I Voted Republican for the First Time & Here is Why…
On Sunday, for the first time in my life, I voted Republican and I have a litany of reasons why.
First, let me make clear that I am not a Republican but an Independent. I am a moderate American voter who wants to vote based on his principles instead of a political party’s demands.
However, I was a “vote blue no matter who” kind of moderate Democrat years ago. I don’t recognize that Democrat party anymore. The party I used to support stood for liberal values like free speech & now pushes harder and harder for censorship.
As is often said, the First Amendment is the first amendment for a reason. This is why all the recent (but going back forever) calls to suppress speech give me the creepy-crawlies, when they don’t actually enrage me. From hate speech to now even “misinformation,” there are people, and now whole professions and classes of people, that claim that they enjoy the right to make people just shut up. We’ve seen how dangerous this is only recently. A horrible pandemic, which killed, lets remember, millions of people, turns out to have been much worse than it might have been, precisely because some people seized on the opportunities it presented to attempt to muzzle those around them, if they dared speak what they deemed incorrect thoughts. Some of what the dissenters claimed turned out to be true, and some of it false. But we are figuring out what is true because people down the supposed food chain of knowledge are speaking up, often at considerable cost to themselves, for the truth.
There seems to be no limit to the bars some factions are willing to try to impose on others. So such simple biological facts as boys are boys and girls are girls, and men are men and women are women, suddenly have become controversial (or “problematic”), let alone other more rightly controversial statements.
Like a lot of people, I have been reading Hannah Arendt and Michel Desmet lately. What they say is that resisting totalitarianism — and that’s what we’re dealing with in this bizarre exudence against free speech — is all about standing up for the truth, about “living not by lies.” Even the small lies, even just the symbolic submissions to trumped up authority — that is the key. I am finding that people who are willing to do this are much rarer than I would have thought, and they are found both on the left and the right. An irredeemable lefty turns out to be a bulldog for freedom of speech. But over here are some complete worms on the Right. So it’s not about Left and Right, but something deeper. And if you haven’t noticed, now is absolutely the time to stand up. You won’t be alone.