Democrats Increasingly Embrace Censorship to Maintain Unearned Power in the Class Warfare they are Waging

Leighton Woodhouse has articulated the connections between self-proclaimed Democrats, their love affair with censorship, authoritarianism and class-warfare in the latest post at Public:

Pew has a poll out showing that Americans have become far less committed to free speech over the last five years. From 2018 to today, the percentage of Americans who favor tech companies and the US government “restricting false information online” has risen from 39% to 55%.

The 16-point increase is almost entirely attributable to Democrats: while Republicans’ support for online speech restrictions has barely budged, Democrats’ support has gone from 40% to 70% in the span of half a decade. That’s a thirty-point shift against the First Amendment.

Since 2016, Democrats have heard almost nothing from their pundits and party leaders but constant fear-mongering about the wicked souls of their fellow citizens and how the internet is a weapon to spread their evil beliefs like the zombie fungus in The Last Of Us. Through Russiagate, Covid, and the aftermath of the January 6 “insurrection,” they have been terrorized by dark warnings of rising fascism, and told again and again and again that mere exposure to bad ideas is enough for unsuspecting persons to be transformed overnight, into deranged extremists and white supremacists capable of political violence.

Concurrent with that barrage of paranoid propaganda, the party’s base has shifted radically away from working class voters and toward college-educated white liberals. As the party has become beholden to urban, credentialed professionals, it has come to adopt the prejudices of that class. When today’s diehard Democrats cast their gazes upon the vast majority of the country, two-thirds of which does not have a bachelor’s degree, they see a nation of parochial bigots, each of them one Facebook post away from being brainwashed by QAnon.

These party loyalists believe they’re resisting fascism, but they’re courting it. Every authoritarian movement has started by persuading one faction of the population that another faction, be it a minority or a majority, is a malignant threat within the body politic. In the name of neutralizing that threat, the authoritarian party demands the abridgment of rights and liberties, beginning with political pluralism. And that starts with policing the opposition’s speech.

The Democratic Party is in a dark place. Still suffering under the illusion that it’s the party of workers, it is unable to see that its leaders and activists are waging a class war from above. Every time a Democratic leader intones gravely about “fascism,” they’re expressing the anxiety of a cloistered elite terrified of the resentments of the unwashed masses. Every time they invoke a crisis of democracy, they’re borrowing from the playbook of dictators, who always contrive a national emergency to justify their power grabs.

From this reactionary paranoia springs the Democratic rank-and-file’s turn against free speech and its leadership’s constant calls for online censorship. Capitulating to them is the road to ruin.

How desperate are things getting? Many of of our most sense-making institutions are substantially corrupted. Not only are they failing to do the work they were created to do, but their prime directive has become "Not Trump," all else being a matter of reverse engineering. If facts get in the way, fuck the facts.

Look at the pattern: in every major societal institution, from the news media and the universities to the FBI and DoD, powerful individuals are committing crimes, covering them up, and spreading disinformation.

As soon as whistleblowers, journalists, or anyone else blows the whistle, the people in power cry “Conspiracy theory!” and demand their opponents be censored.

Which scandal are we referring to? Practically all of them.

I sometimes feel like I'm in the crow's nest of the Titanic. I don't know whether to keep watching in horror or whether I should excuse myself to go down to the main deck to seek the distraction of the music.

Continue ReadingDemocrats Increasingly Embrace Censorship to Maintain Unearned Power in the Class Warfare they are Waging

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Responds to Attempt by 102 Democrats to Censor Him at Congressional Hearing Concerning Censorship by the Federal Government

102 Democrats attempt to censor Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy responds.

Continue ReadingRobert F. Kennedy, Jr. Responds to Attempt by 102 Democrats to Censor Him at Congressional Hearing Concerning Censorship by the Federal Government

Newly Released Slack and Emails of Top U.S. Scientists Reveal Highly Coordinated Misinformation Campaign Aimed at Americans Regarding the Origins of COVID Pandemic

A coordinated corruption and coverup by numerous top U.S. scientists is now clear, based on reporting you will find today in Public and Racquet. The article is titled: "Top Scientists Misled Congress About Covid Origins, Newly Released Emails And Messages ShowTop advisor to Anthony Fauci still thought a lab leak was possible in April 2020, one month after claiming publicly that it wasn’t."

Simultaneously, you will not find any information about these numerous newly-leaked documents at NYT, WaPo, NPR, MSNBC or CNN. Why are these "news" outlets not interested in this dramatic and disturbing new evidence that top U.S. scientists have been lying to the American Public about the cause of the pandemic?

Here is an excerpt from today's article in Public (from a much longer article that contains numerous excerpts from the Slack and email messages of the scientists):

For months, Fauci, Andersen, and their allies have been pushing the message that ”we may never know” what caused the Covid-19 pandemic. In truth, we are getting closer to understanding what happened with every new batch of emails and Slack messages.

Previously released messages show that a top Fauci advisor who boasted of evading FOIA with his Gmail, and hiding Fauci’s role.

“Tony [Fauci] doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories,” wrote Fauci advisor David M. Morens. “As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly… Don’t worry...I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

The evidence now shows a clear pattern of Fauci’s top advisors behaving the way that people might if they were engaged in a cover-up. Fauci and Collins pressured Andersen and his colleagues to publish an article dismissing the lab leak even though they believed in it. Morens and Andersen both attempted to evade future FOIA and Subpoena requests using Gmail and Slack.

If it was really the case, as Garry and Andersen said, that Covid-19 did not leak from a lab and that the behaviors revealed by the emails and Slack messages are not a conspiracy theory, then what do they have to hide? Where is the Zoom recording of the February 3 meeting? What was said?

As a nation, we need to go from “we may never know” to “we must find out.” If the behavior by Fauci, Collins, Andersen, Garry, and the others was entirely above board, then they should have no objection to helping members of Congress, journalists, and the public understand what exactly happened between February 3 and February 6 for them to abandon “project-wuhan_engineering” for “project-wuhan_pangolin.”

Here is an excerpt from the Racquet (Matt Taibbi) titled: ""So Friggin' Likely": New Covid Documents Reveal Unparalleled Media Deception: Newly released chats and emails between the authors of a crucial scientific paper leave no doubt: an unprecedented official disinformation campaign accompanied the arrival of Covid-19."

The core four also repeatedly pored over the problem posed by the “furin cleavage site,” a distinctive feature of the Covid-19 genetic sequence. As is now known to the general public thanks again to the digging of the DRASTIC group, which leaked the material in the fall of 2021, researchers at the University of North Carolina led by Dr. Ralph Baric had sent a proposal to the Pentagon seeking to introduce “human-specific cleavage sites” into bat coronaviruses, for a program called DEFUSE. Baric and Shi had worked together on more than one occasion, and even co-authored a paper in 2015 demonstrating that a coronavirus spike protein can infect human cells.

In any case, with these and other issues in mind, all five scientists express belief that escape from the Wuhan lab was at least possible, if not probable:

Andersen: “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely because they were already doing this work…

Garry: “The major hangup I have is the polybasic cleavahe [sic] site… it’s not really a natural process.”

Also: “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF research we know is happening.”

Lipkin: “[A draft of the paper] does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there… we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.”

Holmes (replying to Lipkin): “I agree… Seems to have been pre-adapted for human spread since the get go. It’s the epidemiology that I find most worrying.”

Rambaut: “I am quite convinced it has been put there by evolution (whether natural selection or artificial).”

...

As detailed in Public, the Proximal Origin authors who initially discussed lab escape in such a casual manner appeared to have a change of heart after a February 3rd conference call that included the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-NIH Head Francis Collins, and Dr. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust (and now the WHO).

Continue ReadingNewly Released Slack and Emails of Top U.S. Scientists Reveal Highly Coordinated Misinformation Campaign Aimed at Americans Regarding the Origins of COVID Pandemic

America’s Free Speech Malaise. What Happened to Us?

Ten years ago, it was easy to find liberals who opposed war, authoritarian tactics and censorship. Good luck finding "liberals" who take those positions now, case in point being the authoritarian tactics most liberals strongly supported during COVID. The positions of most liberals have dramatically shifted, in lockstep with the positions of the DNC. One result is that I am politically homeless. I am pessimistic that the United States will ever figure itself out, that it will ever again treasure free speech.

Two months ago, an active tenured law professor recently told me that the First Amendment was a good idea at the time and the Founders were well-intentioned, but we now need to allow government control of misinformation and disinformation. He trusts the FBI and the CIA to tell us what is true.

What?? What's going on? I've been struggling to figure things out. So has Matt Taibbi.

The following are excerpts from Matt Taibbi's speech at the "Freedom Fest" last week in Memphis. Taibbi's entire speech is published by Taibbi at Racket News. The following are excerpts:

It wasn’t hard to understand why the FBI was organizing a censorship scheme, or why companies like Twitter and Facebook that lived off lucrative regulatory subsidies were going along with one. The motives of the powerful actors in all this were never mysterious. The part that didn’t compute was why so many in the general public were accepting of the situation. This included people I knew. Many people in America are not just accepting of digital censorship, they believe it to be vitally necessary.

Learned Hand . . . wrote in 1944, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.” Justice Hand had a hard time defining this thing that “lies in the hearts of men and women.” But, as an American, I believe I experienced it growing up. As [Former President of the ACLU], Nadine [Strossen] said, it’s that “right not to remain silent,” something in which I believed almost religiously. It was something fiery and motivational, which I felt gave me an advantage over people from other parts of the world ...

[I]f that spirit of liberty Justice Hand talked about dies, no amount of lawsuits or congressional hearings will revive it. In their book [The Canceling of the American Mind], [Greg] Lukianoff and [Rikki] Schlott suggest that just as a person’s natural instinct is to slouch, society’s natural instinct is to censor. Is that true?

If so, that would make the last few hundred years of our history, a history of defiant political movements, astounding scientific invention, and vast outpourings of great music, art, literature, movies, even standup comedy — it would all be an aberration. But why? ...

I spent months thinking about this. It troubled me from the beginning of the Twitter Files story. Now, I believe Americans are not just being censored. I believe there’s an equivalent effort on the front end of Internet culture to rob people of their will to be free. I believe this is is the hardest part of the Internet censorship story to understand, but also the most crucial and most dangerous...

As we found in the Twitter Files, we lean more and more on machines to do our thinking for us. However, the worst part is, we often do not distinguish between thinking that is ours, and thinking that is someone else’s.

We Americans once cherished independence, and lived off folk tales about going off on one’s own, on the open road. Think about Ishmael, or Huck and Jim, or Chuck Berry, who picked up a guitar and sang about setting out with “no particular place to go,” creating a dazzling sound that touched a nerve with the whole world.

That was then. Now instead of giving the world something invigorating and freeing like rock n’ roll, we’re exporting mass neurosis. At home we’ve become afraid to walk even a few steps without our electronic helpers. Our sense of self is now inextricably tied to a huge global entourage of prying commentators who live in those phones of ours that are always in our pockets and whose good opinion we never stop seeking, whether we admit it or not.

This was never us before. We long celebrated the individual, even if the individual was crazy...

The freethinker was always a cherished archetype.

But thinking for yourself is hard work, and political interests in the Internet age have preyed on another very American instinct: laziness. Their sophisticated programs begin with the premise that the Internet always punishes difference and rewards conformity. This is the core principle at work in shadow-banning and de-amplification algorithms. These automated surveillance tools look for phrases like “Open-minded” or “I like to do my own research” or “I’m generally apolitical” and don’t score the people saying such things as tolerant, creative freethinkers.

What the algorithm instead detects is someone harboring a dangerous willingness to embrace unorthodox ideas, or look at a forbidden thing and not flee.

It was once a virtue for Americans to say, when asked about their politics, “None of your damn business.”

Nobody thinks that way anymore, either. Young people especially are worried to the point of mental illness about their likes and ratios. We not only want people to know what we think, we’re terrified of people not knowing what we think, lest we be suspected of harboring something unsavory underneath.

This is how it is for Americans trying to be themselves now. First they became addicted to the Internet as a tool of convenience. Then it became a cheap substitute for real-life interaction. Finally they learned to submit to the wisdom of crowds, which on the Internet, as we also found out, is really an artificial representation of a crowd, generated by political and social engineers from the FBI, DHS, the Pentagon, Meta, Google, and other bureaucracies. These groups are letting loose algorithms on that “Spirit of liberty” Justice Hand talked about. The results have not been good.

If they can preemptively extinguish that fire in us, formal censorship will become unnecessary. The population will become too fearful of difference to ever risk punishment in the first place...

Continue ReadingAmerica’s Free Speech Malaise. What Happened to Us?