Blog Post #6

The Right to Dissent and Antiwar Voices 

When looking at the website ANTIWAR.com, I immediately noticed that I had never seen anything like this before in my life. Everyone has seen the different political stories on the front page of news on almost every news outlet. In reality, when looking at websites to talk about the United States government, it’s typically always politics and, at the moment right now, about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. This can be seen in the picture on the left when one searches for American politics. 

Looking deeper into ANTIWAR.com was extremely difficult because there is so much different information on one page. Almost everything on this page, I had absolutely no knowledge these things were going on. This then brings me to the question of why have I never seen something like this before? When learning about the progressive era in class, one of the more critical things was antiwar voices being silenced for voicing their opinions. From my point of view, this must be something still going on because I haven’t seen anything of this nature before on any part of the internet. I believe from the two websites provided that the government is trying to silence antiwar voices. 

This also makes me wonder the question of is why our mainstream news is filled with so many irrelevant aspects of politics? Continuing with us, is it possible that our mainstream news is using the politics in the United States, like our former presidents, to fill up those spaces that people should use to voice their antiwar opinions? 

Looking at this on an even larger scale, this goes against our First Amendment right to dissent. Being able to voice different viewpoints is a key to our constitutional democracy. With this, the government is able to understand things that need to be changed or things that are working. Overall, the government needs to hear everyone’s voices like they are supposed to, as our constitution states, we the people. 

I find it interesting that these websites are obscure, and this is due to the fact that they are trying to stay hidden so they will not be taken down. The American Conservative website looks like your typical news website. Still, once you start looking deeper into it, you’ll notice that you most likely have not heard of or touched on the topics the mainstream media discusses. For the more obscure websites like the antiwar website, it is very busy. There are so many different things on the screen that someone could look at and not want to look further into. I feel these websites' strategies are to look very obscure or very normal to stay hidden from the government trying to silence them, as they had done in the past due to World War I.