It’s War To The Knife Time (UPDATED)

     We’ve already had indications of this. AntiFa committing mass assaults and vandalism and getting away with it. Organized bands of hecklers shutting down talks by conservative and libertarian spokesmen. Public harassment of Republican Congressmen and Trump Administration figures. Major Web service providers Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube censoring anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. And of course, pustules on the body politic such as Maxine Waters and Eric Holder slyly encouraging all the above and more.

     The latest casualty brings a unique poignancy to the situation:

     If you’re unfamiliar with Gab.com, it’s a Twitter replacement that doesn’t censor. It excludes illegal materials – e.g., child porn, doxxing, threats of violence – but that’s all. Everyone is welcome to say whatever he pleases as long as what he posts doesn’t violate the law. Its founder and chief executive, Andrew Torba, has been stalwart in his defense of absolutely free expression. Yea verily, even for folks whose views nearly everyone would find repugnant.

     But the Left is determined that we in the Right shall not be permitted to express ourselves. So ever since this affront to Leftist domination of social media got seriously rolling, the Left has conducted a campaign to have Gab.com “deplatformed:” i.e., deprived of a Web host, payment processors, and anything else a social medium requires for survival.

     Web hosts and payment processors are apparently pusillanimous enough to be bullied into denying Gab.com their services. As of this morning, Web host provider Joyent has pulled its service out from under Gab’s site. The rationale? Pittsburgh synagogue shooting suspect Robert Bowers had posted there:

     The alleged gunman in Saturday’s mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue spewed anti-Semitic posts on a social media platform where he claimed that Jews were "the enemy of white people," according to a report.

     Two hours before Robert Bowers, 46, allegedly burst into the Tree of Life Synagogue and opened fire during a Shabbat service, he posted on the chat site Gab.com about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the New York Times reported.

     People like Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton – the lowest and most vicious dregs of humanity – can say anything they like at Facebook and Twitter, including a huge amount of anti-Semitic vitriol...with no consequences. But for Gab.com to allow an anti-Semite to express himself is unacceptable? Gab.com is somehow responsible for what this maniac did in the flesh?

     I hardly need to draw my intelligent Gentle Readers a cartoon.

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     The Left has figured it out: If we can keep Americans in the Right from finding and communicating with one another, we can keep them feeling isolated and helpless. They’re doing everything they can to bring that about. The elimination of relatively young, relatively small social-medium Gab.com indicates that the Left has resolved that its silence-and-isolate strategy shall be seamless.

     Does that put you in mind of anything else. Gentle Reader? Perhaps a passage from a famous novel?

     “Yes, I suppose I should explain,” said Dr. Ferris, “that we wish to get your signature early in the day in order to announce the fact on a national news broadcast. Although the gift program has gone through quite smoothly, there are still a few stubborn individualists left, who have failed to sign—small fry, really, whose patents are of no crucial value, but we cannot let them remain unbound; as a matter of principle, you understand. They are, we believe, waiting to follow your lead. You have a great popular following, Mr. Rearden, much greater than you suspected or knew how to use. Therefore, the announcement that you have signed will remove the last hopes of resistance and, by midnight, will bring in the last signatures, thus completing the program on schedule.” [Emphasis added by FWP]

     There are still people who laugh at Rand’s nightmare vision. There are still people who say, to themselves if not to others, “Oh, it will never get as bad as that!” or “Well, freedom of speech is all very well in theory, but you have to draw the line somewhere.”

     Some years ago, Jonah Goldberg, whom I once respected, wrote that everyone is in favor of censorship; we just want to censor different things. Perhaps he’s reconsidered. As I disagreed with him then just as now, I don’t have to.

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     Allow me to reprise a snippet from another visionary, the late Dr. Clarence Carson:

     [W]e are told that there is no need to fear the concentration of power in government so long as that power is checked by the electoral process. We are urged to believe that so long as we can express our disagreement in words, we have our full rights to disagree. Now both freedom of speech and the electoral process are important to liberty, but alone they are only the desiccated remains of liberty. However vigorously we may argue against foreign aid, our substance is still drained away in never-to-be-repaid loans. Quite often, there is not even a candidate to vote for who holds views remotely like my own. To vent one's spleen against the graduated income tax may be healthy for the psyche, but one must still yield up his freedom of choice as to how his money will be spent when he pays it to the government. The voice of electors in government is not even proportioned to the tax contribution of individuals; thus, those who contribute more lose rather than gain by the "democratic process." A majority of voters may decide that property cannot be used in such and such ways, but the liberty of the individual is diminished just as much as in that regard as if a dictator had decreed it. Those who believe in the redistribution of wealth should be free to redistribute their own, but they are undoubtedly limiting the freedom of others when they vote to redistribute theirs.

     Effective disagreement means not doing what one does not want to do as well as saying what he wants to say. What is from one angle the welfare state is from another the compulsory state. Let me submit a bill of particulars. Children are forced to go to school. Americans are forced to pay taxes to support foreign aid, forced to support the Peace Corps, forced to make loans to the United Nations, forced to contribute to the building of hospitals, forced to serve in the armed forces. Employers are forced to submit to arbitration with labor leaders. Laborers are forced to accept the majority decision. Employers are forced to pay minimum wages, or go out of business. But it is not even certain that they will be permitted by the courts to go out of business. Railroads are forced to charge established rates and to continue services which may have become uneconomical. Many Americans are forced to pay Social Security. Farmers are forced to operate according to the restrictions voted by a majority of those involved. The list could be extended, but surely the point has been made.

     Dr. Carson was quite as incisive as Rand. Yet he might not have anticipated that once freedom of speech became dangerous to the Left, it would strive to eliminate that vestige of American liberty just as it had striven to eliminate all the previous ones. Note also how Leftists have striven to corrupt the electoral system. They can’t abide that any longer, either; after all, it rejected their anointed candidate in favor of a real estate magnate from Queens!

     There’s a moral here, and it shouldn’t take a lot of skull sweat to divine it.

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     We are at the edge of the abyss. We are quite literally fighting to remain even slightly free. And we are losing.

     We can afford no more prissy reservations about tactics. If we insist on keeping to Marquess of Queensberry rules while the Left batters us with bats and stomps our fallen bodies with spiked boots, we might as well surrender now.

     I trust that no more need be said.

     UPDATE: Read this if you have any remaining doubts.