Setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible

I saw a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson.  It seemed just a little too on the nose, so I researched to see if it was accurate.  Indeed, it was.  It was extracted from a larger context and therefore lost something but the fundamental issue was that the words being attributed to him were indeed his.  

From A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, Chapter 82 (1779) by Thomas Jefferson.  My emphasis added.  The winds of illiberalism sweep the extremists of the nation with desires to control speech and de-platforming people not in agreement with the right-thinkers.  

Call them Woke or Social Justice Theorists or Critical Race Theorists, or Communists.  All accurate enough but somewhat persnickety.

The real issue is not so much their philosophical heritage but rather are they Liberal or Illiberal.  In the old division.  Thomas Jefferson and all the Founding Fathers were classical liberals.  Seeking to enshrine natural rights such as freedom of religion and speech, committed to a world that could be understood by investigation and argument and recognizing the individual as the ultimate minority and fundamental unit of society.  

Emphasis in bold are the elements especially pertinent when we face the illiberal powers so eager to use authority and totalitarianism to ensure their power.  For all those wanting to combat "disinformation", Jefferson's words are a good reminder that government may have an interest in facilitating the discovery of new information but it has no role in limiting speech and belief in order to control "disinformation."

Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet choose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to exalt it by its influence on reason alone; that the impious presumption of legislature and ruler, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time: That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical; … that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; and therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust or emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religions opinion, is depriving him injudiciously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow-citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emolumerits, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, … and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate ; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.