Early on, he realized that revolutions don’t require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brushfires in people’s minds.
Diane Ackerman on Samuel Adams (“The Man Who Made a Revolution,” Parade, September 6, 1987), in a quote variants of which are often misattributed to Sam Adams.
On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia.
On this date in 1992, economist and social philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek died. He remains best known for his 1944 political tract The Road to Serfdom.
When instructed to remove tweets in order to recover account access, people tend to comply.
Not always, but often.
Hard to blame them. But it does mean that Twitter gets away with all kinds of egregious censorship that the social media “platform” shouldn’t get away with.
The Bee’s latest sin? Bestowing upon HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine — who had just been dubbed a Woman of the Year by USA Today because Levine “identifies as” a woman — the title Man of the Year.
Twitter has locked the Babylon Bee out of its Twitter account.The platform literally “can’t take a joke.” And Twitter demands the Bee must delete the tweet to regain access.
“We’re not deleting anything,” says Bee CEO Seth Dillon. “If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it.”
Dillon notes that account holders are not only expected to remove offending tweets but also to repentantly check a box to renounce the censored viewpoint. “You have to deny that you meant it. . . . They’re forcing you to grovel and adopt an ideological position that you don’t actually hold.”
The Babylon Bee is routinely assailed by Internet censors. Satire, parody, pastiche, lampoon, spoof, sarcasm, irony, etc. are all allegedly forms of “misinformation” and “hate speech,” thwarting of which is the rationalization du decade for stopping people from talking to each other.
In response, the Babylon Bee is thankfully taking a stand and, let’s hope and trust, won’t back down.
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Courage, then, my countrymen, our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.
Sam Adams, Speech, State House of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (August 1, 1776).
On March 22, 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed the possession of cards, dice, and gaming tables. Exactly eight years later, the colony expelled Anne Hutchinson for her religious dissent.
In 1812 on this date, Stephen Pearl Andrews was born. Andrews would go on to become an important American abolitionist, free love advocate, and theorist of “individual sovereignty,” promulgating the reforms of Josiah Warren.
On March 21, 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Nearly two decades earlier, the Twenty-second Amendment (Amendment XXII) of the United States Constitution, passed Congress. The date was March 21, 1947. The amendment, ratified on February 27, 1951, set a term limit for election and overall time of service to the office of President of the United States. This was an obvious reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s more than three terms in office.
The first section of the amendment reads as follows:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President, when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
This week began with Mike Pompeo and a whale, and ended with securing your safety online:
Note: the first upload of the audio version of this weekend’s podcast was not quite loud enough. If you streamed it and gave up on it, the louder, “normalized” version is up on SoundCloud now.
Sadly, I’ve spent the last few years working for Channel One, doing Kremlin propaganda, and I’m very ashamed of this. Ashamed that I allowed lies to be broadcast from TV screens. Ashamed that I allowed others to zombify Russian people. We were silent in 2014 when all this started. We didn’t protest when the Kremlin poisoned Navalny. We just silently watched this inhuman regime at work. And now the whole world has turned its back on us. And the next ten generations won’t wash away the stain of this fratricidal war. We Russians are thinking and intelligent people. It’s in our power alone to stop all this madness. Go protest. Don’t be afraid of anything. They can’t lock us all away.
Marina Ovsyannikova, pre-recorded statement explaining her on-air protest against the invasion of Ukraine.
On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published.
Paul on the nature of World War III, now underway:
This Week in Common Sense, third week of March 2022.