‘Tis the season for stifling free speech.
Americans awoke this Christmas morning to the glad realization that they once again survived the war on Christmas.
This year was no more or less insufferable than Christmases past. The year 2018 bore witness to liberals who sought to tear down nativity scenes, assassinate Rudolph and to ban iconic songs such as “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
However, if you think for one minute that the liberal attack on free speech and freedom of religion stops at the manger door, you simply haven’t been paying attention.
For liberals, the war on free speech is a year-round sport.
This year alone, we witnessed tech giants such Google, Twitter and Facebook admit that they squelch conservative speech. Leaked Google documents showed that the tech company did, in fact, show bias against conservatives after the 2016 presidential election; Twitter finally admitted it has a shadow ban plan; and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg testified that the company exists in an “extremely left-leaning place” while the company also admitted that it scans text and photos from users’ Facebook Messenger exchanges.
The widespread tech bias came as liberal universities across the country slapped restraints on students’ free speech rights, often spiking fees for conservative events to nearly $20,000 so as to make it nearly impossible for college Republican chapters to afford them.
Lest we forget Hollywood.
Comedian Roseanne Barr lost her TV show over a comment she made about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. Comedian Kevin Hart lost his gig at the upcoming Academy Awards due to a years-old homophobic Tweet. (Never mind that fellow comedians Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman and Chelsea Handler all committed the same foibles, with zero consequence.) Their hypocrisy is nothing short of Oscar worthy.
All of these attacks on free speech are part of the liberals’ “Free speech for me, but not for thee” mentality.
It’s a time-honored tradition that leftists — namely, socialists — have embraced not just over the past year, but for centuries.
During the French Revolution in the late 1700s, liberal atheist leaders banned Christmas. In the Soviet Union in the early 20th Century, atheist socialists not only prohibited the Christian holiday but they actually enlisted the help of children to proverbially knock down Christmas trees and spit on crucifixes. In Nazi Germany, leaders not only banned Christmas celebrations but they perverted Christmas songs and changed the lyrics to racist ones.
So, the attack on Christians and our holiday is nothing new.
However, it is a shock that as Americans our free speech rights are just as under attack today as they were on the birth of our republic more than 200 years ago — perhaps even more today.
Our saving grace and solace this Christmas is that an imperfect man sacrificed himself for us many years ago — and that another imperfect man continues to sacrifice himself for us every day inside the White House, vigorously defending our right to say, “Merry Christmas!” and year-round serving as a megaphone for the squelched, forgotten voices.
Jen Kerns (@JenKernsUSA) served as spokeswoman for the California Republican Party; spokeswoman for California’s Proposition 8, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; and as a Fox News writer for the 2016 U.S. presidential debates.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.