welcome to breakpoint daily look in an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth Poquoson Center I'm John Stonestreet
 Americans throughout our nation's history of all ways to find ourselves in terms of Liberty where the land of the free and the home of the brave are national holidays Independence Day we spend all of our Wars as Wars of Liberation most recently we Face Down the twin tyrannies or fascism and communism making Liberty of conscience and the untether flow of information all marks of our free Society but suddenly however it seems that freedom of speech has become something controversial for example that we might expect self-professed liberals to fear that the richest man in the world who already has his hand in multiple key Industries to use his Newfound power at Twitter to suppress dissent not allowing marginalizing unpopular voices to be heard instead they seem to be worried that he won't suppress dissent that he will allow those they don't like to stay on the platform remember the days of relativism where we were told that all ideas are equally true all voices equally valid remember the postmodern idea that since all authorities are equally biased than all are equally false and there's a
 what's true for you and what's true for me while those were the good days there were some voices however who did predict that this idyllic state of Tolerance would not last Pope Benedict for example describe the impending dictatorship of relativism Frederick Nietzsche and his French disciples force all the power struggle that would come to Define Reality by determining language in the meaning of words and recently Ross Douthat described it this way in the New York time quote cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and where is that the First Amendment goes too far Trump and conservatism flirts with post-modernism and channels Michelle Falco nothing but the complaints of social media pundits from one end of the political Spectrum we might safely ignore this apocracy however in the last couple of weeks I'm on Twitter have begun to reveal that it was an alliance between social media giants like Twitter and Facebook and various governments around the world alliances that were designed to quickly delete or suppress post that were designed to be harmful
 or misleading and the ones making that call Ware State officials these complaints were put forward by Publications on both the right and the left and I've been shared by the ACLU who commented quote the First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false online or anywhere our government can't use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights look it would certainly be nice if there were a way to rid our news feeds and digital platforms of misinformation hate name-calling but do we really want politicians and bureaucrats to make that call as Ronald Reagan famously quipped quote the most terrifying words in the English language are I'm from the government and I'm here to help the idea that state agency should decide what citizens deserve to know to terrify all of us no matter our political loyalties and that's because any group political or otherwise that sets himself up as the Guardians of people in Arbiters of right and wrong information presumes to have the wisdom of Solomon and somehow to be immune from its own biases
 tragically the greater confidence a person seems to have in their own good intentions the more likely they seem to be two abused that power this of course is one of the great lessons from both Lord Acton and the lord of the ring that The Temptations of absolute power simply too much for even the best of us the tradition in the West for tolerating to send demanding Free Speech even for a fuzz did not come about because people decided that everyone was wonderful that all ideas should be share and share alike so long as a few bad apples were tossed aside instead of came from the hard realization that on account of her all too human frailties none of us is fit to hold absolute power even over Twitter. John Stonestreet just breakpoint was co-authored by dr. Timothy Padgett for more resources to live in this cultural moment please go to Colson Center. Org