Okay, folks, it’s confession time: I have never been more concerned about the future of this country as I am today. But it’s not because I fear China is about to nuke us, or that Anthony Fauci will soon declare Covid is actually incurable (he’ll reverse himself the next day).
No, the reason I worry more about America today than ever before is how we are so meekly sliding into a technocratic “Cancel Culture” tyranny far more insidious than that Nazi boot Orwell saw in “1984” forever stomping on a human face. Think Twitter’s bearded Jack Dorsey forever clicking the delete button to silence you and me.
The evidence of this tyranny’s rapidly flexing power is all around us. At the beginning of January, our new tech tyrants justified their kicking the President of the United States out of America’s digital public square by accusing him of fomenting violence. That rationalization passed the smell test … if you didn’t sniff much.
Now, barely three weeks later, our censors have dropped any pretense of a reasonable justification for their dictatorial actions and are today snuffing out any Joe Blow Citizen who expresses opposition to Leftist Orthodoxy.
Just ask Robert Gagnon, a Houston Baptist University professor who teaches New Testament and who earlier this week committed the offense of defending a friend who had posted on Twitter satirical criticism of President Joe Biden’s recent executive order allowing transgender individuals to serve in the U.S. military.
“In his post, Gagnon said the executive order will endanger women, and noted that those who promote transgenderism are allowing males to invade women’s athletics and shelters. He also likened transgender ideology to a ‘religious cult’ and said it ‘is indeed a pseudo-science,’ in that it forces people to reject basic biology,” reports The Christian Post’s Brandon Showalter.
One need not agree with Gagnon’s view — which I do, by the way — to recognize the brute injustice of Twitter suspending him and his friend for “incitement” to violence. Gagnon earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University Seminary.
Gagnon’s was not an isolated experience. The censors also silenced Focus on the Family (FotF), one of the nation’s largest and most effective Christian advocacy and education groups.
The Daily Citizen, published by FotF, allegedly incited violence by tweeting this: “On Tuesday, President-elect Joe Biden announced that he had chosen Dr. Rachel Levine to serve as Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of HHS. Dr. Levine is a transgender woman, that is, a man who believes he is a woman.”
If you can find the incitement to violence in that paragraph, I have a bridge crossing the Gulf of Mexico to link Texas and Florida I’d like to show you. Trust me, I can make you a great deal on it.
And it’s not just criticizing transgenderism that draws the censors’ ire. You dare not criticize the Left’s plan to pack the Supreme Court so that it never again delivers a decision that conservatives can cheer, like this one.
A group known as “Keep Nine” put together an ad for distribution by Google. The ad consisted of seven words: “Stop Court Packing, Nine Justices, Bipartisan Support.” The same week Biden announced formation of a commission to “study” the High Court’s future — i.e. come up with a court-packing recommendation — Google trashed Keep Nine’s ad, citing a “sensitive event,” that is, Biden’s inauguration.
“We are extremely disappointed in Google’s conduct. We are not advocating for a candidate or a campaign. We aren’t calling for revolution or violence. We are simply a group of citizens with legal and political backgrounds who are concerned about the court packing issue,” Keep Nine said Friday afternoon.
“Google has arbitrarily handpicked us for censorship. They did not bother to research our organization and its mission. They apparently, however, took issue with our message of bipartisanship. We are disgusted that Google would be scared so much by bipartisanship, but we plan to continue appealing to Americans who want an independent Supreme Court. No dictate from Google or anyone else will change that. Count on it.”
Keep Nine consists of former state attorneys general representing both political parties. The group’s constitutional amendment proposing to fix the Supreme Court’s membership at nine was introduced in Congress by a Democrat and a Republican.
They won’t roll over. Neither should the rest of us.
President Ronald Reagan wasn’t the first to say it, but he said it well when he declared that “to sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last – but eat you he will.”
Mark Tapscott is an award-winning investigative journalist who covers Congress for The Epoch Times, and who is founder and editor of HillFaith, an apologetics ministry sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with congressional aides.
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