I’m writing this on Election Day, November 5, 2024. The polls close in just a couple of hours. But no matter what happens, I firmly believe that the key to national survival is to fight political censorship and the social isolation that censorship is designed to create. This means developing a sense of real community with others and speaking openly, especially when there are blatant government attempts to shut down your speech.
Below is an example of how bad it can get. In the UK police approached a man silently praying, asking "what is the nature of your prayer?" They arrested him for silently praying about abortion about 50 yards away from an abortion clinic.
So we are only now learning that if we don't speak openly about problems, we cannot solve them, and the problems just keep getting worse, like being confronted with literal thought police. This was unthinkable just a decade ago.
But in my Federalist piece yesterday I emphasize the good news: that there is an awakening among Americans that we must push back against the blatant attacks on free speech.
“It’s starting to dawn on Americans that our loneliness epidemic is largely the result of a manipulative propaganda-censorship machine that keeps us from talking to one another. We’re catching on that isolation is not only unnatural and dangerous to survival, but isolation is manufactured through attacks on free speech.”
The unity party under Trump/Vance/Gabbard/Kennedy/Musk/Shanahan promises to protect the First Amendment. But the anti-speech coalition under Harris/Walz/Obama/Cheney/Clinton/Kerry promises to impose censorship and even criminalize speech under the ridiculous guise of protecting us from “misinformation or disinformation.”
In the latter case, fighting censorship and speaking up will seem a lot harder. But we must do it! In either case, more Americans must gather together with the express purpose of learning how we even got to this point. We should learn how tyrants always use the natural human fear of ostracism to induce us to self-censor.
I call this process the weaponization of loneliness, which is the whole basis of political correctness. We cannot give in to it because that only tightens the noose around us, isolating us further.
So how do we learn about that process and build the courage to speak out? My book club is designed as one model to help people learn about the processes and patterns of weaponized loneliness and to build resistance to it. The idea is to gather with three or four trusted friend and acquaintances, maybe more or maybe just one or two.
If such groups increase, they can be a force multiplier in society so that ideas ripple outward, something the anti-communist freedom fighter Vaclav Havel explains in his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.”
So, no matter what happens with this election in the days or weeks or months or years ahead, we must keep speaking openly and throwing wrenches into the machinery of loneliness.
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