CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) You remember during the COVID days, if you dared to question the safety of vaccines, or whether they should be required in order to go to work (or to go fishing, for that matter), you’d wake up one morning and find that Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram had blocked your post. “This information has not been verified by independent fact-checkers.” Perhaps your account was suspended or removed. And we now know it was the federal government-the Biden Administration-that reached out to the social media companies to flag posts that were “problematic.”
If they could get away with it, the issues of climate change and hurricane relief would get the same treatment. We are told that storms are getting stronger because of global warming. Anyone who points out that Milton is only the ninth named storm of the hurricane season should have their post taken down. Anyone who points out that FEMA funds the hotels, meals and flights into the country for illegals is dangerous; they’re hampering hurricane relief efforts.
John Kerry, former Secretary of State and Climate Czar, said it himself. At the World Economic Forum he described our first amendment as a “major block” to public consensus on important issues. If we could only make sure that other points of view were difficult or impossible to share, then everyone would fall in line. He pined for the old days when the New York Times and the alphabet networks decided which facts people were exposed to. Well we’ve had a taste of ABC’s fact-checking during a presidential debate and CBS’s 60 Minutes creative editing of a Kamala Harris interview to know that these are not to be trusted. But, oh my, would life be easier for the government.
What our government censors don’t realize is that freedom of speech is more important than ever in times of emergency. The government would love nothing more than to tell us how star-spangled-excellent their hurricane relief has been so far, as families’ one-time $750 debit cards get spent down to zero.
In the government’s world, the truth gets drowned by the flood waters.
Chris Conley
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