Sooner or later, speech must be controlled

In response to @MyCancellation Twitter Account Keeps Getting Suspended :

Ah, the return of the spam-flaggers.  It’s been a while since that little tactic made the news.  What a perfect expression of mindless left-wing groupthink.

It’s interesting how completely the Left has abandoned all pretense of respecting free speech during the Obama era.  From the Sandra Fluke radio jihad (which did damage to a lot of people who had absolutely nothing to do with Rush Limbaugh – arguably much more damage than they ever inflicted on Rush himself) to the Chick-fil-A boycott… from Obama’s creepy “Attack Watch” obsessions to recent White House threats against insurance executives who spill the beans about ObamaCare… from Obama’s bizarre insistence that the people he blamed for creating the financial mess “shouldn’t do a lot of talking right now,” down to these Twitter cretins forming lynch mobs to shut down people they don’t like.  Shutting people up is so much easier than debating them!

You always get this sort of thing in authoritarian and collectivist governments.  Power requires control.  Bigger government means more control.  At a certain point, even rhetorical dissent becomes an unacceptable loss of power.  Look at the current Obama dead-ender meme that Republican opposition somehow “sabotaged” ObamaCare.  They’ve been willing to argue that even talking it down was tantamount to treason, a deadly insult that shattered the fragile program’s tender sensibilities.

Power is sustained by obedience.  There is little power in a law that everyone disobeys.  The new craze is for power beyond the law – forcing people to obey the will of the Ruling Class, destroying them for taking perfectly legal actions the Ruling Class disapproves of, such as cancelling insurance policies ObamaCare made more expensive.  In order to exercise that level of power, dissent must be suppressed.

But that’s really an inevitable conclusion of the fundamental “liberal” belief in the State as the soul of its people.  “Government is the one thing we all do together,” they chirped at the Democratic National Convention.  Well, nobody of good will can possibly dissent from the judgment of the popular will.  If the government is the fountain of benevolence, then anyone who interferes with it must be malevolent.  QED.  And why should malevolent people be allowed to pollute the shining public square with their filthy words of doubt?