We may be more technologically advanced in the 21st century, but tyranny has not evolved — it's still awful. Before our independence, colonists were subject to severe penalties for obscure crimes. If you said something less than flattering about a monarch, then you would have been taxed, jailed, or executed, depending on how cantankerous the judge was feeling that day. If a British soldier accused you of mocking the king, his best buddy would back him up, a sham trial would have commenced, and you would be off to prison within 24 hours.
The United States of America exists today because a generation of brave and principled people decided our rights come from God, not government. They took up arms (and pens), united against oppression, and broke up with Britain. You'd think after that ordeal (and losing to France) that the British would have done a bit of self-reflecting to determine where they went wrong and make at least some changes.
That's a negative, Ghost Rider; they did not.
In fact, their tyrannical behavior is even more terrifying today because the colonists at least had an ocean to separate them from the seat of power; these modern-day subjects are at the whim of the internet. Last year, Lucy Connolly, a daycare owner and operator, made some comments online in the heat of a tragic moment: three small children had been stabbed to death at a dance class in her central England town. This woman, who clearly cares about kids enough to make their care her livelihood, took to X after she heard a rumor the murderer was an Islamic extremist in the country under the guise of asylum and posted this message to her 6,000 followers:
Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the f***ng hotels full of the bastards for all I care. While you’re at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.
Obviously a knee-jerk reaction, an emotional outburst, a hint at the frustration of other issues bubbling under the surface, not a good choice, whatever you want to call it, it was shared more than 900 times in the course of a couple of hours. Connolly deleted the post once her temper cooled, but nothing is ever really deleted from the internet, is it? The 1s and 0s are forever. In the following days, riots ensued, and people did in fact try to set fire to hotels where asylum seekers were being housed.
X.com rejected reports that the post violated its terms of service, but that didn't stop the courts from sentencing Connolly to 31 months in prison, a harsher sentence than some of the criminals who destroyed property. The Boston Massacre in 1770 left four men dead and seven wounded; the officials in Beantown were walking on eggshells because they were clearly outnumbered, and it would take two weeks to get word to and from London. Today, the populace is castrated: the illusion of safety behind a keyboard, strict gun control laws, and the attention span of a goldfish.
The rights to peaceably assemble, speak against the government, and keep and bear arms were directly inspired by the Boston Massacre. Other clauses in the First Amendment stem from the Vestry Act (which taxed all non-Anglican churches and their worshippers) and the signers of the Declaration of Independence being sentenced to death for treason.
Proponents of this kind of censorship point to the Holocaust, the hate-fueled violence that spanned the European continent and killed millions. They reason that if one psychotic and charismatic influencer can do such evil things in the 1930s and '40s without the internet, imagine what one psychotic and charismatic influencer can do online.
They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. —Benjamin Franklin
Hamit Coskun, a man born in Turkey who established citizenship in Great Britain, burned a Quran in front of the Turkish embassy in London to protest the government's Islamic leanings. After he set fire to the book, Coskun shouted about Islam being the religion of terrorists before being stabbed by a passerby later identified as Moussa Kadri. Coskun was arrested after he was released from the hospital.
From the Wall Street Journal:
It isn’t illegal to burn a religious text in the U.K. But a court in June found Coskun guilty of a “religiously motivated public disorder” offense and fined $325. In his ruling, the judge said Coskun’s actions led to disorder by provoking people to attack him—a decision critics said amounted to victim blaming. In his defense, Coskun asked the court to consider whether he would have been prosecuted for burning a Bible in front of Westminster.
Coskun has a thought-provoking question: Is the problem someone voicing their disagreement with a religion, or someone voicing their disagreement with Islam? The answer, though, is the same: it does not matter because the right to speak and reason comes from God, not government. If the state is going to limit speech, then it will be forced to censor more than less, lest it be accused of favoring a certain group over another. Tyranny does not pick and choose small swaths of the population; it only works when the masses are under the government's boot.
For those who seek to exercise their God-given rights to speak their opinions, the internet is a great place because you can let your Dummy Flag fly all day and all night. For those seeking power at the expense of their fellow man, the internet is a great place because there are emotional, ignorant dummies everywhere. Our Founding Fathers showed real grit when they firmly established that free speech is free speech because they wanted America to outlive and be far greater than themselves. The reason monarchs expect to hear "God save the King/Queen" is that it is entirely about themselves as individuals, so of course, their delicate sensibilities are going to be higher maintenance.
Across the pond, we are witnessing the natural consequences of society without the First Amendment, and in this humble commentary writer's opinion, it makes me even more grateful for patriots like Paul Revere, Penelope Baker, Richard Caswell, and Thomas Paine. I would rather risk being offended than coerced into silence.
What do you think about the internet's relationship with tyranny? How, or even should, the governments limit internet speech, or is this a matter of simply monitoring?
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