Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.
Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1848), p. 21.
A few hundred years ago, not far from Deas’ Point near Weehawken, New Jersey, was a ledge eleven paces wide and 20 paces long, situated 20 feet above the Hudson on the Palisades. This ledge, long gone, was the site of 18 documented duels and probably many unrecorded ones in the years 1798–1845. The most famous is the duel between General Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, and Colonel Aaron Burr, third (and sitting) Vice President of the United States, which took place on July 11, 1804.
Hamilton died the next day of complications from a bullet wound at less than 50 years of age; Burr died on September 14, 32 years later at age 80.
One clue: officials like Jennifer Psaki, White House press secretary from 2021 to 2022, forbiddingly and publicly demanded that social-media firms do more to suppress disapproved speech.
Even so, many left-wingers stressed that once allegedly open public forums like YouTube, Facebook, pre-Musk Twitter et al. were private entities with every darn right to set standards for posting.
Just market decisions, that’s all that was happening here!
Now that litigation has delivered so much evidence that government agencies have been colluding to censor, directly and chronically “working with” social-media firms to suppress dissent, many on the left are not even pretending to favor protection of First Amendment rights to express speech they disagree with.
Jonathan Turley notes that according to The New York Times, a recent ruling temporarily enjoining the Biden Administration from colluding to censor would, by fostering open discourse, lamentably “curtail efforts to combat disinformation.”
Washington Post editors and others on the left “no longer deny censoring,” agrees Jeffrey Tucker. “Now they defend censorship as a policy in the national interest. . . . They don’t even pretend to have respect for the First Amendment that gave rise to the national media in the first place. They now seek a monopoly of opinion and interpretation.”
Yes. Cat’s out of the bag.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
John Morley (1838–1923), On Compromise (1877).
On July 10, 1832, U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States, in effect ending formal central banking in the United States until the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
This was mainly a “good news” week, but there remains plenty in the world to anathematize:
Some of us are simply a bit bored of hearing people ripping at closed wounds and then crying about their presumed hurt.
Douglas Murray on Piers Morgan Uncensored, discussing reparations for slavery.
On July 9, 1776, General George Washington had the Declaration of Independence read out to members of the Continental Army in Manhattan. Meanwhile, thousands of British troops on Staten Island prepare for the Battle of Long Island.
It’s been a great week, with Independence Day to celebrate and the court system defending freedom. But there was enough trouble to justify a few anathemas.
Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
First words of A Frolic of His Own (1994), William Gaddis’s fourth novel.