Facebook Bans Pamela Geller

Human rights activist Pamela Geller went to Facebook on Friday morning and discovered a notice saying: “We suspended your account.” The notice went on to say that Geller has 180 days to dispute this decision, which was made without any specific explanation being offered to her, or her account would be permanently disabled. This is just the latest example of a striking and unmistakable fact: in the face of being exposed as the totalitarians and enemies of the freedom of speech that they are, the Leftist elites have not retreated in the slightest, or made any effort to cover up their actions. Instead, they’re more open and unapologetic than ever about their attempt to destroy the freedom of expression, which is the indispensable foundation of any free society.

Without notice or explanation @facebook has permanently suspended me

Like all totalitarian regimes that came before, freedom of speech,individual rights,equality for all before the law are banned. Defenders of these human ideals are persecuted,marginalized & eventually… pic.twitter.com/mzHnWROERp

— 🇺🇸 Pamela Geller 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 (@PamelaGeller) June 2, 2023

Under a subsection entitled “Why this happened,” Facebook’s notice offered only generic boilerplate: “Your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards.” Although no specifics were given here, this has been a long time coming. Facebook has previously flagged Geller’s posts for dissenting from the Leftist establishment line on the COVID hysteria and the effectiveness of the vaccines, as well as on the trustworthiness of the 2020 election results.

In both cases and others, Geller turned out to be right, and the establishment line was wrong. But even as their authoritarian enforcement of their fact-free agenda has been exposed, Leftists have doubled down, continuing to censor points of view that they don’t want the public at large to hear. Pamela Geller has been a consistent voice of truth and sanity in a world that is increasingly mad; first, she was smeared as a “Muslim hater” for her opposition to jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women, and then, when the self-appointed guardians of acceptable opinion saw that this was not sufficient to destroy her influence altogether, she was deplatformed altogether.

Twitter was first, banning her in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, as Leftists pulled out all the stops to ensure that Donald Trump would be defeated and the senescent corruptocrat who now pretends to be president of the United States would be installed in the White House. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, she was reinstated, but his overall commitment to his earlier-stated free speech absolutism has been shaky at best, and the other social media giants have proceeded full speed ahead with their censorship program.

The Left’s impulse, going all the way back to the French Revolution, has been authoritarian and hostile to dissenting views. The great Leftist empires of the twentieth century—the Soviet Union, Communist China, and the rest—ruthlessly quashed any and all voices that spoke out against their policies. As the American “progressives” have edged ever farther to the left and completed their embrace of socialism, they have progressively grown more intolerant.

Just as the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s became a testing ground for and prelude to the Second World War, the present-day efforts to stigmatize and silence “disinformation” were honed in the struggle against “Islamophobia.” After 9/11, the Left, joined by the establishment Right, waged an all-out campaign to condemn, vilify, marginalize, and invalidate those who dared to speak honestly about the elements within Islam that gave rise to Islamic jihad terrorism and the oppression of women and others under Islamic law. Foremost among these was Pamela Geller. Americans were told again and again that the real problem was not so much Islamic jihad, which represented a twisting and hijacking of the peaceful religion of Islam by a tiny minority of extremists, but “Islamophobia,” the alleged demonization of that peaceful religion by a cabal of greedy, unprincipled, but well-financed opportunists.

This was a false scenario from the very beginning. The most prominent “Islamophobes” were telling the truth and working with shoestring budgets to call attention to a genuine threat. But the forces working to silence them were far more handsomely funded, and they were able to make their views mainstream among politicians and the media. The same techniques, now honed and perfected, have been turned against all those who dissent from the insane agenda of the Biden regime.

In its quest to criminalize opposition to its policies, the Biden administration has not hesitated to actively move against the freedom of speech, working with Twitter and the other social media giants to silence dissenters. This is no surprise, since the establishment media and its ancillaries in the educational system and entertainment industry have been working hard for years to popularize the concept of “hate speech,” one of the most dangerous and insidious ideas ever to become widely accepted in the United States.

“Hate speech” is dangerous because it is left undefined, and yet those who use it generally assume that they know what it means. It’s generally understood as referring to speech that is disparaging, offensive, and insulting to a particular group, or to an individual because of his group characteristics, but the groups in question are invariably ones for which the Left is showing particular concern.

As hateful as Leftists can be and are toward those who dissent from their agenda, they virtually never get charged with hate speech. The reality is that the concept of “hate speech” is a tool, used by those who hold power to discredit and silence their critics by stigmatizing them with this label. Tyrannical forces can keep the masses complacent and silence dissidents more easily by branding them as purveyors of hate speech than by openly admitting that they do not believe in the First Amendment, and do not want to accord its protections to their opponents.

That’s where we are now: the freedom of speech, and free society as a whole, hangs by a thread. Facebook’s ban of Pamela Geller was another step toward the authoritarian regime toward which the Left is working.