An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg

OPINION:

This week I had a new Facebook “friend” send me this note: “Upon liking your professional page a minute ago, Facebook warned me that your page ‘has repeatedly shared false information.’” 

Because communicating with a real human being at Facebook’s Ministry of Truth is more difficult than talking with your dead uncle at a Madam Blavatsky seance, perhaps this open letter to Mark Zuckerberg is in order.

Your Eminence Mr. Z, 

I have recently been informed that I am guilty of posting “false information” on your social media platform. I, therefore, respectfully ask for a hearing before your tribunal of Thought Police. I would like to ask a question or two. More specifically, I would like you, and or them, to respond to the following.

Put simply; I am just curious what your little Orwellian minions have decided is “false information” regarding my Facebook postings.  

Was it when I suggested that censorship such as yours is not all that unlike the students in university towns across Germany who in 1933 gathered to burn more than 25,000 books, including the works of authors like Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller. Was this fake news? 

Or was it when I reminded all my readers that at the same time these bonfires blazed, the German minister of Public Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels, bellowed forth to his fans, “We are commit[ting] to the flames the [unwanted ideas] and evil spirit of the past.” Was that fake news? 

Or maybe it was my refresher that Mao Zedong empowered his nation’s youth to silence all who held unwelcome views and that the chairman’s “Red Guard,” thus, proceeded to cancel, i.e., kill, all those they labeled as purveyors of “false information.” Was that fake news? 

Or if it wasn’t these sins of “false information,” maybe it was when I posted that when Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge seized power, they immediately began burning books and imposing government censorship on all “intellectuals” who posed a threat to the “official narrative” and as a result, approximately 2 million people were buried in the killing fields of Cambodia. Was that the fake news of which I am guilty?  

No, Mr. Zuckerberg? None of this is what your little army of ideological fascists thinks is “false information” on my Facebook page?  

Well then, maybe it was when I said this: 

“Not one of these Facebook ‘fact-checkers’ care a whit about what history has taught concerning the dangers of censorship and the punishment of ideas.

“Not Mr. Zuckerberg. Not one of his employees. Not one of his investors. Not one of his Democrat Party puppets. Not one of them seems even to be aware of the warning of George Santayana that ‘he who doesn’t learn the lessons of history is doomed to repeat them.’ Not one of them cares.   

“These pandering priests of political correctness presume to tell all the rest of us what we can read and what we can say. These are the ‘smarter-than-thous’ who apparently think only they have the necessary gray matter needed for being arbiters of what is true and what is false. 

“These are the moral-flat-earthers who think a female is no longer a biological fact, that a 5-year-old can choose his gender, and that a woman should have to give up her shower, her bathroom, her sport, and her scholarship to a man simply because he wants to play dress up and make-believe.

“These are the brilliant ones who tell us that critical race theory is a fact and that it’s not racist to label someone because of their race. 

“These are the Mensa members who want all of us to believe our planet only has ten years left if we don’t immediately make John Kerry and AOC king and queen of the universe.

“These are the butchers who have the temerity to tell us that a human baby is not a human being worthy of human life and human rights.

“These shameless deceivers live in a fairytale, a land of pretend. They deny reality. They deny science. They deny history, and they deny the truth. And now they dare to suggest they should be the ones to tell the rest of us what is true and what is false and what we can read and what we can print.”

Mr. Zuckerberg, is this the “false information” that has warranted the yellow star your goose-stepping lemmings have decided to assign to my Facebook page? Is this the sin for which they have bound me and led me to the edge of your pyre? Are these the “lies” that have inspired your papal decree? Is this what has led to the burning of my books?

Oh, and Mr. Zuckerberg, assuming the answer is yes to all the above, here’s another bit of “fake news” for you and your gods of information to consider in the days ahead. “Where one burns books, one will soon burn people.” (Heinrich Heine). You better start collecting the firewood now. You’re going to need it.  

• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery).