Baltimore newspaperman H.L. Mencken once said that the trouble with fighting for human freedom, was that you often had to fight on the behalf of scoundrels and those less savory or civil.

It is hard to stick up for scoundrels, especially today as they are the chief targets of culture warriors. Back in the heyday of the Moral Majority it mostly involved the wives of politicians simply siccing their husbands against the likes of Frank Zappa and Dee Snyder. Looking back on it, it all seems almost in good fun, or at the very least good civics.

For the culture warriors of the current moment, the battlefield has shifted toward the Internet, from which it has seeped into nearly every aspect of the American experience. The goal is pretty much the same: to control the actions and speech of others.

More importantly, it can be used to attack and remove speech that runs counter to the goals of such ideological operators who typically serve as moderators and administrators on sites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit. Rather than having culture be upstream from the vagaries of political partisanship, social network platforms have been harnessed to curate and determine what culture is allowed to be.

This policing of speech and ideas on social networks caused millions of users to shift to different platforms like Gab, Odyssey, and Rumble, either out of frustration or because they were banned for violating nebulous and arbitrarily applied rules. Others would also gravitate around semi-closed chat rooms and forums on apps like Discord, Signal, and Telegram. If one can’t speak their mind in the DeFacto public square, then one has no choice but to seek out a space “safe” for such speech.

That feeling of safety is illusory even in such private and anonymized venues. The harshest but least respected reality of the Internet is found in its nature as a “selfish ledger;” an eternal and complete accounting of billions of individuals thoughts and behaviors over time. Everything is public, everything is forever, and it is optimized for search engines.

Rob Port’s exposé on the North Dakota Young Republican’s secret Telegram group has made a lot of hay castigating its users for their use of “bigoted and offensive” language. ND GOP Chairman Perrie Schafer is perfectly entitled to condemn the various candidates and young republicans for their speech and participation. That said, given the intraparty discord between established conservatives against the GOP’s young Turks and fringe populists, the whole affair seems a tad opportunistic.

The Old Guard of North Dakota politics for the most part have been spared from having their worst statements and actions recorded on the Selfish Ledger, which instead are lost to time in the echoing din of dive bars thirty to forty years ago. As disgraced state Senator Ray Holmberg illustrated for us, anyone can have a skeleton.

The golden rule if you grew up before the Internet was to keep your mischief and misdemeanors below the threshold of newsworthiness. The youth of today are essentially groomed and engineered by apps and tech companies to want nothing more than to have everything they say and do be under the public’s microscope, for better and worse.

While the ND Young Republicans face the consequence for believing they were sheltered from scrutiny, others in the state desire nothing more than exposure, and know how to bait the basilisk of outrage culture for their own ends.

Look no further than Keith Hapip Jr. and his Facebook page crusading to protect children from all ages drag queen events. Utilizing nothing more than publicly shared images and available information, Hapip has made dozens of posts identifying drag queens and the organizers of events. Despite thousands of reports and complaints, Facebook has not yet banned Hapip or his page.

In response, LGBTQ activists and drag supporters have returned the favor tenfold by urging local vendors to boycott his woodworking business and for him to be fired from his job and removed from his position on the Washburn city council. Neither party in this is interested in hearing from the other, but needs the other as an antagonist to rationalize their activism.

The whole fiasco around the Pledge of Allegiance and the Fargo School Board is driven by the same partisan push and pull. When former board member David Paulson first proposed saying the Pledge, it was in and of itself a political statement, which ironically didn’t improve his chances of winning. The act of removing it by the freshly elected board was one as well.

Simply reverting back to old precedent without comment may have kept the story local. Their comments on why they chose to make the decision were really what sparked the flame. No one can possibly condone the nastiness directed their way, especially in the racist messages received by board member Nyamal Dei. However, they would have had to be utterly aloof to not anticipate the reaction it would receive and how quickly it would be fed into the outrage machine nationally.

The whole silly process of adding the pledge, ceasing the pledge and bringing it back is all part of the kayfabe kabuki theater that renders everything political indistinguishable from professional wrestling, but that just speaks to the civic deficit our culture is afflicted by.

The back end of that Mencken quote points out the obvious truth that tyranny always looks to the scoundrel first, and it must be stopped there and then, if it is to be stopped from going further. Based on the rhetoric, more and more people have come to the conclusion that such policies haven’t gone far enough in censoring things they don’t want to hear, and inflicting consequences on people who do not adopt compelled speech and beliefs they prefer.

Policing the beliefs and speech of others destroys any chance of dialogue occurring in good faith. All we are left with is cultural rot, with our present stripped of all virtues and history. The end result is a demoralized society drug down into the mire, where we’re all better off not saying anything at all.

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