Thomas DiLorenzo, LewRockwell.com: Why the Left Must Destroy Free Speech – or Be Destroyed
Of course minority opinions “must also be silenced” and “every act of the government must become sacrosanct and exempt from criticism.” This was never more on display than in government responses to the “pandemic” of 2020, followed by the Biden campaign and its collusion with “Big Tech” to censor even the president of the United States along with massive evidence of the colossal criminality and corruption of the Biden family crime syndicate. This was arguably the biggest governmental assault on the First Amendment, apparently organized by the FBI and CIA, since it was essentially done away with by the John Adams administration’s “Sedition Act.”
Academe must also be thoroughly corrupted, said Hayek, for “the disinterested search for truth cannot be allowed in a totalitarian system.” American universities have gone almost all the way down to the end of the road to serfdom in this regard. Many have fallen off the cliff completely. This is especially true, said Hayek, of the disciplines of history, law, and economics. They must be compromised in a way that supports the state rather than criticizes it, however mildly. The American history profession is almost completely dominated by Marxists, for example, and economics has been plagued by Keynesian central planners and “market failure theorists” for decades. As Doug Casey once remarked, most economists today “are political apologists masquerading as economists.” They “prescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.” The field of economics, said Casey, “has been turned into the handmaiden of government in order to give a scientific justification for things the government . . . wants to do.”
In totalitarian societies, wrote Hayek, truth is not something that is discovered by learning, education, self-study, research, and debate and discussion. Instead, it is “something to be laid down by authority . . .” In today’s world, for example, global warming hysteria is “settled science,” the most un-scientific phrase ever uttered. A true scientist always questions the status quo, not necessarily rejecting it but keeping an open mind that new research can alter his thinking. Nothing is ever “settled.” How a slippery politician like Al Gore is considered to be an expert on the philosophy of science – and atmospheric science to boot — is one of the wonders of the world. (Don’t forget that the notion that the earth was flat was once declared to be “settled science” by the Al Gores of that day).
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Hayek based these ideas on his years of study of world history and of the totalitarian regimes of the early twentieth century. “Wokeness” did not just suddenly appear and proceed to take over almost the entire Western world. It is just the latest manifestation of totalitarianism that has been marching through the institutions for several generations. There are always totalitarians in our midst, the title of Chapter 13 of The Road to Serfdom, and today’s totalitarians consider themselves to be standing on the shoulders of all those who preceded them, however unsavory they might have been. That is why many on the Left celebrated after the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “We no longer have to be associated with monsters like Stalin, Mao, Nicolae Ceaucescu, and other mass-murdering communists of the twentieth century,” they said. And like all other totalitarians who came before them, they fully understand that freedom of speech is to them what sunlight or a Christian cross is to Dracula. That is why they are all now hellbent on destroying Elon Musk, a man who is attempting to add a tiny smidgen of free speech to the stifling, statist political correctness of American society. Their treatment of Musk will eventually make their treatment of Donald Trump seem like a love fest in comparison.
Read the rest here.
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