RUSH: Now to this Facebook controversy. You know, I think it’s a good illustration of how ignorant and biased and bigoted and prejudiced liberalism is. Here you have Facebook, and they are hell-bent on keeping hatred off of their site, right? They are hell-bent on keeping divisiveness or whatever else they can use to characterize conservatism. They are there to rid, really, conservative from their online operations. And they call it hate or hate speech or what have you.
So Facebook removed an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, claiming that the text of the Declaration of Independence violated Facebook’s policies on hate speech. “The Liberty County Vindicator had been uploading the Declaration of Independence in parts to their Facebook page.” This is a newspaper in Texas. They have been uploading the declaration in parts, in segments, to their Facebook page. The tenth part was removed.
I’m not gonna read the entire text that was removed, ’cause it’s a pretty long paragraph. But it’s the paragraph that describes the reasons the colonists are declaring independence because of the tyrannical behavior of the king. And it is categorized. It’s listed.
For example. “He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.”
You know, as I read this, I wonder — and I’m serious — I wonder how many people in America have actually read the Declaration. I think a lot of people think they know the preamble. But I wonder how many people have actually — not to mention the Constitution. I am here to tell you, I agree with our friends at Hillsdale College. I really believe if more people had been taught, actually read the Constitution, we wouldn’t have as many problems culturally and socially as we have in this country.
But it isn’t taught. And in modern era days, in fact the Constitution is taught as a racist, bigoted charter of negative liberties. The Constitution is actually ripped and criticized in much of public education, university education today. And by charter of negative liberties, these people claim, “Well, it doesn’t tell the government what it can do.” Exactly right. The Constitution is a document of limits on the government.
The Constitution is the documentation of the founding of a nation based on the sovereignty and freedom of the citizens. And it spells out what government cannot do. But it doesn’t spell out what government can do! And so a bunch of leftist anti-constitutionalists think that it needs to be rewritten.
Likewise, I’ll bet you, I would hazard a guess. I don’t want to hazard a guess, but I’ll bet you a large percentage of the people even listening to this program, when I was reading this excerpt of the Declaration, were hearing it for the first time. Let me ask. Mr. Snerdley, when you were in school, were you required to read the Declaration? Dawn was not. Brian can’t remember.
I was taught the Declaration. Snerdley was made to learn it, read it. But the other two here weren’t. Probably par for the course. So let me jump forward to the end of this paragraph, which, again, is listing and categorizing the atrocities of the king, which, in part, demand independence and is, as such being declared in the document.
“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
Now, the Texas newspaper, the Liberty County Vindicator, is unsure why this whole paragraph was removed by Facebook. But their guess is that it is the use of the term “merciless Indian savages.” That has to be what — there’s nothing else, unless the listing of violence and disturbing acts and so forth.
I’ll guarantee you that because of their bigotry and because of their bias and their ignorance at Facebook, the term “Indian savages” probably red alerted these people at Facebook, and they thought they had a four alarm fire and emergency. And they had to run in and remove it. This is how they were characterized by the Founding Fathers who wrote the declaration. It’s history. It’s what the document says. You can’t sanitize it, although they’re trying to.
You know, folks, this is not much different — there was an official in the Washington, D.C., city government. And during a debate in the city government on the city’s budget, this guy used the word “niggardly” to describe the spending habits of the some of the members of the city government. This guy was fired. He was fired, he was sent to reeducation camp. “You can’t use the N-word. What’s the N-word got to do with budgets?”
Well, it wasn’t the N-word. It was n-i-g-g-a-r-d-l-y. But nobody knew this, particularly in the Washington, D.C., government. It’s like this guy who was a sportscaster at ESPN who got fired for describing I think it was Serena Williams’ guerrilla tactics approaching the net in tennis. Remember this, Snerdley? People said, “He just called her a gorilla. You can’t call her gorilla. Oh, my God, that’s horrible.” No. No. Guerrilla, g-u-e-r-i-l-l-a. It’s a swarming military style of attack. It’s not g-o-r-i-l-l-a. It is not the beast supposedly from which we all came.
But if that’s the case, why are they still around? If we came from apes, why are there still apes? But this is the level of stupidity and ignorance that then has the power of these people to enforce all kinds of racism and bigotry and prejudice behind the ignorance. So a guy who uses the proper word to describe spendthriftedness and then a sportscaster describing Serena Williams’ net tactics both get blown out for essentially being racist.
And now Facebook panics because of “Indian savages” referenced in the Declaration of Independence. Facebook has now apologized to the Texas newspaper for part of the Declaration being labeled hate speech. Facebook apologized after initially flagging a post of the text of the Declaration as hate speech.
The Liberty County Vindicator in Texas posted excerpts from the document on its Facebook page, and they think that “Perhaps had Thomas Jefferson written it as ‘Native Americans at a challenging stage of cultural development’ that would have been better. Unfortunately, Jefferson, like most British colonists of his day, did not hold an entirely friendly view of Native Americans.”
Back then they were called Indian savages. Well, we can’t have that. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Panic sets in, anger. Knee-jerk reactionaryism. “Racism, racism, conservatism, bigotry,” so forth and so on. But, anyway, it’s all to the good in the end because it’s called attention to the Declaration and people, if they expose themselves to the story, they’re reading elements of the Declaration they probably never heard before, never read or what have you.
But it does illustrate what we’re up against, the sheer ignorance of so many powerful people in media, the absolute, sheer ignorance combined with their already triumphing racism, bigotry, and prejudice. We’re really being ruled by a bunch of doofuses in more ways than we can probably count.