Saturday, October 5, 2019

Only when speech is carefully policed can speech truly be "free."

Snopes, a statist site which used to do fact-checking but which now just tries to suppress free speech, keeps making the argument that the satirical humor site Babylon Bee warrants fact-checking because people might mistake them for a news site. A position I view as absurd.

Babylon Bee is brilliant in their satire. And they are always in danger of not being able to be absurd enough to distinguish themselves from the foolish positions of the New York Times, Washington Post and other establishment social justice enemies of the people.

For example the clearly satirical Free Speech Is Killing Us op-ed by Kim Jong Un is not in substance all that far from the New York Times op-ed Free Speech Is Killing Us by Andrew Marantz.

Compare and contrast. Kim Jong Un
Look, I am not calling for repealing free speech entirely. What I'm arguing for is silencing those whose speech your majestic rulers---namely, me---find to be potentially seditious. Only when speech is carefully policed, with your betters determining what can be said and what cannot be said, can speech truly be "free."
versus Andrew Marantz.
I am not calling for repealing the First Amendment, or even for banning speech I find offensive on private platforms. What I’m arguing against is paralysis. We can protect unpopular speech from government interference while also admitting that unchecked speech can expose us to real risks. And we can take steps to mitigate those risks.
There's not a lot of daylight between those positions.

The hatred of the Babylon Bee by the Mandarin Class, the Chattering Class and the clerisy might be simply the product of anti-Christian prejudice but I suspect it is more based on the fact that Babylon Bee keeps unmasking the totalitarian statist mindset. Dictators hate nothing more than mockery.

And Babylon Bee is really good at mocking those that need mocking by free people.

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