such an obvious attempt to silence all dissent says a lot about what the Biden administration thinks of us. They must view us as loathsome cowards too lazy to defend our God given rights. Until recently, they were correct. Then the unthinkable happened. Elon Musk bought Twitter. He understands the importance of the freedom of speech. He promises to open the platform to all speech. Democrats are in full blown panic mode. All of a sudden they are not able to stifle 100% of the voices of those who disagree with them. The people who campaigned on protecting democracy are scrambling to keep Twitter in line. Musk went from being a hero of the Left, when he touted the importance of electric vehicles, to being a tyrant who threatens democracy. All that he was guilty of was buying Twitter and promising to unleash free speech. The press/media, the government, and other social media platforms, are working mightily to degrade him. The next few months may well decide if we will continue to enjoy free speech. Apple is threatening to remove the Twitter app from their app store. That would deliver a severe blow to the company. That any private company has the ability to threaten our freedom is maddening. That a company domiciled in the U.S. would consider such a thing is infuriating. The government would prefer that Apple do its dirty work. If not, and if the government decides that Twitter and its new owner threatens its power, it will try to find ways to force musk to comply, or it will try to shut him down.

What is happening in China should send a shiver down the spine of every American. The Chinese government is able to shut down all forms of communication between its citizens. It can direct its message to the people without the chance of any rebuttal. Should we ever lose the freedom of speech what we are witnessing in China may be a blueprint for us.

Thank you for reading my blog. If you think it has merit please share it with your friends. Bob