Americans have always been scrappy individuals willing to take enormous risks on something new in order to capitalize on future success. This was in the DNA of our Founding Fathers, and it continues to this day as we live the “American Dream” of building something out of nothing and ensuring prosperity for future generations.
Nowhere in recent history was this more true than during the dawn of the internet, which was built, fueled, and capitalized upon by the very same type of individuals who built our country. Instead of waiting to get picked, asking for instructions, or getting in line, Americans were able to pick themselves. They built businesses, then search engines, then social media platforms. They were widely successful without traditional office spaces, multimillion-dollar deals, or even advertising agencies to sell individual perspectives and innovative ideas.
You were in charge, and you could create and say anything you wanted to by solving problems, adding value, and creating a whole new world of possibility for you and your family. There were no gatekeepers, no dream quashers, and no real barriers to entry. It was an age of the individual, the rise of ideas, and the beginning of radical self-reliance.
But that all came to a screeching halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, when federal agencies positioned themselves as the ultimate gatekeepers—using deception, coercion, and flat-out censorship to stifle your freedom of speech, silence your ideas, shut down your businesses, and quash any ideas of self-reliance or alternative views.
Suddenly, many of us were plunged into Orwell’s dystopian world of Oceania, where people online “simply disappeared … your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated—vaporized.”
Whether it was reporting or opining on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the lab leak theory, mask efficacy, the Great Barrington Declaration, or just plain common sense, if you shared your personal views on the trending topics of the day, your digital identity (or in too many cases, your actual livelihood) could be destroyed.
By Jeff Landry
