So you don’t agree with a policy position passed not by your elected government, but endorsed by a current administration? Then agents within that administration (with or without explicit or implicit sanction by the elect) will come and get you.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) will contend that its first amendment rights can and should be able to deflect this attack [see here]. However, as any good totalitarian knows it is the process itself that is the punishment, and the threat of the (not due) process that deters future victims from exercising this right.

An authoritarian state must continually ask us to deny the truth of our own senses, convictions and common sense. If the state needs to continually remind us, often daily, that Islam is peace, that gender is fluid or that life-giving carbon dioxide will destroy the planet, we must be vigilant, skeptical and wary of these constant pronouncements.

When the state realizes we are being vigilant, skeptical and wary to its propaganda however (in another word, ‘free‘), what is its next move? If their ‘Big Lies‘ are being mocked and ridiculed, what can your average dictatorial regime do? Well, exactly what it is doing to CEI: persecute the blasphemer.