Dakota Beacon

The important thing is to never stop questioning.  (Albert Einstein)

Exactly who are the new Nazis?  At the moment, those who have stood behind the United States Constitution, arguing in favor of the well-established rights Americans have enjoyed for two centuries - the right to own arms, self-defense; the right to free expression - speech, press, religion; the right to security in our persons and effects, not to be subject to unwarranted search/seizure; the presumption of innocence until proven guilty of actual, genuine crimes - these are the people who are being labeled “Nazis”.  (A year or two ago an acquaintance of mine from the left, asked me about a self-described Nazi, assuming that because I generally come down on the “conservative” side of many issues I would naturally be acquainted with him.)

How does an honest person even discuss this?  It is absolutely contrary to the facts, to the truth - it is an Alice-in-Wonderland discussion.  What were the distinguishing features of Naziism?  How do we recognize a Nazi?  Or a neo-Nazi?  A fascist?  One of the things abhorrent to a Nazi has always been the perception that people should be free to speak, to express differing views, to present their case for the opinion they espouse.  A political movement or organization as morally frail as the Nazi movement could not tolerate this because they generally have an indefensible program, they are unable to put forward any solid argument - based on truth - to support morally the positions they take.  The heat is turned up as the philosophies of these people are boiled down to action.  When the rubber meets the road, so to speak.  When that somewhat vague, ivory-tower view of the ordinary man not being intellectually equipped to formulate ideas becomes the action taken to silence him when he expresses his ideas.  

We’ve moved on quite a bit in the past year.  We have gone from a society which has accepted “othering” or “cancelling” of those whose ideas do not match the official story, whose proponents are not marching in lock-step with the left to something far more aggressive.  Now we are seeing a purge of authors, of scientists and intellectuals and patriots or those who still honor the tenets of the Constitution and believe in human and civil rights.  Those who question the 2020 election, those who question the covid “vaccine” (or any vaccine), those who question the wisdom or practicality of leaving our borders open to what amounts to an invasion, who question policies which have worked (obviously as intended) to destroy our economy, who question teaching little children that their skin color makes them innately evil, those who question anything - are seen by the left as people who must be broken, must be silenced, must be marginalized, othered, censored.  And it is not confined to a few high-profile people but extends to every man on the street.  Your Facebook posts are censored, “fact-checked” and sometimes banned and deleted.  Twitter or Instagram might well shut down your account if you cross the line and post something that differs from the official narrative.  That is very, very deep censorship, Nazi-level censorship.  Soviet-level censorship.  In some cases people are finding that even some banks and other financial tools are taken away from those who offer a different view.  So Twitter and Facebook banned not only the President of the United States, while he was still in office, but will carefully audit your posts and ban them - an equal-opportunity censorship.  (It is interesting to ponder just how Trump could have been characterized as a "dictator", as the left has attempted to do, when he was censored - his communication with the public cut off.  This is not the sign of a "dictator".)

One of the ways people who simply note facts even without proposing an explanation but only some questions are discredited and othered is by calling them “conspiracy theorists”.  It’s fairly effective.  It shouldn’t be because smart people have noticed that a lot of people who were labeled conspiracy theorists in the past - those who questioned the mental stability of J. Edgar Hoover, for example, those who questioned the Warren Report’s whitewashing of the Kennedy assassination - today are recognized has having asked the right questions after all, casting doubt where it should be cast, for discerning the truth.  Then they were conspiracy theorists but now, when more information has become available they are understood to have been right.  It doesn’t matter - today we are repeating the same othering.  If we believe there was something amiss in the January 6 political rally in Washington, if we refuse to call it an “insurrection” (an insurrection in which the participants come armed with no more than snacks, quad chairs, cameras and signs would signal an impossibly weak insurrection), if we reference the statements of people like Bill Gates when we question the “vaccine” he is promoting we are “conspiracy theorists”, “tin hats”.  If we question the motivation behind “critical race theory” indoctrinating our little children with shame for the color of their skin, we are crazy, right-wing lunatics.  Yet these questions should be asked, they should be answered as well, not silenced.

Yesterday Dr. Joseph Mercola, an adherent of natural medicine and natural health, announced that he had taken down his entire archive of articles, discussions of medical issues, interviews with renowned experts, his own opinions and bases for those opinions.  He has been censored.  He had to self-censor, in fact, in order to preserve his own personal safety.  He was not alone.  The New York Times published its blacklist of dissidents.  There were twelve on the list, Mercola being at the top.  This will cause each of them enormous harm - people will be afraid to invite them to speak, people will be deprived of the information they shared freely before.  The facts they presented were never challenged.  They were denounced but never challenged and never “corrected”.  Where have we seen this before?

Well, the Soviets suppressed authors.  Dr. Zhivago, despite winning for its author, Boris Pasternak, a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, was banned in the Soviet Union.  It was smuggled out of Russia piecemeal.  It was a novel, not even written as non-fiction.  It was too much for the Soviets, however.  Not surprisingly, Pasternak was forced to decline the Nobel Prize - he was a family man, after all.  It happens all the time in totalitarian societies.  In Salem, Massachusetts, there was, for a time, a single point of view allowed - that of the Puritans.  In order to keep everyone on the same page and avoid anyone straying into other thoughts, people were labeled witches if they disagreed, or had knowledge beyond the general establishment.  One feature of this kind of “cancelling” or “othering” is that it is used as a tool to get rid of someone you don’t like - a rival, competition, someone who happens to have something YOU want.  The witches were burned at the stake, drowned or killed by whatever method came to hand.  They were “tried” of course.  It hearkened back to the trials by ordeal of the Middle Ages.  Thankfully we emerged from that murk when someone accused the Governor’s wife.  That put a stop to the carnage.  Perhaps the Salem Witch Trials put air in the sails of our Founding Fathers when they penned the First Amendment.  It was a “never again” moment.  The iconic image of censorship for many of us, though, is probably the 1933 book burning in Nazi Germany, where thousands of works were purged, along with their authors.  Anything that could possibly be construed to cast shade on what the Nazis believed or did was verboten.  Their behavior was so stark that we have referred to “book-burning” ever since in regard to aggressive censorship.  

Book-burning is where we are now in America.  What will be next?  We cannot pretend, for instance, that anyone who is getting the covid “vaccine” is providing “informed consent” because it is impossible to claim that these people have had any access to information - at least any balanced information, any opinions on that information from any who are “dissenters”.  If someone questions the official plan to vaccinate everyone with or without his consent, that person is silenced.  Dr. Mercola was silenced.  Dr. Tenpenny and many others are being silenced.  It’s been coming a long time, some at lower levels - dissidents in our universities, for example, were cancelled, their lives destroyed by the “establishment”.  It begins to bleed through - when our institutions of “higher learning” are careful to employ censorship we will have left only those who know better than to question and those who are in accord with that establishment.  Now we see this in the field of medicine, which makes it an existential threat to the people.  When we silence experts who disagree we lose a hell of a lot of invaluable information.  If Mercola, for example, interviewed someone with whom the government (the establishment) disagreed, the government representative could answer the points made by Mercola’s guest.  If they cannot, their only recourse is to silence Mercola and his guests - not answer them.  “If we can’t give the people information to counter this we must just deny the people even the knowledge that our policies are questioned.”  

Our First Amendment was placed at the top of the list for good reason - without the right of free practice of religion, of free speech and a free press, the freedom to congregate with others, to seek redress of grievances, there is no freedom at all.  When we impose censorship we basically delete the First Amendment.  The rest will fall like dominos.  The disgusting thing here is that our so-called Fourth Estate, our press, is complicit in this.  Social media giants are silencing everyone from Donald Trump to you.  The New York Times is carrying water for this establishment which has become rotten and is now part of the forces of oppression.  The press should be seeking to reinforce the First Amendment, not snuff it out.  Their shame will become legend.

We must all resist this effort to shut down discussion and debate.  We need to hear everyone’s opinion and share information.  It is more important to us now than ever.  Call your local newspaper when they are out of line.  The Grand Forks Herald is famous for not printing letters to the editor which express views different from their narrative (at least in my experience), so call them out when they do this - call your local radio station call-in programs - but get your message out fast because they will likely hang up on you as quickly as they can.  Call your state legislators and let them know how you feel about the importance of the First Amendment, call your Congressmen and Senators (202-224-3121) and let them know we need to stop the censorship - using the “capitalist/free-enterprise” argument to hang it on is no good.  We have had to bust trusts before and on far less excuse.  Just because it is a private business does not mean it may skirt the Constitution.  Our rights, you recall, are inalienable - even we cannot sign them away.  

Our health and our nation’s future, the need for a generation to carry on - which will be denied if the vaccination goals are reached and the announced depopulation program is successful - require our attention now.  It’s not someone else’s fight - it’s yours.