I’m seeing a lot of people online whining, frankly, about free speech and censorship and living in a communist country because President Trump got kicked off Twitter and Parler got shut down and now we’ll be next and no doubt they are coming for our guns too.
So I just thought I’d use MY free speech (because I DO have free speech here on this blog which I pay for, unless of course I start trying to plan to an insurrection, in which case WordPress would kick me off their platform, and rightly so) to explain how so many people are getting it wrong.
Read on, and then you can comment below (IF I approve your comment, of course, because I have comment moderation turned on, which does not make this a communist country or even a communist blog).
Do you see what I did there? To elucidate:
- There always have been, and always will be, limits on speech in this country. Example: If you make violent threats against the President, you may find yourself arrested.
- In most situations, your free speech gives rise to consequences. Examples: If you make offensive comments at my house, I might ask you to leave. If you make offensive comments in public or at work, you might get fired. Your speech is still free; you were not jailed or executed for speaking your mind: you just suffered consequences.
- In a communist country, the government either owns or exerts control over the press. If this were a communist country, with Trump as its leader, he would still have a Twitter account. The government would either own Twitter or they would put its owner in jail if he tried to kick the President off.
- It is because the U.S. is a capitalist country that we have these giant companies whose platforms feel essential to us, and that have the power to kick us off those platforms when they do not like what we say, or are worried about being liable for what we say, or are afraid they will lose advertisers if they continue to allow us to say it, or are patriotic enough not to want to facilitate the planning of an insurrection.
- You may or may not consider the above to be problematic (I would agree that it can be), but it has nothing to do with your (or Donald Trump’s) right to free speech, or with communism.
Here’s to a year of my speaking more freely, and trusting that God will be with me through whatever the consequences may be!
