As advocates for inherent or inalienable, natural rights, the things government shall not infringe, we find the increasing censorship, the narratives about pre-bunking, misinformation, and disinformation … disqualifying characteristics for anyone pursuing public office. It is parentalism, and it needs to stop.
Parentalism is the government or its advocates insisting that you are incapable of something you do every day. Filtering out the truth from fiction, fact from fancy. The state and its allies (media, big tech) must protect you from content that might mislead you … into believing that they are the colluding, misleading, lying, censorious bastards bent on controlling you, your labor, your actions, and the way you are allowed speak and think.
Speech codes, compelled speech, blocking, suppressing, or limiting public expression should all be challenged when suggested or promoted.
Why do you think your constituents, the people, are too ignorant or too stupid to work through the facts on their own?
Better yet, what makes you, or those you’ve chosen or accepted for this task, better suited? If your voters are too stupid to know right from wrong, how could their representative be any better? You, by all rights, are a reflection of their will, and if they are too ill-informed to sift the news, you can’t possibly be much, if at all, more capable.
But you think you are, which makes you the more dangerous idiot because you are the reflection of them with government power, which you have demonstrated a keen interest in abusing.
The result is a system of governance that increasingly treats its people like children, from telling it what it can see or say to medical decisions and whether you even have rights at all and, if so, when and where.
Reinforcing this relationship by re-electing people who foment it will only make matters worse. And while there is a reasonable argument that we’re past being able to vote our way to clean election, you can still do it at the local level.
States have rights, and one of them is to tell the Feds to go to hell. It can refuse to enforce federal laws that contradict state law or the Constitution, and while that won’t always look the way we’d like (Hawaii denying 2nd amendment rights, for example), that culture is likely the only thing standing between you and tyranny from sea to rising sea.
They do not know better what is best for you, your family, friends, or the local community they were allegedly chosen to protect, but if you don’t call the parentalists in government, it will only get worse.
