Shades of the oppressive, evil Catholic Church.

The left will never cease pointing to the Catholic Church as the apotheosis of all that is oppressive, hypocritical, and intellectually dishonest in human affairs. E.g., church insistence on incorrect astronomical theories.

But the eventual dominance of the heliocentric view of the solar system did not eliminate all forms of obscurantism. Rather, intellectual dishonesty has roared back to life, if not ruinous domination, with the advent of a vengeful new priesthood that presides over a new and improved regime of thought control:

It was not until 1758, more than 200 years after the death of Copernicus, that the Church finally revoked a general ban on all books that advocated a heliocentric view of the universe.

However, even after lifting its ban, the Church only allowed public access to heavily censored versions of Galileo’s Dialogue and Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus. Surely if a widely accepted lie could persist as the truth among the masses for centuries as a result of those in power suppressing fact, then many similar instances today are possible. Today, the executives at Google (who also owns YouTube) and Twitter have become the modern day equivalent of the ancient Roman Catholic Church by deplatforming, demonetizing and shadowbanning all social media channels that forward any narratives that disagree with their own, even censoring results from internet searches (in the case of Google).^[1]

This modern private tyranny is far worse than the very limited one of old. Even Galileo got papal approval to lay out the heliocentric view of the solar system as long as he did not go so far to advance that theory over the other, if memory serves me. Galileo was so stupid as to write in a dialogue form in which the thinly-disguised character of the Pope was made to look like a moron. Was he punished for his unorthodox scientific views or for gratuitously insulting the Pope? As I don't subscribe to the automatic demonization of all rulers and institutions prior to Saint Franklin, my money is on the table where it says "Dumbasses get their just desserts."

There is NO area of modern life that isn't fatally infected with widespread lunacy. But the time-tested corrective of free inquiry is unavailable to our whole culture. Jail, economic ruin, loss of children, and attack by free-range leftist thugs are all widespread weapons wielded against the normal, let alone against cutting-edge free thinkers. These are the weapons of first resort used by the Treason Class to maintain the delusions of the age.

Western civilization has not evolved to some colorful redoubt of liberty and rationality in a sea of primitives but has slid into a swamp of pettiness and vindictiveness that is a disgrace to our ancestors. And ourselves.

Notes
^[1] "The Death of Capitalism, Redux for 2019." By maalamalama, ZeroHedge, 7/27/19.