David for Liberty
I completed Ballotpedia’s survey about me, which included questions about my positions on various issues. You’re welcome to review my responses to that survey. If you have questions about me, then please contact me anytime to ask them.
Facebook is threatening to delete my official campaign page soon due to reports that I am defying its policies somehow.
I’m not currently clear which policies they suspect that I’m violating. Initially, it appeared that they were citing copyright violations, but I’ve been using a mix of both public domain images and free stock images, which is perfectly legal. Afterward, it appeared that they were concerned that I was posting violence, nudity, and/or harassment, but these concerns seem unjustified to me. But I worry that, even if there’s no justification for it, then I might still get censored anyway.
I’m a staunch advocate for free speech. I oppose public censorship; I believe that private censorship is legal but unwise.
For whomever it may interest and for whatever it may be worth, I share this letter that I wrote in 2020 to Facebook policymakers…
To whom it may concern:
I joined Facebook in 2007, and I’ve enjoyed using it regularly since 2011 to openly discuss my three passions of religion and family and politics, along with other subjects that interest me. I’ve had no issues with Facebook’s policies to thwart use of its platform for attempted rights-violations like murder or rape or theft, nor to curb pornography. But, since about 2018, I’ve felt appalled by Facebook’s newer policies to silence disfavored viewpoints, whether conservative or merely “fringe.”
I respect that, in accordance with both property rights and contractual rights, Facebook’s owner has a right to impose reasonable rules upon those who use Facebook’s virtual property, just like I have a right to set reasonable rules for guests in my physical home. And, just as I can rightfully kick guests out of my house for expressing opinions that I dislike, Facebook can likewise rightfully ban users from its website for expressing opinions that it disfavors.
However, having a right to do something doesn’t innately make it right to do. And, whenever one person has freely chosen to exercise his/her right to do something foolish, it’s another person’s right (and moral but not legal duty) to freely choose to try to convince that wrongdoer of the error of his/her ways. And that’s why why I’m writing this letter to you today, not because I “hate” you, but because I care enough about you (and my fellow users) to say that…
Open dialogue (not censorship) is innately the best way to correct error, to spread truth, and to make progress, whether as individuals or as societies.
Silencing “wrong” opinions from being freely expressed may superficially seem like a more-effective alternative, but it’s lazy and brutish and uncivilized—and, more importantly, it not only fails to change anyone’s hearts-or-minds for the better but, by forcibly concealing errors from public view, it actually deprives us of opportunities to do so. Or, in other words, correcting error requires addressing error, and error can’t be addressed if it’s not first expressed.
And this is equally true in cases of alleged “hate speech,” which is perhaps overdiagnosed. For example, I believe that it’s foolish to sell oneself deeply into financial bondage to buy frivolous things, but my saying so doesn’t indicate that I’m a hate-filled “debtophobe.” Even if someone’s beliefs are truly rooted in feelings of hatred, then their heart will improve only through persuasion. Coercion can change only outward behavior, instead, and only for as long as it continues.
And, sometimes when we attempt to correct other people, they might correct us instead. To err is human, and we mere mortals are all human, so who among us is fit to judge the truth for everyone else? I’m not, and neither are you. Each of us has an equal God-given (or natural) right to express our perspectives freely, and none of us mere mortals should ever presume ourselves so superior in our correctness that we should habitually prohibit others from contradicting us.
But arrogant people sometimes believe that they are fit to silence any views that diverge from their own, and we sometimes foolishly entrust such people with sufficient power to do so. And this is why conservatives executed Socrates, Catholics suppressed Galileo’s astronomical observations, Nazis burned great works of literature and science, and Soviets denied the science of genetics. Such censors can potentially silence actual errors, also, but it’s safer to leave this task to open dialogue.
One reason that open dialogue is safer than empowering an “expert” to curate everyone else’s communications is this: that, amidst such curated discussion, people might cease to develop their own capacity to discern truth from error, resulting in rampant intellectual laziness and excessive deference. Over time, such a servile society, while impaired in its ability to discern, could become increasingly ripe for captivity in other respects, including subjugation by domestic tyrants.
As Nazi book-burning showed, private censorship can serve as a stepping-stone toward public censorship. And state censorship is significantly worse because politics (more than most professions) naturally attracts the virtuous less than the corrupt, especially the corrupt who habitually deceive for personal gain. We should never entrust such serial liars to operate a Ministry of Truth, which they’d likely use to propagandize us into captivity. Tyranny is naturally facilitated by censorship.
So, whether as a public entity or a private one, let’s please never habitually cast “wrongthink” down the “Memory Hole” by annihilating years of users’ social-media posts. Deleting user accounts is arguably the electronic equivalent of book-burning, which we should leave in history books, rather than revive for the Information Age. As book-burning target Heinrich Heine once wrote, “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings,” and history sadly proved him correct.
So, it’s better to simply let all users freely express their own views as equals, develop their own respective capacities to discern, attempt to both correct error and spread truth, and let the truth speak for itself until it ultimately prevails, even if/when some errors prove unusually stubborn… all without some arrogant self-appointed “expert” distorting the process. In other words, please stop censoring any user content except to thwart rights-violating activity and/or unsolicited pornography.
So, those are my thoughts about this subject, for whatever they may be worth, and I hope that you can sense the truth in them. The pen is mightier than the sword, I believe, which is why the Roman empire has long turned to dust while Christianity endures. And I hope that these timeless concepts of free speech will prove similarly enduring, despite aberrations like Facebook’s. In any case, I thank you for taking a few moments of your valuable time to consider my views about this subject.
David Edward Garber
P. S. This contemplative FEE Out of Frame episode linked below shows how Mark Zuckerberg could have responded to Congress’ efforts to pressure Facebook to censor itself. I’m sad that he chose a very different course for now. Perhaps next time?
– David Edward Garber
Please stand firmly for open dialogue rather than censorship. Please help others to do likewise. Please do so while you still can.
UPDATE: I felt relieved to discover that this was merely a scammer’s attempt to hack my account, not Facebook’s attempt to delete my account. Even so, I worry about ongoing federal attempts to secretly collude with social-media companies to censor disfavored opinions, and I know too many people personally whom Facebook has censored or even banned. Such behavior is unworthy of a free society like ours should be. Please champion open dialogue and please vote accordingly!
I thank both the City of Orem and Stand for Orem for interviewing me in June about my motives, skills, experiences, priorities, solutions, and related topics. I’m embedding both of those videos below for whomever they may interest.
This evening, Orem’s Planning Commission hosted an Imagine Orem Station Workshop, which I attended as a thoughtful observer.
This workshop’s purpose was to invite Orem’s residents to provide their input to the commission as part of its “visioning” process to devise central plans for Orem’s land-use surrounding the UTA FrontRunner’s Orem station. And, so, its participants got to play at central economic planning, imagining where local homebuilders might construct what sorts of houses, where local businesses might operate what sorts of stores, where local politicians might provide what sorts of recreational facilities, et cetera, after which they presented their land-use maps for consideration.
I understand that this visioning exercise was funded by the Mountainland Association of Governments (MAG), by the way, which is a local regional-planning organization. Although this meeting’s hosts generally favored zoning for high-density housing served by heavily-subsidized mass-transit, which is often favored by those who prefer overgrown government for various reasons, most participants favored zoning for single-family housing instead, an an exercise of political power to try to preserve Orem’s current character as Family City USA. Which is very understandable.
But I favor a third option, which I believe is even better, which is to end zoning entirely. Although I like municipal planning for expanding public infrastructure to keep-up with municipal growth, I assert that municipal planning goes too far whenever it dares to oversteps those limits (including via zoning) to infringe upon land rights. Respecting private property rights decentralizes power and enables property owners (within the limits of their rights) to make their own plans about their own property—and the plans of the many are generally far superior to the plans of the few.
Sadly, municipal zoning has become so commonplace that most Americans don’t question it—but we should! Zoning’s alleged benefits involve forcing markets to do what they’d generally already do freely on their own, but at a terrible price. Zoning’s burdensome costs are that it curtails development, reduces competition, reduces housing supplies while raising housing costs, mandates false “order” and/or aesthetics over genuine needs, excludes “undesirables,” wastes people’s valuable time with needless paperwork, retards economic progress, and lowers standards-of-living.
Zoning laws, combined with other burdensome regulations, are causing America’s housing costs to skyrocket into a so-called “housing crisis,” which is driving Americans from single-family homes to high-density alternatives, whereas reducing such regulations would reverse this trend. And this explains why Houston, which enjoys virtually no zoning laws, also enjoys some of America’s most affordable housing, while highly-regulated Los Angeles’ skyrocketing costs-of-living are driving away its middle class in droves to more-affordable cities like… unzoned Houston.
Let’s please render Orem more like Houston and less like Los Angeles in this regard! Please read my webpage about Zoning for more.
I felt so pleased to interact with hundreds of you along Oremfest’s grand parade route today in advance of the procession—and to watch it with you afterward. I may not have a fancy car and lots of supporters distributing candy, but I have a passion for helping people to defend their rightful liberty, and I like to think that I know something about how to do it right.
And I felt very grateful for feedback from some of you about local issues like school district splits or unfair taxation policies. If there’s some local issue that YOU feel especially passionate about, then I’m eager to know about it, so please contact me about it anytime; your perspectives are very important to me, whether-or-not you ever persuade me to share them.
It’s official! I’ve filed my candidacy for Orem city councilor. I thank all those fellow Oremites who have expressed their confidence in me so far, and I’ll do my best to never disappoint you.
Since my youth, I’ve enjoyed an intense passion for politics. And, since the early 2010s (at least), I considered campaigning for public office someday, but I never felt ready for it yet for various reasons.
This status changed unexpectedly in 2021 on July 5th, when I felt strongly that I should campaign for public office and, as best as I could figure out the details, this meant for Orem city councilor in 2023.
So, in 2023 for George Washington’s Birthday (a.k.a. Presidents’ Day), I officially announced my candidacy on social-media. And now, on March 20th, I’m debuting this David for Liberty website to the world.
This website is still far from polished fully, along with both my ads and my literature, but I hope to complete it all by the end of this month and then to start engaging my neighbors in-person for springtime.
I worry that I’m also far from polished fully but, ready or not, here I go. Whether I win or lose, this campaign should provide prime opportunities both to learn and to teach, which are also among my passions.
David for Liberty