"As recently as five or six years ago, who would have thought that America’s dominant social media platforms, such as Facebook, Google-You Tube, or Twitter would assault its host country’s First Amendment rights by engaging in the silencing of a huge number of its users through censorship, cancellation, and de-platforming?
Of all the impediments to America’s progress on every front, censorship and the cancel culture probably rank right at the top.
Many of the younger generation accept cancel culture as being part of depersonalized relationships that social media has fostered.
It seems many have gotten used to cyber-bullying and the flippant cancellation of people, ideas, and relationships -- all facilitated with just a few clicks.
The older generations appreciate that protection of free speech, free association, and a presumption of innocence have always been a core principles in America ...
... So why is cancel culture, which is so demonstrably limiting, harmful, and antisocial -- exacerbating intolerance and hatred, on the rise in America?
That is best answered by simply identifying who benefits.
Clearly external enemies of the United States benefit, particularly those who want to remake the world, like the Chinese Communist Party and elites associated with Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, famous for its annual meetings in Davos and its push to bring about the “Great Reset.”
These external hostile forces have domestic allies among the elites in the U.S., in political parties, government bureaucracies, academia, and in the corporate world, but also with groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa.
The elites use these latter groups in similar ways that Hitler used the Brownshirts.
BLM and Antifa are essentially the elites’ foot soldiers used to foment internal fear, division, and to destroy society’s connection with its past, and even precipitate civil war -- all of which facilitates the end game of subordinating the U.S. to the global elite’s new world order.
Much of the cancel culture may not realize that in desecrating historical monuments and rewriting history they are unwittingly serving the elites at the top.
... Cancel culture is regressive, not progressive -- and we can project where it will take us by understanding the past and what has happened to other societies and nations that adopted such practices.
... Cancel culture has its roots in intolerance dating back to the French Revolution (1789-1794), when Robespierre’s Reign of Terror resulted in some 30,000 deaths -- a period accompanied by a concerted effort to erase and destroy Christianity and its traditions and institutions.
... Marxism took the cancellation of culture to a new level.
Although that ideology was formulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the first half of the 1800s, it wasn’t implemented until Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917.
One of Lenin’s first projects was to cancel the past by tearing down the tsarist statues and symbols of Russian history -- emblems, coats of arms, double-headed eagles -- all destroyed in the name of the revolution and creation of the “Soviet Man.”
The vast majority of people in the Russian Empire were, at the time of the revolution, religious believers.
Lenin ordered his communist vanguard lieutenants to destroy religious institutions and replace religious belief with atheism.
In the first year after the revolution, the state expropriated all church property, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed.
Many more were persecuted.
... Even though there was a concerted effort to hide the wholesale crime of the Soviet rule of Lenin and Stalin, by the 1960s scholarship and inside testimonies established that Bolshevik and Soviet totalitarian rule had resulted in death tolls of at least some 20 million people.
Like Lenin and Stalin’s communist rule in Russia, Mao Zedong’s communist revolution in China was based on historical determinism -- a fundamental tenet of Marxism which required the cancellation of past history and the subordination of its citizens to the collective identity of the communist state.
During the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 Mao directed his Red Guards to mobilize the population to cancel and rid itself of the “Four Olds”:
Old customs,
Old culture,
Old habits and
Old ideas.
The result was devastating, with Chinese people turning on each other, with brainwashed youth even betraying their own siblings and parents.
In the end Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution were responsible for at least 40 million deaths, both those for which Mao was directly responsible and those that resulted from disastrous policies he refused to change.
... After its founding in 1948, North Korea became a closed society, cancelled from its past and isolated from the present world around it.
Quickly descending into a secretive communist totalitarian state, it would have failed at several points were it not for aid supplied by the Soviet Union and China.
Under successive Kim family dictatorships, North Korea’s brutal communist policies of collectivization and repression killed some 3.5 million of its citizens, many from mass starvation.
Cambodia was even worse.
Between 1975 and 1979, the communist despot Pol Pot brought almost complete destruction to his country’s cities and rural areas, turning the entire country into a prison -- eradicating public schools, universities, private property, churches, religious belief, and executing all the educated and well-to-do Cambodians.
In the end Pol Pot’s genocidal policies killed nearly 3 million people, some two-fifths of the nation’s 7 million population.
These are but some of the examples of the results in states large and small that implemented communism.
We think of the 20th century as being the century of progress.
But world wars and the imposition of communist rule and its totalitarian practices also made that century the bloodiest in human history.
We have been reticent and slow to face the communist threat from China.
The CCP is not only our greatest military threat externally, but also internally -- through its ongoing multi-billion-dollar industrial, academic, and political espionage and subversion programs operating in the U.S. -- China is also our greatest existential threat.
The starting point of protecting our freedoms and expanding opportunity in America is to refuse to accept or facilitate forces that are clearly associated with repression and tyranny.
... Cancel culture and censorship have no place in the United States."
