Sacking the citadels of censorship

We are living through the darkest period in U.S. history when it comes to our fundamental rights of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association.

In more than two centuries of free government, no administration has attempted to muzzle, jail, or perhaps even murder its principal political opponent as the current one has. Never before have lawyers been professionally ruined and criminally indicted for standing up for honest elections or the rights of political defendants. Never before has an administration worked with Big Tech allies to keep ordinary Americans from expressing and sharing their concerns and grievances about failures and corruption in high places, no matter how evidence based. Never before have some of our leading universities joined with the bureaucracy, the secret police, and the spy agencies to combat wide-ranging and well-grounded dissent.

My fellow political felons, indicted and unindicted: Be of good cheer!

We’re all aware of these menaces, but we need also to remind ourselves of the successes in uncovering and standing up to them. X (formerly Twitter) was liberated from the censorship-industrial complex by the largess of Elon Musk and once again provides a fair and open forum for political discussions, often informative if sometimes intemperate. Murthy v. Missouri (better known as Missouri v. Biden), a legal challenge to the core censorship partnership between the administration and Big Tech, after successes before lower courts, made it to the Supreme Court (which unfortunately then chose to evade the issue on jurisdictional grounds).

COVID dissenter Alex Berenson, who played a key role in the transformation of Twitter, is marching forward in court against the Biden officials who gave that firm its censorious instructions. The Stanford Internet Observatory, which harnessed the key university in Silicon Valley against freedom of speech, has closed its doors and seemingly dissipated its personnel and resources.

The increasing and spreading awareness of the sheer magnitude, dishonesty, and brazenness of this censorship is itself an important sign. The enemies of freedom have been outed. Their names and agencies are known more and more widely. And now that they are outed, they can be countered in the courts, in the press, on social media, and in the voting booth. So, too, we should take new hope from the fact that so many Americans, including many prominent critics of Trump, have rallied to his side despite the unconscionable legal warfare waged against him.

So, my fellow political felons, indicted and unindicted: Be of good cheer! “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Americans from the wealthy and powerful to the modest and ordinary are waking up — and waking up in time — to the destruction of their liberties the Biden administration and its deep state and Big Tech allies have wrought.

Those of us who saw these dangers early must continue the alarm and reinforce the rally. The citadel of censorship still stands under its meretricious banner of “fighting misinformation,” but as one can see every hour on X, we have taken the war for the restoration of our liberties into the enemy’s country, and the friends of liberty are being joined by new allies from every political grouping.

This July 4 let us draw new strength not only from our ancestors’ struggle for independence but their struggle against later armies of darkness and enslavement. This time next year, if everyone does their duty, we will raise a toast amid the ruins of the citadels of censorship that we have overthrown.