Students of Unified Educational Centers attend a lesson on “Fake News: access, security, and veracity of information,” in Sao Paulo on June 21, 2018.
MIGUEL SCHINCARIOLAFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Question: Do you believe everything that is written in the Holy Bible, the God-breathed words given to man, from Genesis 1 to Revelation 21?

If so, then you know that the heart and mind of man is consumed in wickedness. Evil imaginings. That the human heart is wicked and in rebellion against God. Not holy. Not righteous. Unless an individual hears the voice of the Lord, “Come…” and answers the Lord. Confesses their sin. Repents. And asks forgiveness and for the Holy Spirit to come into their heart, their mind, their spirit, and soul, into their body, and for that born again individual to make Jesus, the Christ, Lord of their life.

You believe that, then, right?

Okay.

Glad we established that.

Then it only is reasonable, makes sense, rational, logical, right, and true that the spirit of evil is at work in this fallen, corrupted world, and is leading the overwhelming majority. Not all who claim with their tongues, or think that the gold, silver, platinum, jeweled, wooden tree of shame around their necks makes them a Christian, are truly born again.

Another question: Do you then also believe, and KNOW within as a result of knowing and believing the Holy Bible, from daily reading and study, and meditation upon its words, along with the guidance of the Holy Spirit and awareness of THIS AGE WE LIVE IN — that we are in The End of Days? The last of the last days. That the world is as it never has been in world history and THIS AGE is as lost, wicked, rebellious, sinful, corrupt, and evil as any that came before. Only most delude themselves to the contrary.

And that it is very likely that the son of perdition, that spawn of Satan, thee Antichrist, as there have been millions, billions of antichrists in this world since the apostles declared as much 2,000 years ago — anyone — ANYONE — that is opposed to Jesus Christ, refuses to believe Jesus is fully truly God, was fully truly a man, refuses to believe everything written in the Holy Bible pertaining to Jesus from Genesis 3:15 to Revelation 19 — ANYONE — refusing to believe, to submit, to ask forgiveness of their sin, that is not born again is an antichrist.

Anti, against Christ.

But thee Antichrist of the last days possibly is already alive somewhere on this earth.

And the days of this world are numbered. We are living in THE END.

One of the things that evil can’t abide and wants to abolish, is the truth. Is the Word of God. Is mention of evil, of sin, of calling sin sin. Of speaking or writing the truth. Free speech. Now called “hate speech.”

It isn’t about woke, or even a political movement or agenda. It’s all about, only about evil’s agenda.

Thus, evil has been actively working for decades in America to abolish the First Amendment.

And we are closer than ever to allowing evil to do so. Evil has already rotted and corrupted, misled the minds of the majority of people living in America under the age of 40 believe that the First Amendment either needs to be abolished or rewritten. To suit them. And their sensitivities. Their inability to reside in reality and their abhorrence of the truth. Keeping them from living 100% in a perpetual state of delusion and being 100% controlled, manipulated by Satan, by evil.

Wake up.

Pay attention.

Get your backsides, your eyes, your ears, your minds, your spirits, and your hearts up on the wall and become a diligent watchman or watchwoman on the wall. If not already. According to the Lord and the Word of God. Not submitting to this world. Not being soft. As malleable by the lies of this world as lukewarm clay in evil’s hands rather than allowing oneself to be molded, glazed, and fired in the kiln of truth by God, by Jesus, by the Holy Spirit, and by every word within the Word of God.

Read on…

Ken Pullen, Wednesday, April 10th, 2024

Yes, They Want to Shut Down Free Speech

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Reprinted from The Epoch Times

If you want to see the future of free speech in the United States, look to Brazil today. Speech that runs contrary to the existing regime of Brazillian President Lula da Silva is being criminalized. The restrictions grow tighter by the day.

I feel it in my own contacts with my friends there, with whom I’ve been in touch for many years. They fear even answering texts. This is because they cannot know from one day to the next which tech platforms are going to be cooperating with the regime and which are resisting. They fear even getting on the internet without a VPN.

Tragically, the tech platforms themselves have proven to be incredibly unprincipled throughout this entire period. In both the United States and Brazil, most have gone along with the censorship push, even to the point of cheering it on.

One of the few holdouts is the platform formerly known as Twitter, which is now X, managed by Elon Musk. He still believes in free speech as the foundation of all other freedoms. A justice of the Supreme Court in Brazil has sent the company notices to restrict certain accounts in Brazil or else face daily fines. Over the weekend, Mr. Musk flatly refused, prompting the judge to say he is guilty of criminal conspiracy.

In the background is a gigantic protest that filled many city blocks in São Paulo. It was organized mainly through postings on X. This outraged the government and tipped it toward totalitarian controls, cracking down not only on the right of assembly but speech itself.

The Lula regime is a close ally of the Biden administration, so of course the White House has said nothing about any of this. There is even some speculation—I don’t think we are at this point yet but who knows?—that the Biden administration would allow Brazil to extradite Mr. Musk in this criminal indictment. The only thing preventing that right now, in my view, is the bad public relations look for President Biden.

Goodness knows that the Biden administration loathes him that much. And it’s not just President Biden but the entire establishment that his administration represents, including the highest powers in corporate America from legacy media to big tech and pharma. Together, this tribe may only represent 1 percent of the people, but they constitute 90 percent of the financial and political power in this country.

Free speech right now stands at a precipice. No question that many powerful people want it shut down completely.

I don’t usually listen to podcasts, but I spent time with one on TechDirt. The person being interviewed was law professor Kate Klonick, who is a designated expert on free speech and the law. In matters of internet speech, she favors more control and cheers for the Biden administration in the case before the Supreme Court right now in Murthy v. Missouri.

I listened hoping to discover some new arguments or facts of the case. She offered nothing new. What we got instead was a very long display of tribal loyalties. From her perspective, there is no principle at stake here. The plaintiffs are nothing but rabble-allied right-wingers who plotted with a Trumpish Fifth Circuit Court and barreled their way into the halls of justice where they do not belong.

She is somehow certain that the presumed bad guys are going to lose this struggle and that the Biden administration will win. After all, the government has to have the right to “jawbone” social media to get its perspective out there. She even raises the question of whether the plaintiffs in the case have any standing at all, since, to her mind, they didn’t really experience any authentic coercion at the hands of the government.

Listening to her interview, you would never know that most of the plaintiffs have no connection to anything “right-wing” at all but are rather just scientists trying to correct the record in times of extraordinary disinformation being dished out by the government. In this attempt, they ran headlong into a massive censorship industrial complex that involves a complicated web of control and influence, all being directed by the government itself.

We have tens of thousands of pages documenting this extensively.

Our learned professor cares nothing about this at all. For her, it’s all a matter of tribal relationships. The censors are the good guys, her team, a gang of credentialed experts who know what is true and are determined to see it prevail in public culture as the dissidents are shoved to the margins. Her condescension is as palpable as her loathing of the very idea that speech should be free from coercive control.

Sadly, she speaks for an entire class of rulers in many sectors of society today. They have sympathizers in the courts and every corporate boardroom. They are working to defend and celebrate the advent of totalitarian forms of governance in the West, all because they believe that they are and will be the ones in charge of it. The justification is to suppress the populist movements that threaten the entrenched power of global government elites.

A strange paranoia has struck elite circles in our time. They have convinced themselves that people such as former President Donald Trump, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the old days, El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and probably many others are nothing but enemies in the way of their plans for permanent global hegemony. So they have all been targeted as the enemy, along with all their supporters.

Any media venue such as The Epoch Times or research institute such as Brownstone is regarded as recalcitrant dissidents whom no one in polite society should touch. And now, Mr. Musk is in the same category, declared to be an enemy of the state.

These struggles have existed for 10 years or longer, but they haven’t always been this out in the open. On the plus side, it is easy to tell who is who and what is what. There was a time when people trusted sources such as Slate, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Wired, and, of course, The New York Times. But now, they are very reliable tellers of ruling-class tales.

Frankly, they are difficult to take seriously. The chasm that separates the venues of honest journalism from the repeaters of regime propaganda is growing ever wider, even as the fictions of our rulers are getting ever more implausible. We do indeed seem headed for a breaking point.

But we should ask ourselves: How is it that we know all this? It’s because of the freedoms we have left to publish, speak, read, and listen. It’s these freedoms that they want to take away. This is because the controlled venues of legacy media are losing money, while alternative sources are growing in traffic, influence, and profitability. The only real option remaining for the plotters is to seek a full shutdown of the internet and the criminalization of speech.

That is exactly what is happening in Brazil and what many in the United States want in our future. And we are not talking about a far-distant future. The threat is present right now, coming to a head in the coming months.

If the plotters get their way, the First Amendment will be a dead letter. I have no prescient wisdom as to how all this will turn out. The battle is ongoing and taking place right out in the open. At least we are clear on the battle lines.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.