In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official--or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube--may allow.
Free speech is no longer free.
What we have instead is regulated, controlled speech, and that's a whole other ballgame.
Just as surveillance has been shown to "stifle and smother dissent, keeping a populace cowed by fear," government censorship gives rise to self-censorship, breeds compliance, makes independent thought all but impossible, and ultimately foments a seething discontent that has no outlet but violence.
The First Amendment is a steam valve. It allows people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world.
When there is no steam valve--when there is no one to hear what the people have to say--frustration builds, anger grows and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation. By bottling up dissent, we have created a pressure cooker of stifled misery and discontent that is now bubbling over and fomenting even more hate, distrust and paranoia among portions of the populace.
Silencing unpopular viewpoints with which the majority might disagree--whether it's by shouting them down, censoring them, muzzling them, or criminalizing them--only empowers the controllers of the Deep State.
Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned--discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred--inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination and infantilism.
The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying and policing.
This is how you turn a nation of free people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other.
So where do we go from here?
If Americans don't learn how to get along--at the very least, agreeing to disagree and respecting each other's right to subscribe to beliefs and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different--then we're going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals).
The government will lock down the nation at the slightest provocation.
Indeed, the government has been anticipating and preparing for civil unrest for years now, as evidenced by the build-up of guns and tanks and militarized police and military training drills and threat assessments and extremism reports and surveillance systems and private prisons and Pentagon training videos predicting the need to impose martial law by 2030.
Trust me: when the police state cracks down, it will not discriminate.
We'll all be muzzled together.
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