Why is censorship a bad thing? Because it empowers a single offended zealot to destroy a person or business that offends them.
Some people cheered when — in the name of tamping down racism — that people and sites associated with White Supremacy were targeted and removed from the Digital Public Square.
Not only were they chased off social media, but the providers that hosted them and companies (like Visa or Paypal) with whom they had business arrangements were pressured to cut them off.
While nobody with any decency will mourn the absence of avowed racists in the digital space, those of us sensitive to free speech issues raised some obvious inconsistencies of this policy.
Social Media Censors White Supremacists But Muslim Terrorists … eh, Not So Much
This approach set a dangerous precedent for empowering a group with an already long history of using their platform to demonize people, name them ‘enemy’ and seek the ruination of people and companies for no better reason than a difference of political opinion.
Mozilla’s CEO was pressured to resign once he was outed for making a private donation to the ‘wrong’ (pro-traditional marriage) political cause.
Chick-Fil-A is perpetually demonized and regularly targetted for boycotts by LGBT activists despite the fact there is not a single policy in their workplace that disadvantages LGBT rights in any way.
We’ve seen this played out again and again in other venues. The Cake Baker going to the Supreme Court, winning, and being the subject of another complaint the next day is the most obvious of the list.
SPLC’s ‘hate’ list was used by a crazed gunman as justification to shoot up the Family Research Council… and somehow SPLC continues to be held as an honest arbiter of who is and is not ‘hateful’.
SPLC is an extremist activist group that is among the forefront of demonizing anyone who deviates at all from their narrow definitions of political orthodoxy. To make matters worse, they lean HARD to the left. (You can see where this is going.)
This a technique that’s been weaponized by the political Left to bully the Right into silence… which was precisely our objection to it in the first place. It is an explicitly anti-American approach to fair and honest political discourse.
It’s the well-worn totalitarian jackboot approach of silencing those you disagree with. The silencing of political adversaries is why some have drawn loose comparisons between the digital Facebook Purge earlier this month and Germany’s infamous “kristallnacht”.
If you’ve read “The Hangman” by Maurice Ogden, what happened next should not surprise you.
It mirrors what happened on Facebook, where first ‘extreme’ Alex Jones was targeted without andy repercussions and then more mainstream right-of-center sites were taken down.
Having been emboldened by earlier success in censorship, the Militant left is now aggressively demanding another scalp (it will not be the last).
This time, it’s LifeSiteNews — a Pro-life Christian website.
They are unflinchingly bold about their positions, but nothing they say would fall under any but the most cynically self-serving definitions of ‘hate’.
From LifeSiteNews:
Update, 11:55 a.m. EST: Our web developer was up all night implementing temporary measures to keep our site online even if our current web-hosting company followed through on its threat to shut down our services. We are extremely grateful for his hard work on a Saturday night. However, this is only a temporary solution. We are currently looking for a web-hosting company that will not cave to threats of this kind. We are also exploring legal options to combat Adam Flanders’ campaign of harassment as well as our web-hosting company’s extraordinary decision to give us 12 hours to move our site late on a Saturday evening. We will keep our readers posted.
October 27, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – This is extremely urgent. I need to inform you that LifeSite just received an email at 8:30 p.m. EST from our web-hosting company alerting us that they will be taking our website down within 12 hours, if not sooner.
They wrote: “we are implementing our ‘SUSPENSION OF SERVICES’ clause…and giving you 12 hours notice to move your web site operations off of our servers…”
We received absolutely no forewarning whatsoever about this decision.
The company told LifeSite it is acting in response to a months-long campaign of complaints against us by Adam Flanders. Flanders is a convicted sex abuser and homosexual activist who is angered over our reports exposing him and his past. As LifeSite recently reported, he has already succeeded in taking down other pro-family websites by targeting their server companies.
Flanders’ latest complaint is focused on the absurd allegation that LifeSite “has been implicated in a violent hate crime against a gay man and Catholic church,” and that we “instigated property damage and a physical assault.”
Read the Full Story At: LifeSiteNews
The point of Ogden’s was that, when it was the ‘other’ guy being targeted unfairly, nobody spoke out against it. And ‘other’ voices were whittled away until, when the hangman turned his attention to ‘me’ … there was no one left in the empty square to call for the hangman to stop.
Some people use their speech for lovely and noble things. Others for disgusting and scummy things.
If we fail to protect the rights of those whose speech we dislike… we are, in the process, eroding the protections of our own speech.
The Left isn’t a big fan of anyone standing up for pro-life issues, be that a website, or even an elected President. But we don’t take our cues from what the left wants, do we?By the way, since Facebook has unpublished ClashDaily’s page, your best bet to keep in the loop is to Subscribe to our ClashDaily Newsletter right here:
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