OPINION: In Many Respects, the United States is No Longer a Free Country

In any free society, dissidence ought not only to be tolerated but exalted. The values on which the United States was founded presume that you can freely criticize the society and speak loaded truths without fear of chastisement, and we ostensibly have a legal right to do so. Today, however, legal rights and dogmatic tenets of social justice have reached a point of reciprocal hostility, whereby they are rendered mutually exclusive. Big Tech platforms, in the name of social justice, trump all legal considerations in pursuit of ridding their platform of purportedly threatening dissent. The cultural narrative has effectively monopolized and coagulated all avenues of life; one distasteful joke at the office concerning the affairs of women, and you are terminated on a whim.

A similar theme is reflected through the execution and enforcement of the law in this country. Conservatives hastily remark “Blue Lives Matter,” developing an almost Pavlovian allegiance to law enforcement in response to the criminal activity of the left. When push comes to shove, however, police act on behalf of their authority, an authority that evidently loathes dissent. While Antifa is permitted to imprecate our history, vandalize public art, loot and arson private businesses, and remain untarnished by law enforcement while being financed by big corporations and canonized by the media, police might arrest those whose mask slips ever so slightly below their nose depending on the locality. The difference is jarring.

The administrative state has structured the society such that it is easiest to conform and hardest to resist, and, of those who do resist, most will be subsequently deterred out of sheer intimidation and force. The success of America’s mega-corporations and the mendacious politicians who profit accordingly is largely contingent on our willingness to consume and espouse the newest product, social trend, movies, and videogames. Big business has facilitated the creation of the widely ascribed identity of the celestial consumer, dissolving communal bonds in the process and creating an atomized society. We have become de facto slaves to our insatiable and intemperate desires, craving nothing but the very material items that will only further cement this outwardly parasitic relationship. Many of us have become trapped in a cyclical echo-chamber, devoid of greater purpose and with little desire but to consume.

To top it off, we have been slavishly deceived into thinking we are free because we have the choice to partake in our own self-destruction. It is the equivalent of exhorting to go first in a game that was purposefully designed to facilitate your defeat. American patriots must wake up to the slip of hand occurring at the hands of America’s power structure.