Free Speech, Censorship, Toleration, and a Lame Libertarian Argument

An argument increasingly lame, now totally non-ambulatory

Your right to free speech entails my duty not to impede your speech; it does not entail a duty on my part to provide you with a platform. "But then you are censoring me!" In a broad and defensible sense, yes. I am tolerant and so I tolerate you and your beliefs. To tolerate, however, is not to approve but to allow, to put up with, to — wait for it — tolerate. Toleration does not extend to an aiding and abetting of views that I, after years of study and due diligence in the formation of my beliefs, consider false or pernicious.

In any case, it is not my censorship you should fear, but that of the State, especially when a regime of anti-constitutional rogues has  seized control thereof. The State has non-state adjuncts and allies in the private sector that serve as their enablers and propaganda arms. They are to be feared as well, extending as they do the State's reach into the private lives of citizens as they hollow out the space of civil society which traditionally served as a buffer between Leviathan and the naked individual.  Among the enabling adjuncts and allies: Big Tech, Big Pharma, Mainstream Media.

There is no need for an Orwellian Ministry of 'Truth' within the government when CNN, CBS, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and all the rest serve as propaganda arms of governmental distortion and directives.

At this point a libertarian argument needs to be addressed, one that had some probative force decades ago but in the teeth of current developments is becoming increasingly lame.  A libertarian will point out, rightly, that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the citizen against the government in respect of the following rights: exercise of religion, free speech, peaceable assembly, and the right to petition in redress of grievances. But the amendment says nothing about the protection of the rights of citizens against private-sector entities. The libertarian argument, however, weakens the more huge corporations with enormous economic and cultural clout infiltrate and influence the government thereby merging with it. 

The merging of woke-Left capital with woke-Left government puts paid to the libertarian argument which, increasingly lame, is now totally non-ambulatory.