Aha! You are disobeying the directive to not read this article. That means you are a person who is inquisitive, a person who is seeking truth no matter where you might find it, a person who wants to make up your own mind. You are the type of person that our founding fathers recognized was needed for this new government of democracy to endure. This is why they added as the first amendment to the new constitution a set of five freedoms, two of which had to do with speech.

But like the frog in the pot of hot water that never jumps out and ends up getting boiled to death, our country has been fed a bunch of hooey that we must be protected from “hate speech,” or “disinformation,” or “offensive” words, even to the point of being “triggered” by anything or everything. No better evidence of this is Google. I typed in “conservative concerns about free speech,” and the first nine articles that popped up were all criticizing conservatives for challenging these ideas. The articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, PBS, etc., highlighted how conservatives are “threatening global free speech,” “attacks on free speech,” “turning against academic freedom,” etc. I had to go ten articles down before I found an article from a conservative viewpoint on free speech — what I actually was asking for!

I have mentioned this in previous articles, but my family and I were missionaries in the former USSR and were there when the republics became independent from Russia. No one could pinpoint exactly why the USSR fell, but I sincerely believe one of the major reasons was because the communists could no longer control information. In the old regime, customs would not allow anything that remotely related to communication; no walkie-talkies, no fax machines — it was even illegal to bring in a ream of blank paper! But technology knows no boundaries, and as the Soviet people began to get the unfiltered information from the West, the more they wanted the freedoms that the West enjoyed.

So, when I hear our wise and wonderful guardians of the gate of information (politicians and their subordinates in the media industry) tell us we need “protected” from “offensive” and “dangerous” advice, guidance, or direction, I am hearing echoes from a collapsed regime of decades ago. George Orwell prepared us for this with his novel 1984, which was written in 1948. He described a Ministry of Truth, which had the job of altering historical records and disseminating government-approved (false) information. Ironically, when asked before Congress to define disinformation, FBI Director Christopher Wray could not do it, even though it is the basis for the FBI’s campaign to censor Americans.

Truth be told, it has always been this way, all the way back to our country’s origins. The British sought to ban Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense” as it was considered so influential to the American revolutionary cause that it was reportedly said at the time that “without the pen of the author of ‘Common Sense’ the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Yet in an irony of ironies, this celebrated part of American history was removed from public school libraries in 1946, and the U.S. State Department banned Paine’s works from Information Service Libraries in 1953 as it was seen as “provocative.” There was a pushback from the American Library Association, though. On June 25, 1953, seventy years ago, ALA made a statement known as The Freedom to Read. It stated, “We trust the people of this nation to make their own decisions about what they read and believe. The suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society.”

So, let’s lift up our voices for freedom. We are entitled to express differences of opinion from the all-wise and powerful media and their government protectors about government overreach shutdowns, election illegalities, insurrections (so-called), indictments of a former president, lack of prosecution for other special classes of people, climate change, inflation, illegal immigration (yes, there are federal laws on immigration), government debt, abortion, public school curriculum, competency of elected officials (especially our president and PA US senator), men/boys allowed in women’s/girl’s shower rooms and restrooms, children are given “gender-affirming” surgeries, China, Ukraine, Russia, etc., etc., etc.

We have a constitutional right to express those opinions. The right to read, hear, see, and obtain different points of view is a First Amendment right as well. A right cannot be a wrong. As St. Augustine reminds us, “Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.”