Free Speech Colonialism
The "Left's" Loss In November Might Be Bigger Than They Think
With President Donald J. Trump’s Inauguration less than a week away, it seems like a good time (honestly, there is no bad time) to revisit just how epic the left’s loss in November was. They had everything. More money (more millionaires and billionaires), more media (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC), more celebrities, better sets, Big Tech (Google and Facebook, in particular), and a history of successfully dragging elections out until they won.
Most of the progressive Western World and all of the Marxist bits wanted one of the worst, weakest, most incomprehensibly vapid but successful political climbers in American History to win. Neither of our geographically closest neighbors wanted Trump. Neither Central nor South America (except for Javier Milei in Argentina) wanted The Donald to celebrate a sweet repeat - where would they empty their mental hospitals and prisons if not America?
With few exceptions, the physical and digital world were willing to put up with Kamala not to have Trump. I’m not sure why celebs and big tech thought more “weak America” was good for them, but we know why the foreigners wanted it. It left an opening for them to take what economic and diplomatic advantage they could to prop up their failing regimes for a few more years.
Scope - No, Not the Mouthwash
I know all of this, you say - or did know and were happy to forget it, but please don’t. If you voted for Trump, you were on the right side of something so incredible that it bears repeating. Google! What obscene percentage of online searches do they control? It’s not 100%, but it’s close. Not just in the US but globally. Its algorithms were, and still are, bending the arc of reality to ensure you are unable to find anything positive and everything negative about Trump, Republicans, America, all of it. Everything MAGA from America’s founding to now is online but buried by the Internet’s Media Industrial Complex.
Trump-Hitler will get you an absurd number of results showing us how Trump is Hitler absent his love and adoration of his Jewish family members, support for Jews and Israel, and so on.
Facebook continued, until last week - and even then, I’m still suspicious of claims they’ll change - to stifle reasoned or balanced debate on the election, doing what it could to prevent it from reaching as wide an audience as it would have without their interference.
The Handmaiden media listed above, which increasingly includes FOX News, delivered billions if not trillions of dollars in positive earned media to Harris and Democrats while smearing Republicans, Donald Trump, and his supporters.
The so-called supercharged, deep-pocketed new media, including podcasters, are not financially comparable to the establishment media. Not even close. But the message proved more important than money. Even Democrats had enough of Joe and Kamala’s crapstorm.
You might say they could not outtalk what people were actually experiencing, but yes, they can. They do it all the time. And they are so beholden to it that the rise of podcasts, the Epoch Times, the Washington Beacon, The Daily Wire, the Daily Caller, Red State, the Blaze, and scores of national and local sites and programming is not just a threat but a deciding factor.
This truth informed their censorship and cancellation culture. That is why they want Jankovich and the Ministry of Misinformation. This fear defines their fake fact-checkers and the war against free and open debate. It drove the behavior uncovered in the Twitter Files - government leverage brought to bear to force private “public squares” to silence whatever the Feds said they should.
If Elon Musk had failed to turn Twitter into X, things may have ended differently. But even with that, they had all the money, influence, power, advantages, global backing, institutional support—and a burgeoning police state they were willing to use.
And they lost.
In the movie, Serenity, a totalitarian police state, fails to hide a long-held dirty little secret that could bring them down, summarised by this quote. You can’t stop the signal, Mal.
Well, you can. Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, China…England (to name a few). It can and has been done, but it’s getting much more complicated, thanks to technology (made affordable by free markets and greed). Our Modern-age Gutenberg revolution.
The other thing you cannot stop is that eventually, the human spirit, even those who enabled their own political oppression, will yearn for that, too.
For millennia, we had no notion of free speech (despite the urge) because there was no universal concept of individual rights. Saying the wrong thing to the wrong person got you killed. English colonialism spilled these ideas—like a tipsy cat lady’s wine at “book club”—all over the globe. Some took to it better than others, but no one took free speech, association, and assembly as seriously as America’s founders.
That is still true today, and people worldwide wish they had it, too.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if, in the end, all the lives, education, productivity, and liberty that were lost because of the response to COVID-19 resulted in a world where America’s First Amendment spread to places it had never been - defended by citizen journalists (the other kind don’t want the competition)?
They could be Martyrs and heroes whose sacrifice enlightened the world.
There will always be evil, and it loves to work for or with the government. It will always be there, and nearly everyone is susceptible to its whispers and charms. It is corruptible for the right price or advantage, and it doesn’t like to let go once it grabs hold.
The tyrants always insist that their censorship is for your safety. You shouldn’t need to decide what’s funny or fake, sarcasm, parody, lies, or truth. And it’s not that you’re too stupid (despite their ruling class narcissistic superiority complex); it is that you are smarter than they are. You have more common sense. And you live in the real world. And it scares them when you exercise free thought and then engage in action in significant numbers, like voting.
They are aware of the threat, and it has emboldened their search for a way to silence you because tyranny never sleeps, but neither shall we. Your speech is as precious as mine, especially when we disagree, and that is how it is supposed to be.
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Let us hope he follows through Ithaca his promises. I pray President Trump and his family stay safe.