Over the past few years, it’s been common to hear defenders of social media censorship retort to those who complain about, “Twitter is a private company, and they can ban whom they want. If you don’t like it, go start your own Twitter!”
One interesting aspect of this argument is that those who made it generally were individuals who were not known to respect laissez-faire capitalism or private property. In fact, they tended to be socialists of one stripe or another.
Those who complained about the censorship, generally those people who tended to favor political and economic liberty, then were wrongfooted. Either they felt they had to call for government regulation of social media, which contradicted their free market principles or to make charges that the government was behind the censorship, at which point they’d be called “conspiracy theorists.”
“Conspiracy theorist” is one of those terms that seemingly everyone wants to avoid. “I’m by no means a conspiracy theorist,” is a common turn of phrase people will use when they’re about to introduce an idea that sounds like a conspiracy theory. It’s as if to believe in conspiracies is the very height of ignorance, and that one must deny conspiracies exist if he wants to remain a member of society in good standing.
But conspiracies do exist and are even recognized in criminal law. In many Western nations, one can be charged with conspiracy to commit murder. In the Bible, we find many conspiracies. When Absalom sought to overthrow David, his plot was rightly described in the King James Bible as a conspiracy. Twice, the Apostle Paul found himself the object of conspiracies to kill him. The arrest and crucifixion of Christ was the culmination of a three-year-long conspiracy by the Jewish religious leaders to get rid of the man they perceived, rightly, as a threat to their power. Doubtless, other examples of conspiracies can be found in the Bible, but these should be sufficient to make the point that conspiracies are not a figment of the imagination, but a documented historical reality.
If he has done nothing else, Elon Musk has exposed for all the world to see that the “conspiracy theorists” were right. As the Twitter Files have revealed, the government was deeply involved in the social media censorship business. Not that there was any lack of evidence of this previously. For example, the New York Post ran a headline on July 15, 2021, that read, “White House ‘flagging’ posts for Facebook to censor over COVID ‘misinformation.’” The Independent ran a piece on February 3, 2022, with the headline, “White House urges Spotify to take further action on Joe Rogan: “More can be done.’” Why did the White House want Spotify to censor Joe Rogan? It was due to the popular podcaster’s explosive interview with Dr. Robert Malone, who among other things, called the hysteria over Covid an example of “mass formation psychosis.”
English philosopher Jeremy Bentham is best known today for his utilitarian ethics, in which he posited that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong.” This of course is far from Christian ethics which posits that the law of God is the measure of right and wrong.
Lux Lucet 