“Cult of Personality v. Suppression of Voices” Sydney Williams
http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
Olawale Daniel, founder of TechAtLast International, once said: “The most dangerous and powerful people in the world do not carry guns or shoot missiles; they write code to surveil and suppress opposing views.” There is no question that a commanding personality can become demagogic, especially when emotion supplants reason, and the goal is nefarious. But a demagogue only becomes dangerous when accompanied by a willing state, a compliant media and a culture of conformity that does not permit dissenting voices. So long as people are free to exercise their natural rights to speak, write, assemble and pray, people will remain the master and politicians the servants.
For four years the Left ranted about the risk to democracy, with a “demagogic” Donald Trump in the White House. They spoke of his coarseness, exaggerations, and his non-PC speech. Ignored were the facts he diminished government’s impact on individuals through deregulation and reduced government’s resources through lower taxes. A charismatic personality can camouflage a bad leader, as the world learned in the last century, with Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao, but it can also magnify a good leader, like Churchill, FDR or Ronald Reagan.
It is the suppression of voices that should concern lovers of freedom. In 1950, when the United States was experiencing a “Red Scare” and Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) was starting his infamous hearings, President Truman sent a special message to Congress on August 8: “…we must be eternally vigilant against those who would undermine freedom in the name of security.” Three years later, in the March 1953 issue of the Vassar Alumnae Magazine, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote: “Restrictions of free thought is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one Un-American act that could most easily defeat us.” Over the years, free expression allowed man to grow and expand his horizons. Freedom, progress and wealth are its progeny. It is a never-ending process, which will continue so long as man is able to think, speak and act freely.
In his concurrence in Whitney v. California (1927), Justice Louis Brandies wrote: “Man feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.” When universities ban books for fear of hurtful language, they do damage to those they purport to protect. When politicians repress opposing views with threats of investigations and inquiries, they do irreparable harm to our Constitution. When tech companies shut down social media accounts for those they dislike, they set precedents that affect all mankind. When mainstream media reports only the news that fit their narrative, they promote ignorance rather than knowledge. During the Trump years, the response of the Left was far more dangerous than anything Mr. Trump said or did, for they blocked dissent and suppressed speech. It is not just Mr. Trump who was treated in this manner, but those who supported him. This was done under a hypocritical flag of moral righteousness, abetted by mainstream media and a cultural environment that celebrated wokeness, and which canceled history and opinions when they did not conform to a predetermined narrative.
Who is responsible for this state of affairs? Politicians? The media? Schools and universities? Churches? Wall Street and large corporations? TV personalities? Cultural institutions? Hollywood? Publishers? Eleemosynary organizations? All bear some responsibility. In a political environment inundated with conflicting opinions and no one to sort them out other than ourselves, we must, like Diogenes, conduct the search for truth alone, whether it is asking about the unpublished Durham Report, learning exactly what happened on January 6, or uncovering the origins of COVID-19. In an undated video, Carl Sagan (1934-1996), the astronomer and planetary scientist, spoke: “The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge.”
While Sagan was speaking about science, his words reflect the current environment of enforced conformity to woke ideas regarding equity, diversity, inclusion, victimization, race and gender. Roger Kimball, writing in the May issue of The Spectator, noted that at one time colleges and universities were dedicated to the “pursuit of truth and the transmission of the highest values of our civilization.” Today, the “mantra is ‘diversity.’ The reality is strictly enforced conformity about any ideas that might disturb the heavy moral slumber of wokeness.” The story of our past is cancelled, for fear it celebrates the whiteness of our European ancestors, thus denying today’s youth the history of man’s progress over the centuries. Today, some of the United States’ most successful individuals emigrated from Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. It was here, within our culture and customs and under our government and our laws, that they flourished. Is not that something to recognize and celebrate?
History moves across a continuum, reflecting events and ideas, along with changing and unchanging values. We cannot know who we are without learning of our past, the good and the bad. Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter, under the banner of equity, would have us fall backward into a discriminatory and divisive past, when we should be moving forward toward a mutually respectful and tolerant future. In a recent column in The Epoch Times, Victor Davis Hanson wrote: “When an arrogant present dismisses the wisdom of the past, then an all-too predictable future becomes terrifying.” Staying silent, when an enormous cloud of fairy dust is sprinkled on the people by woke elites, is not the answer.
While there is, at present, no mesmerizing politician on the Left capable of lassoing the current cultural environment of wokeness and suppressed speech, the landscape has been prepared and the gate is open. I am reminded of how the ground in Germany was furrowed and seeded in the half dozen years leading to Hitler’s Chancellorship in 1933. We must be vigilant. For, it is when the charismatic politician enters an arena with uncritical support from the media, universities, woke corporations and cultural institutions that we have to fear.
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