Criminalization of Words

When I was a child and first went to school at the age of 5, some kids weren't always nice. Sometimes they teased kids, sometimes they even called them names. I was told by my grandparents that if this should happen to me that:

"Sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you."  This means that mere words cannot harm a person, and a child who is teased or called names or insulted should learn to ignore it. 

We are taught that we can judge a person by their actions AND by their words. So, if someone insults you - it does not reflect badly on you, but rather it reflects badly on the person doing the insulting, doing the name calling, and doing the teasing.

The Constitution of the United States of America guarantees Freedom of Speech. [ Amendment I: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" ] Most other modern democracies as well as U.S. states have similar constitutional sections and laws protecting freedom of speech and of the press absolutely. Yet today, in 2021, we find speech and the press being censored on a daily basis: in the United States, in the United Kingdom, in France, in Germany, in Sweden and in almost every "western democracy".

We know that real monarchies (like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Thailand); dictatorships (like China, Russia, North Korea, Turkey and Afghanistan); religious states (like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Israel, and Iran); and communist countries ( like China, Russia, North Korea and Vietnam) all lie, censor and deny their citizens freedom of speech and freedom of the press. We take this for granted, understand this and know not to trust their words. Censorship can have devastating even lethal consequences - as we have seen with communist China's cover-up of the deadly Wuhan virus known as Covid-19 (see WuhanVirus.Info for more on this); Saudia Arabia's recent killing of its critic, Khossoggi, a journalist who had uncovered wrongdoing by the ruling royal family; Pakistan's abominal blasphemy laws that see it killing people for mere words; Iran's disgusting fatwas against author Rushdie and other authors who dare to criticize Islam; Israel's continuing killing of Palistinians (a genocide, in fact - shame on Jews for allowing this after what happened to so many of them during World War II) and continued theft of their lands, the lands they have been living on for millenia; Afghanistan's and other Islamic contries' killing, assaulting, raping and harming their own citizens because of their beliefs, words and opinions; even because of their way of dressing; Islamic Turkey's killing and imprisioning hundreds of thousands of its own citizens for their words and beliefs and desire to live in a democracy which used to have a separation of church and state, and has now sadly become an Islamic Dictatorship. Iran's killing and torturing and imprisioning of its own women and men because some girls and women are tired of being forced to wear a headress. And the government lying about it and about what really happened to the killed women. Shame on you disgusting religious clerics and Iranian government of today. Iran was once one of the cradles of human civilization and thought; yet today it's extreme religious fanatacism places it at or near the very bottom of the list of nations as regards being "civilized". The list of nations, governments, religions, groups, leaders and judges who censor is endless, and growing. 

We see that countries which censor have something to hide. Something bad. Something wrong. Censorship is always linked to something wrong and to corruption. The United States was founded by people who knew that the monarchies and religious dictatorships that were England and other countries in the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, when America was being colonized and modern America was being formed, were doing something wrong; something unacceptable - namely censoring, thieving, unlawfully seizing property, etc., as well as forcing all people to have the same religious beliefs as the monarch, and to accept the monarch's absolute rule. To accept that the monarch had all the rights - even the right to decide who should live and who should die - and that individuals had no rights at all. The same situations - to varying degrees - exist today in all real monarchies, religious states, dictatorships and communist countries. For the same reasons, because they are doing something bad and wrong. Even "western democracies" censor thier own citizens more and more each year; refusing their own citizens freedom of speech by passing, and having a corrupt judiciary uphold, unconstitutional laws criminalizing speech, by making illegal criticism of certain powerful groups like jews, homosexuals, immigrants, women, feminists, etc., with their unconstitutional "hate speech" laws.

Groups were never meant to have and hold power. In the United States; the Constitution gives all rights and power to individuals - the people. Yet groups have become all-powerful in U.S. politics and in the judiciary, in the USA, and in France and elsewhere. "Group rights" currently and sadly reign, when the very thought of such a thing would turn Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Franklin and Washington over in their graves.

Historically censorship has been used by the very worst and most corrupt and harmful governments in history. Ancient Rome, Ghengis Khan, the Spanish Inquisition, Napoleon, the mass murderers Lenin and Stalin, the Turkish mass killings of Armenians, Nazi Germany, modern day Islamic State, the Taliban and such, horrible Putin and his radioactive poisoning of detractors and his invasion of Ukraine ... the list is endless. Censorship allowed them to consolidate and keep their hold on power. Just like it does for today's corrupt politicians, judges, and the groups which believe themselves to benefit from censorship (Dictators, Monarchs, Religions).

However, to have freedom of speech and freedom of the press abridged in the good old U.S. of A. and in other western democracies is simply intolerable. Yet it has been allowed to happen, and it is getting worse. This censorship and denial of our constitutionally-protected rights and freedoms to say and to publish what we think and believe has been going on for over three to four decades now. How has this been allowed to happen? Corruption. Political and Judicial corruption - is the sad answer. Laws that are unconstitutional have been made by corrupt politicians censoring speech and the press , and corrupt judges have refused to strike down these unconstitutional laws. 

The Solution: use, and demand that others use, freedom of speech and freedom of the press as a litmus test for all politicians and judges everywhere. Impeach those existing politicians and judges that do not uphold absolute freedom of speech and of the press; and refuse to elect anyone to any office, or allow any judgeship to be filled by anyone who does not support absolute freedom of speech and absolute freedom of the press, absolutely. It's as simple as that.

Support our challenge to all and any law abridging free speech or freedom of the press, which we hope to present shortly directly to the United States Supreme Court. This should not be necessary, but we find that it is. We should not have to add another amendment to the U.S. Constitution protecting freedom of speech and freedom of the press. These protections were the first rights and protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution). We just need to get rid of the corrupt politicians and judges who do not uphold the Constitution. 

Furthermore, in order to help other countries facing the same problems to resolve their abridgements of constitutionally-guaranteed rights, let us boycott every country which does not allow absolute freedom of speech and absolute freedom of the press. Do not visit those countries, do not buy goods or services made in those countries, and do not do business with nationals of those countries or supporters of those countries, until such time that the country allows absolute freedom of speech and absolute freedom of the press. It's as simple as that. A boycott is an expression of free speech and is an excercise of free speech. Everyone has the Right-to-Boycott.com!

Proudly brought to you by

Matthew Edward Hooker

future POTUS - President of the United States, and what is more:

an American.

One of America's greatest and most beloved poets, Robert Frost, wrote a beautiful poem about freedom of speech that all should hear and consider how it applies to their own thoughts, lives, and reactions when they hear speech that they do not like:

A Minor Bird

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.

Sites We Love:

Unalienable Rights For All .Men

We Must Use Our Reason To Survive .Faith

There Is Nothing Higher Than The Truth .Science

ManifestDestiny.Space

Censorship.Science

WuhanVirus.Info

ExtinctionOfSpecies.ORG

Copernicus (which is a Latinized version of his original Polish name Mikolaj Kopernik) has gone down in history as the person who developed the heliocentric theory. That is, Copernicus developed a model of the solar system where the Sun was at the center and the planets revolved around it, instead of the old Aristotelean/Ptolemaic model where the Earth was at the center and everything else revolved around it.  Despite being a deeply religious man (an ordained canon of the Catholic Church), Copernicus’ work would be suppressed and censored by the Catholic Church and derided as heresy by Martin Luther. His master work, De revolutionibus orbum coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), would be one of the most famous banned books of the 17th and 18th Centuries.

Like many ideas in science, Copernicus’ theory was neither entirely new (ancient Greek astronomers and medieval Arab astronomers both had heliocentric models) nor widely accepted at the time it came out. Copernicus’ book was not published until either right before he died or just after his death on May 24, 1543. It is believed that he never actually saw a copy of the book that he spent the last 30 years of his life finishing.

Two astronomers in the 17th Century picked up on Copernicus’ work and made it popular. One was a prominent German Protestant astronomer, Johannes Kepler, who discovered that the planets made orbits that were ellipses around the sun, not perfect circles, as Copernicus believed. The other was an Italian Catholic, Galileo Galilei, who used a newfangled device called the telescope, to discover that not only did the Earth rotate on its axis, but so did the other planets. And even the Sun! And not only did Earth have a Moon, but Jupiter had four of them.

Galileo Galilei was an Italian astronomer from the 1600s who caused a major controversy with the Catholic Church.

On 26 February 1616, Galileo Galilei was formally banned and banished by the Roman Catholic Church for teaching and defending the opinion that the Earth orbits the Sun. Galileo was ordered to turn himself in to the Holy Office to begin trial for holding the belief that the Earth revolves around the sun, which was deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Standard practice demanded that the accused be imprisoned and secluded during the trial.
It is commonly believed that the Catholic Church persecuted Galileo for abandoning the geocentric (earth-at-the-center) view of the solar system for the heliocentric (sun-at-the-center) view.

On April 12, 1633, Galileo was tried and found guilty of heresy against the Church.
When Galileo (1564-1642) first published his Dialogo in 1632, defending the Copernican heliocentric view of our cosmos, the Catholic Church put him under house arrest and banned not just the Dialogo but also all of Galileo’s earlier writings. This censorship only fueled the demand for his works and several editions of his writings were published in France, England and the Netherlands throughout the 17th century.

But as far as Italian editions were concerned, the 1710 printing of the Dialogo was only the second of its kind, due to the fact that it remained on the Index of Forbidden Books. And so it should not come as a surprise that an identifying printer’s mark or publisher’s device was missing from the volume. With this information missing, how do we know who was responsible for this clandestine undertaking? And that it had indeed taken place in Naples instead of Florence?

The sources which were consulted enlightened us to the fact that the introductory letter to the reader at the beginning of the volume provides us with an important clue: the signature Cellenio Zacclori is (with the exception of one missing letter) an anagram for Lorenzo Ciccarelli, a Neapolitan lawyer who ran a print shop in Naples that specialized in the publication of forbidden books.

According to Vincenzo Ferrone, there is evidence that Ciccarelli’s shop was tolerated by some of the more progressive members of the Catholic Church, which helps to explain how he was able to elude shut-down by the authorities.

Today, in 2023, free speech is under attack from all sides. By this I mean that the “left” has made it clear that “insults” (especially against Jews, homosexuals, transgenders, blacks, women, immigrants, any “minorities”, Muslims, etc.) will not be tolerated. Unfortunately, these people believe that every group or individual gets to decide what is or is not an “insult”, with the result being that free speech no longer exists in the West because of this extreme “political correctness”, as I call it.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. It is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. Disproportionate punishments are routinely meted out to targets of public shaming by institutional leaders conducting "panicked damage control". We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, thinkers, philosophers, politicians, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. In the last half decade, a number of figures have been shamed online for making comments considered offensive by some, including on topics of race, gender and sexuality. In some cases, employers took action against the individual after sustained and targeted criticism.

Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

People are being hounded for perceived moral slip-ups. It has become a modern-day witch-hunt of political correctness which has the most chilling effect on free speech and freedom of opinion. For example, in June 2020, the New York Times' opinion editor resigned amid outrage over a piece by a Republican senator calling for military forces to be sent to cities where anti-racism protests had turned violent. And in January of that same year, publisher Flatiron Books cancelled author Jeanine Cummins's tour after her novel American Dirt was strongly condemned for stereotypical descriptions of Mexicans.

During the recent covid-19 pandemic and surrounding debates, an older white American, who was simply trying to participate in the debate about how to avoid being infected with covid, threw out the idea that perhaps black Americans had higher rates of covid because they didn’t wash their hands as often as white Americans. This was just an idea, and democracies work when people are allowed to express their ideas, and debate them. Science works when scientists form a hypothesis around an idea and then test it. Unfortunately, the response from society to this man’s idea was to so demonize him that he was fired from his job and could not find another, was branded the worst sort of racist, and was ostracized and harshly “punished” by society at large. Anyone defending him was also punished and made to appear to be a racist of the worst kind.

This is such a good example of what is wrong with America and the world today: censorship pervades all facets of society, and freedom of speech, opinion and association is being abridged more and more each year. A “litmus test” of “political correctness” is being applied to anyone who participates in societal and political debates, and American society is becoming increasingly polarized – namely because absolute freedom of speech is no longer allowed. When people criminalize criticism, as certain groups of people have been doing in America for a half-century or more now, then polarization increases and society moves towards battle and civil war, rather than towards the peaceful co-existence that absolute freedom of speech allows.

Various politicized groups are now censoring free speech on any issue that upsets their belief structures, so much so that there is now a severe restriction of the debate about scores of cultural, social, economic and political issues – important issues which are on most people’s minds today.

Recent outcries on “racial justice” and “social inclusion regarding people who choose non-mainstream sexual and gender orientations” have fueled a stifling of open debate. There now exists a vogue for public shaming and ostracism and a blinding moral certainty over very controversial issues. The “politically correct” do not want a debate, they want blind obedience to and acceptance of their points of view.

On the right of the political spectrum, free speech is also under attack, with environmentalists and serious ecologically-minded scientists being censored, so that what they say or report does not harm powerful interests and businesses like the fossil fuel industry, or orthodox religion, etc.

Science needs the freedom and liberty to search for the Truth without fear of censorship or reprisal if the Truth does not fit with the ideological, political, economic, or religious beliefs of those who have and wield Power.