Political Power and the Need for Free Speech

Greg Lukianoff of FIRE:

In a democracy, the majority doesn’t need special protection for freedom of speech because their power is protected by the majority vote. The bully and the bigot easily get their way if they have the votes.

The fact is that only those with opinions that are unpopular with the majority or the ruling elite need the special protection of freedom of speech. It is not, in fact, a coincidence that the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s rights movement, and the gay rights movement (just to name a few) only really took off when the protections of the First Amendment became strongly interpreted beginning in the 1950s. Prior to that, without a strong First Amendment, those movements were easy to shut down.

But the powerful in higher education find this narrative inconvenient. This is because, frankly, they are unsatisfied with the amount of power they have over speech and thought (which is already immense, and regularly abused). They prefer a narrative in which they are still the underdog (which they've never really been) and still the hero (which they very rarely are). At the same time, they’d like to continue to censor “bad” speakers and “bad” speech — not just with new tools, but with a continued sense of self-righteousness about their authoritarian impulses.

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Mike Benz: It’s time to take apart the Death Star of government censorship.

I've followed Mike Benz for several years. He formerly worked in the US State Department. His analyses of the US censorship industrial complex are detailed and credible.

Question:

I want to ask you about the protections that we need for social media companies. How can we stop the government from being able to bully social media companies into censoring content that it dislikes.

Benz:

With control over the executive branch, it would be surprisingly easy not to take the whole thing out, but to devastate it in effectively a single blow. All you would need is an incoming day one executive order that prohibits government grants and contracts by any government agency to any outside group involved in regulating, flagging or downranking so-called "disinformation." It does what the Supreme Court should have done and said that the funding of censorship by the government is censorship by the government. So that Executive Order will allow you to go agency by agency and kill all of those grants and contracts that comprise the censorship industry. There are hundreds of 1000s of people now around the world, and 10s of 1000s of people here in the US whose full time--their paychecks, their livelihoods, their mortgages are effectively paid for by doing full-time 24/7 censorship work. This field did not exist eight years ago. It was created after the 2016 election as a response to Trump winning to stop a night like tonight where he might win again.

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RFK, Jr.’s Position on Vaccines

The corporate news, which is largely financed by Big Pharma and pressured nonstop by the U.S. security state, has lied to us for years regarding RFK, Jr.'s position on vaccines. That why so many people have sincerely looked me in the eyes and asserted that RFK, Jr. is "against vaccines" or is a "conspiracy theorist regarding vaccines."  People are free to agree or disagree with him, but responsible people should make sure they accurately understand RFK, Jr.'s position before hurling ad hominems at him out of ignorance and laziness.

Here is RFK, Jr.'s actual position regarding vaccines:

I just want to make this clear. I don't want to take vaccines away from people. I don't want to impose my choices on the American public. If vaccines are working for you, you ought to be able to get them. And I'll make sure that happens. But people should have informed choice. So they should have good science that tells them the cost and the benefits of these products, particularly since they're being ordered to use them.

76 million kids a year are required to use them. and they're healthy children. So it's the only medical product that's given to healthy people. You want a product like that to be extra solid, to make sure there's no risk, because you can take, you know, there's certain risks that you'll take if you're sick to get better. Of course. But if you're not sick, and you shouldn't be required to take a product unless it is iron-clad, unless you know what the... you know, what all the costs and benefits are.

And the problem with vaccines is that they were originally introduced by the Public Health Service, which is one of the five military services. That's why there's a surgeon general. And the Public Health Service introduced them and pushed them as a national security defense against biological attacks on our country. So they wanted to make sure that if the Russians attacked us with anthrax with some other biological agent They could quickly formulate a vaccine and then deploy it to 220 million American civilians without regulatory impediments.

A normal Medical product takes about eight years to get to market because it has to go through double-blind placebo controlled trials And you need to see long-term effects. There are many effects On every medical product that have long diagnostic horizons long incubation periods They didn't want to go through that because they said it's going to be a national emergency. So instead of calling it a medicine, we're going to call it a biologic and we're going to exempt biologics from pre-licensing safety studies.

So there's no vaccine on that schedule, that 72 vaccines, that has ever gone through a pre-licensing safety study placebo-controlled trial against a real placebo. And that's wrong because that means that nobody knows what the risk profiles are on these products. And nobody can tell you whether that product is averting more problems than it's causing.

And what I will do, you know, if I'm given this job in the White House, is I'll make sure that those studies get done, that there are people on the panels that approve these products that are not loaded with conflicts of interest. So it's real science. disinterested people and that doctors and patients and Americans know exactly what the costs and benefits of every vaccine are and can make a rational decision.

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Real Education

John Leake:

People who go to university and receive professional training generally obtain higher social status and incomes, and this fosters their belief that they are educated. This is especially true of medical doctors, who undergo far more training that almost every other professional.

However, it seems to me that a true education only begins when one graduates from college, and it never ends until one’s dying day. Common sense tends to decline with college education, but then returns as one continues on the path of experience and diligent learning.

People sometimes ask my why Drs. Peter McCullough and Paul Marik broke ranks with so many of their academic medical colleagues during the pandemic.

“Because they continued performing investigative scholarship while most of their colleagues sat on their hands and waited for guidance from Fauci’s NIAID,” I replied. In other words, most medical doctors in the United States acted more like clerics deferring to orthodoxy than true scholars.

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