{"id":88652,"date":"2022-12-14T16:05:06","date_gmt":"2022-12-14T22:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=88652"},"modified":"2022-12-14T16:05:06","modified_gmt":"2022-12-14T22:05:06","slug":"88652","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=88652","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Why the Left Must Destroy Free Speech \u2013 or Be Destroyed<\/a><\/p>\n

In Hayek\u2019s famous 1944 book,\u00a0The Road to Serfdom<\/em>, he warned that the intellectual and political classes of the democracies of that time were embracing some of the same ideas that inspired Hitler\u2019s Germany, Mussolini\u2019s Italy, and Stalin\u2019s Russia:\u00a0 comprehensive government planning, hyper regulation of industry,\u00a0 nationalization, welfare statism, and collectivism in general.\u00a0 He did not predict that these societies would end up \u201cin serfdom,\u201d however, as some have mistakenly claimed. \u00a0Quite the contrary.\u00a0 In his first chapter he clearly stated that he hoped the ideas in the book would help these countries to avoid that disastrous fate.\u00a0 He hoped the ideas of the book would be a roadblock on the road to serfdom.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The eleventh chapter of\u00a0The Road to Serfdom<\/em>\u00a0is entitled \u201cThe End of Truth,\u201d about the historical imperative in all totalitarian states throughout history to destroy freedom of speech so that the only true belief is \u201cthe social plan\u201d imposed by the state, whatever that may be.\u00a0 This is achieved by relentless institutionalized lying and propaganda, coupled with harsh censorship of all contrary ideas or even questions about the propriety of forcefully imposing one single \u201csocial plan.\u201d This is American society today, in other words, in case you haven\u2019t noticed.\u00a0 (Socialism, Hayek said, has always been about substituting the plans of politicians for the plans that all of the citizens make for themselves.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a matter of planning versus no planning, but\u00a0who<\/em>\u00a0is to do the planning).<\/p>\n

The significance of propaganda in totalitarian countries, Hayek wrote, is that \u201cIf all the sources of current information are effectively under one single control, it is no longer a question of merely persuading people of this or that.\u00a0 The skillful propagandist then has power to mold . . . minds in any direction he chooses . . .\u201d\u00a0 Jeff Deist, among others, has commented that America today has become a \u201cpost-persuasion society\u201d and he is right, almost eighty years after Hayek issued this warning.\u00a0 The Left is no longer willing to seriously debate anything \u2013 at least for the time being while they control the universities, all three branches of government, the media, (laughingly-named) \u201centertainment\u201d industries, and more.\u00a0 Even dopey Prince Harry publicly denounced the First Amendment in a pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself with Hollywood Leftists like his wife shortly after divorcing himself from his family and moving to Hollywood.\u00a0 If you disagree with their latest version of socialist totalitarianism (\u201cwoke-ism\u201d coupled with green hysteria and calls for worldwide central planning), then you can be canceled, smeared as a racist, a white supremacist, or even fired from your job and prevented from getting a new one.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0moral\u00a0<\/em>consequences of totalitarian propaganda are even more profound.\u00a0 It is \u201cdestructive of all morals\u201d because it \u201cundermines one of the foundations of all morals:\u00a0 the sense and respect for the truth.\u201d\u00a0 An avalanche of Official Lies has always been the tool of \u201cvarious theoreticians of the totalitarian system,\u201d wrote Hayek, citing Plato\u2019s \u201cnoble lies\u201d and \u201csocial myths\u201d championed by the French philosopher Georges Sorel.\u00a0 The ends justify the lying means to totalitarians everywhere.\u00a0 When was the last time a \u201cWhite House spokesperson\u201d did\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0lie in public?\u00a0 (See my 1992 book,\u00a0Official Lies: How Washington Misleads Us<\/em>, with James T. Bennett).<\/p>\n

Of course minority opinions \u201cmust also be silenced\u201d and \u201cevery act of the government must become sacrosanct and exempt from criticism.\u201d\u00a0 This was never more on display than in government responses to the \u201cpandemic\u201d of 2020, followed by the Biden campaign and its collusion with \u201cBig Tech\u201d to censor even the president of the United States along with massive evidence of the colossal criminality and corruption of the Biden family crime syndicate.\u00a0 This was arguably the biggest governmental assault on the First Amendment, apparently organized by the FBI and CIA, since it was essentially done away with by the John Adams administration\u2019s \u201cSedition Act.\u201d<\/p>\n

Academe must also be thoroughly corrupted, said Hayek, for \u201cthe disinterested search for truth cannot be allowed in a totalitarian system.\u201d\u00a0 American universities have gone almost all the way down to the end of the road to serfdom in this regard. \u00a0Many have fallen off the cliff completely. \u00a0This is especially true, said Hayek, of the disciplines of history, law, and economics.\u00a0 They must be compromised in a way that supports the state rather than criticizes it, however mildly.\u00a0 The American history profession is almost completely dominated by Marxists, for example, and economics has been plagued by Keynesian central planners and \u201cmarket failure theorists\u201d for decades.\u00a0 As Doug Casey once remarked, most economists today \u201care political apologists masquerading as economists.\u201d\u00a0 They \u201cprescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.\u201d\u00a0 The field of economics, said Casey, \u201chas been turned into the handmaiden of government in order to give a scientific justification for things the government . . . wants to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

In totalitarian societies, wrote Hayek, truth is not something that is discovered by learning, education, self-study, research, and debate and discussion.\u00a0 Instead, it is \u201csomething to be laid down by authority . . .\u201d\u00a0 In today\u2019s world, for example, global warming hysteria is \u201csettled science,\u201d the most un-scientific phrase ever uttered. \u00a0A true scientist always questions the status quo, not necessarily rejecting it but keeping an open mind that new research can alter his thinking.\u00a0 Nothing is ever \u201csettled.\u201d\u00a0 How a slippery politician like Al Gore is considered to be an expert on the philosophy of science \u2013 and atmospheric science to boot \u2014 is one of the wonders of the world.\u00a0 \u00a0(Don\u2019t forget that the notion that the earth was flat was once declared to be \u201csettled science\u201d by the Al Gores of that day).<\/p>\n

Medical science is not science, we have been told; Anthony Fauci is medical science.\u00a0 Or rather, the \u201cauthority\u201d of Anthony Fauci, a grotesquely overpaid government bureaucrat is science.\u00a0 Again, nothing is more un-scientific than these ridiculous, arrogant, and tyrannical pronouncements by Anthony Fauci and his political sidekicks.<\/p>\n

\u201c[I]ntolerance, too, is openly extolled,\u201d in totalitarian societies said Hayek, anticipating by decades the 1960s-era \u201cNew Left\u201d hero, the totalitarian intellectual Herbert Marcuse, who authored a widely-celebrated paper on \u201crepressive tolerance,\u201d the idea that only \u201cthe oppressed classes\u201d deserve free speech.\u00a0 In the world of the 60s \u201cNew Left,\u201d whose students and political descendants now control almost all of academe, television, the media in general, much of government, \u201cwoke\u201d corporations, and other institutions, the \u201coppressor class\u201d is comprised essentially of all white heterosexual males, especially ones of European descent.\u00a0 Everyone else is oppressed by them, the theory goes.\u00a0 The poorest, lowliest, white redneck is said to \u201coppress\u201d black millionaires and billionaires.\u00a0 Question this theory in our post-persuasion society and you will be labeled a racist, a white supremacist, and probably even a Nazi.<\/p>\n

Hayek based these ideas on his years of study of world history and of the totalitarian regimes of the early twentieth century.\u00a0 \u201cWokeness\u201d did not just suddenly appear and proceed to take over almost the entire Western world.\u00a0 It is just the latest manifestation of totalitarianism that has been marching through the institutions for several generations.\u00a0 There are always totalitarians in our midst, the title of Chapter 13 of\u00a0The Road to Serfdom<\/em>, and today\u2019s totalitarians consider themselves to be standing on the shoulders of all those who preceded them, however unsavory they might have been.\u00a0 That is why many on the Left\u00a0celebrated<\/em>\u00a0after the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s.\u00a0 \u201cWe no longer have to be associated with monsters like Stalin, Mao, Nicolae Ceaucescu, and other mass-murdering communists of the twentieth century,\u201d they said.\u00a0 And like all other totalitarians who came before them, they fully understand that freedom of speech is to them what sunlight or a Christian cross is to Dracula.\u00a0 That is why they are all now hellbent on destroying Elon Musk, a man who is attempting to add a tiny smidgen of free speech to the stifling, statist political correctness of American society.\u00a0 Their treatment of Musk will eventually make their treatment of Donald Trump seem like a love fest in comparison.<\/p>\n

Their hatred for Trump, by the way, is derived from the same source as their hatred for Elon Musk:\u00a0 Like Musk, Trump called out and publicized many of the official lies and official liars of the Washington establishment, especially those in the \u201cfake news\u201d business.\u00a0 The Left considers the fight over free speech to be a political death struggle, and they are right about that.\u00a0 If anything deserves to be strangled in its crib it is the Left\u2019s current assault on the First Amendment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why the Left Must Destroy Free Speech \u2013 or Be Destroyed In Hayek\u2019s famous 1944 book,\u00a0The Road to Serfdom, he warned that the intellectual and political classes of the democracies of that time were embracing some of the same ideas that inspired Hitler\u2019s Germany, Mussolini\u2019s Italy, and Stalin\u2019s Russia:\u00a0 comprehensive government planning, hyper regulation of … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scratch-a-lib-find-a-tyrant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88652"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88653,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88652\/revisions\/88653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}