Shutting You Up – Being Canceled by the Political Left’s Perfect Rhetorical Fortress

Over at Facebook I often post news items (from X) that people won't see if they get their "news" from legacy outlets. In response, many people have tried to belittle me with many flavors of ad hominem attacks. It's amazing to see grown adults resort to such tactics. They also use many other tactics, most of which are described in an excellent book by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott: The Canceling of the American Mind.

I asked Grok 3 to summarize the tactics often used by people on the political far Left against anyone who disagrees, including people like me who had for many years voted for Democrats. No longer. I don't recognize the current Democratic Party and I abhor many of their positions, such as pro-war, pro-censorship, race-essentialism and advocating for confused teenagers to undergo permanent life-changing surgeries and sterilization through cross-sex hormones and so-called "puberty blockers."

When I criticize these positions on social media it doesn't take long for the attacks to start. Many of these attacks have been described in Chapter 6 of The Canceling, "The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress." These are not attempts to communicate. Rather, they are attempts to shut people up, to cancel them. I asked Grok to summarize these "barricades." Here's Grok's response (which I reviewed for accuracy):

These tactics are described as "barricades" that form an impregnable fortress, protecting the user from having to address arguments on their merits. Below is a summary of the 11 barricades as presented in the chapter, based on the book’s framework:

Fasco-Casting This barricade involves labeling someone as "conservative," "right-wing," "far-right," "fascist," or even "neo-confederate," regardless of their actual beliefs. By associating the speaker with a negatively perceived ideology, their arguments can be dismissed outright as inherently bad or unworthy of consideration.

Are You a Man or a Woman? This tactic questions whether the speaker’s gender disqualifies them from speaking on certain issues. For example, men might be told they can’t discuss women’s issues, creating a barrier based on identity rather than the argument’s validity.

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Trump’s Free Speech Report Card

I was happy to hear Trump's strong rhetoric on free speech. Unfortunately, he is making major missteps in the real world. Matt Taibbi is also concerned. This is an excerpt from Matt's article at Racquet News, "If Trump Blows it on Speech, the World is ScrewedWith civil liberties flatlined around the globe, Donald Trump is blowing off the First Amendment at the worst conceivable time":

China guarantees free speech, unless it undermines “the interests of the state.” You can be fined 14.7 million yuan for comparing the army to a squirrel. In Russia jails are filling with regime critics, while papers like Novaya Gazeta are forced to suspend publication until after the Ukraine war. British police routinely conduct speech raids against offenders across the spectrum, Germany boasts about its thought cops on 60 Minutes, and the EU’s vast censorship law, the Digital Services Act, just played a role in helping overturn an election result in Romania. Around the world, from Ukraine to Australia to Israel to India, free expression is in full retreat.

That leaves America, where the First Amendment is the last obstacle to a global movement toward bureaucratization of speech. In last year’s campaign Donald Trump and J.D. Vance rightly ran against the speech excesses of the Democratic Party, with Vance saying views on censorship constituted the “biggest difference” between Trump and Kamala Harris, and Trump upon inauguration naming censored figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to high office. The administration initially acted like it understood the gravity of the situation, with Vance confronting Europe over its civil liberties crackdowns. They seemed to know what they wanted to achieve on this issue.

That operation is now hanging by a thread. Trump is suddenly blowing it on speech in a big way, with two big categories of screw-ups: pandering to Israel, and reaching into the same emergency-power cookie jar that foreign counterpart-jackasses like Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz and Thierry Breton have recently raided, in efforts to suppress populist movements like Trump’s own. Once he jumps on this bandwagon, we’re all screwed, because there’s nowhere left to run.

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A Tale of Two Informational Ecosystems

For years it has been increasingly difficult for me to have a give-and-take conversation with a Democrat. I've voted almost entirely with the Democrats all my life, and I remain committed to what were, more or less, the Democratic values that were known and accepted by the far majority of Democrats 10 to 15 years ago: anti-war, anti-censorship, don't judge people by irrelevant characteristics like the way they look, deference to the family re how to raise children, etc.

Now it is almost impossible to talk. My guiding assumption is that almost all people think and act rationally based upon what they know and believe. We live in two primary informational ecosystems, however, and the one embraced by most self-proclaimed modern day Democrats has ever-fewer connection points with those who are not in that tribe. It is for that reason that I have, indeed, been posting X links to my FB page, to the the dismay of what turns out to be a smallish group of very loud people who respond almost entirely with ad hominem attacks. I also receive many private messages thanking me for sharing these posts, many of these also adding that they can't "like" or res-hare my links because of social and economic repercussions. Such a sad state of affairs.  BTW, Elon Musk has encouraged the sharing of X posts to those who are still trapped in the Matrix:

I try to explain what I'm doing on FB and why, but it's difficult to see much progress. In this way, the resistance to free speech and fear of wide-open discussion seems so much like a religion! Here's one of my recent FB posts:

If you eat shitty food, your body will suffer. If you ingest shitty information, you will act "rationally" on the basis of that bad information. If you are extremely smart, you will think and act extremely well on behalf of that shitty information. There are thousands of Iago-equivalents on on the federal payroll. Their job is to insidiously gain control of your brain so that (in the case of modern-day Democrats) you'll become pro-censorship, pro-war and and a big believer in race-essentialism (among many other things). In short, you'll become the opposite of what you were 10 years ago, you won't know why you did the 180 and you won't even be concerned that you have betrayed many of your deepest convictions.

Before you weigh in on any issue of national importance, the first question you need to ask yourself is whether your world view has been hijacked by US censorship and propaganda. The "misinformation" and "malinformation" system is extremely sophisticated, developed over the decades by deep state experts. Based on recent disclosures, legacy media have been significantly funded by USAID and other federal sources for many years, going back to Project Mockingbird and beyond. Whether you are "smart" has nothing to do with it. Your only hope is to read widely and read news sources that conflict with each other so you can weigh the evidence for yourself. This will take too much work for many people. They will get fatigued and stick with U.S. approved "news" sources and they are the most over-confident people here on FB.

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FFFO Report: EU, Financed by U.S. Taxpayers is Trying to Shut Down Free Speech in the U.S

Excerpt from a new must-read report issued by the Foundation for Freedom Online: "23 US-Funded Organizations Drive The EU’s War on Tech Companies."

The American taxpayer is bankrolling online censorship in Europe. Multiple organizations involved in enforcing the EU’s draconian Digital Services Act (DSA), which imposes massive fines on American tech platforms found guilty of carrying “misinformation” or “hate speech,” are American entities backed by American government funding.

Supporters of these efforts, many of whom are deeply tied to the legacy US foreign policy establishment, admit that the goal of these efforts is to shut down free speech for Americans. The pressure is about to mount, as the previously-voluntary EU code of practice on disinformation becomes a mandatory regulation governing tech companies operating in the region.

The Foundation for Freedom Online has analyzed organizations that signed the EU’s code of practice, or are involved in enforcing it, finding eight organizations that receive funding from US government sources.

Additionally, two of the organizations on the list, NewsGuard and Bellingcat, are drectly involved in enforcing the EU’s censorship regime, as active participants in Europe’s network of EU-backed “digital observatories” aimed at detecting disfavored online narratives that can be analysed and targeted for censorship.

Who are these U.S. funded entities that are working overtime to deny Americans their right to free speech?  The above report names the names. And it is all looking incredibly ominous. The bottom line is that the U.S. right to free speech is being attacked by "foreign" entities that are financed by U.S. taxpayers. Americans are afflicted with the free speech version of an auto-immune dysfunction. Here is more from the report:

As the Foundation for Freedom Online highlighted in its 2024 Censorship Index, the U.S. government also pushed censorship in Europe through the State Department’s office of public diplomacy:

Gave the Atlantic Council a $300,000 grant to build a “transatlantic response to disinformation.” This grant was seemingly used to fund a conference involving conversations about cooperating on the EU Digital Services Ac (DSA)t. A grant transaction description mentions a June 2022 conference.

The Delegation of the EU to the United States and the Atlantic Council hosted a June 2022 EU-US Defense and Future Forum. During the conference, members of an audience, which included officials from the U.S. State Department, asked questions to and attended a talk by Gerard De Graaf on the EU-US Digital Policy Agenda, largely centered around the DSA.

Gerard De Graff was the Director of Digital Transformation at the European Commission. He is responsible largely for the creation of the DSA. De Graff was named Special Envoy for Digital to the US and head of the newly created EU San Francisco Office in September 2022, seemingly fitted near Silicon Valley to push American tech platforms into compliance with Orwellian European regulations.

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Nadine Strossen: Strongly Enforced Hate-Speech Laws Existed in Post-WWI Germany

Nadine Strossen discusses the "Weimar Fallacy." Strong hate speech laws prior to WWII in Germany shoved hate speech underground, out of sight, where it festered and grew. The better alternative would be to let the people say their hateful things out in the open market where their ignorance will be forced to engage with ideas that are better than hate. Strossen explains:

For more on this topic, see Greg Lukianoff's article, "Would censorship have stopped the rise of the Nazis."

Continue ReadingNadine Strossen: Strongly Enforced Hate-Speech Laws Existed in Post-WWI Germany