I recently joined X, wrote about X’s owner, Elon Musk (see here) and attacks on free speech (see here). Today, I want to bring all three together with the minimal going over of old ground.

I admit to an active long-term interest in social media, especially Facebook, and to a lesser extent WhatsApp. I do so because I learn a lot and, while there is danger of over obsession and toxicity, I find these are useful resources. While there is a lot of nonsense or stuff that doesn’t interest me, overall, it is often a surprisingly helpful way to communicate and share ideas. It is a means for knowing what “friends” and acquaintances are up to and their perspectives on life. I often find a lot that is of interest just by scrolling down my Facebook home page along with stirring “thoughts for the day”. It provides me with a useful platform for sharing information and ideas (in my case, with the many who follow me or are “friends”).

The downside has been that Facebook does censor free speech under the guise of maintaining their community standards and I have spent time in Facebook jail for expressing an opinion. I have even had harmless memes (imho) taken down (like that above). This became especially apparent during the Covid pan(scam,plan)demic, when posting a view that didn’t fit the official narrative could get you deplatformed and kicked off, and in my case that is what happened.

I have been long aware of X (formerly Twitter) but, until recently, I had decided not to be an X user, at least until recently. The main reason for this long delay was that the sort of people I had most to do with preferred Facebook over Twitter. Also, the censorship was every bit as harsh as Facebook, at least until Elon Musk took over, when it became to a significant extent the free speech platform that is much needed in this age of misinformation when the only views deemed acceptable by those in control, were the views that those in control approved off. For all his faults, some detailed in my recent blog, Musk has done a great service along with what he has achieved thus far on behalf of DOGE and rooting out USAID corruption.

I check out what is posted on X mainly to study the thoughts of those with something worth saying. Two that spring to mind fulfilling that criteria are: Katie Hopkins and Andrew Bridgen. But my enthusiasm for X, as yet only as an irregular visitor, isn’t without reservation. For all its faults and mysterious algorithms that appear (refreshingly) to favour the awake deplorables over the acquiescent awoke, I can scroll down my X homepage and I find a lot of stuff that isn’t worth giving attention to and, I daresay, is it because X has had me sussed out as a sort of person who may be interested.

Even so, I want an alternative take on what is going on in the world that is significant to that offered by likes of the BBC, CNN, MSNBC and the Guardian, that often fails to do this, and often it can be found on X. In short, X provides me with helpful insights into things that are going on I deem important even though it does lend itself to angry types wanting to vent their anger, because they now can on X, and not enough imho balanced insights and measured commentary. At the same time, while pushing back for a season the prospect of Orwell’s dystopian nightmare, not so dissimilar to what some of those powerful opposers to free speech want to bring in through censorship – or is it all just a bad dream, part of the pantomime?

While many of the people I consider as being in the “baddie” camp disapprove of X and offer reasons like protecting people from misinformation, in the main I disagree for reasons that I often cite in my forays into the blogosphere. X, along with resources such as Telegram, UK Column, Rumble and Bitchute, I consider good alternatives to mainstream media etc. Whether recent X outages were as a result of attacks by said baddies who see their lies and nefarious plots being exposed by the likes of X, is matter for debate and we still don’t know enough to be sure, but the danger of losing such platforms is a real one, as we see free speech being taken down.

The truth about UK mass immigration, including the role of Islam, the war in Ukraine and issues I mentioned in my recent blog on the subject, the Romanian presidential election and attempts to exclude the populist front runner and the targeting of Christians for attack and worse by the new regime in power in Syria are four examples why we need an alternative to the mainstream media and for all their faults (X and Musk) they have given us hope. They do so alongside the new US administration, evidenced by J.D.Vance’s speech at the Munich security conference, when he took UK/EU leaders to task in their shutting down free speech. But always, there are reservations and none are immune from spreading propaganda.

In my last blog, where I reflected on the depressing state of British politics, I bore reference to this phenomenon and that ordinary people are being punished for offering views deemed by the establishment as being unacceptable, noting often people who are incensed over some wrong too often respond unwisely, yet their punishment is often disproportionate to other “crimes” that receive lesser punishment or aren’t even investigated. History shows us numerous examples of free speech being shut down and what happens to those who speak out of turn. In more recent times, this is not just confined to the likes of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. It is happening in my country right now and it could get worse. All of which begs the question of how best can we respond?

I’ll begin with a response some nice Christian friends may not approve of and are depicted by two memes before the start and at the end of this paragraph. In Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, there is a scene involving a man wanting to be a woman and being ridiculed for it. It has come to light recently as something best excluded as being politically incorrect, even though original cast members have stuck by their guns wanting the scene retained. Then there is Ricky Gervais presenting the Oscars and calling out the Hollywood elites for wrong doing. These two examples give me heart because, while free speech is under massive attack, it is far from dead and people are standing up and asking the right questions that “they” (whoever they are) don’t want us to ask, who would rather we kept quiet.

Then there is a response my nice Christian friends should approve off although maybe not in its entirety. On my mind there is the fact that the rise of Nazism was made possible, partly because of its suppression of free speech, while many of the nice Christians around at the time, with some notable exceptions, like Deitrich Bonhoeffer, chose to keep silent as all too often is happening now. We are called to seek, speak and live truth as well as to exercise wisdom in our choice of words and knowing when to speak and to whom.

Moreover, we are called to trust and hope in God, and Him alone. I end though with the words of the Psalmist, living in exile in Babylon, and like him as I watch on my wall at happenings around me taking place, it is also like a dream, but one from which we can take hope!