Tesla CEO Elon Musk leaves the Senate Artificial Intelligence Insight Forum on Capitol Hill in September 2024. (Elizabeth Frantz for The Washington Post)
Perhaps you’ve read about the famous Christmas truce of 1914.[1] As WWI was getting underway, Allied and German soldiers, much to the horror of their commanders, decided during Christmas that they preferred celebrating peace on earth to killing one another.
Christmas 2024, on the other hand, saw a war break out. Not a shooting war of the sort raging in Europe in 1914, but a war of ideas. This time, the battlefield wasn’t France. It was X. And the opposing forces weren’t the British and German armies but was more of a civil war, pitting Trump supporters against other Trump supporters on immigration.
Immigration is a big topic. The Christmas immigration war of 2024 was focused on one aspect of the subject: the H-1B visa. More to the point, the focus was on the incoming Trump administration’s desire to remove the country cap that currently limits the number of H-1B visas issued to a particular country. India was the focus of this battle, as the bulk of H-1B visas are issued to Indian tech workers. Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and others argued that more H-1B visas would help America “win.” Others were upset, seeing the proposed increase in H-1B visas as opposed to Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda.
Elon Musk takes on the Biden Regime over its border invasion.
My Comments: Sometimes you find allies in unexpected places. I never thought of Elon Musk as someone willing to take a stand against Biden’s Border Rush, but he seems to have a genuine interest in standing up to the powers that be and fighting the immivasion of the United States. See the link below featuring a number of his posts on the subject.
While I’m at it, I’d like to give a shout-out to Allan Wall, one of the few Evangelicals to write with understanding about immigration and the author of the article in the link. I’ve followed his work for about 20 years now and have always found his work insightful. So few Evangelicals seem to be willing to speak out against the destruction of our republic by mass illegal and legal immigration and refugee resettlement. And the Evangelicals who do write on immigration sadly often echo Roman Catholic talking points, promoting the same tired socialist immigration dogma one can find in any U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops press release, just without the Roman Catholic distinctives.
This man does not deserve to die. For he has spoken to us in the name of the LORD our God.
Jeremiah 26:16
Today, I saw the meme above in a tweet from, of all people, Elon Musk. It’s funny, but there’s a serious aspect about it that requires comment. And that’s the connection between the liberties historically enjoyed in the West and the Protestant Reformation. Specifically, I have in mind the relationship between the First Amendment guarantee of free speech in the Constitution of the United States of America and the Protestant Reformation.
Americans rightly believe that the right to free speech is one of the defining characteristics of our nation. It’s our birthright, given by God and guaranteed by our Constitution. But as is often the case, and I include myself here, it becomes easy to take our birthright for granted.
But in the past few years, beginning in 2018 and accelerating with the tyrannical Covid hoax in 2020, the ability of Americans, and of Westerners generally, has increasingly come under pressure.
I mention 2018 because it was in August of that year that the first big strike against free speech on the internet took place with the rapid-fire banning of Alex Jones and his Infowars website from nearly every major social media outlet. It gave every appearance of being a coordinated attack and was extensively covered in the press. I wrote about it myself in this space at that time. Worth noting is that Infowars has as its tagline, “There’s a war on for your mind.” That’s true, and it has always been true. And that war is fought with words and with propositions. If we believe the truth, we live. If we believe the many lies out there in the world, we perish.
In Romans, Paul tells us that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. But what if people never hear the truth of the gospel. How can they believe? This was a major problem in the Middle Ages, ruled as it was in Europe by the Roman Church-State. Rome and her innovations such as the real presence of Christ in the mass blinded people to the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Antichrist popes enforced the people’s blindness by torturing and murdering those who dared speak out against Rome’s evil system.
One might say it was Antichrist’s version of cancel culture.
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.”
Lux Lucet 