"The Corporate War on Free Speech"

G. K. Chesterton once said "The problem with capitalism is too few capitalists," thereby pointing out that not only socialism but capitalism could be oppressive if unconstrained by the moral respect for the individual, the family, and what Pius IX called the Principle of Subsidiarity. In his book, The Church and the Libertarian, Christopher A. Ferrara also points out that it is not only big government, but a triumvirate of big government, big business, and big finance that serves to create a "market-driven" political economy where the the Church has no business intruding with its moral imperatives. The other side of that equation is that the "free marketplace" of business and finance isn't a value-free "naked public square," to borrow the phrase of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, but a place now straightjacketed with the "politically correct" values of the left. Ryszard Legutko argues this in his masterful book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (2016). And now Jim Goad argues, in "The Corporate War on Free Speech" (Taki's Magazine, March 5, 2018), that it is not only government-sponsored PC censorship that threatens the free marketplace of ideas, but, even more, the private sector's corporations that have taken up the left's ideological war on the traditional ideals of freedom of thought and free speech in the public forum. And when "Political Correctness Goes to the Vatican" (The Philosophical Salon and the Los Angeles Review of Books, December 25, 2017), one wonders what traditional institutions remain to oppose the totalitarian grip of leftist ideology and its dream of jackboot repression of all opposition.

The primrose path to fascism: chilling

Do any of you remember the book of Naomi Wolf wrote in 2007, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot?

Written during the George W. Bush era, the book was provoked by the remarks of a Jewish holocaust survivor who kept repeating, "They did this in Germany," every time she heard about a new policy (such as the Patriot Act) invoked by the Bush administration restricting freedoms in the name of national security.

Accordingly, the book takes an historical look at the rise of fascism, outlining 10 steps necessary for a fascist group (or government) to destroy the democratic character of a nation-state and subvert the social/political liberty previously exercised by its citizens:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create secret prisons where torture takes place
3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens' groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Treat all political dissidents as traitors
10. Suspend the rule of law

In 2008 Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern made a documentary film based on Wolf's book. If you're up to it and have the time, maybe it would find it interesting: The End of America: The Movie (2008; from Saadaal Wacan, posted 2012).

The really interesting question, I think, is how normal the things now seem that initially alarmed Wolf and her Jewish friend, as well as how apathetically our nation now seems willing to accept the previously "unthinkable" realities that have just come to light in the most recent scandals involving the current Obama administration. Just the tip of the iceberg.

Related: https://www.facebook.com/naomi.wolf.author (Wolf's ongoing posts available here)

Martin Luther King, Jr. on fascism

Apropos of Martin Luther King Jr's recent birthday, a timely quote:

Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man." To the conformist and the shapers of the conformist mentality, this must surely sound like a most dangerous and radical doctrine. Have we permitted the lamp of independent thought and individualism to become so dim that were Jefferson to write and live by these words today we would find cause to harass and investigate him? If Americans permit thought-control, business-control and freedom-control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism.

-- Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

[Hat tip to C.B.]