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The ongoing protests against Israel––from its defense policies and warfighting tactics, to its very existence as a nation and a people––have featured levels of irrational hatred and despicable endorsements of genocidal terrorists. The U.S., of course, is also a target not just for being Israel’s enabler, but for alleged historical crimes like “settler colonialism,” racism, and genocide. These charges are morally idiotic, ethically incoherent, and historically challenged. And they serve and advance political agendas dangerous for our national interests and security.
That such mendacious protests are legal in most Western nations reflects one of the foundational principles of Western civilization: the freedom of ordinary citizens to criticize and challenge their own country’s policies and actions. But these recent protests highlight the dangers of that freedom: the nurturing and spreading of a national self-loathing that undermines the patriotism and loyalty any country needs to survive.
Of all the world’s great civilizations, none has been as critically self-conscious as the West. Starting with the ancient Greeks, the West has been willing to question its own beliefs and institutions, make them objects of thought and criticism, search for their meaning and significance, and use this process to make innovative improvements. The Greeks, as the 19th century historian Jacob Burckhardt said, “seem original, spontaneous and conscious, in circumstances in which all others were ruled by a more or less mindless necessity.”
Slavery, for example, has been a global evil since history began, and still persists in some regions of the world today. The Greeks’ critical examination of this practice––back then, no more questionable than the domestication of animals––on the one hand led to a justification for it, such as Aristotle’s infamous argument that those in bondage are “slaves by nature,” since they lack rational self-control and so can be justly controlled by another.
On the other hand, thinking critically about slavery also generated questions about the justice of it, as the early 4th century BC rhetorician Alcidamas did when he said, “The god gave freedom to all men, and nature created no one a slave.” It took two millennia, but this early argument that slavery is a consequence of force, and thus unnatural and unjust, bore fruit in the late 18th century when Christians started the West on the road to abolition.
However, these boons of critical consciousness led to the dismissal of other sources of wisdom such as tradition, religion, and common sense. The first recorded martyr of free speech was Socrates, whose critical interrogations of fellow citizens challenged the institutions of Athenian democracy, which put him to death for his public speech. Yet Socrates was vocally antidemocratic based on his assumption that governing requires not common sense or tradition, but reason and philosophical training, skills that only a minority of citizens possessed.
For Socrates, choosing leaders from the dêmos, the common people, to manage and guide the state, was like the passengers and crew of a ship voting for who would be captain. The upshot of Socrates’ criticisms was a preference for elite technocrats, or Plato’s “philosopher king,” to rule the many. Political freedom and equality, the foundations of our political order, were thus available only to the few. But such rule invariably turns into tyranny, for as Juvenal asked, “Who will actually guard the guardians?”
In our own times, we have seen where the expansion of free speech since World War II has led us. Rational, empirically supported criticism of our politicians and policies necessary for maintaining our heritage of freedom and equality, has edged ever closer to functionally treasonous speech that proposes not improvements that strengthen our core constitutional principles and values of ordered liberty, citizen sovereignty, unalienable rights, and political equality, but to “fundamental transformations” that are replacing those principles with ideologies and policies that concentrate power in the elite few and governmental bureaus and agencies unaccountable to the citizens.
Yet trying to control and limit any speech carries the moral hazard that would-be tyrants will use those “guardrails” to silence political opponents. We currently are living during one of the most dangerous times for free speech in our history, when self-selected media “fact-checkers” demonize their political opponents’ speech as “disinformation” while ignoring their party’s gross distortions and outright lies; partisan government agencies collude with social media companies to silence political opponents, while the Fed’s 2.1 million employees are rewarded by Biden with paid leave to “volunteer” as poll workers; and universities betray both the First Amendment and the academic freedom of selected students and professors whose free speech rights are violated by “speech codes,” an Orwellian term for censorship.
Moreover, many of the dangerous ideas that new communication technologies instantly and globally publicize, threaten all our freedoms. For over a century Marxism in its various guises has polluted many of our public and private institutions, despite its universal failure to create freedom and prosperity, at the cost of 100 million dead.
At the same time, since the “sexual revolution” our morals and mores concerning sexuality have degenerated to the point that children are exposed to behaviors once the purview of rakes, perverts, and roués––much of it pornography now protected by the First Amendment. Meanwhile, Christian faith, tenets, and doctrines that contributed to the Founders’ creation of the Constitution have been marginalized in schools, culture, and politics.
Remember how during the Covid pandemic and its feckless, destructive lock-downs, churches were shuttered while marijuana dispensaries and liquor stores stayed open, and BLM and Antifa rioted, burned, looted, and assaulted with impunity? Or how prayer and Bible study have been banished from schools, and replaced with racist curricula, transgender recruitment, and vulgar drag-queen performances?
Then there are the suicidal policies that bespeak a culture of self-loathing: an open border that during Biden’s tenure has let in 8.5 million mostly unvetted and illegal aliens; a war on carbon that has weakened our energy independence and raised fuel prices; a foreign policy of timid, appeasing diplomacy and unpunished attacks on our military personnel; and our corrupted federal agencies like the FBI and DOJ that have brazenly canceled the 14th Amendment’s equality under law provision. Nearly four generations of Americans have been exposed to such wages of toxic ideologies all protected by the First Amendment.
Nor are there viable remedies for this degradation of free speech. Censorship creates the Juvenalian moral hazard. We’ve lived through the left’s long assault on free speech, and its principle of “free speech for me, but not for thee” that censors for partisan and ideological ends. Not just conservative principle and policies are silenced and punished, but science itself is subject to the censor’s veto, as we’ve seen with Covid protocols like masks and lock-downs, and even the origins of the disease. Scientists who challenged, with facts and arguments, the CDC’s careless, politicized, unsubstantiated claims about risks, treatments, and mitigation policies, were subjected to vicious attempts to “cancel” them personally and professionally.
Moreover, decades of numerous socio-cultural dysfunctions, especially secularism and failing educational institutions, have burrowed deep into our citizenry, and taken root in government, education, popular culture, corporate boardrooms and, most troubling, many of our military services’ top brass. The illiberal and truly racist doctrines of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, empowered by fashionable self-loathing, have turned the military’s attention away from warfighting and materiel development and procurement, to serving the “woke” program to aggrandize power at the expense of the nation’s security and interests, as well as its freedom.
So it is that freedom of speech, one of our greatest assets in creating and maintaining our political and personal freedom, may turn out to be the agent of our descent into tyranny. Ancient Athens suffered that fate. The great classicist Gilbert S. Murray, in his 1929 defense of the Greeks and their seminal contributions to the West, wrote that the Greeks’ innovations like political freedom, rationalism, and critical consciousness could be agents of our collapse, and ancient Greece become the “great wrecker in human history” that “held up false lights which have lured our ship to dangerous places.”
“All you know” is a lie. That ship did not sink.
The problem is not about the freedom of speech. The problem is that too many people believe in the wrong ideas. IOW the problem is one of philosophy..
For example, many people believe that the truth is subjective, ie it is whatever one believes it to be. This is the “my truth”, “your truth”, “his truth”, “her truth” crowd. When these truths run into contradictions, they resolve it by believing that the truth is what a majority of people want it to be.
In such subjective epistemological approaches, it’s no wonder that many people believe in an ethics of nihilism or subjectivism. So the definition of the good is either non-existent or completely up for grabs.
Many profs and students on college campuses today are subjectivists in their ethics. These are the ones who are drawn to Marxist constructs such as the oppressor/victim theory of politics.
Mr. Thornton…Your first paragraph reveals your lack of respect for the First Amendment of the US Constitution. It is you who has an agenda…and it is a Zionist agenda.
When self-proclaimed Christians in the US begin to learn that they have been mislead/deceived call what it is…and Israel is not The Secular State. Ted Cruz may lose election over this…and the Congress who voted for a Religious State is disgraceful. And they will all pass too in time.
May we pull up our Constitutional Britches and Stop this foolish and blood-guilty war…before he it comes back to you.
I am clean of this blood shed…and profess Christ Jesus as our Redeemer.
Hello John and all – followers of Christ have, famously, to “lay down” their weapons of warfare, and be “no part of the world”, as Jesus was. Isn’t that why Jesus called us “sheep among wolves”, given that, in worldly terms, we would have no defences?
And Dr.Thornton, I think your article well illustrates the truth of the warning in the Hebrew Scriptures (Jeremiah 10;23) that “it does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step”,
Human history has been a tragedy since the loss of Eden. Isn’t this why we urgently need the Kingdom of God, the heavenly government for whose coming Jesus taught us to pray? It, and it alone, will restore paradise, earthwide. Nothing we have tried has worked.
And thank you by the way for referencing the millions of dead of Marxism/Communism. They have no real political weight to this day.
“Human history has been a tragedy since the loss of Eden”
Read better, the tragedy begins in the garden itself.
We must differentiate between the world wanted by God, which was thought by God, and the created world.
The Garden is indeed part of the created world, but that is not how it was designed by God. It’s just that divine perfection cannot be in the creation.
This is the reason why God does not completely destroy this world following the fault of Adam and Eve.
He understood that. And so he deals with events.
This is a great lesson of wisdom.
The end of history does not exist, the world is chaotic for eternity, and the kingdom of god can only be found in our hearts.
Best !
Hello Nicolas – and thank you for your reply. And, yes, you are right the tragedy did begin in Eden – from the moment our first parents were persuaded to disobey their Creator, and so cut themselves off from their Source of life, they fatally damaged themselves. They had been living – from that moment on they were dying. And they had been living in paradise, which they lost.
And we – their children – who should have been born of perfect, living parents are all born of dying, imperfect ones. Aren’t we born damaged and dying – through no fault of our own?
But the Inspired Scriptures, both Hebrew and Christian Greek, assure us that we are not abandoned to this. A rescue is well in hand.
They also reassure us that God’s creation was perfect. And also tell us that the Kingdom of God is a government, one that will rule from heaven. Please would you look at Daniel 2:44 and see what that heavenly government is about to do…
FYI: Christ Jesus was a nice Jewish boy. So were his parents.
Hello J.J. Indeed. Generations of faithful Jewish scribes recorded his ancestry right back through Abraham to Adam. Did anyone say he wasn’t?
“a Zionist agenda.”
I was wondering,,,can you preen for us a little more loudly and tell us what a great Christian you are, and of course express your devoutness in an even more annoying manner.
Whoever said Israel was a secular state? You can always move to Gaza, Jew Hater.
Another Jew hating screed.
News flash. Israel is not a secular state, and the more it slips in that direction the more it will suffer from the enemies within.
Sadly, the First Amendment does not have an idiot clause. If there was, people like Obama, the KKK, and you, John, would have been blessedly unheard from.
John says : “and it is a Zionist agenda”
Be careful, because there is maybe a Zionist agenda under your bed….
HA HA HA !
A zionist agenda. Oh, man! … Must be terrible … do they eat children ?
HA HA HA !
Lign in drerd un bakn beygl!
They didn’t do a very good job then because idiots like you are allowed to freely express your nonsense on a public platform.
“ sources of wisdom such as tradition, religion, and common sense.”
Common sense isn’t so common as the comments above demonstrate.
The Jew haters have been emboldened by the Cabbage Brain Biden administration. Remember Jojo wanting to be like FDR? FDR Is BEST KNOWN for sending Jews to Germany to be exterminated and for putting Americans into concentration camps.
He’s concerned about losing the terrorist vote with the muslims and their #AbandonBiden hashtag. Make no mistake…..Cabbage Brain WILL throw the Jews and Israel under the bus before November to retain those very important terrorist votes.
Mr. Thornton raises an intriguing and crucial question should the remnants of America as founded and indeed the traditions of civilization since Magna Carta somehow survive “the gathering storm.”
To wit, how do we preserve our freedoms and inalienable rights as enumerated in the Constitution while preventing the anti-Americans in our midst from using those freedoms – as they have done for at least the past century – against us and overthrowing us once and for all?
I think the answer is the freedom and ability to debate. Without debate – real debate – over a topic, there’s no way to have freedom of speech. It seems that everything boils down to marketing messages and propaganda without debate.
The left happily weaponizes empathy and tolerance. They have to be called out for the provocation that it is, every single time they do it.
In the near term we do all that we can to elect Donald J. Trump this November. That’s a tall enough order
alone.
So you are still whining about that 50 year old attack. Hell, why don’t you whine and moan about the USS Indianapolis sunk by a Japanese sub in 1945. But you won’t.
You are upset because of your basic anti-semitism.
You could always join Hamas, tough guy. Obviously you don’t know much at all, moron.
Then you don’t know nothing,
The writer falls into the very common trap of being enveloped by the creators of the propaganda, The actual numbers of these protestors and screamers is very small. A few hundred thousand nationally at most. Don’t you remember the video of the payoffs being made after “protests” outside the capitol 4 years ago? The budget for these plays is not even very large. They are used to provide cover for the big payoff recipients. Most people won’t pay any attention until the front door crashes in though.
Joe does not want to defend Democracy, he is for Demagogy. And limiting freedom of speech to saying what pleases the far left. All the rest is hate speech. For freedom of speech to be constructive, the citizens have to be trained in fairness, and they have to have a commitment to fairness and avoiding the temptation to demagogy.
Mr. Thornton assumes there is an “ordinary citizen” whose freedom to criticize and protest U.S. policy is “spreading national self-loathing.”
We no longer have an “ordinary citizen” and we no longer have freedom to criticize and protest our country’s policies. Look at the January 6th citizens who tried that and are now serving hard time.
The average citizen today is not what he used to be in terms of civics education (or anything else). The hordes of newcomers have no attachment to this place, its customs, language, history, culture or its people. They will not defend her when there is war or the plunder runs out.
“So it is that freedom of speech, one of our greatest assets in creating and maintaining our political and personal freedom, may turn out to be the agent of our descent into tyranny.”
If we had freedom of speech, we would be able to mock and criticize the leftists and their agenda as they do us. If we had freedom of speech, ideas would be debated publicly and poor ideas would be exposed. It is not freedom of speech that it weakening us, but the lack of it.
“Slavery, for example, has been a global evil since history began, and still persists in some regions of the world today.”
Slavery not only still persists, but is widespread:
https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery/
The above article does not consider child sex slavery, a very lucrative criminal enterprise. Unlike drugs, a child can be sold over and over again, multiple times per day for a period of ten years or more.
Here is another:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/09/13/1122714064/modern-slavery-global-estimate-increase
What will become of the many millions of people on this planet who, through no fault of their own, have no productive purpose other than hard-scrabble subsistence?
We participate in a diverse experiment and the concept of an ordinary citizen is absurd.Criticism is rampant as are protests.. Though the need for organized religion has long since disappeared as we learned the cause of eclipses and discovered there was no benevolent god. The crusades, pogroms and jihad continue. Expressing your own opinions may result in injury or death in our own society. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice must be in one of the Petri dishes of this experiment