Who owns the truth?

I'm becoming increasingly alarmed about the Comrade and his regime's attacks on the First Amendment. This is truly enough to make your hair stand up on end, given that for many years, things like Radio Free Europe kept the human race alive inside the Communist Bloc, and things like that. 'Course, we wouldn't expect the Comrade to regard that as anything positive.

A couple weeks ago, Glenn Beck did a show all about Sam Adams. Beck presents Sam Adams as a religious figure, a man of deep faith. OK, maybe he was. Adams had been educated at Hahvahd when it was a Methodist (I believe) seminary. He was qualified to be a religious minister, but I don't believe he ever was. He did work as a tax collector for time. He refused to collect the taxes. The Brits fired him. Boston re-elected him as Tax Collector. Apparently Bostonians liked the way he handled the job. Sam Adams was one cool dude.

Curiously, Glenn Beck shied away from the notion that Sam Adams was a propagandist -- which Adams surely was. Adams constructed and worked diligently to sustain the Committees of Correspondence, which eventually evolved into the Continental Congress. Some people claim he organized the Sons of Liberty, though I don't know that that's proven. He definitely had a finger in the radical political pies in Boston and encouraged their efforts.

Adams was the first to get the word out about the Boston Massacree -- through the Committees of Correspondence -- and picked and harped at it as cause for... maybe armed revolt? He did the same for events at Lexington and Concord. He was a relentless rabble-rouser, the "rabble" being 12 other colonies hundreds of miles distant from each other.

After the American Revolution, the French, who were quite pleased to see the wild colonials give Britain a big black eye, elevated Ben Franklin and Sam Adams to legendary fame as the two men most responsible for putting the United States together.

About 30 years ago, I did a term paper on propaganda during the American Revolution. That's how I met Sam Adams. The term paper was supposed to be something like 12 to 15 pages. I wrote 39 pages. It was fascinating. Imagine, no telephone, TV, radio, and barely a post office (until Ben Franklin), and Sam Adams managed to get 13 very disparate colonies with varying interests to hang together and defeat British rule.

That is mind-boggling. Sam Adams -- helped greatly by George Washington, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and numerous others whom he recruited -- managed to persuade four million skeptical British subjects to cast off the authority of the Crown. He convinced them that they didn't need British law, British trade, or British protection -- in a wilderness that had yet to be mapped and was still prey to every naval power in the world.

I ended that term paper with the thought that the men who created the USA enshrined their rhetorical and propagandist efforts into one simple legal provision:  The First Amendment.

They understood the power of speech, the power of ideas. They had created the American Revolution through speech and propaganda, and they ended up advocating free speech as one of the most indispensable elements of a just and righteous government, one dedicated to exalting the human race rather than enslaving it.

The cure for bad arguments and lies, they said, or for "bad" speech -- the cure for that was MORE speech -- to defend or counteract, correct, or refine every idea. It all gets milled and ground down to the basics, considered and reconsidered, built up or knocked down, amplified or forgotten, allowing each of us to make the best decisions possible to control our own lives to achieve our own goals.

There is no such thing as "too much information." There's only a vicious and anti-humanitarian concern about who should "control" information.

No one controls it. No one ever SHOULD control it. Anyone who wants to control it is, without any doubt at all, looking to take away your liberty and control you. There is NO DOUBT about that whatsoever, no other explanation or rationale for that position.

This goes directly to the issue of living by your own lights. Giving however much time and effort you want to a particular issue, you listen to the various sides of the argument, you research the background, you review and assess your own situation, and you make up your own mind about what makes sense to you and what you believe in. This is applies to everything from, "Should I buy hot dogs or hamburgers?" to "Who should I vote for?" or "Which church should I attend, if any?"

Without any information -- or only limited information -- to make a decision, you're hamstrung and completely at the mercy of the guys with the guns.

But then, the whole idea behind government control is taking away citizens' ability to make their own decisions. The totalitarian government does all the decision-making for you. You just roll up in a ball and suck your thumb and hope you're not the one who gets the beating today. This is exactly the way the slave-owners managed their "dependencies."  This is exactly why it was illegal in most states to teach slaves how to read and right. And the slave states also censored the mail.... "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and The New York Tribune was not allowed in the slave states.

This regime's concerns about the unhampered dissemination of information over the Internet, through radio, and other media is the most serious kind of bullshit I've ever heard -- and to hear it coming from a US president is a shocking disgrace. Comrade Butthead announced that the unfettered and chaotic information available to Americans today via a wide range of media, is a "distraction" and a "diversion, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than a means of emancipation."

So now he's telling us what information "should" be and how we "should" use it? And how do you suggest we get it, Mr. Wonderful? And from whom? I'm waiting for that shoe to drop. Possibly exclusively from this Liar-in-Chief? And his tireless propaganda machine? Half-grown 18-year-olds in red shirts displaying the hammer and sickle? Weary and stale old hippies -- those who managed to survive the Reagan Administration in spider-holes in Canada -- or at the University of Illinois? The Comrade's voter base?

Whatever goes around usually comes around, know what I mean? This jerk in the White House can dish it out, but he can't take it. And the answer?

MORE INFORMATION!!!! Crank up those Tea Parties another notch. More signs and bumper-stickers. Why not burn a few people in effigy while we're at it? That's how Sam Adama and the Sons of Liberty went about it. And it worked. Free speech has always worked. And it will again. Truth will out.
Save the republic.