What can you say about free speech and the internet these days? How many times can you say free speech is free speech?
It's a waste of time to keep talking when you say it once and the people you are talking to refuse to listen. Then you become the one who belongs in the loony bin.
These days, Google, Twitter and Facebook are synonymous with the United States government - a cruel, runaway, intolerant global killing machine that isn't in the business of listening.
They don't care.
Every age has its decaying orthodoxy, and our age is no different. Just as the Catholic Church five hundred years ago punished, condemned or excommunicated heretics such as Galileo and Copernicus for stating the obvious, so too do the leaders in our digital age shut down alternative media for daring to challenge their supremacy.
Just as the earth ceded its supremacy to the sun as the center of the solar system, so too did The New York Times cede its supremacy to alternative media as the paper of record, the bastion of truth . It's tough for the elites to accept this. For too long they have had their way with the people. For too long they have been able to suppress legitimate movements with their fables.
This is no longer the case, and so they proclaim people like Alex Jones and other authors of alternative media sites as heretics, deliverers of fake news. When that does not suffice, these cardinals of the millennial church - Google, Twitter and Facebook - band together and excommunicate them.
In a word, they ban them. This was what excommunication meant in the Catholic Church; this is why it was such a big deal. In those days, the Church was the truth.
But truth can not be stopped.
Just as the printing press ushered in the Renaissance, so will the digital age and internet usher in a new Renaissance. It can not be stopped.
By punishing, condemning and self-censoring Galileo and Copernicus, the Catholic Church legitimized them. They were in effect saying: These people have something important to say, otherwise why would we be banning them?
So too with Alex Jones, Abby Martin, Peter Lavelle, the Hagmanns, Richie Allen, Jimmy Dore and many, many others. By banning them, Google, Twitter and Facebook legitimize them.
The genie is out of the bottle.