Abridging Free Expression

by proxies

In our previous essay “Dissent …” we drew attention to the fact that the recent court cases against Donald Trump, among their other errors, difficulties, and limitations, have a necessary and intentional chilling effect on free speech and freedom of the press. Today, we are going to examine all the threats and limitations to freedom of expression including freedom of economic expression.

1. We’ll begin by looking at what we have traditionally been taught in the United States about what our system is supposed to provide and protect.

2. Then we’ll look at what those of us who were involved in the pioneering of the interwebz wanted.

3. After that we’ll take a look at what we got, instead, and a number of the very many things wrong with the current situation. The implications for the future of freedom in the event the current wrong-headed approach is extended are extremely dire. So we’ll touch base on the rampant idolatry, hatefulness, and enslavement of mankind that the effete intellectual eastern-Ivy-league-educated scum have proclaimed their intention of imposing.

4. Finally we’ll look at what we can and should do about it, including what some of us are in fact now doing. This section will be extended upon in the comments and in future essays on this topic. See also our other posts on #BuildClub

1. What we were taught

People have a lot of confusion about history. As a professor of history, mathematics, computer science, communications, speech, astrophysics, and religion, I have considerable insight into the facts of American history. Essentially all of what is taught today in the public skools in the big coastal cities in America about the history of our country is false.

Declaration
The essential document of American history is the Declaration of Independence. My friend Bill Buppert of ZeroGov.com says that the constitution is the casket in which the Declaration was buried.

There are a few paragraphs of grievances, most of which are reasonably applicable to today, but the main thrust of the Declaration is in its preamble and in its conclusion. So let’s look at those parts in detail.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.

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We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour.

For the purposes of the consent of the governed, I strongly favour the wording preferred by L. Neil Smith regarding how it should have been written. In his books based on the world he created in his epic novel The Probability Broach, Neil wrote that the unanimous consent of the governed is essential. Had Jefferson put that one extra word in place, a whole train of events would likely have unfolded, beginning as far back as the Whiskey Rebellion. Hamilton and Washington would have been shot as traitors, the constitution replaced by the earlier articles of confederation, and a minimal “night watchman” state restored.

Bill of rights UK
An important historical antecedent for the Declaration and for the American bill of rights was the Bill of Rights of 1689.

It says, in part:

That the pretended power of suspending the laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal;

That the pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution of laws by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal;

That the commission for erecting the late Court of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes, and all other commissions and courts of like nature, are illegal and pernicious;

That levying money for or to the use of the Crown by pretence of prerogative, without grant of Parliament, for longer time, or in other manner than the same is or shall be granted, is illegal;

That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal;

That the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, unless it be with consent of Parliament, is against law;

That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;

That election of members of Parliament ought to be free;

That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;

That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;

That jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned, and jurors which pass upon men in trials for high treason ought to be freeholders;

That all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void;

And that for redress of all grievances, and for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the laws, Parliaments ought to be held frequently.

And they do claim, demand and insist upon all and singular the premises as their undoubted rights and liberties, and that no declarations, judgments, doings or proceedings to the prejudice of the people in any of the said premises ought in any wise to be drawn hereafter into consequence or example; to which demand of their rights they are particularly encouraged by the declaration of his Highness the prince of Orange as being the only means for obtaining a full redress and remedy therein.

Bill of rights USA
There are many aspects of the Bill of Rights that are applicable to our current essay, but for the time being let us focus on the first and ninth amendments, so-called.

Amendment 1: Freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, and petition

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment 9: All rights not enumerated retained by the people

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This “ninth amendment” is key to a great many freedoms. The right to be anonymous in paying for transactions, for example, was a traditional and venerable freedom at the time the bill of rights was ratified (Anno Domini 1791). The right to travel as fast as possible by the current conveyances of the day was regarded as inviolable. The right to come and go freely within and outside the country without passports or pass letters was widely understood, recognised, and honoured. The security state and the standing army were regarded as unAmerican and evil.

Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville was an important observer of the American popular culture at the time of his visits to North America in the early 19^th Century. He wrote extensively about American culture and law. His two-volume Democracy in America is considered one of the most important works on the meaning of the constitutional republic in 1835-40 when the book was released. His books were required reading for my high school’s required two-semester course on “the constitution,” which every senior had to take in order to graduate. Obviously most public skools no longer have such requirements, and, behold, you don’t have much of a republic any more.

Analysing de Tocqueville for The First Amendment Encyclopedia, William W. Riggs wrote, “Although critical of American journalists because of the proliferation of newspapers contributing to the dilution of journalistic acumen and excesses in commercial advertising space at the expense of substantive content, de Tocqueville, nevertheless, acknowledged the existence of a pluralistic press, which meant that the press found it difficult to act in a unified manner. Such plurality allows the press to perform its watchdog and gate-keeping functions as reporters of facts, thereby enabling citizens to make individual decisions on political and other issues. De Tocqueville ranked the press as being second in power, after the people.”

Riggs also noted, “Americans’ egalitarianism sprang from being comfortable with the presumption of the moral equality of every citizen. De Tocqueville discusses the First Amendment freedoms of assembly, speech, press, and religion in detail. He compares the connection between equality and the collective power that average Americans acquire through unlimited political association to that of the European aristocracy, which possessed power based on birthright. De Tocqueville notes that it is the unlimited freedom to associate for political goals that prevents tyranny of the majority, because in a country where associations are free, secret societies are unknown; although there may be factious persons, there are no conspirators.” Of such naive optimism great blunders have been made.

Let us turn from an analysis of what de Tocqueville thought to a few quotes of what he said:

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

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Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.

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In America religion is the road to knowledge, and the observance of the divine laws leads man to civil freedom.

Jefferson
Another great author of American thought on individual liberty was Thomas Jefferson. A critique of Jefferson’s lack of consistency is at all times welcome. He had ample and repeated opportunities to free his slaves both while he was alive and posthumously and deliberately refused to do so. He acknowledged in his private writings that he had no power to buy the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon Bonaparte, and did it anyway. But amongst his other good ideas, he probably drafted the Declaration, he certainly wrote the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions on independent state powers, and he believed in a free press more than he believed in a national government.

In 1787, while the plotters under Hamilton and Washington were seeking to obliterate the limits of government found in the articles of confederation, Jefferson wrote:

The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.

Fragile woke children

Finally, there are certain ideas that we were all taught during or even before kindergarten. An important saying is, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” The communists have always hated this saying because it is a longstanding purpose of freemasons and their lackeys in the communist parties to deny free speech. The current “woke” mind virus, so-called by, amongst others, Elon Musk, denies the strength of character of Americans. Instead, they insist that words are hurtful.

At its core, this belief that words cause harm, that “hate speech” is not protected, and that “safe spaces” are required for the timid, fragile, pathetic, worthless college students of coastal cities is evil. It is worthless, useless, and is itself the very same hate speech that it claims to be against. The woke position against free speech is against decency, humanity, and for the enslavement of mankind. It cannot be a part of American culture because it is inherently against all goodness.

The wokesters are also against freedom of association, which allows individuals and businesses to refuse service to anyone anywhere for any reason. Instead, those infected with the woke mind virus claim authority to force Christians to bake gay wedding cakes, to design web sites for transsexuals, and to otherwise impose on freedom as long as the impositions are aligned with their disgusting beliefs and habits.

These are not the ideologies of a free people. Indeed, if the woke academics and their communist adherents were not paid, and paid well, for espousing this garbage, they would stop. They are in the pay of European aristocrats who seek to set people against one another both ideologically, racially, and based on other divisions they seek to exploit. The purpose of the “patricians” in Rome and the aristocrats in Europe is to enslave everyone else. They don’t care how much of their inherited wealth they have to spend to do it. And they don’t have any humanity or decency to limit their avarice.

What we wanted

In 1994, Tim May wrote the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto. I’ve linked the original text so you can read it in full, but here is the best part:

“Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re-routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation. The technology for this revolution--and it surely will be both a social and economic revolution--has existed in theory for the past decade. The methods are based upon public-key encryption, zero-knowledge interactive proof systems, and various software protocols for interaction, authentication, and verification.”

In short, we have these technologies today, and we can and should have robust communications without government control, with no top down authority, with complete freedom of speech. We should have these things because the government is a parasitical organism that has been usurped by the evil men and women of the deep state to enslave mankind for their paymasters in the European aristocracy. It was the aristocrats of Europe who put my family off our Highlands property in 1745 and deported my family to America in 1746. It was the aristocrats who drafted one of my great grandfathers and would have sent him charging on horseback at Prussian cannons had he not deftly deserted and made his way to America.

It was the aristocrats of Europe who paid Woodrow Wilson to push the income tax and Feral Reserveless schemes through congress, and the same wealthy parasites who convinced Wilson to betray his “he kept us out of war” campaign promises, just as they paid FDR to betray his anti-war promises, and paid Barack Obama to betray America and sell American foreign policy again and again.

John Gilmore

One of the leaders of individual liberty on the Internet, John Gilmore, co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. Cygnus is widely known as one of the groups promoting “free software” which became “open source software” and has revolutionised information technology.

One of John’s best quotes is, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Censorship is damage, and everyone involved in the censorship of free speech is evil.

Julian Assange

Julian Assange is a pioneer in disseminating information that nasty evil government mass murderers want to keep secret. If you have pre-formed an opinion that anything Assange actually did was wrong, feel free to post your mistaken thoughts in the comments. But if you want to pretend that there was ever any meaningful evidence behind the false and defamatory rape accusation, you have no idea what you are talking about. The same for this ludicrous idea that free people should pay the evil cia and evil state department to lie and cheat and murder and rape and nobody should expose their misdeeds because “it might be dangerous to government agents.” If that’s your line, you probably won’t find the posts in this Substack to be of any interest. #FreeAssange Here are some of his words:

Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice.

If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find.

Ross Ulbricht
Ross Ulbricht has been condemned by evil men and women in government, including in the courts, to a very long sentence in prison because he made a web site. Again, if you think people should not be free to publish information about things for sale, you are a disgustingly indecent person and should not be accepted by civilised persons. Feel free to justify your lunatic theories in the comments. #FreeRoss

Ross’s libertarian political philosophy supports his claim that he designed and created Silk Road as a “free-market economic experiment” with an emphasis to protect user privacy, not as a drug market.

“I created Silk Road because I thought the idea for the website itself had value, and that bringing Silk Road into being was the right thing to do. I believed at the time that people should have the right to buy and sell whatever they wanted so long as they weren’t hurting anyone else. … Silk Road was supposed to be about giving people the freedom to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness, however they individually saw fit.”

The violently prejudiced judge was paid off to make sure the sentence of life was imposed to make Ross an example, to hurt as many people as possible, and to support the gooferment’s view that nobody is free to do anything without the gooferment’s permission, and nobody with permission is free from gooferment agents being corrupt and demanding more every time the “licence” (aka tax, aka theft) is renewed. Their system is a disgusting betrayal of American values.

“I want you to understand what it means to lose your freedom,” said Ross at the Bitcoin Conference Miami in 2021. By this point, of course, we have all lost all of our freedom, whether we are imprisoned or not, unless we stand against censorship, abuse of power, corruption, and the violence of government power by means I suggest below.

Paul Rosenberg
My friend Paul Rosenberg wrote the book A Lodging for Wayfaring Men. It is a novelisation of Tim May’s cryptoanarchist manifesto, in some ways, and an excellent read. Paul also publishes The Freeman’s Perspective and has for many years. So, when I asked him for a quote for this essay, he wrote back asking me to include this statement, “You don't understand anything aright until you've favorably considered its opposite.”

I think that’s the most important thing about censorship. Nothing the government ever does should be understood based only on what the evil, nasty, mass murdering, lying, thieving scum in government say about it. The government is a parasite feeding on the productive activities of everyone else, and it cannot speak the whole truth and nothing but the truth, ever. It always lies and cheats and steals and murders, and very often those in government rape men, women, and children. So if you want to understand anything correctly, you should favourably consider the opposite of what you think you understand. If you don’t you won’t know much.

But the governments of this world hate humanity and want to enslave mankind for the benefit of billionaire aristocrats. If you don’t like foul language and disgusting descriptions, don’t click on that link to “aristocrats” because it clearly and completely identifies everything that is wrong with inherited aristocracy. You cannot understand things if censorship is pervasive.

What we got

Instead of the culture of free and self-responsible individuals that is clearly described in the Declaration and which is overwhelmingly desired by people all over the world, what we have now is a sham, a travesty, and a fraud. Much of the problem can be attributed to disgusting aristocrats like John D. Rockefeller and his descendants, especially Nelson Rockefeller; Cecil Rhodes and his subordinate Alfred Milner; evil politicians like Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, both Bushes, both Clintons, Obama, and Biden; the “project for a new American century,” its false flag 9-11 attack, and the despicable USAPATRIOT act. But they are trying to normalise tyranny, and it is time to say “no.” It is time to disobey.

Instead of the Internet becoming a depository of information for people all over the world, a place for free people to engage in trade and commerce, a resource of communications able to survive a nuclear war, what we got was an Internet where some especially pernicious jerks (the “WorldCoin” scum) want to require you to have your eyeball iris scanned before you can log in, say anything, buy anything, or do anything. Because, after all, nothing says “the world that is against God” more than censorship, abuse of power, and the enslavement of free people everywhere.

What we got were despicable horrid communists like Linda Yaccarino who personally hates individual liberty and wants to enslave mankind. The disgusting people who handle budgets for Madison Avenue propaganda outfits that call themselves “ad agencies” are mostly controlled by the same scum who run the cia, fbi, and dominate the culture of demon worshippers in the district of corruption. These are not good, decent, kind, God-fearing people. They hate mankind, they object to “Sound of Freedom” because it attacks child trafficking, which they personally profit from, and they are cretins. These are people who wallow in filth and want to make it mandatory that children be castrated and mutilated for the sake of the demons they worship.

Elon Musk is noteworthy for being a liar. He lied when he said he was against permanent bans on Twitter/X. He clearly favours them and enables them. He lied when he said that freedom of speech was in, but freedom of reach was out, because he pays teams to flag hundreds of thousands of posts a month, to de-boost and attack other sites like Substack, and to remove posts, ban posters, and generally make a hash of his pretence to be for free speech. But what should we expect from the wealthiest welfare whore in the history of mankind? Musk’s ventures, especially Tesla, his solar home grift, and SpaceX, receive billions of dollars a year from the USA taxpayer, who is forced to pay taxes that congress allocates to giant agencies it has no meaningful oversight over and which then throw money in great wads at Musk and other vermin. Musk is not a good man, he is “the Devil’s champion” by preference, based on his long-standing profile picture. He is just another grifting liar who wants to enslave mankind out of his personal hatred for humanity. He is also a loud-mouthed bully, who is too cowardly to fight Mark Zuckerberg despite months of bluster. And, yes, everything written in this paragraph and all the other paragraphs in this essay and in every essay on this Substack is my opinion. And if mElon wants to sue, that should more than any of his many other actions, illustrate the extent to which he is a coward, a bully, and a censor.

There are a great many recent newsstories worth sharing on the topic of censorship, so I will post only a few of the ones that have come to my attention.

News Guard
There is a group that hates freedom and wants to enslave mankind, in my opinion, based on their actions. They are paid to pretend to objectivity, but they have none. They are paid to attack independent news sources and post claims about how this story or that one is currently out of favour and therefore must be disinformation or misinformation or the rather tawdry “malinformation” being correct but likely to serve to caution the public. You can read about their crimes against humanity here.

Twitter Files (X Files)
The Twitter files prove that many government agencies subverted Twitter (and other social media platforms) to attack individual liberty and censor all points of view between roughly 2017 and today. There are some reasons to believe that some of the bad actors at Twitter were fired. There are extensive reasons (likes expiring, posts being “de-boosted” to prevent them from being read, ongoing permanent bans, the imminent elimination of “block” so that commies can endlessly harrass everyone they want to cancel) to believe that mElon doesn’t want to stop the censorship. He might want to pretend it isn’t as bad as it once was.

Possibly one of the best essays on Substack about this topic is from Vigilant Fox:

The reality is that while Twitter, under Musk, was vocal about being a ‘free speech’ platform, there was an alarming increase in account bans and content deboosting.

Such actions made one question the transparency and authenticity of Musk’s commitment. It’s evident that any content deemed ‘spicy’ or potentially contentious faced an 81% deboost, a statistic unsettling to many, especially when such determinations rely heavily on automated systems known for inaccuracies.

Google didn’t like the fact that people could learn things by using its search tool, especially during and after the 2016 election (the results of which were denied by Hillary Clinton with impunity) so they have emasculated it. Now you only get the search results that Google’s owners and paymasters in the government want to allow you to get. You might try Yandex instead. We hear that the English language version of Yandex.ru is even better.

Rather worse, everything you search on Google is tracked. Google will even ask your browser if it can grab your location information, because nothing says Stasi fink like telling the government the location of people searching for the truth. If you like the Google database but not its info tracking, try Search.Brave.com

Cancel culture

Bank prevention of RKBA

Central bank digital currencies and the death of freedom

Gag order against gun journalist reporting on gun case

In April 2023, the government passed Bill C-11 (the Online Streaming Act) which gives unprecedented power to the CRTC to monitor and influence the media we consume, then just a couple months later, it passed Bill C-18 (the Online News Act), which requires online platforms to pay media outlets for sharing news content. We’re already seeing the impacts of this bill. Meta has refused to comply and has chosen to block Canadians from accessing news from their platforms. Google also followed suit and is blocking links to Canadian news in response to this legislation. 

What we’re doing about it

The first thing to do is to turn to God. God has the power to end tyranny. You should ask for God’s help. For this purpose, last year, I was led by the Holy Spirit to compose this prayer. I encourage you to pray it often.

Eternal Father please help us to free the slaves, stop the wars, and end tyranny. Please help with guidance, resources, ingenuity, endurance, fortitude, and patience. Please show us the little fires so we may pass by them. Please bring love into our lives so we remember what we have to live for.

God tells us in Scripture, “We ought to obey God rather than men.”

Build free places. This work begins with Your County and continues with your home.

Build free networks. Build free markets.

Learn how to keep communications private and data secure

Learn how to make private transactions

We, the people who have grown up with the Internet, who have built digital gold currencies, who have built private free market stock markets denominated in grams of gold, who have invested in crypto-currencies, and who have used and taught encryption technology for many decades, want you to be free. You should look more closely at Monero, Zcash, PirateCoin, and other resources for private transactions.

Naomi Brockwell’s NBTV is probably the best ongoing resource for really excellent videos and tutorials about protecting your privacy. Without privacy you cannot have financial autonomy. Without secure communications, you are depending on truly evil people in government not to abuse their power over you.

In future essays we’ll examine some of these technologies and the companies behind them. Until then, that’s all I’ve got for today. God bless you and your families. Amen.