Many in this room this week are rightly celebrating Judge Terry Doughty’s decision in the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, striking down government censorship on the internet.

But if that spirit of liberty Justice Hand talked about dies, no amount of lawsuits or congressional hearings will revive it. In their book, Lukianoff and Schlott suggest that just as a person’s natural instinct is to slouch, society’s natural instinct is to censor. Is that true?

If so, that would make the last few hundred years of our history, a history of defiant political movements, astounding scientific invention, and vast outpourings of great music, art, literature, movies, even standup comedy — it would all be an aberration. But why?

[Taibbi gets to a point I recently made with Adam Baldwin on an Amiable Skeptics podcast. We have lost a shared culture, and that loss began well before the Internet arrived. It started when revisionist historians took over curricula to impose a Howard Zinn narrative about America, and then to teach American history through grievances rather than achievements, the better to separate Americans into victim classes rather than unite them as self-governing citizens. The Internet has merely accelerated this process of fragmentation; it didn’t start it. And the end result is a demand that government impose a top-down justice in public discourse rather than trusting citizens to decide for themselves what is true or false. — Ed]