Why the Elites Are Panicking Over Free Speech

Why are the Elites freaking out over free speech? In a mass-email to subscribers, Catherine Herridge explains:

The new super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices, and embrace transparency which can strengthen democracy. This is nothing short of an industrial revolution driven both by technology and by loss of trust in corporate media. In 2023, Human Rights lawyer Jacob Mchangama wrote about the upheaval and resulting, 'elite panic.

Elite panic is this recurring phenomenon throughout the history of free speech, where whenever the public sphere is expanded, either through new communications technology, or to segments of the population that were previously marginalized, the traditional gatekeepers, the elites who control access to information, tend to fret about the dangers of allowing the unwashed mob — who are too fickle, too unsophisticated, too unlearned — unmediated access to information. They need information to be filtered through the responsible gatekeepers and it may be even more dangerous to allow them to speak without adult supervision. That's a phenomenon that we see again and again. And we're seeing it play out now on social media. … [Elite panic is] one contributing factor to the free speech recession.

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Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson Discuss Ukraine and Propaganda

What follows is an excerpt from a Nov 20, 2024 discussion between Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson. This is a critically important discussion regarding recent developments in the Ukraine War and related U.S. Propaganda:

Glenn Greenwald [00:18:53] Tucker, there's nobody I'm certain of this in the United States, just an average, ordinary American voter who believes that their life is affected in any way by the question of who rules various provinces in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. Nobody thinks about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass, let alone eastern Ukraine. It's an incredibly complex situation there in terms of the people's allegiances, which are far closer to Moscow than they are to Kiev. The question of what that territory should be, should it be somehow autonomous, should it be used as a buffer against the West? The whole framework, as you well know, and as other people have pointed out, when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany, which was obviously an extraordinary thing for the Russians to agree to, given the Russian history in the 20th century with respect to Germany, when they opened, the Berlin Wall fell and they allowed the eastern and the western parts of Germany to reunite and to become part of the West and become part of the EU. The only concession they extracted in exchange for that was with reunification. NATO's now moving eastward, closer to our border in a country that has devastated our country twice in two world wars, invaded Russia twice, killed tens of millions of Russian citizens. The only thing we need as a security guarantee in exchange for allowing that is that NATO will never expand one inch eastward beyond what was East Germany and the United States agreed to that. And immediately in the 90s, an administration, the administration started talking about it and implementing NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia. Exactly what was promised to Gorbachev the United States would not do in exchange for them agreeing to reunification. And why? Why? Why did we need to expand eastward toward Russia. And now it's not just eastward in general. It's going directly up to the Russian border on the part of their border that has been invaded twice in Ukraine to destroy Russia. And both of those world wars, we also participated in the change of government. We removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine before his constitutional term was expired in 2014 because we perceived him as being too friendly to Moscow, which is what the Ukrainians voted for and replaced him. [U.S. State Department's] Victoria Nuland constructed a government and they was replaced by a government that was more pro-U.S.. Imagine if the Russians engineered a coup in Mexico to take out the government because they were too friendly to us and put in a hard line, pro Russian, anti-American, anti-NATO president. Imagine how threatening we would regard that as. And that's exactly what we did in Ukraine. The question is, though, this has nothing to do with the national security of the American people. No American is threatened by who governs Ukraine. What they're threatened by is what the United States is doing in Ukraine, including this most recent act.

... This is not a lame duck decision and it's not like there was any emergency to it. It wasn't there was no emergency to it. They just wanted to escalate it because they thought Trump wouldn't. And so they did.

Tucker [00:27:52] It puts us in this remarkable moment where the only adult is Vladimir Putin. This person, we've been told, is Hitler and deranged, crazy, dying of nine different kinds of cancer can't be trusted like the only reason we're not. I mean, we're all relying on his restraint. That's just a fact right now. How weird is that?

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Exhibit A: Joe and Mika Exhibit their Lack of Journalistic Principles by Bending a Knee to Trump

This video has got to be seen to be believed. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski loved and promoted Donald Trump in 2015-2016. They had Trump on their show every week for friendly call-ins, something thoroughly disreputable because it is contrary to the need for reporters to be always antagonistic and distrusting of those in power. Now memory-holed, at that same time Scarborough actively sought to be Trump’s VP. After that didn’t pan out, things then took a dramatic U-Turn. For many years, until two weeks ago, the two pundits pummeled Trump as a fascist, a white supremacist and much worse. It was non-stop hyperbolic ranting that played to an ever-dwindling audience. Until now. Glenn Greenwald explains what has been going on, playing numerous Morning Joe video clips to substantiate his claims. Watch and enjoy this exquisite story of unvarnished media whoring.

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About Trusting the Experts

We should be questioning everybody, including our tribes and our selves and then make our choices based solely on the best evidence, especially for things we are "sure" of. That is our duty as citizens. We need to dramatically remake our intensely propagandized world. Rich/powerful people are often the puppeteers of "experts" and corporate media for their own benefit, not ours. When we disagree with others, our first question should be "Where are you getting your information?" That explains differences of opinion most of the time. Consider also Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:

We live in a democracy. We don't have a priesthood here. We don't have high priests who are telling us, we're in charge of our own lives, and Americans need to do their own research. And, you know, listen, people say trust the experts. That became a mantra during COVID. I brought over 500 cases. and almost all of them involved in scientific controversy.

My job is to read science, to learn it, and to be able to read it critically. In every case I've ever brought, there's an expert on that side and an expert on this side. When I brought them, when we brought them on Santo case, there were three experts from Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and we had three experts from Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and they were saying exactly the opposite thing.

Oh, you know, saying trust the experts to me. Makes no sense at all. Trusting the experts is a function of religion and totalitarianism, it is not a function of democracy. In democracy, we question everybody.

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The NYT Presents the “News”

This paragraph from an article in the New York Times speak for itself:

Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many artificial ingredients, questioning why the Canadian version has fewer than the U.S. version. But he was wrong. The ingredient list is roughly the same, although Canada’s has natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used “for freshness,” according to the ingredient label.

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