King Charles in the 1600’s banned coffeehouses in England. Why? Because coffeehouses were places the people gathered together and talked, and they’d be a little amped up because of the coffee and they’d be feeling good with eacher other and so he put out a proclamation. I’m quoting it here:
“Restrain the spreading of false news and licentious talking of matters of state and government.” And he said that “this old discource that was going on” — this is really worth it — “that the public assumed to themselves a liberty not only in coffeehouses, but in other places in meetings, both public and private, to censor and defame the proceedings of state by speaking evil of things they do not understand and causing jealousy and dissatisfaction in the minds of my subjects.” The king’s subjects.
But I want to give you one more piece of this. The following year, he extends it to not just coffeehouses, but any place that sells coffee or chocolate or tea. And I’m not joking, by the way, this is true. And then the following year, he does another proclamation, and this one says, “Spreaders of false news or promoters of anything malicious against the state will be considered seditious.”
…Why I wanted to share that with you is that here we are on The Joe Rogan Experience which has had its share of shit flung at it for literally just having conversations — nothing more going on in here, no collection of weapons or plans to overthrow the government — and I always like to remind people that these things are not new. They’re human nature, meaning governments have done this always, and every word I just read in that thing — it’s amazing — he wanted to ban coffeehouses, and now people want to ban end-to-end encryption or anything else that will actually allow for open dialogue.
Gavin de Becker