Too many today strive for a movement they don’t fully understand. What the group of people that claim to be “woke”, don’t seem to understand is that the people they look up to can be the ones who are taking away their freedom, and they can’t 100% tell you that they know they aren’t being controlled, because they may have already brainwashed to think the educated people are the ones who need to be “educated”. For these reasons, we cannot develop one way of thinking, or ban words and call them “hate speech”, when it’s really a form of thought control. I understand that you don’t like the racist, or the bigot, or any form of hatred, but if you want freedom, those people must live alongside us, free of thought crimes. We can denounce them by showing that their way of thought is neither good for society but is downright inhuman. We educate them on human rights and show them that their hatred for other races or anyone is misguided. To ban their ideas, or thoughts, and call it “hate speech”, may sound like your being progressive and stopping the big bad racist, but all you’re doing is setting up the groundwork for others, in the future, to be manipulated by some group that can hijack your party, and you won’t even know the difference because you’ve already banned thought, so all they have to do is use your “logic” and you’ll buy into it. Then, over a period of time they will strip you of your thoughts, and at some point, in the future, that generation will have never known what free thought was. This may sound like some far fetched dystopian reality like Orwell’s 1984, but its partially happening today with people trying to ban words and calling it “hate speech”. You can’t control thought, no matter how good your intentions are, because it will only lead to less and less freedom. No matter how much you don’t like defending a bigots right to spew their hatred, we have to, because to tell people what they can and can’t say is the death of freedom.

This isn’t a partisan act either, even though Republicans will have you think democrats are stripping you of freedom, and Democrats will have you believe Republicans are stripping you of freedom. Somewhere in between lies the truth, and to some degree both parties may be doing things that the other party feels is limiting their freedom. Republicans fear that democrats want to take away their guns, and some extreme democrats have attempted this with the logic that if they take away guns, gun homicides and suicides will go down, which has been shown to work in some countries like Australia, but then again, from a conservative standpoint, there just isn’t enough evidence that these strict gun laws will work in America. Somewhere, in the ongoing gun debate, there is a solution, but it has not been reached because of the lack of studies, on gun safety, in America. Either way, both parties have good ideas, and both have bad ideas. Both have extreme ends of their parties that want to infringe on the rights of the other. Whether you’re Democrat, Republican, Independent, or whatever other political party you associate with, you are free to believe what you want, and we can decide on policies to benefit us all, but we must not go down the road of thinking one party is superior over the other and force the opposing party to succumb to their way of thinking.

Another infringement on thought is religion, which is constantly trying to control how people think and live. The bible is full of verse on controlling the thought of Christians, i.e., “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5) The Quran is also filled with many verses downing anyone who speaks against their religion, i.e., “For the worst of beasts in the sight of Allah, are the deaf and the dumb, those who understand not.” (Qur’ān 8:22). Religion doesn’t want people questioning their faith, and in the past, extreme violence was used, on a daily, to kill off anyone who questioned their words. Today, it’s illegal to kill people for not believing in your god, but what’s stopping an extreme religious figure from gaining power, like Hitler, and repeating the Spanish inquisition? Nowadays, religion uses politics to control what people do, i.e., constantly attempting to overturn Roe V. Wade. One of the many tactics used by politicians is to claim religious persecution when a group tries to stop laws from getting passed that will force non-believers to live their way, but if you’re the dominant religion in a country, how are you persecuted? In America, “in god we trust” is on currency, “one nation under god” is in the pledge of allegiance, Trump just had a National Day of Prayer; which is the opposite of persecution. Religion is one of the easiest tools for manipulation, especially when 2.3 billion of the world are Christian, 1.9 billion are Muslim. One of the greatest feats of religion, in modern times, is anti-intellectualism, which is the death of logic, reason and science, and has gained a lot of traction over the past few decades.

There also seems to be this movement of stopping people from criticizing thoughts, which is another form of control all together. If an atheist wants to criticize your religion because it condones bigotry, they have every right to do so, no matter how much you don’t want to hear it. Criticizing ideas is the foundation of freedom. There are a lot of groups in contemporary America that think they are on the right side of history by trying to ban people from criticizing others for no other reason than that you don’t like what they have to say. If someone wants to fat shame, inform them why it’s bad; you would be surprised how a little information on something can change someone’s whole perspective. It seems that these people want us to live one way, their way, free of criticism, which they think would make a better society by preventing people from openly discriminating, but, again, this can be taken too far. If we start telling people they can’t criticize religion, how long before a group gets into power and stops you from criticizing what you don’t agree with? Just because you don’t agree with someone criticizing you or others, doesn’t mean it should be banned. Again, this is all a form of thought control, and no matter how good your intentions are, banning thought will only cause harm, and is completely the death of freedom. So, the next time you go to join a movement, or to fight for some cause, make sure it’s not to strip someone else’s freedom, because that will eventually lead to you being stripped of your freedom.