The Left’s Reeducation of America and the Threat to Free Speech

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Commentary

Recent polling shows that a majority of Americans favor government restrictions on false information online.

According to a July 20 Pew Research Center survey, at least 55 percent of Americans think that “the U.S. government and technology companies should each take steps to restrict false information and extremely violent content online.”

Fifty-five percent is a majority and is a milestone that shouldn’t be ignored. If more than half of adults can’t think for themselves and prefer censorship to free speech, it seems apparent that the reeducation of America over the past several decades is nearly complete.

Let’s break this down.

Someone Will Always Be Offended by the Truth or a Lie

First, why should people care if “false” speech is online? Isn’t that already clearly understood by anyone and everyone who uses the internet or watches the news?

That’s nothing new. In fact, the United States is the only country in the history of the world that was founded on the idea of freedom of speech. This fact shouldn’t even be questioned, but in the spirit of free speech, the following two quotes should make it clear.

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Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government: When this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved.”

Similarly, Thomas Jefferson said, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

There you have it. Free speech and a free press are the foundation of our rights and identity as Americans and always have been. In fact, heavily biased, free-speaking newspapers were present and quite vocal during the American Revolution, so why can’t we tolerate them now?

Who Holds Government, Big Tech Accountable?

Second, what if the false or violent speech comes from the government or tech companies? Who’s holding them accountable?

That was the intended purpose of a free press, but they’ve mostly been bought and paid for by anti-freedom, pro-globalist folks.

That’s why your eyes are here instead of there.

Third, there’s good that comes from hearing false or even violent speech. For one, it lets everyone know what another person really thinks. If a person spews hateful or false information on social media, he’s letting the world know who he is and opening himself up to being rebuked, ridiculed, and rejected by decent people. If there’s a pedophile-Nazi-anti-Christian bigot in my neighborhood, I want to know about it.

“Sunlight,” as the saying goes, “is the great disinfectant.”

Freedom Falls With Slippery Definitions

Furthermore, who gets to define “false information”?

Take, for example, the statements made during the pandemic by the president of the United States in 2021 that if you’re vaccinated, you won’t get COVID-19, or the warning published on the FDA’s website that ivermectin was ineffective against the virus.

The first was thought to be true by some but was definitely proven false later. The second was also thought by many to be true at the time, but it, too, was later proven false.

On the flip side, what about the “science-backed” claim that healthy children and young people needed to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and kept out of school, even when it was known that they weren’t at risk from the disease? That “scientific claim” was utter hogwash, to put it mildly. It did, however, help drive billions of dollars of profits for the pharmaceutical companies.

Also, how expansive is the definition of “false information”? Should it apply to books and films? Both certainly contain volumes of false information that’s more commonly known as “fiction.” Nazis and communists joyously and routinely censored, jailed, and murdered writers.

What does “extremely violent” really mean?

To a radical vegan, it could just mean a farmer selling cows to slaughter or a backyard chef grilling a steak.

What about religious websites?

The Bible declares that Christ will judge the world with fire and blood and that the unrepentant and unsaved will have their part in the lake of fire. That sounds pretty horrible and violent to me. I also happen to believe that it’s true.

But what if either the person in charge of policy at a social media company or a prominent congressperson thinks that the Bible falls under the “false and extremely violent” definition of information?

You can guess how that will go.

Why Are Americans for Censorship?

So, what happened to America?

To paraphrase Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, just as schools are critical to defending a nation and its culture, they’re also critical to defeating it.

That’s why in the decades after World War II, one of the left’s areas of focus was the education of—or more accurately, the indoctrination of—American children from the 1960s onward.

The process has been simple and effective. The short version is to use the classroom to reeducate kids, to strip away traditional values and norms from even the youngest of minds. That includes replacing reverence and love of country, the country’s history and its foundational ideas, and the Founders themselves with disdain.

Their revisionist view of the United States, which portrayed the nation as an obstacle rather than a force for good in the world, was and remains a tool created by anti-American, communist academics in order to destroy the one nation that had the power to stop the tyrannical leftist elite from subjugating the world.

But, as we’re also seeing of late, the left’s indoctrination of our children includes denying basic biology, imparting sexual confusion, and encouraging a rejection of parents’ authority, so that they may reshape them with “woke” values and norms and reduce their ability for independent thought through infantilization of culture and the normalization of drugs.

None of this is news, by the way; Aldous Huxley wrote about it in his prescient dystopian novel “Brave New World.”

Today, as the Pew survey indicates, the globalist elite are closer than ever to accomplishing that objective. Think such an elite doesn’t exist? See the agendas of the World Economic Forum and the Chinese Communist Party.

The overarching value expression of the left is tolerance, which is fatal to traditional Judeo-Christian values. As Archbishop Charles J. Chaput put it, “Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good.”

I use this quote not just because it’s true, but also because there’s no difference between evil and the left.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.