Who are the totalitarians?

Constitution of the United States

First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In so many blog posts I blather on about how words matter and try to explain the spin information war, that’s working to tear America apart at the seams and divide us into seething factions. My blog has been an ongoing ramble about the spin information war and warnings that “words matter.” Well, the words above, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, are words that protect Americans from some of the efforts to silence citizens happening in many other western democracies, in the name of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion or expressing views that run against the majority popular opinion of the “experts” or leftist culture warriors.

Free speech in America has been under attack at other times in our history, especially during wartime. Here’s a link to information about the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, under President Woodrow Wilson during World War I.

I view this spin information war – not as just normal political messaging, but as a real, deliberate, orchestrated, actual information war, of the kind generally waged by state actors against other state actors or in totalitarian regimes to keep the people under control. Here in America, I believe this change from more traditional political messaging operations to this spin information war began in the 1990s with the Clinton operatives and then spread throughout the entire Democratic Party and left-wing activists. The mainstream (liberal) news media, the “expert” class from academia, and Hollywood have always played an active role in the Dem. spin war messaging operations. These three information avenues drive the culture in America, while the political class tries to solidify those culture war gains into law.

For many years, right-wing allegations of “media bias” were dismissed by the mainstream media, until Donald J. Trump came along and adopted their same corrupt spin information warfare way of advancing political objectives. No matter how much I dislike Trump’s lying and behaving as badly as lying, corrupt liberal spinmeisters, his willingness to get in the same gutter and engage in the same type of vicious smear attacks, the lying, and repetitive messaging games did thoroughly expose the mainstream (liberal) media as corrupt Dem. operatives rather than the professional journalists, they proclaim to be.

There’s a subtle difference between the Dem repetitive messaging games and Trump’s. The liberal media messaging attacks can be spotted with smooth-talking media folks all repeating the same words and phrases that advance Democrat and liberal activist objectives, while Trump’s repetitive messaging games are cruder and less refined, as Trump bellows out some new mean nicknames over and over or rage tweets some new talking point in capital letters on social media that often upends an orchestrated liberal media messaging attack. Trump’s is mostly a one-man guerilla messaging operation, while Dems and the liberal media have orchestrated theirs into a smooth production.

Trump won so many of the spin messaging battles and that’s why the left wanted to silence him. Trump’s current 2024 campaign though is branching out to more orchestrated smear and meme messaging attacks against DeSantis, which is a sign that within the Trump GOP, the corrupt Dem form of spin information warfare is becoming normalized, I think. Partisan politics aside, I have believed, since I first started working to understand this American spin war, that any coordinated large scale media/political effort dedicated to fueling divides 24/7, across all avenues of information, in America is a threat to our American constitutional republic and corrosive to insuring domestic tranquility and promoting the general welfare, that’s mentioned in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. I’ve always been one of those sticklers about following rules.

The goal of the liberal spin information war is to advance the left’s culture war agenda and to do that requires, not only winning elections, but completely dominating and driving the culture in America. They strive to control public opinion and define/control the cultural norms. And yes, words really do matter in this spin information war. They matter for the politicians, but even more importantly is our ability as ordinary citizens, to be able to speak and meet freely, to express opinions without fear of reprisals or punishment.

Many people from other countries don’t understand our American belief in free speech. Beyond autocratic countries, with very few personal liberties, even in many western-style democracies in the past decade, there’s been a push from the political left for enacting “speech codes” into law to restrict and even impose criminal punishments for “hate speech.” A March 2023, article, A Modicum of Sense: U.K. walks back enforcement of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs), better understood as thought crimes, at the City Journal, explains:

“With recorded crime across England and Wales at a 20-year high, signs are emerging that the U.K. government might be coming to its senses.

Under new plans announced by Home Secretary Suella Braverman, the police will be instructed to record non-crime hate incidents (NCHI) only when necessary, not simply when someone feels offended, and officers reporting them will have to give precedence to freedom of speech and expression over restrictions on offensive or insulting language.

Until this change, an NCHI was defined as anything that a victim (or any other person) perceived to be motivated by prejudice or hostility toward one or more protected characteristics. These include (but aren’t limited to) race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-modicum-of-sense

So, anything “perceived to be motivated” by the person alleging a hate crime could lead to you being arrested in the UK. It’s not just the UK, here’s a March 2023 article from Euronews, New hate speech laws kick up a storm in Ireland. Here’s a September 2022 NYT’s article on Germany’s crackdown on “hate speech,” Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door: Battling far-right extremism, Germany has gone further than any other Western democracy to prosecute individuals for what they say online, testing the limits of free speech on the internet. France, Canada, Australia and other western countries have all embraced enacting laws against “hate speech.”

The “hate speech” activism ramped up in the 1980s and 1990s in America resulting in “speech codes” being implemented at many colleges and universities. These sorts of “hate speech” laws have met resistance in our American legal system due to our 1st Amendment right to free speech, but the left-wing activism to silence opposing views and police our language continues, largely through efforts to silence people on social media platforms and foment online mobs to cancel people. The effort to label unpopular views as “disinformation” or “misinformation continues. Here’s a post by a British professor on X (formerly Twitter) :

Another tentacle of the social justice/climate activism is to keep flooding academia, schools, news media and entertainment with new words and terms that create moral confusion and even call reality itself into question. We often get lulled into using these new words and phrases, because it seems everyone else is using them. The media often floods the zone with “experts” to “educate” us on these new words and phrases, that we’re badgered to use. Journalists also have style guides and professional guidance that impose use of the new words and phrases for their publications.

It’s important to not be afraid to speak up and challenge new words that deliberately sow moral ambiguity, defy science, and sometimes even mask horrific practices in benign terms. “Gender-affirming” care for children involves pumping children full of hormones and even removal of genitals, which results in irreversible changes and often sterility and loss of sexual function in adulthood. Some phrases are more subtle. Here’s Mollie Hemingway pointing out:

Whenever you think the insane gender craziness can’t get worse, well, it does. Here’s a CNN story from August 12, 2023: A guide to neopronouns, from ae to ze. Frankly, I’m not going to use “neopronouns” or even try to understand this nonsense, but unfortunately plenty of people avidly adopt all this language lunacy, without question, then run around demanding other people use these meaningless new words and phrases or face public outrage antics or even more serious retaliation, like doxxing or inciting an online mob pile-up attack or even getting media thugs involved in trying to destroy people’s lives/careers for running afoul of the leftist word police.

With the speed and volume of information we have bombarding us, it’s easy to forget short-lived dramas about free speech. The Biden administration tried to launch a Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security last year, to be headed by some silly liberal woman, who had tweeted this in 2020 (I wrote a blog post on it, that’s why I have the link):

The importance of our free speech rights in America is that we don’t ever have to bow down to the majority opinion in expressing what we think. We have the right to hold unpopular opinions and to express them.

We also have the right to reject having our words force fed to us or to be forced into silence. What’s interesting about so many of the liberal people pushing speech codes and hate speech rules is they often wax on about right-wing “totalitarians” and “authoritarians,” while at the same time using the favorite tools of tyrants through the ages to crush personal liberty – suppressing free speech.