“When they come for you they will talk like social workers.”

Tucker Carlson and other pundits on the right are anticipating the oligarchy soon will undertake a wholesale rooting out of all dissident thought, speech and expression in America, though it will be undertaken via the most polite and fastidiously therapeutic language.

Yet, it’s worth pointing out that that a de facto form of censorship arguably has existed for quite some time in America. Before the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the advent of the Internet, about the only method available to any genuine dissenter was handing out mimeographed publications on a street corner or at a mass event, such as a concert or college football game. Better-funded forms of moderate dissent – the sort of dissidence regarded as palatable to the managerial liberal elites, such as William F. Buckley’s National Review – were available through U.S. Mail.

As a teenager in the mid-Seventies, I can remember regarding myself as something of a dissident simply for receiving a publication called Conservative Digest in the mail – something that caused my parents some concern because northwest Alabama was such a heavily unionized Democratic enclave at the time.

To be sure, conservatives such as William F. Buckley and James Kilpatrick, were afforded a small slice of exposure, but back then they were regarded as dissident voices in a country and culture dominated by managerial liberalism. And because the media bandwidth was so constricted and dominated at the time by managerial liberalism, elites so no harm in affording some exposure to accredited forms of dissent – after all, it aided the propaganda struggle against the Soviets.

Elites could extol free speech because all forms of genuinely threatening dissent were contained. Things changed somewhat – from the standpoint of elites, decidedly for the worse beginning in the 80’s – with the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine. Things spiraled virtually out control in the 90’s when the Internet initially developed into kind free speech Wild West. Now elites are slowly managing to rein in all of this troubling dissent. Things ultimately will return to something akin to the status quo that prevailed in the Seventies: There will be accredited venues of dissent and Establishment media organs once again will extol free speech and affirm what a singularly free nation the United States truly is.