It’s been a banner week for authoritarians in Europe, and it’s only Wednesday.
On Monday, a French court banned Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Rally party and the frontrunner in the 2027 presidential election, from seeking public office for the next five years. The same day, The Telegraph reported that a toddler had been booted from a U.K. preschool for being insufficiently supportive of LGBT politics. Over the weekend, a British couple revealed they had been arrested based on complaints they expressed in a WhatsApp chat about their daughter’s public school.
This is exactly the kind of crackdown on free expression that Vice President J.D. Vance chastised complicit European leaders about in February, in an address at the Munich Security Conference. This week’s insanity further proves Vance’s dire warnings were right.
Vance called out the U.K., Germany, Sweden, and the European Union for censoring and criminalizing the free expression of their citizens, citing police raids against Germans for comments posted online and the prosecution of a British man who dared to pray in silence outside of an abortion facility.
“[A]cross Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” he said. That may have been an understatement.
France isn’t the first country to bar political opposition candidates from its elections. In December, Romania’s highest court suspended its presidential election, blaming Russian interference. (Where have we heard that one before?) Calin Georgescu, who cast himself as a Trumpy “Romania first” candidate, took the lead in the country’s first round of voting before the court canceled the election and then barred Georgescu from running again.
Meanwhile, leftists in the German parliament have been threatening a ban on Germany’s prominent right-wing party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). In January, lawmakers considered asking the country’s highest court to “examine whether the AfD is an anti-constitutional party,” which Politico characterized as the “first step toward legally banning it under German law.” Leftist lawmaker Carmen Wegge, one of the partisans behind the effort, claimed AfD posed “dangers to democracy” as she tried to ban the party from the democratic process.
Now, France is the latest in what Vance described as a disturbing trend of “European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others.”
In addition to her five-year ban on seeking office, Le Pen, who held a double-digit lead over the next closest candidate in France’s presidential election, was also slapped with a fine and a prison sentence for which she’ll likely be subject to two years of house arrest. Like U.S. President Donald Trump, Le Pen was accused of complex financial crimes that were alleged to have taken place years ago, with her opponents eagerly invoking the “rule of law” to defend their prosecution of political opponents. The similarities weren’t lost on Trump himself.
After the verdict was disclosed, Le Pen told reporters, “I am eliminated, but in reality, it’s millions of French people whose voices have been eliminated.”
She’s right, the voices of European citizens are being silenced — and not just by courts disenfranchising them by booting their preferred candidates from elections. From parents to preschoolers, Europeans are no longer free to express their views without fear of retribution from the government.
Since Britain’s “Online Safety Act” went into effect in October 2023, authorities have charged 292 people and convicted 67 under the anti-speech law. Among other things, the law criminalizes“false information intended to cause non-trivial harm” and targets “mis- and disinformation.” Months before the law went into effect, a mother posted footage of police arresting her autistic daughter for commenting that a female police officer looked like her lesbian grandmother. A spokesman for the West Yorkshire Police confirmed to the BBC that “a 16-year-old had been arrested on suspicion of a homophobic public order offence.”
On Sunday, the U.S. State Department’s Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Bureau issued a statement expressing concern “about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom.” The State Department drew attention to the case of Livia Tossici-Bolt, a 62-year-old woman who stood trial last month for holding a sign near an abortion facility with the words “here to talk, if you want.”
As U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer tries — so far, unsuccessfully — to escape imminent tariffs from the Trump administration, Britain’s authoritarian speech codes undermine Starmer’s case for special treatment from the United States. According to The Telegraph, someone “familiar with trade negotiations” said the U.K. deserves “no free trade without free speech.”
Things are no better in Germany, where 16 separate “online hate task forces” are tasked with tracking down online commenters who are accused of publishing false or “hateful” speech. Just one of those 16 units “works on around 3,500 cases a year,” according to a report from CBS.
German prosecutors readily admitted to CBS that in their country it is a “crime to insult somebody in public” or even to repost false information online. Germans whose speech lands on the wrong side of the statute may have their homes raided by armed police, be slapped with fines or imprisoned, and/or have their phones and laptops confiscated.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act, which took effect last year, ensures speech that authorities deem “hateful” can be punished across the continent. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr blasted the law as “incompatible” with the “free speech tradition.”
Jailing citizens for the expression of ideas and barring political candidates from elections are two sides of the same authoritarian coin. Neither is compatible with self-government.
“[S]hutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process,” as Vance told European leaders in February, “is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.”
He was right. Unfortunately, European leaders appear to have taken his statement as an instruction manual instead of an urgent warning.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
The theme of my career over the past year has been the transition of departing military service and reintegrating among the civilian populace. As I approached this season, I have heard one particular phrase frequently circulated among much of corporate communication: “Bring your authentic self to work.”
But more recently I have heard cautions for those of us in uniform to be anything but open as we return to the society from which we were drawn. I find this deeply concerning. The nation should beware of prioritizing deception as social currency.
Last summer I began attending the transition briefings required prior to separation from the service. At one particular event, a retired military man — now working for a large national company — warned us that it’s very important to keep a low social media profile because of perceptual risk from hiring managers. He told of unfriending his sister on Facebook because he didn’t want anyone from his workplace to associate them with each other. That moment got my attention.
If the sister posts deviant content, I would probably keep some distance in online spaces for the sake of my sanity. But what if the sister is merely someone who expresses facts that just happen to be inconvenient to the current sociopolitical moment? We have seen time and again that facts disputed by corporate media, social media companies, and government officials frequently turn out to be true.
The call to sacrificially appease the human resources syndicate renewed itself in another employment seminar I attended this year. Again, I encountered the caution through a LinkedIn discussion. I was warned that employers fear that an employee who expresses a thought on his or her own time might also express a thought in the workplace. Such thinking from clearly well-intentioned people seems backward to me, as if we should not encounter ideas and ways of thinking that might challenge our own.
People of faith-directed moral principles routinely encounter rhetoric that is contrary to their own beliefs and sometimes condescending. The reality is that many companies, corporations, and government institutions tolerate “politically correct” expressions in the workplace while shaming voices aligned with a traditional worldview. My time in the U.S. Army contains such instances, and I’m not alone.
This is in spite of protections offered by the U.S. Constitution, civil law, and military regulation. Culture and political sway always trump the rules. When you look at where people are being pressured, disciplined, or fired for sharing their beliefs at work, it is usually an incident of discrimination against speaking the truth by military commanders or civilian managers who have adopted a form of leftist social orthodoxy.
Part of the argument for why we should present as neutral in online spaces revolves around a belief that people cannot be taught how to engage productively on tough issues. Society has lost the ability to think, reason, and respectfully debate. Shall we then remove anything related to thinking skills from educational curriculum? The point of identifying a deficiency is so that it can be addressed. We should not accept a lack of skills in dialogue and thought as normal and then strike them from the list of disciplines to be pursued. Because one generation has not been taught something important does not mean people should abandon it entirely.
Rather than calling for an end to societal discourse, we should work to recapture the skill. I am not advocating that we bring cable news-style fights to the job site or that everyone abandons all expressive caution, manner, and restraint. But we must end the fear and spirals of silence that have become too frequent across workplaces, especially for workers who hold to a morality that was understood to be normal until 15 minutes ago.
By overusing a mantra that demands we avoid talking about religion or politics at the dinner table, we have robbed entire generations of the chance to develop the intellectual discipline that is foundational to reasoning and thought. These skills were expected of all citizens in the early republic. The nation’s current deficit in the tools of discourse paved the way for a cultural capture of the West at the hands of confessional Marxists. In their own words, such people aim to deconstruct and dismantle rather than defend and preserve.
Deliberately or unwittingly, those who argue in favor of self-neutrality demonstrate a worldview that places all power and personal allegiance in the hands of employers. Of course, there is wisdom in avoiding individuals who demonstrate a lack of restraint or courtesy in their manner of expression. But telling people that their employment is purchased with a lifestyle of silence is an elevation of employer to magistrate and priest. It turns employees into quieted servants and enables a soft social credit system that reduces human beings to machines. Such thinking is among the reasons my transition is focused on finding a mission rather than a corporate role.
The Greek general and politician Pericles is quoted as saying, “We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own affairs; we say that he has no business here at all.” The problem is not so much that managers have an aversion to politics. It is that secularists generally have an aversion to ideas that contradict the prevailing winds of culture. They live convinced that policy advocacy on matters in alignment with their belief is not a matter of politics but of principle. The two, however, are inseparable. When one tells you to keep your principles to yourself, that itself is an ideological competitor’s political act of silencing you.
Beliefs turn into expressed ideas, which beget social doctrines. The First Amendment is of little meaning if we make it inferior to social demands of the moment. As a nation, we should beware of allowing momentary fears to become anchored going forward, and we should refuse to cede moral principles to satisfy the increasingly leftist human resources syndicate.
Chase Spears is a retiring U.S. Army officer, concluding a 20-year career in military public affairs. His opinions are his own and should not be construed to be those of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, U.S. Government, or any other affiliated agencies.
A Canadian pastor has “exiled” his family to Kenya after his government invoked emergency war measures to punish citizens who attended a protest where he prayed and sang the national anthem. Harold Ristau, a decorated veteran and seminary professor, participated in the “trucker convoy” against lockdowns last February, when The Federalist interviewed him last. He is now party to a lawsuit arguing the government’s response to Covid that included treating dissent as terrorism violated Canadians’ fundamental rights.
“The fight is far from over,” said Marty Moore, a lawyer for the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), which is litigating Ristau’s case. More than 14 months after the protest, police arrested another convoy leader this May. Lockdown litigation will likely continue for several more years, Moore said. The same is true across the West.
For peaceably assembling to petition his government for one day last year, Ristau says, he was threatened with the removal of his security clearance and government confiscation of his retirement nest egg, kids’ college funds, and other life savings. Ristau says he’s also experienced serious damage to his reputation, career, and friendships after the government used anti-terrorism measures against peaceful protesters.
“There’s no protection, if a pandemic started tomorrow, from future mandates. So that’s why I was really open to coming here,” his wife, Elise Ristau, said, sitting beside her husband in a recent video interview from Kenya.
Besides dealing with overbearing health restrictions, their children were mocked at school for their family’s religious and political views, Elise Ristau told The Federalist. After enduring more than two years of severe social and government repression, the Ristaus moved outside Nairobi with their five children last August.
“I don’t know that I can go back and be a Christian in Canada. So that’s why we’re here in Kenya,” Harold Ristau said. There, the former chaplain with a Ph.D. in philosophy trains Kenyan pastors at the Lutheran School of Theology.
Confiscating Dissenters’ Life Savings
Government use of “debanking” to punish dissent is growing in the West. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government used it on essentially every convoy participant authorities could identify, said Moore.
“As soon as they knew your name if you were on the ground [protesting] in Ottawa, they froze your bank account,” Moore told The Federalist. “…The federal government met with the banks, they gave the [protesters’] names to the banks, and the banks were then pushed to freeze the bank accounts of anyone with that name in their banks. It was a fascist collaboration.”
In May, American whistleblowers disclosed the FBI obtained, without any warrants, “a huge list” of citizens’ private banking data in its Jan. 6, 2021 capitol riot investigation. Investigators targeted any American who legally bought a firearm using a Bank of America account all the way back to the 1990s, the whistleblower testified.
Treating a Veteran Like a Terrorist
After the Canadian government announced it would freeze the bank accounts of convoy protesters and their mostly small-dollar donors without legal due process, rumors of bank runs spread. Multiple large Canadian banks appeared to shut down online operations soon after the announcement. Elise withdrew their family’s savings that Friday, too, she and Harold said. Like thousands of Canadians, they had donated to the convoy. Yet Ristau was the only one of the four plaintiffs in his lawsuit whose accounts were not frozen. He thinks it’s because of his military record.
“Some of the measures that were at least attempted to be invoked are the kind of measures you find to freeze terrorist financing,” Moore noted. “So peaceful protesters were the equivalent of terrorists and the government leaned on banks in the guise of a national emergency to freeze their bank accounts.”
Leftist activists also filed a class-action lawsuit against every Canadian who donated to the convoy. It seeks $300 million in damages. When before the convoy Canada experienced multiple race protests that included violence against stores and police, no class action was filed.
Christians Assisting Government Persecution
Canadian lockdowns kept gyms, restaurants, and liquor stores open but closed churches. Leftist protesters were allowed to yell and sing without masks, and the prime minister kneeled to them, all while provinces banned Christians from singing and chanting in church for years.
Rev. Johannes Nieminen wasn’t allowed to cross provincial borders to perform his pastoral duties, while other Canadians could do so for work, he told The Federalist. After he was denied border entry several times, he said, police finally let him through — but told him he wasn’t allowed to meet with parishioners or hold church services.
“If I’m going to go to the grocery store for physical food, I’m going to the church for spiritual food. If I’m going to the doctor’s office for physical medicine, I’m going to church for the medicine of immortality,” Nieminen said. His denomination believes Jesus Christ’s body and blood are physically present in the wine and bread of communion, and that Christians are commanded to physically eat these — impossible without gathering in person.
Until moving to pastor in New Mexico this summer, Nieminen was clergy in the same denomination as Ristau, the Lutheran Church Canada. He said lockdowns sharply divided many churches, and even though most Covid measures are now lifted, church leaders have largely failed to seek reconciliation and repentance, as commanded in the Bible.
“We need to repent. There’s been crazy division here, and we need to actually talk about it,” he said.
State-Run Western Churches
Nieminen said pastors who obeyed the government to treat churches worse than liquor stores and gyms taught lay people church is non-essential or can be conducted online. The Bible commands keeping a day of worship, meeting in person, singing hymns and psalms, and physically receiving the bread and wine of communion. Christians have done all these every week since the time of Christ.
Communion is a “sacrament,” an action God commands that produces faith and eternal salvation. Only pastors can deliver it, a tradition going back to Christ’s commissioning of His apostles. In all the great pandemics of history, priests and pastors knowingly braved death to bring the sacrament to the dying desperate for the peace and unity with God it promises.
Nieminen said he saw Canadian Christians publicly plead for the sacrament amid lockdowns that nearly lasted three years. They received no response from their pastors, who told Nieminen the pleading parishioners didn’t use the “proper channels.”
“There’s that lack of trust in pastors and a church that they see as giving up on them and basically persecuting them,” Nieminen said. “…They’re being coerced by tyrants to do something against their conscience, and then they go to church and then they’re hearing the same thing from the church.”
Within days of him praying at the protest, says Harold Ristau’s sworn affidavit, fellow clergy began refusing to let him preach and to take communion with him. Some checked with superiors on whether to commune him. Refusing communion to a church member is tantamount to excommunication.
Praying at the protest “demonstrated I was this political insurrectionist” to some clergy whose beliefs about Covid were shaped by state-funded, anti-Christian media, Harold Ristau said: “Prior to Covid, everyone recognized the media were a bunch of liars who hated Christians, but with Covid suddenly we trust them entirely.”
A Political Decision, Not a Health Decision
So far, “none of the [legal] challenges to worship restrictions on church services have succeeded” in Canada, said John Sikkema, a lawyer at the nonprofit firm ARPA Canada.
“Culturally, people find going to the gym very important and less so going to church,” Sikkema noted. “Especially when some churches don’t seem to care and don’t think it’s necessary.”
To secular authorities, keeping the economy going easily trumps the church’s work of caring for human souls, Sikkema noted. That’s why they opened restaurants while restricting churches despite similar health risks: “That’s not really a health decision, it’s a political decision about what’s important to the health of your society.”
Police regularly showed up at churches on Sunday mornings and fined pastors whose parking lots had too many cars, he said. ARPA Canada and JCCF litigated a number of those cases and were often able to get pastors’ fines negotiated down to charitable donations.
Most churches that capitulated to government discrimination against Christians were already declining before lockdowns, and disproportionate percentages of their members didn’t go back to church afterward. Churches that kept to historic orthodoxy, on the other hand, tend to have recovered better from post-lockdown membership losses and many have even grown, Nieminen and Sikkema noted.
Religious Freedom Better in Africa
The difficulty of raising their children in rapidly apostatizing Western culture also affected the Ristaus’ decision to move across the globe.
“Things are normal here, people have traditional values,” Elise Ristau said of Kenya. “It’s inconceivable to think of transgender mutilation. As a mother and father, we do our very best to keep our kids Christian.”
In Canada, Christians are often required to lie or betray their faith to access government grants and licensing credentials, and avoid punishment in many professions, Sikkema said. Many Canadian doctors, lawyers, and teachers, for example, are required to endorse abortion and LGBT sexual acts.Canadian doctors and many other health care workers must help patients obtain an abortion or doctor-assisted suicide.
In 2018, Canada’s Supreme Court banned a Christian law school from opening over Christian sexual standards. The Canadian military is also working to eject chaplains over Christian sexual ethics. Just about every Canadian business sports a government-provided pride flag, Nieminen said. Churches that object to transgender mutilation of children have faced naked protesters as families arrive to worship, Sikkema said.
“Canadians are very aware that we don’t have freedom of religion, we don’t have freedom of speech, we don’t have the right to assemble if that’s in disagreement with the regime,” Nieminen said. “Pastors and teachers cannot speak about the morality of human sexuality. That is a reality Canadians live in, and I think that’s partly why they’re afraid to speak out.”
Christians Welcome in Kenya
The Ristaus had been invited to their current post before lockdowns, but Elise hadn’t wanted to uproot after moving the family so many times for Harold’s military career. They had bought land in Canada for their dream home and planted more than 1,000 trees on it.
“I had dreamed of this perfect life for myself in Canada,” Elise said. But then “there was a kind of turning point where I said, ‘We can go. Nothing is holding us here.’ It was a ‘shake the dust off our boots’ moment.”
From Toronto to Nairobi is approximately 7,500 miles. Flying commercially between the two takes 16 hours or more.
“In Kenya, I know it’s poor, and there’s corruption, but we’re not getting arrested for praying silently outside abortion clinics,” Elise said. “For a Christian in Canada, it’s pretty bleak.”
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
Now that a judge has stayed the federal mask mandate on public transportation, it’s important to have an honest accounting of what this entire mask situation was truly all about. A lot of people will make a lot of claims. A tiny sliver will continue to claim mask mandates actually helped mitigate the spread of Covid-19. They will be the outliers because, in terms of stopping the spread of Covid or any other virus, wearing a mask is the equivalent of doing a rain dance: it might make you feel better, and some quacks will tell you it works, but ultimately it does nothing except make you look foolish and give you a false sense of security. (Vaccine mandates were the modern equivalent of burning witches at the stake.)
It was all so stupid and foisted on us by people we’re supposed to trust, which is why we need this honest accounting of what it was really all about. A lot of people will claim the masks were about establishing and maintaining control. That’s fair, but it wasn’t their primary purpose. The primary purpose of the mask mandates was to make every person who wore one a walking advertisement for fear. If you were wearing a mask, then you were doing your job, because you had given up your right to free expression and replaced it with one, constant sentiment: “I’m afraid, and you should be too.”
That was the main purpose of the masks. That’s why they wanted everyone to keep wearing them. It was about control, yes, but far more than that, it was about promoting fear. That’s why they lied about the threat Covid poses. That’s why they inflated the number of deaths, counting so often all who died with as having died from. That’s why they convinced so many Americans that the threat of hospitalization or death is exponentially higher than it actually is. (For the record, the survival rate for Covid is 99.7 percent for unvaccinated adults, 99.9 percent for vaccinated adults, and 100 percent for unvaccinated children.)
All they did the entire time was work as hard as they could to promote as much fear as possible, and masks were an excellent weapon they could force on you to help spread their message of constant fear, division, and dehumanization. The mask stripped you of your right to free expression and replaced whatever you wanted to communicate with one single piece of speech: “Be afraid.”
That was the primary purpose. That’s why they were all so fired up about it. That’s why they were all so desperate for you and everybody else to wear them.
It’s important we have our heads around that because it will help us avoid letting them do it again in the future. It wasn’t just about control. It wasn’t just about dividing and dehumanizing us. It wasn’t just about turning us against each other and forcing us to deny science so we could devastate each other’s social, psychological, and emotional health.
All of those were welcome byproducts to the “public health experts” and other elites who to this day claim masking provides value. But the primary purpose was to promote fear, and to stifle your speech and expression so you perpetually signaled that fear to everyone else.
You were obedient, yes. But more than that, you were afraid. That was the message, whether you wanted to send it or not. It was the primary reason they made everyone wear them, and it’s important we never let them do that to us again.
Hrand Tookman is a Cleveland, Ohio native with a background in interpersonal communications. He writes with an objective of exposing media bias, and inspiring unity in defiance of so many forces today that thrive off of division.
After the terrifying ransack of the U.S. capitol Wednesday during a Donald Trump “stop the steal” rally, big tech companies are joining leftist elites in the media and government in their effort to squash the Trump movement once and for all. Seizing on the backlash from the riot, they have seamlessly banned President Trump from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
What happened at the capitol was an embarrassment for our country. Now, the hypocritical outcries from Democrats, who proudly condoned left-wing Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters as they terrorized American cities all summer, are ushering in a great reckoning.
The Jan. 6 demonstrators, the vast majority of whom were peaceful, were there to protest legitimate claims of election irregularities and voter fraud. But Google-owned YouTube doesn’t want you to know that. They announced Thursday that they will ban all videos about voter fraud in the 2020 election.
The one free speech haven, Parler, Apple is keying up to ban from its app store and bar from iOS devices, claiming content on the website contributed to the capitol unrest. Google has already jumped the gun, banning Parler yesterday.
Every corner of the Trump movement is being publicly purged from the internet. Thursday, Shopify stripped all online stores for President Trump, including the Trump Organization and Trump’s affiliated campaign account.
Anyone who has supported the president is in for it, as well. Rick Klein, the political director at ABC News, in a now-deleted tweet said that getting rid of Trump is “the easy part.” The more difficult task will be “cleansing the movement he commands.” Democrats have already created a “Trump Accountability Project,” an enemies list to ban, cancel, or fire anyone who staffed, donated to, endorsed, or supported President Trump and his administration.
Trump subverted the elites who run our country. He took on big pharma and China. He negotiated, renegotiated, and destroyed trade deals in his mission to put America and American workers first. He went to war with critical race theory institutionalized in our schools and in government.
He stood for things that those who run our biggest corporations and hold our highest government positions detest. For virtually his entire presidency, they tried everything to delegitimize his administration, beginning with the now-debunked Russiagate. Trump showed their corruption, and now he will pay.
The man, the administration, and his supporters will likely go down in history books as delusional and dangerous. Why? Because the left has a monopoly on power, so they can control what people see and therefore think.
As the left’s arbiters of “truth,” big tech has been banning users they don’t agree with and suppressing stories like The New York Post’s blockbuster investigation into Hunter Biden‘s laptop and sketchy deals with foreign governments and companies with ties to the Communist Chinese government. With the help of their partisan “independent fact checkers,” big tech and the media made sure average Americans never knew about this before they went to the polls.
Following the riot among Trump supporters in the capitol, Facebook removed President Trump’s video calling for peace and rule of law, claiming it instigated violence. Then Facebook de-platformed him. Trump’s speech didn’t fit the narrative that he was a pro-violence, lawlessness insurrectionist.
This disturbing reality we live in, where one political party now has the power to control the narrative in all aspects of our lives — school, work, social media, and government — might make us feel eerie echoes of living under Chinese Communist Party influence instead of in the United States of America.
Perhaps what’s most troubling, and something that we might not have even considered in the chaos of the last few days, is the long-term impact this will have on American children. Generation Z or Zoomers, aged 13 to 21, may be one of the first generations that is more influenced by what they see and read on social media and the internet than what they hear at the dinner table from mom and dad.
A Business Insider’s poll found that 59 percent of Zoomers listed social media as their top news source. While technology used to serve as a way to make information accessible, a way to have the world at your fingertips with just a quick search, it has become something much different. It is teaching the youngest and most impressionable among us that suppression is normal and personal censorship is an important survival mechanism.
Children are being taught to watch what they say and think, lest they be labeled a racist, white supremacist, homophobe, or xenophobe. Indeed, making a pro-Trump TikTok video can get your college admission rescinded and subject you to intense personal harassment. A three-second insensitive or politically incorrect Snapchat video from 2016 can get you featured in a New York Times article and your college admission rescinded, and subject you to bitter bullying.
For young people today, it’s becoming normal to see political leaders in our country deemed “dangerous” to be ousted from public platforms and ostracized from society. They watch their parents self-censor at work, fearful of backlash from employees or coworkers that could get them fired.
Americans used to support the right of people to hold and express opinions others disagree with. Yet the newest generation believes feelings are more valuable than freedom. Study after study finds that younger people are more supportive of limiting speech than are older generations.
A recent survey found that an overwhelming majority of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison think the government should be able to punish “hate speech.” Of course, “hate speech” is simply the left’s ambiguous term for anything veering from the leftist orthodoxy on issues such as abortion, sex, race, and immigration.
Silicon Valley oligarchs have an agenda. They aren’t platforms, they are publishers, which should nullify the privileges they enjoy under Section 230. Will the Democrats who are now running our government do anything to stop big tech tyranny? Of course not.
This problem is not going away. America’s ethos of free speech and expression is going extinct at the hands of big tech and the leftists controlling media and government.
The U.S. Capitol riots are over, thanks to law enforcement. However, the censorship that followed has created a dangerous precedent.
For young people, their “normal” is beginning to feel increasingly like it’s heading towards life in China. It’s less free and tolerant than the America their parents grew up in. Imagine how much worse things will be when today’s youths are running the country.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Evita Duffy is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at the University of Chicago, where she studies American History. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, & her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1
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