OPINION:
President Donald Trump has been booted permanently from Twitter. Parler, the low censorship, zero censorship alternative to Twitter has been suspended from Google, Apple, Amazon. Conservatives by the droves have lost thousands of followers on Twitter overnight — and all coincidentally come just after it’s solid and clear, Democrats will hold the White House, House and Senate come January’s end.
Democrats and America’s foreign enemies are cheering.
Everyone else is feeling the chill.
And rightly so: Mark these words, this is a purge of conservative speech, conservative expression, conservative rhetoric — and this is all just the beginning.
With tyrants, the mission is to blot out all dissenting viewpoints. This Big Tech tyrannical purge is all about testing waters, to see what can be accomplished to make Trump and his supporters completely irrelevant on the political landscape. Call it stage one.
Stage two is to expand the tyranny beyond the scope of social media.
If Amazon can boot Parler from its web-hosting service, all under the guise of protecting citizens from hateful, violence-inducing rhetoric, what’s to keep Amazon from booting, say, books by conservative authors who write of political and cultural truths that the Democrats prefer kept silenced?
‘Cause conservative authors very often fuel violence with their dangerous speech, dontcha know.
What’s to keep Amazon from booting books by George Orwell? Or books about Founding Fathers — the same Founding Fathers the left has been busily condemning as worthless racists? Or, get this, copies of Founding Fathers’ documents, such as the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution?
Other retail could quickly follow this censorship route, or else face the possibility of losing their App Store presences on Apple, on Google. On more. Truly, the censorship possibilities are endless.
Organizations that sell homeschool supplies could get the boot — because, after all, keeping children away from the government-run school system is “authoritarian” and “dangerous,” as one Harvard professor opined in 2020.
Outlets that sell guns, ammunition and firearms supplies, or that advertise training for would-be firers, could go dark — because, after all, as the left has consistently opined, and as Esquire wrote in 2018, the Second Amendment is dangerous and should be “repealed.”
Stores that sell Bibles could be shuttered.
The Bible itself could be banned.
“There has been a long legacy of hate speech, prejudice, and the use of various scriptures from the Bible to uphold anti-Semitic and race based ideologies in the United States,” wrote Dianne Dentice, with Stephen F. Austin State University, in a 2019 abstract in The Journal of Faith, Education, and Community.
It only takes a few to see similarly — and then to compel Big Tech to swing into censorship mode.
Today’s censorship of Trump, today’s social media booting of conservative posts, today’s suspension and possible expulsion and potentially complete erasure of Parler — all that’s just the beginning.
With Democrats poised for a clean sweep of the power halls in D.C. and Big Tech flexing muscles grown bigger by successful test censorship cases in recent months — and the too-tight and cozy relationship between leftist techies and their complicit comrades in Congress — wait for it, wait for it: This censorship is just getting started.
It’s a purge, pure and simple. A Gulag-like purge.
And for those currently cheering, think on this, the writings of Martin Niemoller, who initially supported Adolf Hitler until he experienced first-hand the dictatorial surveillance tactics of the Nazi regime: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Political tools and useful idiots only last as long as their usefulness. The censors will one day turn on their cheerleaders. But by then it could be too late.
By then, there may be no one left to speak.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.
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