Over here in the Land of the Magyars, I’m a little behind on the news, so I just discovered that GoFundMe has cut off the Canadian truckers’ support fund, depriving the truckers of $10 million of donations, which Go Fund Me says it will return to donors. GFM says that some trucker protests turned violent, which is why it has done an about face. Did GoFundMe take down fundraising pages for Black Lives Matter-adjacent groups after some of the racial protests in 2020 turned violent?

Seems like we’re on a path where we’re going to have two of everything, depending on one’s political ideology: segregated websites, financial systems, even charitable giving, the result of systematically banning non-liberals. Seems like that leads to a bad and dark place. https://t.co/hJB0QsWiyb

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 5, 2022

Recall: @TheRickWilson bilked gullible liberals out of $65k using @GoFundMe for a film that never came. He kept promising to get more money, yet: nothing. Despite this being reported and denounced, @GoFundMe did nothing because “the film was anti-Trump:https://t.co/dVlAd7rVqg

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 5, 2022

Meanwhile, Joe Rogan has publicly apologized after some activists collected a number of times he said the n-word on his podcast. Rogan pointed out that they took them out of context, including a discussion about how black comedians used the world, but he still apologized. In a sane world, he would be able to express publicly his regret having used the word, and that would be the end of it. But we are not in a sane world, and though I wish Rogan hadn’t used the world, I also regret that Rogan has apologized to these trolls. Nothing will satisfy them. Nothing. Now they smell blood in the water.

Notice how Rogan, who is a stand-up comedian and not a political or social conservative — used that word in the past on his show without complaint, but now that the Left sees him as a target, all the things he said before, and that caused him no problems, will be dredged up to try to destroy him professionally.

Hear me: what’s happening to Joe Rogan might happen to you one day. Something you said or wrote on the Internet or in social media that was perfectly fine today might not be fine tomorrow — and activists on the Left will weaponize it against you. This is true:

Bottom line as regards Rogan, GoFundMe, & all the other crap constantly flaring up is this: the questions & thoughts of 1/2 of America are not allowed in the public square, period. Stop pretending otherwise. You do not live in a “free society” & it’s laughable to say otherwise.

— Matthew J. Peterson (@docMJP) February 5, 2022

This means anyone of prominence is forbidden from expressing or advocating for the traditional views of the entire nation, now held by 40-60% of the nation, depending. These views includes the traditional idea of what a nation is and what citizenship. 1917 already happened here.

— Matthew J. Peterson (@docMJP) February 5, 2022

Yes indeed. This is the “soft totalitarianism” that I talk about in Live Not By Lies. The anti-communist dissidents who lived through the Soviet years all see it emerging in the woke West. None of us will be able to predict what will be used against us. You are only safe if you never say anything. We are only a semi-free country.

What are you going to do when banks start denying you checking accounts because you have been identified as a Bad Person because of the things you have said or written, the causes you support, the candidates or institutions you donate to, and so forth? What are you going to do when you are denied a license to practice your profession, or cut off from using Facebook or some other social media platform for ideological reasons, even though you need that access to make your living?

What is it going to take to wake people up to what is happening?!?

And what is it going to take to give the Republican Party a swift kick in its collective backside and make it realize what these rich, powerful, corporate Leftist elites and their illiberal activist stormtroopers are doing to traditional American liberties? Enough with the Trump drama (Trump, who sure made a lot of wokesters mad, but who did very little of substance to defend our liberties). Enough with the belligerence over Ukraine. Look at the clear and present dangers here in our own country now. In one of my recent overseas trips, I had dinner one evening with an expatriated American conservative who had lived abroad for years running his business. He had returned not long before to the US, and told me that he is in despair over what has happened to our country. He said that it was just yesterday, it seems, that we were a light unto the nations. Now, we have turned ourselves into the Whore of Babylon. He was talking about the socially destructive filth put out by Hollywood and other liberal elites — I think we were specifically talking about gender ideology, but I’m not absolutely positive. That conversation came to mind just now, because he would have been justified mentioning this new culture of left-wing censorship and control.

We cannot have America as we have traditionally know her if we do not agree to let those with whom we disagree have their say and make their living, despite the fact that we don’t approve of them. We should all be very reluctant to shun others. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell said they are not in favor of censorship, but only didn’t want their music to be on the same platform that hosts Joe Rogan. This is disingenuous BS. Young told Spotify, publicly, that it could have Rogan, or it could have Young, but it couldn’t have both. He tried to force Spotify to get rid of Rogan. There’s no two ways about it. Why couldn’t he have spoken out against Rogan, but let Rogan share the same space? That’s what old-fashioned liberals would have done. But even the old-fashioned liberals (like Young and Mitchell) have now become illiberal progressives.

You all remember the contretemps at The New York Times a couple of years ago when a bunch of progressive employees forced out James Bennet over his commissioning of an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton, whose point of view about using the military to stop race riots was supported by something like 50 percent of the country. When I became a professional journalist in 1989, it would have been hard to imagine a quality newspaper where journalists, who make their living in an industry that depends on free, robust speech, would have behaved like that. At every paper I worked at, I would read things in its pages from both liberals and conservatives that made me wince from time to time, but that was fine, because that’s what it meant to work at a newspaper reflecting a free, diverse society. When I was for two years editor of the Sunday op-ed section at The Dallas Morning News, I worked very hard to keep the section politically balanced and interesting. I had to stop being a conservative in that role, and be a professional journalist; had I tried to keep liberal voices out of the paper, I would have been fired, and would have deserved it.

But see, I come from the Before Times.

The Left is pushing us closer and closer to outright civil conflict. Our elected leaders of the Right don’t seem to have any real idea what to do about it, and prefer to spend their time agitating for conflict with Russia over Ukraine, obsessing over punishing Donald Trump’s enemies, and so forth. Meanwhile, we are all watching Woke Capitalists take away our liberties and drive anyone to the Right of Woke into hiding, and tearing America apart.

Don’t like Joe Rogan or the Canadian truckers? That’s fine. But you had better not deceive yourself: today’s it’s them, but tomorrow it will be someone you do like and admire, and maybe even yourself. This is how the Woke operate — and they keep getting away with it.

The day will come when these totalitarians piss off enough people, and they are not going to be able to stop the backlash, which will turn very ugly. I dread the coming of those days. But at the rate things are going now, either that, or a social credit system through which the woke elites control and suppress dissent, is inevitable.

If there’s one thing we should have learned from the Iraq and Afghanistan nation-building debacles is that you cannot have a liberal democratic society without a liberal democratic ethos having been instantiated in the hearts and minds of the people. The progressives in the United States are busy now exorcising the liberal democratic spirit from America’s body politic — and while they have some help with anti-classical-liberal elements of the Right, it is the anti-liberal Left that holds all the corporate, cultural, and institutional power in the US. They are the ones who determine the future of this conflict. People on the Right — and people like Rogan who aren’t even on the Right, but who suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of the woke Left — are left helpless, waiting to see who the many-eyed monster is going to target next.

Our Big Brother is Woke Anthony Fremont, from the famous Twilight Zone episode, introduce by Rod Serling like this:

A monster had arrived in the village. Just by using his mind, he took away the automobiles, the electricity, the machines — because they displeased him — and he moved an entire community back into the dark ages — just by using his mind. And the people there have to smile. They have to think happy thoughts and say happy things because once displeased, the monster can wish them into a cornfield or change them into a grotesque, walking horror. This particular monster can read minds, you see. He knows every thought, he can feel every emotion.

The monster is a six year old with a cute little boy face, and blue, guileless eyes. But when those eyes look at you, you better start thinking happy thoughts, because the mind behind them is absolutely in charge.

We only wanted to introduce you to one of our very special citizens, little Anthony Fremont, age six, who lives in a village called Peaksville in a place that used to be Ohio. And if by some strange chance you should run across him, you had best think only good thoughts. Anything less than that is handled at your own risk, because if you do meet Anthony you can be sure of one thing: you have entered the Twilight Zone.

One of these days, somebody is “going to take a lamp, or a bottle, or something, and end this.” It’s going to be a bad thing. But not as bad as letting the tyranny expand.

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