Too many times during my years in state politics, someone would claim who they “knew” me to be or what I was thinking, with none of it being real. They knew what they knew without knowing a thing. My usual response was to simply ask, “Who are you?” But sometimes this issue had to be dealt with more directly.
I used to jog early in the morning, often seeing a man out walking his dog. We always greeted each other in passing. One day he did not adjust his dog’s leash, which was blocking the road. Forced to slow down and step over it, I still said good morning, but his reply stopped me in my tracks. “I thought it was a good morning until I figured out who you really are!”
Caught off guard, I just stopped and looked at him.
“I finally figured out who you really are,” he continued, “down there in Montgomery destroying education, berating teachers, and passing nonsense bills that do nothing but tear up what works!”
I knew I had a teachers’ union acolyte in front of me as he parroted talking points about pending legislation from the union newsletter.
“Have you read the bill?” I asked.
Breaking eye contact he said, “I don’t have to read it to understand what you’re up to!”
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “You can greet me like a neighbor every morning, then suddenly, without any real knowledge about something, you decide that what somebody said about me must be real?! That makes no sense! You should be ashamed. Try reading something for yourself for once!”
Embarrassed and grumpy, he walked his dog in the opposite direction. I never saw him again.
When someone is told what to believe without bothering to check on it themselves, they’re left with a fateful knowledge gap. It’s bad enough when the union bosses, big tech, or the media try to gaslight us. It’s worse when the government decides what you are allowed to think or know. At that point, it becomes a form of tyranny.
Elon Musk recently did an interview with HBO’s Bill Maher, who noted Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X). In responding to Maher’s questions on his portrayal of what Musk calls the “woke mind virus,” Musk said, “We need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic and anything that results in the suppression of free speech.”
He didn’t stop there. Musk further noted that the suicide of a society occurs when you can’t question things.
True words.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently ended his campaign for the presidency, and in doing so, gave an epic speech, saying he saw no way forward, while also blaming the media censorship of his campaign as one of the chief factors. In the deepest of ironies, CNN pulled away from his speech right as RFK scolded members of the media for their role in promoting misinformation: “You didn’t alone cause the devolution of American democracy, but you could have prevented it.” It was a scolding for the ages.
That said, I’m reminded that the 71st anniversary of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” is upon us. Written in 1953, it tells the story of a fireman – except firemen in Bradbury’s vision were government book burners. Set in a dystopian future, the book portrays a government determined to remove outside thought, supplying the populace with government-approved thought instead. But when Bradbury’s main character discovers people willing to harbor books at risk of their lives, it causes him to question his role and what he knows, turning the fireman into a free thinker.
The underlying themes of “Fahrenheit 451” deal with illiteracy, caving to authority, tyranny, and, most of all, censorship. And not just the censorship of striking out words, but the kind that strikes out freedom of expression and thought. The kind of censorship designed to keep people in line.
Bradbury authored the book in the wake of the McCarthy era. When interviewed in 1956 he said:
[A]t the time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.
Are we there now? Is the dragon swallowing its tail in 2024?
Across the “Free World,” we are watching as governments settle into the norm of thought-policing. We’ve learned the U.S. government colluded with big tech to suppress major stories to influence public opinion. In France, a tech entrepreneur was arrested for allowing content on his platform that was not government-approved. The United Kingdom has redefined hate speech to mean anything the government doesn’t like and threatened to indict American citizens and extradite them to Great Britain for punishment. Brazil ordered the shutdown of Twitter/X for failing to toe the line on government-approved content.
None of these examples are about stopping the fomenting of violence or curbing societal ills. It’s about a narrative, a theme, an approved version of society for which the government is willing to suppress thought, speech and information to keep the approved narrative going.
This is a dangerous path. It is “Fahrenheit 451” writ large.
Musk is right: Anything less than freedom of speech is the beginning of the suicide of a society.
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