A meme seen on X
When I stopped posting to this blog on January 16th, 2021, it seemed to me that it might never be possible to speak freely again in the United States of America.
The atmosphere of repression was thick. People who stated the obvious, that Biden had come to power in a putsch based on election fraud, backed by repression, were censored.
My own posts were flagged by Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube to name just three social media companies. I did not want to play whack-a-mole with internet censors, so decided to just stop posting, figuring that the censors would not go back in time to delete old stuff while they had to focus on suppressing new information.
That turned out to be pretty much the case, although sometime after Biden's inauguration Blogger took down a old guest post by a late friend, Dr. Terry Hinch, which discussed his conception of "Three Types of Faith" in the light of Mormonism.
But they left this blog pretty much untouched.
It was a bizarre period, to say the least.
We had moved from Washington, DC to Florida in June, 2020 due to insane COVID regulations and BLM/Antifa riots that trashed our shopping centers and smashed windows on cars parked in the street. Our neighbors behaved like zombies from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," decorating their homes with "In this house we believe..." and "Hate has no home here..." signs to show their loyalty (and fear), holding evening vigils in a traffic circle in memory of George Floyd, the neighborhood plastered with threatening flyers about "white privilege", and the DC city government clearly not interested in protecting the property or lives of its citizens. We were more upset with our liberal neighbors than the rioters or government.
We couldn't bear to drive through vandalized downtown DC on our drive south, so took the Beltway to avoid seeing the destruction to Washington's statues, monuments and buildings wrought by the coup--they had been sprayed with Antifa/BLM graffiti. The mayor had also painted BLM slogans on the street around Lafayette square and renamed the area BLM plaza, to let you know who was in charge, contemptuous of Supreme Court rulings preventing governments from endorsing political movements as a First Amendment violation.
It was squalid and depressing. The National Capital had been seized by putschists and the purported liberals went along as willingly--if not more so--than the "good Germans" who allowed Hitler to destroy Germany.
Florida was much better. Governor De Santis was doing a good job preserving as much liberty as possible, and his Covid restrictions were less draconian. We saw Trump stickers on cars and enjoyed Trump boat parades. I even had coffee at a local place decorated with a reproduction of President Trump's Oval Office. Free at last, in what De Santis called "the Free State of Florida."
I concentrated on publishing books through two hobby imprints, "Penny-a-Page Press" and "Washington Books." The thinking was that books might stand the test of time better than ephemeral internet postings.
I also set up a philosophical substack called Philosophical Investigations as an homage to Wittgenstein, but in the end there are some current events, artistic and literary works, and issues that don't rise to the level of philosophy that I wanted to discuss again.
I should mention that in the meantime I had also posted on X and Gab, as well as videos on YouTube and Rumble (and GabTV and Bitchute). Censorship there ended after President Trump was re-elected, or so I thought. However, a recent post of mine was banned by X, I was forced to remove a recommendation that Israel use nuclear weapons in its current fight against Hamas and Iran, which X censors claimed violated policy. How anyone could hope to discuss military strategy without discussion of weapons systems still stumps me, but in any case I deleted my post the other day. Subsequently, I was denounced as a "terrorist" by an unverified account which posted my ID picture. I reported the post because I thought it might incite violence against my person--yet X community standards judges found nothing wrong with it. So I then "protected" my account against non-followers and unverified members, with the result that only a tiny fraction of the people who used to see my posts continue to see them...and also the protection keeps my comments from being seen by people who don't follow me. I preferred the previous system where one could choose to reach only verified users, but for some mysterious unexplained reason, X dropped that. My thinking then and now is that verified users might be more careful about what they post, since they can eventually be found. Yes, I had indeed paid to be verified myself...
Well that was another incentive to start blogging again. At least on my own blog I could say what I like, and then forward it to others, and edit comments myself.
So here goes, we'll see how long this iteration of the blog continues.
I am grateful to President Trump for standing up for true free speech, and just hope this time he can make it stick...
My thoughts will follow in subsequent posts.
