By Matthew Delaney
We’ve developed this funny habit where we need more than our eyes to recognize something as the truth. We also need to talk about it. To speak freely and honestly about what’s happening around us, or else it becomes a disputed fact. If you want to see what happens when you ignore your right to speak up, look at Cuba.
Cuban citizens are facing the threat of jail and/or death for protesting the communist regime. Their marches and chants of “Libertad” while waving the American flag put them at risk because they’re not allowed to criticize the government.
If you can’t speak, you can’t fully express yourself. If you can’t fully express yourself, your life is a lie — whether it’s by choice or not. There’s nothing more degrading than a person realizing their authenticity can be stomped out by force. That’s what the inability to speak gives you. That’s what communism gives you.
Democrats here in the states have been wishy-washy about blaming their favorite intellectual junk food for Cuba’s troubles. Some have come out strongly and acknowledged this uprising’s historic moment. Others have said the protests were about the U.S. embargo, or not getting the Covid vaccine, or whether Space Jam 2 is supposed to live up to the first’s legacy or if it’s just a kid’s movie.
President Joe Biden managed to get enough synapses working in his brain to articulate that “Communism is a failed system, universally failed system,” before he knocked socialism as a poor substitute. But he’s been back and forth on Cuba his entire career. He’s toeing the line of winning Florida and not losing his left-wing base. Yet the latter hasn’t been shy about making themselves, and their truth, heard.
Senator Bernie Sanders and future president Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke out against the embargo, though they did use their inside voices to criticize the regime’s human rights abuses as well.
The International Committee of Democratic Socialists of America said that “DSA stands with the Cuban people and their Revolution in this moment of unrest. End the blockade.” As that same article follows up, capital R revolution means the Communist Revolution; those who are protesting for “freedom” and waving American flags are seen as “counter revolutionaries.”
Black Lives Matter went as far as to blame the U.S.’s embargo solely for the island nation’s history of challenges. It said, “The people of Cuba are being punished by the U.S. government because the country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination. United States leaders have tried to crush this Revolution for decades.” (Notice that capital R there again?)
Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the child of a Cuban defector, told protesters that “If you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States.”
When you speak up, you get the truth you want. That’s why it was so influential when this Washington Post reporter candidly admitted — on CNN, of all places — that Democrats are “…really being led by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and the progressive wing does not want to go hard against Cuba, against some of the things that the Castro regime may have been a part of.”
Those “things” are universal healthcare, which is on Democrats’ socialist wish list. These people will literally offer up your human dignity to see their failed ideas realized. That includes shutting you up the easy way or the hard way.
A quirky sidebar about what led to the assassination of Haiti’s president illustrates why being quiet is so dangerous.
President Jovenel Moïse was killed by a team of Colombian commandos and Haitian-Americans after they broke into the president’s palace on July 7.
The story raised some eyebrows off the bat. Namely, wouldn’t the president of even a poor, dysfunctional nation like Haiti have security? Apparently, he did, and the country’s chief of police has relieved the president’s personal guard of his duties.
Reporting right now tells us the assassination was supposed to be an arrest and overthrow of the president…until the job went awry. Reasons behind that are unknown. The lead suspect, a Haitian American named Christian Emmanuel Sanon, is a bit nutty, but not someone who came off as wanting to kill Moïse.
A country that’s perpetually in chaos sees another chaotic episode. It’s as predictable as Drake dropping a new song with Giannis Antetokounmpo’s name in it.
When you find out that some of the Colombians received U.S. military training, and one of the assailants wore a Drug Enforcement Agency hat during the ambush, it raises suspicions.
These circumstantial details were oxygen to internet chatter linking Moïse’s killing to a larger trend against Covid vaccine skeptics. A select few African leaders who either downplayed Covid’s presence or refused to accept the vaccine had died over the past year. And now the Jim-from-“The Office”-whiteboard-meme is explaining that to me.
I understand the impulse for these thoughts. We’ve been lied to a lot. Our leaders have toyed with the truth for their own gain. Cooking up, buying into, or just going along with wild theories to rebel against them is a fun release.
But as much as our puppet masters act with impunity when they say tomboys should “become” real boys or a rainy day is a sign of climate change, they aren’t dumb enough to kill off world leaders en masse. They isolate their killings, like they did with Jeffrey Epstein.
Being able to express anything except their institutional wisdom terrifies them. Hence the reason their doting media fact checkers put time into disproving a meme I wouldn’t even consider mainstream. If they have their way, they won’t need their media proxies that much longer.
Biden’s administration seeks to shut down “misinformation” on private social media platforms by working with these sites to monitor certain profiles. “Misinformation,” according to press secretary Jen Psaki, is any bit of information they deem inaccurate.
This came during a multi-day news cycle where the Surgeon General said falsehoods on the vaccine are an “urgent public health threat,” and Psaki said being banned from one website means you should be banned from all of them.
Obviously, the federal government getting to decide what is and isn’t accurate information is dangerous territory. That’s unlikely (for the moment). In the here-and-now, their underlying assumption that information they don’t like is intentionally malevolent is the real danger.
The President and his press rep said it’s deadly serious to root out anti-vax materials spread by people online because they’re killing people. You know the trick by now. When they say “it’s killing people” that translates to, “This is a crisis. We don’t have time to verify our claims to you. Just listen to us.”
Biden reiterated the public’s need to “trust the government” during his town hall Wednesday night. A government that cares more about stupid memes than it does its oppressive, anti-American neighbor.
A government who believes our right to discuss kooky shit — like vaccine-skeptic world leaders being killed off — should be overruled by their own paranoia.
As others have noted, that paranoia could extend to a litany of things that are oh-so-convenient to their beliefs. Not listening to them when it comes to systemic racism, gun control, gender equality, and again, climate change, could all be construed as wanting to “kill people” under this same standard.
They just also happen to have the force of the state behind them to enforce those standards.
The hectic scene in the Caribbean has shown us, both directly and indirectly, the power of your voice. Speaking the truth with it is your best defense against our power brokers’ slow creep into your liberties. Or else, life, the universe, or my personal preference, God, will punish you for lacking the courage to do what is necessary.
So, speak now, before they find a way to keep you quiet.
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