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Darrell Castle talks about the fate of the First Amendment, especially the freedom of Americans to speak their minds without running their thoughts through a government-controlled censor.
Transcription/Notes
Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday, the 11th day of October, in the year of our Lord 2024. I will be talking about what is perhaps the most important issue on the ballot this November and that is the fate of the First Amendment especially the freedom of Americans to speak their minds without running their thoughts through a government-controlled censor.
Should the federal government be the arbiter of what the public should be able to read or hear. That is the question I will talk about especially how some prominent Democrats have answered that question. Some of the richest and most powerful people on planet earth are now calling for Americans to be censured. That word sounds so benign that it has to be defined before it has any impact. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees that the government cannot legally prevent Americans from speaking their minds or expressing their opinions verbally or in print. In other words, the government is not legally permitted to censor us. That is the basic foundation of free people, and it is the First Amendment for a reason.
Hillary Clinton seems to have taken the lead in the campaign to restrict our freedom and she has taken her efforts globally by encouraging other countries to restrict the speech of their citizens. She recently asked European governments to censor Elon Musk because he permitted unregulated speech on X. She also went on CNN to talk about how discouraging it is that censorship is such a tough sell to the American people. She said the road the anti-free speech advocates have traveled on has been a rocky and difficult one. “There are people who are championing it, but it has been a long and difficult road to getting anything done.”
Yes, I can see why all those anti-freedom Democrats have had such a difficult time because it is not easy to convince free people to give up their freedom. I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said that to be considered a great man one has to free enslaved men or enslave free men, so I suppose we are back to fighting those battles again. She is not the only one of course, only the point person for the effort. Even NPR has gotten on the anti-free speech, anti-truth bandwagon. The new CEO of NPR wants to get things done it seems, but truth sometimes gets in the way. Yes, those Democrats want to get things done and the pesky First Amendment stands there as an impediment to their noble efforts.
This argument goes right to the heart of the cultural and spiritual war now raging in the West. Do you believe truth and freedom are a priority or just a hindrance to getting things done. To quote the new CEO of NPR; “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.” Well, I don’t think I would like walking on a common ground built on lies but that seems to be what he wants. That’s a mild position compared to what some other prominent Democrats have been saying.
So, perhaps the most important issue in this coming election is whether or not we as Americans will protect the Constitution and its guarantee of freedom or whether we will surrender to the one party, one mindset that many Democrats are trying to build. Given the control that mainstream media has over information, the freedom to speak our minds in opposition, especially on social media is vital. Things are bad around the world right now with wars, famines, and other such government instituted madness, but as long as we are free we have at least a fighting chance, so of course, the enemies of freedom are working overtime to take that away from us.
John Kerry, speaking to the World Economic Forum:
“The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. There’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc., our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.” — John Kerry
Yes, he said the First Amendment is a block to regulating dissenting opinions out of existence and he sees that as a bad thing. I have to remind Mr. Kerry that the government is the worst purveyor of disinformation in the history of the world.
Bill Gates, speaking in an interview on CNBC, had some thoughts on the subject of totalitarian points of view as he usually does. “We should have free speech, but it you’re inciting violence, if you’re causing people not to take vaccines, you know, where are those boundaries, that even the US should have rules. “He went on to suggest that artificial intelligence could be used to censor or even alter dissenting speech since allowing dissent to his vaccines even for a day could be too long. During the covid years of 2020 and 2021 despite the fearmongering and vaccine promotion, social dissent on social media could not be completely suppressed and that is just too much for kindly old gentleman, Bill Gates.
Hillary Clinton went on CNN the other day to speak about the need to control social media saying that it should be at the top of every legislative agenda.
“We should be, in my view, repealing something called section 230, which gave platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass throughs, that they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted. But we now know that was an overly simple view. Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control and it is not just the social and psychological effects, it’s real harm.” — Hillary Clinton
“We lose total control” that is the purpose of the First Amendment Ms. Clinton to prevent people like you from having total control. The section 230 that she mentioned was put in place to keep the social media platforms from being liable for the content posted by their members. If I post on Facebook that I am opposed to the Bill Gates bioweapon that he chooses to call vaccines, then Facebook would not be liable if that was determined in court to be harmful or defamatory. In Ms. Clintin’s world Facebook would be required to examine every post and determine whether or not it would pass the government’s censors so that only one view would ever be heard or read.
It is indeed difficult for the only one view only one world folks to deal with the idea that we can see and hear a different version of events without having that version filtered through their compliant media organs. We can now make our own determination when the media is lying and post our concerns and our own version. Freedom of thought allows us to see reality and when we come to see and understand the reality of what is being done to us it is frightening.
The current Democrat candidates for president and vice president have similar views regarding free speech. Tim Walz admitted in his debate with J.D. Vance that he intends to criminalize hate speech and misinformation or what he chooses to call speech he disagrees with. He apparently doesn’t think the First Amendment protects speech he disagrees with, but the First Amendment was created specifically for that purpose.
This is what law professor Jonathan Turley said about the position of Harris and Biden on speech they refer to as misinformation and hate speech.
“Governor Walz has been out there saying that misinformation and hate speech are not protected under the Constitution. And there’s a crushing irony there. I mean; in calling for censorship of other citizens accused of disinformation, the governor is spreading disinformation. He’s been told repeatedly by many of us that he’s wrong, that’s just completely and demonstrably wrong. The Constitution does protect those forms of speech.” — Jonathan Turley
Professor Turley went on to comment on Hillary Clinton’s comment about losing total control by saying that she’s revealing where they want to go, so we can fight it. She’s doing it because they know they are losing control.
President Biden often claims that democracy is at stake in the upcoming election and that, if Trump is elected, he will end democracy. The problem that is obvious to many is that he, Joe Biden, has done more to hinder democracy as reflected in our ability to have a free discussion of issues that are, or at least should be, important to voters. He has operated his administration by fiat in his opening of the southern border to mass invasion by illegal immigrants many of whom are violent criminals thus exposing his fellow Americans to rape and murder. He committed the U.S. to participation in two wars neither of which has anything to do with American security at a financial cost of hundreds of billions. He has provided no justification for entering the conflicts let alone a declaration of war.
He has run his electoral campaigns based on the premise that his opponent was in collaboration with a foreign government which he happened to be conducting war against. Perhaps his worst example of corruption at the highest levels of government is his coopting of the national police, investigating, and intelligence agencies into nothing more than arms of his political party. His agencies, one of whom is the department of justice, conducts warfare attacks against his political opponent as well as instigates false flag attacks resulting in hundreds of political prisoners being held in long term confinement many of them without trial.
His cooption of the various agencies has resulted in their becoming incestuously involved with Biden and his political party to the point that he tried to form a “Disinformation Governance Board” within the Department of Homeland Security which was intended to be empowered to discredit citizens based on their complaints about what the government was doing and would describe these complaints as deliberate disruption of the function of government. This went all the way down to education and to parents who complained that their children were taught critical race theory and to question their own gender. Those parents were to be described as domestic terrorists because anyone who disagrees with government policy is a domestic problem and therefore, a domestic terrorist. That is why government officials continually list domestic terrorists as more dangerous and threatening than foreign terrorists.
The greatest fear, in my view, is not that government will lose total control over the internet as Ms. Clinton put it, but that it will gain and solidify total control and build a digital wall around us that will be inescapable. The internet is the single greatest invention for free speech since the printing press and that is why people like Ms. Clinton and Biden/Harris are panicked over losing control of it. If we can just remain true to our values, especially in the upcoming election Ms. Clinton’s Road to total control will continue to be a rocky one.
The elite top 1% may be completely out of touch with reality and with mainstream America, but they wield most of the institutional power and they have built layers of regulatory power that are immune to the checks and balances of elections. They own and operate most media outlets and are therefore able to block or censor the views of most Americans.
Finally, folks, we know who they are and what they will do if elected. As a wise man once said when people tell you who they are, believe them. It seems that in the Democrat Party of today John Kennedy is dead, but Joseph Goebbels is very much alive.
At least that’s the way I see it,
Until next time folks,
This is Darrell Castle,
Thanks for listening.
Photo Credit: Berkleyside.org