It has been understood since the very inception of the United States that freedom of speech is one of the most important ideals of this nation. That ideal forms our very foundation. It is beyond depressing that a significant percentage of the population of the United States no longer values freedom of speech. It is beyond infuriating that a cabal of self appointed high tech overlords have been engaged in the systematic silencing of individuals who express ideas that conflict with the progressive orthodoxy.
The high tech fascism and censorship reached an appalling level when these corporate tyrants ganged up on the free speech social media platform Parler and forced it to close down, perhaps permanently. Here is how the CEO of Parler described what took place. The quote is from this Deadline article.
Parler CEO John Matze said today that his social media company has been dropped by virtually all of its business alliances after Amazon, Apple and Google ended their agreements with the social media service.
“Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day,” Matze said today on Fox News.
Matze conceded that the bans could put the company out of business while raising free speech issues, calling it “an assault on everybody.”
“They all work together to make sure at the same time we would lose access to not only our apps, but they’re actually shutting all of our servers off tonight, off the internet,” Matze said. “They made an attempt to not only kill the app, but to actually destroy the entire company. And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day.”
Liberals on social media constantly point out that these tech companies are private companies therefore they have every right to engage in this despicable behavior. That is true. What liberals are implying is that we have no right to complain about this fascism and we must remain silent about it. On that they are egregiously misguided. I have every right to speak out against anything and everything I choose to because I have freedom of speech, and that includes private companies that are behaving like a bunch of fascists. I have every right to speak out about this disgusting censorship and use my voice, and typing to suggest that everyone who is outraged by these direct attacks on freedom of speech to boycott any company that is involved. Every individual has the tight to criticize, complain about, and rail against whatever they want to. I for one will never use Amazon, Google or Apple again.
I don’t know how many times someone on the political left has told me that what these high tech companies are doing is not censorship because only governments can engage in censorship. That is utter bovine excrement Censorship occurs whenever someone is silenced by someone else, no matter the circumstances. Censorship is always wrong and always deserves condemnation.
Progressives, and many on the right who should know better, believes that there is such a class of speech known as hate speech and that it is not protected by the First Amendment. The problem with the whole concept of hate speech is that no one can agree what is hate speech and what is not. You absolutely do not want the government of high tech tyrants defining that constitutes what speech. Far too often progressives deem something to be hate simply because it conflicts with their political beliefs and ideology.
