The U.S. government has become particularly
intolerant of speech that challenges the government’s power, reveals the
government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the
citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech
that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to
censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, bullying speech,
intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening
speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government
speech, right-wing speech, extremist speech, etc.
Yet by allowing the government to
whittle away at cherished First Amendment freedoms—which form the backbone of
the Bill of Rights—we have evolved into a society that would not only be
abhorrent to the founders of this country but would be hostile to the words they used to birth this nation.
Don’t believe me?
Conduct your own experiment into the government’s tolerance of
speech that challenges its authority, and see for yourself.
Stand on a street corner—or
in a courtroom, at a city council meeting or on a university campus—and recite
some of the rhetoric used by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John
Adams and Thomas Paine without referencing them as the authors.
For that matter, just try
reciting the Declaration of Independence, which rejects
tyranny, establishes Americans as sovereign beings, recognizes God as a Supreme
power, portrays the government as evil, and provides a detailed laundry list of
abuses that are as relevant today as they were 240 years ago.
My guess is that you won’t
last long before you get thrown out, shut up, threatened with arrest or at the
very least accused of being a radical, a troublemaker, a sovereign citizen, a
conspiratorialist or an extremist………
(Full details at link below)
What we’re
dealing with today is a government that wants to suppress dangerous words—words
about its warring empire, words about its land grabs, words about its
militarized police, words about its killing, its poisoning and its
corruption—in order to keep its lies going.
As I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on
the American People, what we are witnessing is a nation
undergoing a nervous breakdown over this growing tension between our
increasingly untenable reality and the lies being perpetrated by a government
that has grown too power-hungry, egotistical, militaristic and disconnected
from its revolutionary birthright.
The only therapy is the truth and nothing but the truth.
Otherwise, there will be no more
First Amendment. There will be no more Bill of Rights. And there will be no
more freedom in America as we have known it.
As the insightful and brash comedian George Carlin observed:
“Rights
aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all
we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you
read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and
shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the
government does not give a f*** about them! The government doesn’t care about
you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety. It
simply does not give a f*** about you! It’s interested in its own power. That’s
the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”
