by Phill Kline
We are witnessing a long-planned and allowed assault on three cornerstone rights necessary for the protection of individual liberty – the right to affiliate or assemble with persons of your choosing; the right to speech and thought, and the right to petition your government for changes or improvement.
Long-planned in that Marxist thought has merged with progressive-left action to undermine American institutions that once protected these rights – education, the church, and the family.
To a Marxist, all things are political, and politics rises above all other things.
There’s no end to the tyranny of a Marxist’s good intentions – all people must eat well, think well, be well, speak well, associate well, and behave well. They thereby justify the exercise of their power over all human relationships – parent-child, individual-government, husband-wife, member-church – and enforce that power with the cudgel of cultural conformity, media parroting, surveillance capitalism, and fear. “Never [will] so many been manipulated by so few,” predicted Aldous Huxley.
The far left has targeted free speech for generations and the left is now finding its sustenance from the generosity of a misguided but wealthy pupil of Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper (pictured above).
Popper forwarded the “paradox of tolerance” arguing as a professor at the London School of economics that affording free speech to those opposed to free speech defeats free speech. Sitting at his feet at the time was a star-struck pupil by the name of George Soros.
Soros applied what he considered to be Popper’s philosophy to investment decisions and became a billionaire.
Soros funds vision and talent and has provided the drive and monies for a vast and unprecedented network of nonprofits that partners with organized labor, higher education, and the administrative state to operate a shadow government separated from political accountability set on creating cultural hegemony in subordination of Soros’s interpretation of his mentor Karl Popper’s vision.
Although attractive on a blackboard, Popper’s “paradox of tolerance” principle is horrific in application.
If some speech is to be limited who then is afforded the power to define true and acceptable speech, and what speech is offensive?
Government, of course turning the First Amendment on its head. Soros and company are accomplishing the opposite of what they claim to support.
Rather than exercising restraint and allowing the American people the freedom to pursue truth, government is weighing in, playing favorites, and using its awesome power to censure thought and speech.
Thus, we have a weaponized government whose only constraint is the concern that the American people will wake up from their over-indulgent culture of distraction and act.
This fear, that the deep reservoir of liberty residing in the American heart, will rouse itself, compels the left to hollow out words and become bolder in their deception.
Now questioning government is called a threat to democracy, parents are presumed to be enemies of their children, and government tries to convince us we cannot be trusted with the truth.
This assault is allowed because the conservative right participated in making the assault possible. For years DC conservatives exercised power without discipline, participating in the incremental growth of the administrative state by overpromising to the American people and passing laws in a vain attempt to deliver on those promises.
The United States had fifty-eight federal crimes at our founding, and all were understood by the American people in that they were immoral and involved harming another.
Today, we cannot count the number of crimes, and many are so complex our appellate courts routinely fail to reach consensus on their meaning. No person living in such a regime is free from the targeted abuse of government power.
If we seed government with the authority of determining what is true and not true – government will, as history and logic teach – use that power to define those opposed to its power as the enemy and forwarding “untruths”.
The Biden administration, joined by a few local officials, has decided that former President Trump, and his movement are the enemy of the government. Using the images of violence on January 6, the far left has justified years of investigation by multiple agencies leading to criminal charges forwarded by the USDOJ and local and state officials.
Yet, even with the exercise of such unprecedented investigative power, the evisceration of attorney-client privilege, the harvesting of cell phone data and emails enabled by Big Tech, there is not one allegation that any of those charged were involved in or engaged in encouraging violence or threatened those oppose to them with violence. Not one!
All the predicate facts in the charges involve speech and petitioning the government.
There are some fights from which you cannot walk away for losing redefines a nation. This is one of those fights.
You don’t need to love Trump and you may even hate him and still be a civil libertarian. I am forced to ask, where are you?
No nation of free people will remain free if its people are not willing to stand for the freedom of those with whom they disagree. As George Orwell observed “if liberty means anything to all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
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Phill Kline is the former Kansas attorney general. He is now a law school professor and director of the Amistad Project.
Photo “Karl Popper” by DorianKBandy CC4.0.
