(like the Iron Curtain with the same freedom crushing purpose)
In the beginning, we were clustered in small communities. We knew one another and lived and died together for better or worse. The sharing of ideas was face to face in hardware stores, marketplaces, taverns and churches. It was centralized and it worked. The birth of our nation was due to the ease in which we could create a space, a public square where ideas, the good ones and the bad, could be thrashed out and polished. The freedom of speech has been a core principle in our nation, necessary for all of us to begin and to continue as a free people. It has never been systemically strangled effectively until now. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Google, Amazon all arrived on the scene embracing and celebrating this freedom. They provided all of us more freedom of choices and platforms for expression without being monitored and censored. They all were rewarded with unimaginable wealth and power through the freedom of speech and market. In the beginning they added to the freedom and it was good. Now, those same companies behind that Silicon Curtain have the infamous distinction of infringing on those same precious freedoms. The Silicon Curtain is now to America what the Iron Curtain was to Europe. A formidable forbidding structure that threatens all of our freedoms.
The Iron Curtain was a term to describe the barrier between east and west, between freedom and bondage, between democracy and totalitarianism. It was the curtain that shut out liberty, rights and rule of law. It was the curtain that kept people locked into a police state society and prevented escape to a free society. Behavior was monitored. Politically correct speech was the rigid order of the day and any slip of the tongue at any time could be fatal. That wall came crashing down by 1991 under the pressure of Reagan. Now, in 2021, the Silicon Curtain would find a place of honor among the communist who built and maintained that Iron Curtain. They would feel right at home with the ideologies and censorship control exerted by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon…They would be impressed and no doubt would recruit these modern-day fascists to sponsor workshops and seminars to improve their own people control skills. Silencing a free people, suppressing speech, eliminating thoughts already expressed, is no small accomplishment and has set in motion the rapid degradation of our 1st Amendment rights. The Silicon Curtain even silenced the voice of the President of the United States, something no global power could ever imagine doing let alone successfully execute. The freedom of speech is now under severe attack by an industry that owes its great power and wealth to that same right that it is now crushing. Viewpoints that support science, logic, sanity, morality, American freedoms and rights have frequently been targeted. The questioning the medical protocols to the Wuhan virus as well as the suspension of our constitutional rights during the shutdown, views in support of open, honest and clean elections and any discussions on the mountain of evidence to the 2020 massive voter fraud and the very voice of our President, all have been deliberately suppressed or silenced. From the shutting out communications of the President during a serious crisis down to taking away Dr Seuss books from children, we are under attack from a dangerous and fascistic movement. All these issues and more have resulted in thousands of Americans being silenced in the public square. All censored through the left-wing spectrum of intolerance and the fascistic control of major lines of communication.
The Silicon Curtain has deployed the thought police but they come with the happy face of trying to be truthful and not to offend. They target whatever thought, idea or belief is counter to their left-wing bias and just call it hate speech or untrue and that ends the argument. No messy discussions, no right of appeal, no free flow of ideas. No freedom of speech. They can even just threaten or suspend accounts without any just cause. It can be completely random. With guidelines conveniently vague, it is easy to just shut anyone down for any reason or for no reason at all. This creates fear from you and me to publishers to authors that what you are expressing may be unacceptable. So for many, self-censorship is becoming the new normal. We are being taught to self-censor. We are being trained to express only what a small and dangerous group of people want us to express. What could never be codified as law, is now embraced by social practices. This level of censorship which could never be forced on us by the government, now is being done to America by a small group of fascists behind a silicon curtain. The exodus to freedom friendly platforms is now well on its way. So refugees are going from Facebook to Me We, from Twitter to Parler or Gab, YouTube to Rumble or Bit-chute, Snap chat to Telegram, Google search engine to DuckDuckGo, Google Chrome to Brave as your browser of choice and from the evil Amazon to Overstock… we need to hurt these companies now. It is time America, to tear down that silicon curtain.
With Unsettled Distress,
Nelson Velez
Chairman
Virginia Tea Party
