So the king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, "[There is] still one man, Micaiah the son of Imlah, by whom we may inquire of the LORD; but I hate him, because he does not prophesy good concerning me, but evil" (1 Kings 22:8).

The First Amendment deals with the issues of free speech and the freedom of religion.  It's not an accident that these two concepts are linked.  For Christianity, and it was Christianity that the framers of the Constitution had in mind, is a religion of the Word.  "How can they hear without a preacher?" was Paul's rhetorical question to the Romans.  The obvious answer is that unless men are free to preach the Gospel, sinners never will hear of salvation by belief alone in Christ Jesus. 

Christianity's emphasis that salvation comes only by understanding, and agreeing with, the propositions of Scripture, requires that men be able to speak that truth freely.  Hence it is every Christian's concern that the liberty to speak and to discuss the Word of God not be inhibited by legal restrictions. 

And because Christians are commanded to treat others as they themselves would like to be treated, one of the implications of Christianity is that all should enjoy to right to freely discuss their ideas without fear of legal sanction.  In a Christian society, there are no such things as thought crimes.  We leave that mistaken notion to the Marxists, the fascists, and other authoritarians.

Christianity is not, as the ACLU would like you to believe, hostile to free speech.  Rather, it is it's only source and guarantor. 

Because free speech is both an implication of Christianity and necessary to its propagation, the maintenance of free and open discussion is of great importance to Christians.  Likewise, when free speech is threatened, it is incumbent upon Christians to come to its defense. If, when the free speech comes under attack, Christians remain silent, we do so, not only to our shame, but to our own harm as well.

It is with these thoughts in mind that I undertook to write about the deplatforming of Alex Jones and other prominent conservative and libertarian thinkers last week, and it is why I'm writing about it again this week.  Whatever one may think of Alex Jones, Mark Dice, Diamond and Silk, Daniel McAdams and Peter Van Buren - whether you love them, hate them, or never watch them, it matters not - the fact that these individuals and others have been the targets of an apparently coordinated attack by Big Tech is a matter of great concern. 

If Christians stand by and say nothing while Apple, Spotify, Facebook, and Twitter deplatform Alex Jones simply because they don't like what he says, they should not be surprised when these same organizations target them for deplatforming at some point in the future when it becomes politically expedient to do so.

Now, some may argue that these are private companies, and private companies have the right to regulate what is said on their own platforms.  I agree.  But that said, I am also of the opinion that there is more to this situation than private businesses simply running their social media platforms in the way they see fit. 

A strong circumstantial case can be made that the deplatforming of conservative and libertarian voices - a deplatforming that has been going on for some time and one which has recently picked up steam - is really a joint venture of between privately owned social media enterprises and the Deep State, the permanent, unelected government that largely runs the country the way it wants to, regardless of what politicians happen to be in power.

Lord willing, I shall make that case in a future installment.  But for today, I'd like to dig a bit deeper into the Scriptures to show just how strong the Biblical support for free speech is.

Examples from the kings of Israel and Judah

"You are the man!" These were the crushing words of Nathan the prophet when he confronted King David with his sins of adultery and murder. 

David is described in the pages of Scripture as a man after God's own heart.  But as students of the Bible know well, David almost inexplicably fell into deep sin, committing adultery with Bathsheba and then having her husband, Uriah the Hittite, murdered to cover up his sin. 

But when the Lord sent David's friend Nathan to confront him, what was David's reaction?  Did David say, "How dare you speak to me this way!  Don't you know who I am?  Why, I'm the Lord's anointed!  Off with your head!"?

No, he did not.  What was his reaction to Nathan's words?  Scripture tells us, "So David said to Nathan, 'I have sinned against the LORD' " (2 Samuel 12:13). 

David did not punish  the prophet for confronting him with his sin.  That is to say, David believed in free speech.  In fact, it almost seems as if David were relieved that Nathan said what he did, for David repented of his egregious sins and was forgiven by God. 

Another incident from David's career is illustrative as well.  When David was on the run from Absalom,  a certain Shimei came out to curse him while he and his men were travelling.  As Shimei cursed, one of David's men spoke up and said, "Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king?  Please, let me go over and take off his head!"  To which David responded, "So let him curse." 

David could easily have put an end to the cursing but did not.  As the Scripture reports, "And as David and his men went along the read, Shimei went along the hillside opposite him and cursed as he went, threw stones at him and kicked up dust" (2 Samuel 16:13). 

Shimei, it would seem, put on quite a show.  Yet David let it go on.  Not that he couldn't have ended it any time he wanted.  But David perceived that the Lord had ordered Shimei to do what he did and accepted the rebuke. Once again, David supported free speech.

David, of course, was not the only Hebrew king to be confronted by one of the prophets.  But not all of them reacted the same way David did.  Some repented, others became enraged that anyone would dare question their authority.

In fact, the reaction of a king to prophetic criticism, that is to say, the degree to which a king supported free speech, could almost be seen as a litmus test for what kind of man he was, whether he was a good and godly king, or a scoundrel. 

Consider the quote at the top of this post.  The quoted words are those of King Ahab of Israel, who, as the Scriptures tell us, "did evil in the sight of the LORD, more than all who were before him" (1 Kings 16:25).

And as we would expect from a man who despised the Word of God, unsurprisingly, Ahab also had a problem with free speech.  Unlike David, Ahab did not, in general, react well when confronted with speech that contradicted him.

For example, Ahab openly expressed his hatred for the prophet Micaiah.  And why did Ahab hate Micaiah?  Ahab tells us plainly it was Micaiah's prophesying against him. 

Micaiah was already in jail when Ahab expressed his hatred for the prophet to Jehoshaphat.  We don't know exactly the reason Micaiah was locked up, but, given Ahab's words, it likely was due to something the prophet had said to Ahab on an earlier occasion. 

When Ahab finally did drag Micaiah out of prison, so he could weigh in on Ahab's plans to attack Syria, the prophet foretold Ahab's defeat and death.

And what was Ahab's reaction to the bad news?  "Put this fellow in prison, and feed him with bread of affliction and water of affliction" (1 Kings 22:27).

Ahab, unlike David, did not believe in free speech.  In Ahab's eyes, Micaiah had committed a crime by not telling the king what he wanted to hear and was deserving of punishment. 

As a follow up, when King Jehoshaphat, a godly man and Ahab's ally, returned to Jerusalem after the military debacle against Syria, he too was confronted by a prophet named Jehu.  Jehu said to the king, "Should you help the wicked and love those who hate the LORD?  Therefore the wrath of the LORD is upon you.  Nevertheless good things are found in you, in that you have removed the wooden images from the land, and have prepared your heart to seek God" (2 Chronicles 19:2,3). 

Scripture does not record Jehoshaphat's reaction to these words of rebuke, but given the overall positive view that Scripture takes of his reign, the most reasonable conclusion is that he accepted the words of the prophet and repented. 

King Ahab's wife, the remarkably wicked Queen Jezebel, didn't believe in free speech either.  For it was she who killed the prophets of the Lord.  Those who survived her purge did so as a result of the faithful actions of Obadiah (1 Kings 18:13). 

Or consider the case of King Jeroboam of Israel.  He's the one who instituted idolatry as the state religion of the Northern Kingdom.  When the king had set up a golden calf and was prepared to burn incense on an altar he had built, Scripture tells us that a man of God confronted the king and prophesied against him. 

Jeroboam reacted by calling for his arrest.  Clearly, Jeroboam did not believe in free speech.  It should come as no surprise, either, that his reign is viewed in the pages of Scripture as decidedly negative.  The Bible tells us, "After these event Jeroboam did not turn from his evil way, but gain he made priests from every class of people for the high places; whoever wished, he consecrated him, and he became one of the priests of the high places.  And this thin was the sin of the house of Jeroboam, so as to exterminate and destroy it from the face of the earth" (1 Kings 33, 34).

Worth noting here is that Jeroboam not only disdained free speech, but he also violated the principle of the separation of powers as established in the Law of Moses.  According to the Law, priests only were to sacrifice to God, but Jeroboam did not hesitate to combine the role of priest with his role as king. 

If we were to couch this in constitutional terms, we would say that Jeroboam did not respect the separation of church and state as required in the Antiestablishment clause of the First Amendment.

In effect, evil King Jeroboam trashed both major provisions of the First Amendment, if I may use such an anachronism.  In the first place he prohibited free speech in that he called for the arrest of the prophet sent by God to rebuke him, and in the second in that he involved the civil government in religion in a way that was unlawful.

One last example of the attack on free speech in the Old Testament is worth exploring, the case of Jeremiah.  Jeremiah exercised his prophetic ministry in the final years of the Southern Kingdom.  It was a troubled time for Judah and Jerusalem, as the specter of coming the Babylonian captivity casts its shadow across the pages of the book that bears the prophets name.  Jeremiah's message was as simple as it was unpopular with the power brokers in Judah:  Surrender to the Babylonians and it will go well with you; Resist, and you will die.

Scripture records at least two serious attempts to deplatform and kill Jeremiah during his ministry.  After preaching a particularly unpopular sermon in the court yard of the temple, Scripture tells us, "So the priests and the prophets and all the people heard Jeremiah speaking these words in the house of the LORD.  Now it happened, when Jeremiah had made an end of speaking all that the LORD had commanded him to speak, to all the people, that the priests and the prophet and the people seized him, saying,  'You will surely die!  Why have you prophesied in the name of the LORD, saying, 'This house shall be like Shiloh, and this city shall be desolate, without an inhabitant'?' And all the people were gathered against Jeremiah in the house of the LORD."  The princes of Judah also piled on Jeremiah, saying, "This man deserves to die!  For he has prophesied against this city, as you have heard with your ears" (Jeremiah 26:7-9, 11).  Jeremiah was able just barely to avoid his deplatforming and death, when he convinced the people and the princes and the elders that he spoke for the LORD. 

Some of the elders even cited an earlier example in Judah's history when a prophet named Micah of Moresheth prophesied the destruction of Zion in the days of Hezekiah.  These elders asked, "Did Hezekiah king of Judah and all Judah ever put him to death?"  The answer was, of course not.  Hezekiah was a righteous king and his tolerance for unpopular speech is evidence of his faith. "Did he [Hezekiah] not fear the LORD and seek the LORD's favor?," asked the elders. 

Some time later, after Jeremiah had been imprisoned, the prophet was faced with a second serious attempt on his life.  The princes of Judah complained to the king that Jeremiah's message of "defect to the Babylonians and you shall live!" was weakening he resolve of the men defending Jerusalem and demanded, "Please, let this man be put to death."  King Zekediah agreed to turn Jeremiah over to the princes, who lowered him into a well, and leaving him there to die. Jeremiah survived this second deplatforming attempt when an Ethiopian court eunuch organized a rescue party to pull him out. 

It's been said that the principle of free speech does not exist to enable us to talk about the weather.  Free speech is about protecting unpopular speech.  Today we looked at a few examples from the Old Testament and found that the godly kings did not punish the prophets who brought bad, that is to say, unpopular news, but rather supported their right to speak the truth.  These kings supported free speech and didn't believe in shooting the messenger.  Wicked kings, on the other hand, would go to extreme measures to silence their critics.  In this respect they acted very much like liberal critics in the mainstream media, in government and the heads of Big Tech companies.  These individuals prefer to silence alternate viewpoints by deplatforming their critics rather than fairly debate the issues with them.

This attitude, so prevalent among academics, government officials and Big Tech executive represents a toxic mixture of intellectual cowardice, institutional hubris and power.  It needs to stop. 

Next week, Lord willing, we shall take a look at the implied support of free speech found in the New Testament. 

(To be continued...)

"We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to,"  said then President Obama in Pittsburgh in October 2016. 

The President continued, "There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world."

In the opinion of this author, those are some of the most chilling words any president has ever spoken.  In all but name, Obama called for the government to establish a 1984 style ministry of truth.  Perhaps more chilling, not many people took notice or seemed to care.  

Perhaps the lack of attention could be chalked up to the timing of Obama's remarks, made, as they were, less than a month before the most contentious presidential election in recent memory.

In light of the events of the last two years, and especially those of last week, a week that saw the coordinated takedown of Alex Jones by the biggest social media platforms, it's this author's contention that Obama's statement ought to be seen as a declaration of war by the deep state on internet free speech. 

Now someone may say, "I don't like Alex Jones, he's just so over the top."  Others, perhaps who aren't into social media or who don't follow politics or economics or just aren't into alternate news sources, may yawn and think this has nothing to do with them.

Christians, particularly American Christians, concerned as they ought to be with maintaining freedom of religion may be tempted to pass over Jones' very public, Big Tech deplatforming as having no direct bearing on their ability to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ or to openly worship. 

But it is the contention of this author that ignoring what happened to Jones would be a serious mistake for anyone, Christian or not, who cherishes liberty, limited government, and the ability to think and to speak freely and without fear of punishment, either from the civil authorities or key private institutions.

So just what was done to Alex Jones last week that prompted this essay?  For that matter, who is Alex Jones and why should Christians care about what happened to him?

According to a piece on ThinkProgress, "Alex Jones was dealt a series of blows on Monday when Apple and Spotify decided to remove nearly all of Infowar's podcasts, and Facebook banned several of his pages." These bans followed the lead of YouTube, which just a few days earlier pulled all of Jones' Infowars channels except The Real News with David Knight.

As seems to be the standard operation procedure with such bans, the reasons given by the tech companies were rather vague.  The article continues with a comment from an Apple spokesman who is quoted saying, "Podcasts that violate these [hate speech] guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming." 

In a post explaining its actions against Jones, Facebook said, "Earlier today, we removed four Pages belonging to Alex Jones for repeatedly posting content over the past several days that breaks those Community Standards."  As with Apple, we see a vague reference to "Community Standards" and "hate speech" but no specific examples of what was said that prompted Facebook's act of removing the Infowars pages or explanation of why these statements were so egregious that they required the banning in the first place.    

But lest one suppose that Infowars is uniquely the target of big tech tyrants, there have been many other casualties, not just last week, but over the past two years since Obama's call for "truthiness tests."

For example, in an email to supporters of the Ron Paul Institute, Executive Director Daniel McAdams related his recent experience of being banned from Twitter for having the audacity to tweet support for a friend whose Twitter account had been permanently banned.

For those unfamiliar with McAdams, alone with being Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute, he's a former Congressional staffer for Ron Paul and Ron Paul's co-host on the daily Ron Paul Liberty Report.  From my observation, Mr. McAdams, far from being over the top or deliberately provocative, conducts himself as a gentleman and a scholar, none of which prevented him from feeling the wrath the masters of the Twitter universe.

McAdams' Twitter account has since been restored, but the restoration came with an odd, Orwellian twist to it.  McAdams wrote,

Twitter also did something to Scott [McAdam's is referencing Scott Horton, Horton, a libertarian writer, also was banned for voicing his support for fellow libertarian Peter Van Buren,  the same thing that got McAdams in hot water] and me that was positively Stalinist: when we tried to log in to our [Twitter] account while suspended, we were greeted with our "offending" Tweets, the message was clear:  you must admit how wrong you were and remove it yourself.  I told a colleague about this strange demand and his response was chilling...and accurate:

That's giving the game away for them, Stalin face, deniability for them by making you self incriminate...communitarian policing to the extreme, psychological reframing, behaviorist modification...just like they would do to a child in school.

Neither Scott nor I bit.

The suppression of accounts, which seems to happen only to conservatives and libertarians, rarely if ever to socialists, is not limited to outright deletion.  It's not uncommon for social media platforms to engage in the practice of shadow banning. 

So just what is shadow banning?  Let's quote one of the leading experts on the practice, Twitter itself.  "The best definition we found is this:  deliberately making someone's content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster."  

According to Vice News, Twitter had engaged in the practice of shadow banning, not on various fringe personalities, but on some of the biggest names in the Republican party.  On July 26, Vice reported that "Twitter appears to have fixed search problems that lowered visibility of GOP lawmakers."

So who were these lawmakers?  "Those affected included RNC [Republican National Committee] Chair Ronna McDaniel, Republican Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, along with Andrew Surabian, Donald Trump Jr.'s spokesman and former Special Assistant to the President."

These are not by any means obscure individuals, but some of the most powerful and best known Republicans.  Twitter claims that the problem with the accounts was "a side effect attempts to clean up discourse on its platform." 

The Vice article goes on to describe the shadow ban technique used on the Republicans as "[A] shift that diminishes their reach on the platform - and it's the same one being deployed against prominent racists to limit their visibility.  The profiles continue to appear when conducting a full search, but not in the more convenient and visible drop-down bar."

What is more, the supposed "side effect" of Twitter's efforts was limited to Republicans only, as there were no reports of this happening to Democrats.  As Vice notes, "Democrats are not being 'shadow banned' in the same way, according to a VICE News review.  McDaniel's counterpart, Democratic Party chair Tom Perez, and liberal members of Congress - including Reps. Maxine Waters [in what came close to a call for physical violence against Trump administration officials, Maxine Waters recently called on her supports to "push back" on Trump staffers if they saw them in public], Joe Kennedy III, Keith Ellison, and Mark Pocan - all continue to appear in drop-down search results.  Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter's search." 

To make matters worse, Twitter responded to criticism of its practice of shadow banning by issuing a denial that sounded a whole lot more like an admission of guilt.  Said Twitter, "We do not shadow ban.  You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile).  And we certainly don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology."

But what is shadow banning if not making people "do more work to find" tweets by those out of favor with the powers that be?

And Twitter's denial that they shadow ban based on political viewpoints seems threadbare in the face of Vice News' findings reported above.

And, oh yeah, Vice News, far from being a conservative bastion,  is a liberal publication. With that in mind, their reporting that prominent Democrats were not subjected to the same treatment as their Republican counterparts can be seen as an admission against interest.

But as notable as the above deplatformings are, they are not the only examples of the tech left bringing down its heavy hammer on those who dare voice opinions at odds with the received government / mainstream media narrative. 

Trump supporters Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, better known as Diamond and Silk, testified before Congress about how they were censored on Facebook and demonetized on YouTube.

So what did they mean by censored and demonetized?  In the case of Facebook, the sisters claim that, beginning in September 2017, their 1.4 million followers stopped being notified about new posts.  This is similar to Twitter's shadow bans in that, while Facebook allowed Diamond and Silk to post content, they made it harder for people to access their content. 

As for the charge of demonetization, that's something YouTube does to videos its algorithms are programmed to recognize as "not advertiser friendly," that is to say, videos by conservatives and libertarians that challenge the liberal mainstream media news narrative, are actually interesting, and attract a large audience of unfashionable people sporting unfashionable opinions, who have the audacity to ask unfashionable questions of their supposed betters.  That is to say, videos liked by the dreaded deplorables. 

To demonetize a video means YouTube makes it ineligible for advertisers to sponsor it.  Since YouTube content providers receive advertising revenue from the ads that run on their videos, YouTube is depriving popular YouTubers of advertising revenue when their videos are flagged as not being advertiser friendly.

During their Congressional testimony, USA Today reports that Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee questioned Diamond and Silk on what role Congress could have in telling private entities how to manage their platforms.

Good grief! Since when did the Democrats ever see any successful private entity they didn't want to tax and regulate into the ground?  And now, when YouTube is doing their dirty work of censoring their opponents for them, suddenly we're to believe they've had an epiphany, having discovered wonders of laissez faire economics and limited government?  What hypocrisy! Spare me!

For some of the best, not to mention most entertaining, Congressional testimony you'll ever see, check out this video from Mark Dice which shows Diamond and Silk unloading on Congressman Hank Johnson (D, GA).   

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DgehKvd25lc" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

And speaking of Mark Dice, he's another YouTuber and one of the biggest voices among alternate media conservatives.  He has 1.3 million followers on YouTube, yet routinely has his videos demonetized, considered as they are by YouTube, not advertiser friendly.

So how have conservatives responded to all this cyber harassment?  In many cases, not well at all. 

Echoing the Congressional Democrats, one inadequate conservative response has been to take the position that, since Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et. al. are private companies, their decision to ban Jones, Diamond and Silk, Mark Dice and others is simply an example of private businesses exercising their property rights.  Therefore, no one has the right to complain.  The message?  Just stop complaining, shut up and go start your own version of Facebook already!

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times last week, establishment conservative and never-Trumper David French said as much when he took issue, not with the tech left's banning of Alex Jones, but they way in which they did it.  The "loathsome" Jones and his "loathsome" content should be banned, says French, but Twitter, Facebook and YouTube got it all wrong by booting him for hate speech.  They should have deep sixed him on the basis of libel and slander laws.  

One major problem with French's position is that, as Lord willing I hope to develop next week, one can make a strong circumstantial case that the selective banning of conservative voices is not merely a matter of private companies legally exercising control over their own product, but very likely is the result of their collaboration with the deep state.  In other words, the Big Tech's jihad against conservatives is really a case of the merger of [deep] state and corporate powers, which is the very definition of fascism.

A second problem with French's position is that, not only does he come off in his New York Times op-ed as a rather snooty movement conservative, it never seems to occur to him that someday he may find himself shadow banned or deplatformed in the same way Alex Jones was, a man for whom French has nothing but contempt.  Perhaps Mr. French needs to go back and reread Martin Niemöller's famous poem, First they came...      

Another weak argument used by some conservatives is to say that big tech's censoring of Republicans is a First Amendment issue.  But the First Amendment applies to Congress - Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.  Since Congress has not passed a law abridging free speech on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, arguing on First Amendment grounds seems like an unpromising line of attack.

Finally, there are calls by some to threaten the big techies with antitrust lawsuits.  Admittedly this is tempting, but this would be a mistake.  Not only are antitrust laws a product of the regulatory state which Christians should eschew, but they actually can work in favor of the businesses being regulated. 

As James Corbett argued in a recent video, the tech left's banning of conservatives is part of a larger chess game Corbett refers to as Problem, Reaction, Solution.  Corbett believes that antitrust regulation of big tech will not weaken, but actually strengthen the grip of the current crop of Silicon Valley billionaires on the social media market just as it strengthened John Rockefeller's grip on the oil market 100 years ago. 

Corbett makes a compelling case that the tech left has deliberately provoked conservatives in the hopes that they will react by calling for the one thing the tech industry craves:  government regulation.  And why do they crave regulation?  It helps them stamp out up and coming competition.

One of the most misunderstood aspects of government regulation is that big business actually likes it.  Established big businesses have the resources to cope with regulations in a way that start ups do not.  Government regulations actually act as an entry barrier for entrepreneurs by imposing costs on them at a time when they are most vulnerable and perhaps lacking the legal sophistication and the money to comply with a complex set of laws.

In other words, Facebook and the others are scared of becoming the next My Space or America On Line, as well they should be, and see governmental regulation of the industry as a way to keep this from happening.   And not only that, but they want to trick you into doing the job for them, first by creating a problem, thus provoking you to react, and then helping Congress write the laws that will regulate and protect, not you, but them. 

Now you may be asking yourself, so what does any of this have to do with Christianity.  The answer is, quite a lot.  Christianity is a religion first, not of the deed, but of the Word.  And that Word must be heard to be believed.  If Christians cannot freely write and speak the truth of God's Word, then they are in for serious problems indeed. 

It is not accident that it is Protestant West that pioneered free speech and where it to this day has the most support.  But free speech is under aggressive assault today, and not just from the tech left.  Lord willing, we shall explore this and other related issues in future installments of this series. 

(To be continued...)