A monopoly on speech

If you aren’t worried, you must not be paying attention.

Of course, you could be a neo-liberal, and believe everyone except a heterosexual white Christian male has the right to speak freely. In that case, you’ll probably think it’s great if someone decides to “de-platform” this website under the premise that it’s “hate speech” to state the obvious, which is to say that people born with an “Y” chromosome (formerly known as biological males) have significant physical advantages when engaged in athletic competitions against people without “X” chromosomes, a.k.a biological females.

Or, if I really wanted to throw caution to the wind, I might even have the audacity to say that fetus is nothing more than a fancy word substituted for the phrase unborn baby to assuage the guilty consciences of millions who want the legal right to kill them. I know, I know…the word “fetus” is a technical, scientific term, and I’m using the vernacular of the unwashed, uneducated (and uber-religious) masses to describe the exact same thing. However, the point of this little diatribe isn’t to rail specifically against transgender athletes or legal abortions, but to demand the freedom to criticize them without having to live in fear of retribution.

The First Amendment guarantee of free speech does not require that a private business should have to provide services to customers they do not wish to serve. Because I supported the right of Colorado businessman Jack Phillips and his Masterpiece Cakeshop to refuse to bake a cake for a gay wedding on religious grounds, I must also, albeit reluctantly, accept the decision of Jack Dorsey to permanently ban President Trump’s Twitter account and disconnecting him from millions of his supporters because Twitter is also a privately owned business, not a government entity, and the First Amendment applies to liberals as equally as it should to conservatives.

There is one crucial difference to be noted between those two situations: the gay couple in Colorado had multiple options of other bakers willing and eager to provide a cake for their wedding. Indeed, Jack Phillips offered to sell them a cake that was available for sale, and merely drew the line at baking them a special cake for the wedding reception. Jack Dorsey hasn’t offered President Trump any sort of accommodation, but that isn’t the real problem.

The biggest problem is that Jeff Bezos and his Amazon Web Services shut down Parler, Twitter’s main competition, giving Dorsey a de-facto monopoly on that specific type of messaging service. Without a doubt Dorsey created the business model with Twitter and Parler was a good imitation, but the need for Parler came from Dorsey’s habit of heavily censoring conservative speech on his social media platform and the strong desire for a more open alternative.

Apple, Google, Facebook (and Youtube), and the mainstream media have all seized control of the narrative for the last couple of months, repeatedly insisting there was no evidence of election fraud, the courts had all reviewed the evidence and ruled in favor of Joe Biden, who had won fair and square, and that Donald Trump had incited a seditious riot and deserves to be the first president in history to be impeached during his last week in office and tried by the Senate as a private citizen.

Meanwhile, four full years after Trump took office, John Durham’s investigation into the allegedly seditious coup attempt against the Trump administration that began before his inauguration plods along while the main conspirators such as Andrew McCabe and James Comey enjoy new jobs in the private sector and may never suffer the consequences of their behavior.

Normally, I would sarcastically ask, “Is this a great country, or what?” Today I would rhetorically answer my own question by saying, “Not anymore.”

Long before Twitter permanently banned President Trump, a popular website known as The Conservative Treehouse was de-platformed by WordPress after years of hosting them because the content at that website was deemed unacceptable to use their services. Now that Parler has been shut down, liberal and “mainstream” (but I repeat myself) media services have called for the silencing of One America Network, News Max, and even Fox News (which many conservatives no longer follow) because they don’t want free speech, they want a monopoly on speech. They want absolute power to suppress any conservative speech.

The attacks on free speech from liberals is coming from all directions. Social media accounts for conservatives on the “approved” platforms like Facebook and Twitter are routinely shadow-banned or suspended, but liberals don’t get disciplined for even worse behavior. Conservative websites and social media alternatives have been shut down and de-monetized, denied advertising income and banking privileges. Forgiveness has become an outdated concept of the past, and simply shooting people with whom we disagree isn’t enough punishment–we must “salt the fields” so the suffering is long and extraordinarily painful. Starve people of their ability to earn an income, and then literally starve them to death. Family and friends have warned my worldview is obsolete and merely by stating my opinion, I could be putting my chances to earn future income in serious jeopardy. After all, if Jeff Bezos suddenly decided to blackball my books at Amazon because I don’t think he should own Amazon, The Washington Post, and Amazon Web Services because it gives him too much power over free speech, he could do it, and deny me the right to earn an income off my hard work. I don’t think Jeff Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, etc. should have the right to decide what I can and cannot say. They have assumed, incorrectly, that death is more important than freedom.

In addition to my books and novels and blogging here at Southern Prose, I’ve contributed the occasional essay or blog piece to a conservative website called American Thinker over the years. It became customary for me to interact with readers via the comments section on the day of publication. Recently, the editors announced that comments would be permanently disabled, because they had been given an ultimatum to disable comments or the entire website would be permanently shut down. When I inquired about the origin of the threat, it seemed that the threat of shut down extended to revealing the identity of the source, because the editors were cordial but clear in their communications that they would not answer that question. Why would they not tell one of their contributors?The threat of shutdown must be serious, and coming from a legitimate source with the power to carry out the threat. The primary reason I’ve chosen to write this piece for my blog is because no one can stop me from publishing it, and the truth getting out.

Now before any reader concludes this could only refer to some mysterious but powerful agency of the federal government, I would submit the feds shouldn’t be our only suspects. Alphabet, or their subsidiary Google, could easily wield that sort of power, and a handful of other entities owned by powerful liberals are also viable candidates for delivering such a threat.

In the Book of Revelation, Chapter 13, verses 16 and 17 read: “And the second beast required all people small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, 17so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark— the name of the beast or the number of its name.” Verse 18 goes on to say that the mark of the beast will be 666. If I could figure out how to connect the number 666 with an uppercase “D” for Democrats, I’d be ready to argue that the apocalyptic prophesy is coming true.

Think about it–Donald Trump was permanently banned for giving a speech on January 6th, calling for peaceful protests of the election at the Capitol but the Ayatollah Khomeini has publicly called for Trump’s assassination, and only had his account temporarily suspended. How screwed up is that?

Yes, the Democrats, and some Republicans, have accused Trump of inciting the violence that took place, but the transcript of his exact words says something completely different. Trump literally said: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Conversely, Black Lives Matter has been known to lead riots with demonstrators chanting violent, hateful rhetoric such as, “Pigs in a blanket. Fry them like bacon!” and of course the disgusting chant, “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!” The double standard and hypocrisy is appalling and unnerving.

But rather than de-monetizing that domestic terrorist organization, the NBA and other corporate entities poured hundreds of millions of dollars into their bank accounts that were ultimately redirected to support Democrat political candidates. The ugly, insidious lie that police officers intentionally target and murder unarmed black men is repeated and used to incite racial violence not only without consequence, that appalling and divisive speech is handsomely rewarded. Meanwhile, the truth about Hunter Biden’s business relationships with foreign entities such as Burisma was deliberately hidden from voters prior to the election.

As of now the media can decide what stories are covered, how they are covered, and what the average citizen can say about those stories. Powerful liberal media entities have routinely silenced opposing viewpoints and shut down competitive alternatives with impunity thus far. As Lord Acton famously said, “Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.” Facebook, Twitter, and Google have effectively seized control of all means of mass communication, and only one side of the story is now being told.

I now fully understand the passion and sentiments behind the immortal words uttered by Patrick Henry during the American Revolution:

“Give me liberty, or give me death!”