This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video by Professor Peter St. Onge..

Recently, Elon Musk He gave a talk detailing the government’s attacks on his companies since he came out in favor of free speech and, especially, since he came out in favor of Donald Trump.

These include a host of made-up environmental rules, including a study to see if falling rockets hit sharks. It includes restrictions on SpaceX launches specifically because Elon tweets pro-Trump things. And it includes a $600,000 fine for spilling… drinking water in a desert.

It’s not a joke.

Attacking dissident companies, of course, is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. As Mussolini said, “everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

For a true authoritarian, no citizen can dissent, much less any company, which is an easy target.

Of course, in theory, this kind of thing doesn’t happen in the United States.

In theory, we imprison bureaucrats who wage a Mussolini-style legal war. Unfortunately, this has been happening since progressives imposed the administrative state about a hundred years ago.

Now burden every industry in America with a Big Brother regime, a library full of regulations, mandates, licensing boards, a bureaucratic army that, like everything the government does, is completely corrupt.

Still, before donald trump there was a certain independence. CEOs could still criticize regime slogans like mandatory racism (i.e. affirmative action) or transvestites in girls’ locker rooms if someone had been foolish enough to propose that in 2015.

Unfortunately, all that changed when the authoritarian Borg went to war with Trump, culminating in the reign of terror during COVID-19 who extinguished the slightest hint of disloyalty with an enthusiasm that would make North Korea blush.

We saw it in full color during 2020 Black lives matter unrest. Historically, about 70% of Fortune 500 CEOs vote Republican. Which means that, statistically, at least 70% of them were probably horrified by BLM’s orgy of city burnings and murders.

And yet, no Fortune 500 CEO spoke up. Now, you could say that’s because most of them are spineless cowards, and that’s true.

But look at it from their perspective: You’ve been entrusted with tens of thousands of employees, and if you speak out, rioters will come to beat them, burn down their workplaces, and leave them out of work and their shareholders without a retirement account. .

You could, like Elon, be the target of hundreds of regulators (even prosecutors in blue cities) searching for some way, any excuse, to destroy the entire company.

For a CEO with a legal duty to protect the company (and a moral duty to protect employees) it is simply too risky.

Then they fell silent. To be sure, many turned themselves in, enthusiastically jumping on the institutionalized racism of DEI or writing checks to the same rioters who burned down cities; in fact, BLM collected more than $50 billion in corporate donations.

Not since Genghis Khan has burning a city been so profitable.

But others never drank the Kool-Aid. They may have opposed the left with every fiber of their being. But they were held hostage by the rioters, the prosecutors, the regulators, even financiers like BlackRock.

So what’s next?

The solution is very easy: get rid of the administrative state. Fire the hundreds or thousands of little Mussolinis who populate every regulatory agency, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Supreme Court laid the groundwork earlier this year with its Loper Bright decision clipping the wings of bureaucrats. And Musk himself has been nominated by Trump for a special panel to dramatically reduce government waste and corruption.

The final step is for Congress to sit down and actually defund these agencies. Set them to zero. Return the money to the people. Return bureaucrats to jobs that do not involve extortion.

And let Americans once again exercise our rights without being destroyed.

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