“Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”  asked Mrs. Powell of Philadelphia as delegates departed the Constitutional Convention of 1787. “A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin replied.

Call it freedom.  Call it liberty.  It is the founding principle of the United States of America.

Our founding fathers took Rome as their example.  They dreaded the day Americans might grow complacent, and a Julius or Augustus would sweep our republic away.

Today, too many young people don’t know their Constitution and are not taught their history.  They have lost the context they need to understand and protect our rights and liberties.  Yet it is they who staff the big data companies that decide what we should think and whom may speak.

CFACT senior policy advisor Paul Driessen lays out the pressing magnitude of what’s at stake at CFACT.org:

They loathe and fear ideas, facts and questions that challenge their views and political power. Free speech and access to other people’s free speech is a clear and present danger to their perceived and asserted wisdom on fossil fuels, capitalism, man-made climate chaos, Western culture, and who should make policy decisions on energy, economics, jobs, living standards, religion, civil rights and other matters.

Their version of “free speech” thus includes – and demands – that their critics have no free speech. On college campuses, in “mainstream” and social media, on search engines, in online information libraries, even in the arts, bakeries and K-12 education, thought control and electronic book burning are essential. Despite having a 12 to 1 ratio of liberal to conservative professors, leftist college faculty, administrators and students still ban, disinvite, disrupt and physically attack conservative speakers and their hosts.

You should read Paul Driessen’s full commentary.  It’s important.

The ideals of the American revolution were contagious.  They swept the world, and France soon followed.  It didn’t take long, however, for the French to find their own Caesar in Napoleon Bonaparte.  “Liberty,” the Emperor said, “is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. Consequently, it may be repressed with impunity. Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses.”

Has America reached the point where our liberty can be “repressed with impunity?”

“Forbid it almighty God!” to echo another founding father, Patrick Henry.