In America, the First Amendment allegedly guarantees the right of the people to publicly speak and debate public issues. It also guarantees the right to peaceably assemble for political activities. Most important, it guarantees the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. It used to be that every American child learned this in grammar school civics. It was the defining concept of what it meant to be an American. It is what distinguished Americans from other citizens and subjects of the world.

The only people talking about free speech these days are fringe heretics in the Dissident Right. All of our best people now agree that the only way for the people to be truly free is to require everyone to get permission from the authorities in order to have an opinion. It is the only way to keep the peace in a multicultural society. After all, diversity is our strength and nothing is more sacred than our diversity. Therefore questioning diversity is no different than calling for violent revolution. We embrace all opinions, except the wrong ones.

The trouble our betters have is that the pesky First Amendment is still a part of the Constitution. Passing crime-think laws in America is much more difficult than it is in a modern utopia like China. Unsurprisingly, the way around this problem, the inspiration, comes from China. Instead of having the government censor speech, the government leans on monopolistic “private companies” to police the media. It’s not an accident that the tech giants all worked with the ChiComs to build out the Great Fire Wall of China.

America is now a world where you need permission to speak. If you post heretical material on social media, the tech giants shut off your access. If you keep at it and find ways around the censors, the authorities send the mass media after you. That’s what happened with this fry cook in Ohio. He kept saying unapproved things, so the Times was sent in to investigate and raise awareness. He is now in the process of being un-personed. Thank goodness Carlos Slim is here to defend us from these people!

Most Americans look at these complaints about speech and just roll their eyes. After all, they still have thirteen flavors of the same official opinion on their cable system and, let’s face it, the only people complaining about this stuff are bad people. The trouble, of course, is that this stuff never stops with the bad people. Having found a clever way to get around Constitutional limits on the state, the people in charge are now applying these new techniques to get around the fundamentals of self-government.

That’s what we see here with this story about the credit rating agency Moody’s, dictating policy to cities and towns.

Coastal communities from Maine to California have been put on notice from one of the top credit rating agencies: Start preparing for climate change or risk losing access to cheap credit. In a report to its clients Tuesday, Moody’s Investors Service Inc. explained how it incorporates climate change into its credit ratings for state and local bonds. If cities and states don’t deal with risks from surging seas or intense storms, they are at greater risk of default. “What we want people to realize is: If you’re exposed, we know that. We’re going to ask questions about what you’re doing to mitigate that exposure,” Lenny Jones, a managing director at Moody’s, said in a phone interview. “That’s taken into your credit ratings.”

Americans have figured out that climate change is mostly a racket cooked up by rich people and fanatics to skim money from the public. Americans are willing to go along with low-cost virtue signalling, like toting around grimy canvas sacks to the food market, but no one is on-board with returning to the Bronze Age to please Gaia. As a result, local politicians will pay lip service to global warming, but they have no interest in acting on it, even when offered bribes. It’s a good way to get voted out of office.

The way around this is to have private firms do what the stupid voters refuse to do.That’s compel government to enact the polices the greens demand. No one can get mad at Moody’s. They are just a private firm acting in their interests. Unless you’re some sort of America-hating commie, you must support private business. This is just how the market place works. You’re not against the free market, are you? It’s not hard to imagine a time when credit agencies and banks assign credit ratings to politicians in advance.

In 1881, Pope Leo XIII commissioned a study of what is now called corporatism. The result was a definition that imagined society as an organism. Within the organic state were natural groupings of men, to whom the state delegated power to organize labor and capital, on behalf of the state, within their sphere of control. A generation later, the Charter of Carnaro was a constitution built on these concepts. Most historians view this as the direct precursor to Italian fascism.

The point is that cooperation between private interests and public interests is not a new thing in Western society. What’s new to our age is the scale and power of private interests. Under fascism, the state defines society and everything is subordinated to the state. In our age, the roles will be reversed. The “private” interests will define the state and public interests will be subordinate. The state, of course, will exist only as a theoretical construct, as borders and boundaries are antithetical to global interests.

From the perspective of the modern elites, it is an ideal solution to the problems of self-government, democracy and multiculturalism. Instead of government representing the various interest groups in society, government will now look like a corporate HR department. It will safeguard the interests of senior management. Instead of town hall meetings where citizens address their elected officials, we’ll have leadership seminars where management shares their vision with the populace.

This will not end well.