It Is Your Responsibility, Not Your Right...

Free Speech: Part 1

Some of you may have just read my last post on our friend Ralph Baric. If you haven’t… Shame on you. Here is a link to the fantastic bit of prose hastily drafted with bleary eyes over lukewarm coffee, just before I rushed off for my morning run.

It wasn’t one of my best products, but I have been absolutely slammed with a variety of unexpected, last minute responsibilities. I am also training for the Marine Corps Marathon with our podcast host, Stephanie Weidle. She may seem like the epitome of elegance, but put her on a long distance run and she turns into a seasoned competitor with killer instincts and a slave driver attitude towards training. I am just trying to say… time is tight.

This is a labor of love, so I make the time. My ability to quickly get short written products out fairly quickly is because I have been saving and categorizing articles and social media posts since early 2020. I am also supported by a small team of researchers who have been helping prepare for the anticipated results of our FOIA litigation with DOD over Operation Warp Speed. Those documents will be a game changer for our medical freedom movement.

What does this have to do with free speech?

I have a file of source material I search through when drafting my posts. A search on Baric produced 166 results and I pulled a few pertinent pieces of information to get the ball rolling. Some of the source material includes links back to social media posts and often that also includes posts from Twitter 1.0 pre-Elon.

One file included a screenshot and link back to Nicola Bidola, an Italian researcher who had been examining the virology, genetics, and phylogenetics of SARS-CoV-2.

Nicola was a go-to source of information in 2020 and 2021, but when I went back to check on the Twitter thread, it was missing. It turns out his Twitter account had been censored and subsequently removed by the thought police sometime in 2022.

It wasn’t surprising. Many of the social media accounts I found most helpful (truthful) were the subject of removal and censorship. There were, however, quite a few X users calling for his reinstatement on the platform after Elon Musk promised to repatriate the Twitter heretics.

Unfortunately, Elon Musk has not brought this Italian hero back to his platform. (As some of you may know, I have a soft spot for Italy, Italians, and Italian Americans, so I would love to see Bidoli’s account on my feed once again.)

Don’t put all your Elons in one basket.

Regardless of what you might think of Elon Musk, I think it is unwise to assume that one person is going to save the day. I am really happy with the direction of X, but he is one man and his motives are not entirely clear. Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe the world would be a different place right now if Elon had not made the financially insane decision to buy Twitter for 44 billion dollars, but I don’t view him as the free speech savior.

He can’t do it alone and that is exactly my point.

Free Speech is a huge topic and it can’t be covered in just one post. So, I am going to break up this Substack into a series of related articles that I think are especially pertinent given the current social, political, and cultural climate. More important, I want to give you the bottom line up front, just in case you decide to only read the first in this series of articles.

No one is coming to save you.

Elon Musk isn’t going to save free speech by himself, just like a single political leader can’t save our nation. Free speech may feel like a right. It is the first in series of rights enshrined in our Constitution, but that is really only half the definition. If you have God-given, inalienable rights, you also have an equally weighty responsibility.

Get ready for a series of important articles on our First Amendment rights, but if you decide you are only going to read this one, that is OK. If you take only one thing away from our discussion, you need read no further…

You are responsible for protecting free speech. No one will do it for you.