In a series of Tweets, president Donald Trump has called out the heavy-handed censorship of republican/conservative and right-wing voices in what appears to be related to the recent de-platforming of InfoWars, and a couple of other conservative alternative news platforms to a certain degree.
Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!
This is something that Trump said in one of his recent Tweets and it really resonated with me.
We have become so obsessed with policing what people think and see under the guise of protecting the truth and preventing people from seeing fake news, we have lost our humanity and echoing similar moves to 1930's Nazi Germany and remnants of anti-communist Cold War.
**Who are we to say what is real and what is not real? **
Sure, Alex Jones went too far calling the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting crisis actors and suggesting it was faked. And his xenophobic remarks about Muslim people and immigrants is definitely inappropriate, but he isn't saying things people are not already saying, many of the things president Trump himself has said over the years are xenophobic too.
Just because Alex Jones said something inappropriate and some of his psychotic fans took it upon themselves to dox the family and harass people (which Alex Jones did not condone), does not mean we should silence someone with a different perspective on something (however wrong).
We saw this in the nineties and early 2000's when parenting groups blamed rap and metal music for their children committing school shootings, we saw Marilyn Manson dragged into the debate and blamed over the Columbine School Shooting because the shooters listened to his music.
And then we saw it with violent video games, which once again, were blamed for school shootings and acts of violence. Games such as Grand Theft Auto were attributed via unfounded claims to being a potential cause for violence acts, a scapegoat on a much bigger problem.
Free speech means all perspectives
This is the thing free speech and 1st amendment right proponents seem to forget, free speech means people with good and bad opinions on things deserve to be heard.
They say history repeats itself, and I am reminded of a well-known rewording of a famous quote, "those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it." by philosopher George Santayana, as well as a quote from well-known writer Mark Twain famously, also said, "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme"
While circumstances are most certainly different to what they were in the thirties and other conflicts which saw freedoms restricted or minorities targeted, it's not hard to see right-wing conservatives are the target and the liberal minefield is being set up, waiting for a right-winger to stumble into it and explode. We are seeing history repeat itself.
Scapegoats
History has shown when a terrible act of violence is committed (especially one we cannot explain) we look for a scapegoat, someone or something to blame. We try and make sense of it, we start to make excuses and the real motive and intention become less clear.
I do not like Alex Jones, I disagree with a few of the things he says and believes in, but as is his right to speak, I choose not to always listen (as is my right). I don't wish for anyone to be censored, because censorship is the gateway to something much more broad and worse.