Free Speech - All Our Freedoms - Under Threat in America

There is a specter marching across the land. It is the hunger to tell other people to "shut-up" and to punish people who express or believe differently.

It is the specter of Fascism - American style.

It is not exactly new. After all, the 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony, for many years, forced people to leave who wouldn't conform in word, deed and belief in their official Puritan church. The people leaving ultimately founded Rhode Island.

But the newest wave of intolerance comes nearly completely from the woke Left, and carries ugly echos of the Communist dictatorships of the last century. Regimes that imprisoned over 100 million people in "re-education" or "labor" camps - and killed over 75 million. Regimes that watched and monitored everyone and brutally punished any careless word or statement they found "politically offensive."

In late 2021, Georgetown University ordered a student, William Spruance, who had - in a public forum - questioned the school's Covid masking policies, to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. They demanded he waive medical privacy - so they could try to threaten and smear him. They then suspended him and threatened to blackball him from future jobs.

Spruance - who is a descendant of the great US Admiral Raymond Spruance of the famed World War II Battles of Midway and the Philippine Sea - refused to back down, and retained an attorney. The media started calling. And the Georgetown administrators - cowardly bullies - dropped their demands. But not everyone has the resources and moxie of a young Spruance.

Last week, 100 professors at Harvard University formed a "Council on Academic Freedom" to support each other and protect free speech and academic freedom on the ivy league campus.

“We are in a crisis time right now. Many, many people are being threatened with, and actually put through disciplinary processes for their exercise of free speech and academic freedom.” stated Harvard Law School professor Janet Halley.

Halley claims she has seen "countless other professors" targeted and punished for their speech, beliefs or viewpoints.

When America's elite institutions are spawning new generations of little fascists - who don't believe in free speech - and want to censor and punish others who hold different beliefs - then the country is in deep trouble.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. If we don’t defend academic freedom and free speech, we should not be surprised when some thug takes everything away.