I just saw a comment on a Facebook post about Amazon deciding not to continue hosting Parler on Amazon servers, i.e., shut Parler down. [For those who don’t know, Parler is the place many people being banned or hassled by Facebook and Twitter fled to exercise their right to speak freely.]
The comment said, “Business move, not political.”
My response to this question is: What difference does it make why Amazon and other businesses facilitate/implement the government’s desire to infringe on American’s freedom of speech? When the powers-that-be (the government, Big Tech, MSM, the Intelligencia, and others) honor people’s petitions to silence other people because the petitioners do not like what those “other people” say, more and more petitions will be made, and more and more speech will be banned. As if the tyranny of that is not bad enough, keeping up with the continually changing rules as to what is mandatory and what is forbidden can become impossible. At that point, officials can say with certainty, “Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.” Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin’s secret police.
That process can quickly devolve to the stage where loyalty oaths are mandatory (“silence is violence”), and those who do not deliver the pledge with vigor and apparent conviction are doomed. Examples of this kind of tyranny are many, but I doubt anyone has described the end of this process better than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. See the webpage linked below.
Of course, this outcome is not inevitable, but I can’t figure out what can stop the process. If unstopped, neither lambs nor wolves who do not comply will have a chance.