Repressing speech shouldn’t cut it in America

I

t was breath-taking to hear our own President, as well as a sitting congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and a senior Department of Defense official—who remained anonymous,—recently praise the de-platforming of conservative journalist Tucker Carlson. The President did so during the White House’s correspondents’ dinner on April 29. What was even more breath-taking during the President’s speech, however, was to hear the journalists in the room laughing at the President’s mocking of Carlson, who is one of their own. 

Are these journalists even considering that Carlson’s silencing could have easily been them under a different administration? No matter how amusing it may seem to them now for someone they disagree with to be silenced, the suppression of speech for anyone in America could easily lead down a slippery, all-encompassing, slope to full suppression of free speech. That is something none of us should be laughing at. 

With the increased use of powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) for all types of tasks in society, coupled with what has been shown to be glaring biases of those behind the AI’s programming, the data mined through our social media sites today could be used to not only de-platform and silence us, but also criminalize us. Such was the case with Douglass Mackey who, because of a meme he posted on social media, was recently found guilty on charges of election interference by a federal court in the Eastern District of New York. 

The meme Mackey posted on Twitter in 2016 jokingly encouraging supporters of Hillary Clinton to vote by text. Under a different judge and jury at a different time and with a different opinion the verdict could have swayed in Mackey’s favor. How is this right? What exactly is free speech? Is it just the speech that the current administration, or judge, or congress likes at any given time? That isn’t free speech at all.  

A couple of days after Carlson was released by FOX News, he posted a video on Twitter. Within 24 hours of its release, Carlson’s post garnered 60 million views. This is telling. Hopefully the citizens in the United States are beginning to understand that those in the legacy, mainstream media don’t have the public’s best interest in mind.  It is time the public began searching out and depending on more independent, smaller media outlets for trusted news. Some of my favorites include the following: Epoch Times; Michael Yon and Lara Logan on the platform Locals; Edward Dowd on the platform Gettr; and several media outlets on the platform Rumble, including War Room, Charlie Kirk, Maria Zee, Children’s Health Defense, Prager U, The HighWire with Del Bigtree, Kim Iverson, and others. 

Only with pushing back against the biased narrative of our current administration and their lapdog media will we make a change and bring real free-speech that our country was built on back to America.