by Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com
It took years too long, writes Patrick Lawrence. But the law has at last been invoked against the creeping despotism of mainstream liberals as they attempt to control what we read, see, hear, and by way of all this, think.
What kind of a week was last week in the theater of war wherein battles rage over illegal censorship, illegal attacks on freedom of speech, illegal government infringements on our constitutional rights, and, amid it all, the complicity of our most powerful media in these illegalities?
For a brief while it looked as though it was a very fine week. On July 4, an excellent day for this, a district court in Louisiana ruled that the White House and a long list of other federal agencies are barred from all contacts with social media companies if the intent is to intimidate or otherwise coerce Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other such platforms into deleting, suppressing, or in any way obscuring content protected as free speech, to paraphrase a key passage in the ruling.
Wow. A federal judge brings to the surface, there on your morning page one, all the illegal interventions, years of them, in which the Biden regime and its Capitol Hill allies have indulged to quash dissent. What liberal authoritarians impudently dismissed as a kooky “conspiracy theory” on July 3 is in a judicial stroke written into the record as an ugly reality to be eliminated. What’s not to like?
Then came the insidious reaction to the Louisiana ruling among mainstream liberals and in our corporate media, which stand on the wrong side of every one of the illegalities just noted. \
These people, we are on notice, don’t give a tinker’s damn about the Constitution and the rights of all Americans thereunder, they are not going to start giving a damn now, and what happened in the Western District of Louisiana a week ago Monday is not going to stop their rampant trampling on the laws that make our troubled republic tick.
Suddenly the week looked like something other than very fine.
How shall we read these events?
Net positively I will say, risking a charge of undue optimism. Last week was one of sharpening contradictions. It gives us a new measure of clarity amid the fog in which our purported leaders and the media that serve them would have us confined.
It took years too long, but the law has at last been invoked against the creeping despotism of mainstream liberals as they attempt to control what we read, see, hear, and by way of all this think. Their hypocrisy and the extent to which corporate media will lie to obscure it are already more legible.
We are better off this week than we were at the start of the last, in other words. In all things — politics, war, painting, love, psychiatry, you name it — we never get anywhere without acknowledging where we are at the outset, our starting point.
To be perfectly clear about this assessment of an eventful week’s developments, the war over the future of this country — we witness nothing less — is bound to get nastier, dirtier and bloodier before things get better.
If you like the gruesome war of attrition in Ukraine, you are going to love this one. But defenders of free speech and constitutional rights stand to win this very worthy fight.
At the horizon this seems to me the very likeliest outcome. It is a matter of stepping back to discern which of the forces at work in this confrontation is on the ascendant and which is on its back foot.
In his 155–page ruling, Judge Terry Doughty has made overt what was effectively a years’ long covert operation to subvert free speech and freedom of the press. This has led to the corruption of the very institutions charged with protecting these freedoms.
A lot more people now stand to see that a bitter war in defense of their constitutional rights has to be fought. And it will be evident to a lot of these newly aware people that this nation’s most powerful newspapers and broadcasters are complicit in a liberal authoritarian attack on the rights that reside in American law.
read more