Dakota Beacon

Over the past year we have been made aware of China’s egregious “social credit score” system - a means of totalitarian control whereby through mandated telephone apps, facial recognition, general surveillance of every square inch of the country and that old standby, snitches, the state exercises absolute control over its peons . . . er, people.   It wasn’t quite enough to control their information and limit it to what the state wants them to know, now, if someone is heard to say something not approved, is seen with someone not approved, buys something that is not approved, posts a selfie on TikTok that is not approved, jaywalks or colors outside the lines, that person is severely punished.  No travel, perhaps demotion or firing from a job, exiled to the Gobi Desert or, perhaps, selection for donorship of a lung.  We were all horrified.

What a difference a day makes, so the song goes.  Here we are just a few months later.  If you think for a moment that we are not on the same system, think again.  It’s just not necessarily the government.  Because the Democrats and RINOs don’t need to.  Their corporate sponsors are taking care of all that.  It’s called by some “cancel culture”, a term I don’t think is honest or helpful.  We need to quit giving it a social status.  This has nothing to do with culture - “culture cancel” is more accurate, but the real term for it (and regardless of the shifting, drifting sands of the dictionary industry lately, some of us are bitter clingers to our guns and our English dictionaries) is tyranny.  True, it is not very fancy, it is not beguiling and it doesn’t really offer the practitioner the cover of being “social” or “cultural”.  When your freedom is gone, when your Constitution is obsolete or doesn’t apply, you are experiencing tyranny, whether the government puts its official stamp on it or not.  If government tolerates this, we can say that this is tyranny by proxy.  

It is interesting if you catalog the incidents where people are punished for the expression of their opinions.  You could go through the news items with a fine-tooth comb and not find anyone punished for a far leftist comment or activity.  People who literally torched cities all summer, looted, beat people up, threatened, vandalized, if they were apprehended they would be either released immediately or a committee of celebrities and politicians led by people like Kamala Harris, would simply post their bail (Minnesota Freedom Fund).  We would never hear from them again.  If someone such as the McCloskeys resisted the mob, whose home was besieged by rioters, stood on their own front steps and dared to show a firearm to warn them off, they spent the rest of their summer fighting an indictment.  Had a rogue Republican governor not made it clear that he would buck the trend and defend their right of self-defense, they would be in jail now, serving a full term, undoubtedly.  Kyle Rittenhouse knows.  He went across the state line to Kenosha to help a friend protect his business and was attacked.  He fired in self defense, but because he was not willing to be killed himself, he is still in jail awaiting his extradition, the last I heard.  In my upside down world, a peaceful couple defending their property from their own front door, merely showing their guns and not firing a shot, and dispersing a violent mob - that would look to me like the most successful and least dangerous response we saw all year to the show of force by these hordes of criminals.  Rittenhouse, had he been a black man, would never have been blamed for defending himself.  

With the riot season on hold until it warms up again we now can turn our attention to the ordinary citizen minding his own business, or perhaps expressing a thought that has not been officially approved.  It goes from the most ordinary private person all the way to the President of the United States.  Last week, in the middle of a national crisis, Twitter shut down his account as well as the presidential account.  Facebook has banned anything referring to “Stop the Steal”.  Trump was also taken down on Instagram and pretty much everything he was on.  He wasn’t, as far as anyone knows, on Parler.  But a lot of conservatives were on Parler for a couple of reasons - first, they offer a genuine freedom of speech.  As long as the speech is not incitement to violence or related to porn or other indecency, Parler allowed its members to say pretty much anything, disagreeable or not, and they also did not provide their users’ data to anyone.  Beyond this, they were quite as open to someone’s comments from the left as from the right.  Parler was taken down - Apple took them off of their apps, Google took them off of their play store and the coup de gras was when Amazon kicked them off of their server.  Parler went dark overnight.  There were half a million users shut out.  

A couple of ladies traveling on Delta Airlines, having a private conversation supporting Trump were summarily escorted off the plane - eavesdropping snitches overheard them.  

Facebook took down the page of “Walk Away” - videos of former Democrats in all walks of life who have left the party, had an awakening - gays, blacks, hispanics, union members, college students and others.  Gone.  There were about 500,000 of these testimonials.  Many of us saw these over the summer, during the campaign season.  

Senator Josh Hawley had a contract with Simon and Schuster to publish his book.  After he dared to fulfill his duty to question apparently illegal votes, his publisher dropped him - the book won’t come out under their name.  

Dissident former baseball star Curt Schilling, just found out the price of having an unapproved opinion.  He lost his insurance (A.I.G. in case you want to know who not to get insurance with).  

When will everyone become aware of the danger we are in?  Those of us who have had the privilege of learning history know that commandeering of the communication system and censoring dissenters is the first and arguably most important step in putting out the light of freedom.  Hitler did it.  Mao did it.  Stalin, Lenin, the whole Russian crew of dictators did it.  It’s Tyranny 101.  What is strange is that so many Americans remain unaware or untroubled by this.  The divide is clear here.  

We have been routinely lied to for years.  The lies have become more blatant and more egregious and this has accelerated since the virus attack.  About half of us know that we are being lied to about the coronavirus.  We are given inflated numbers of cases, deaths from other causes have been attributed to the virus - even accidents such as falls and car crashes - we are lied to about remedies and therapeutics.  We are lied to about the efficacy of “distancing” and mask wearing.  Our businesses are shut down throughout much of the nation and when they are allowed to reopen there really isn’t much left.  It is half-truths that are killing us.  Yes, there is a very nasty virus and it came from a Chinese lab.  Yes, people in fragile health have been dying from it.  It’s real.  But it is not what it has been depicted to be.  

We have been lied to about our election.  Some of us have followed this closely enough to call out the lies, we’ve watched hearings, we’ve read data presented, but about half of us watch CNN and read Time Magazine or Mother Jones.  That half is being lied to.  Some of them are in denial even if they have heard some of the truths we have heard.  They simply don’t want to know.  

But the thing to know here is that our freedom to dissent, to question, to express our own original thoughts, has been stripped from us.  We look over our shoulder about every other word we utter.  Is this word still safe?  We are ambushed when we use ordinary English.  Wrong pronoun!  Major fail!  We are being trained to self-censor.  This inevitably leads to controlling how and what we think.  If we can’t use a word we begin not to think with the word.  Eventually we will only be thinking what is allowed to be thought.  

All of this courtesy of our “private” companies who have been privileged to be above the law by our Congress by means of “Section 230” of the 1996 “Communications Decency” Act - which exempts them from being sued for blocking communication or, for that matter, slandering those they don’t like with “warnings”.  We are supposed to be able to communicate with each other but because these companies are playing both sides against the middle we think we are stuck.  If we feel that these companies - such as Twitter, Facebook and others like them - are violating our First Amendment rights, they and some ultra-inside-out “libertarians” argue that we can just go and build our own servers, our own networks.  If we want the right to speak or write,what we think we must endeavor now to be some kind of tech wizards ourselves.  Well, in a fascinating example of tables turned, Twitter was banned in Uganda.  Twitter didn’t take it so well.  Twitter Public Policy had this to say:  “Ahead of the Ugandan election, we’re hearing reports that internet service providers are being ordered to block social media and messaging apps.  We strongly condemn internet shutdowns - they are hugely harmful, violate basic human rights and the principles of the #Openinternet.”  Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up!  One commenter, Logan Hall, had a reply.  “It’s a private country.  Twitter and facebook can go start their own Uganda.”  

But this is the situation we are in - our Democrat dictators are finding themselves too busy to attend to the mundane business of censoring you and me.  Make no mistake, they know how important that is, but they now know that, just as your oppressive city council can rely on unpaid clerks in stores and snitchy customers to rat out anyone not swathed in a face mask, they can rely on their minions in the realm of social media to take care of silencing us.  They have found that they can outsource the tyranny of the little guys, which leaves them the time they need to get their hair done, visit Chinatown, select their favorite flavors of gourmet ice cream, pick up the paycheck from their Chinese masters and start another round of impeachment proceedings.  

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