Silence Versus Belief

Can you assume that people believe you merely because they stop debating you? Rob Henderson explains:

Clever activists know how exploit the weakness of professors. Most of the people who become professors just love their field—they don't want to wade into activism or political disputes. A lot of them are introverts, or at the very least, they just want to be left alone to do their work. So if activists flood a professor’s inbox with emails, call their department nonstop, pressure the department, and demand to know why they haven’t signed a petition or denounced a colleague, eventually, a lot of them will just give in.

At some point, the professor just wants the noise to stop. They’ll sign whatever, release whatever statement, do whatever it takes to be left alone. It’s not that they believe in the cause—it’s just easier to give in. They don’t want to get dragged into a political or cultural fight; they just want to keep their head down and focus on their work. A lot of it, frankly, comes down to cowardice—figuring out the fastest way to make the problem go away.

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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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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."

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Who is in Charge?

I'm trying to make sense of who has been in charge of the many trends that are damaging our country (e.g. open borders, constant war, regime-change operations, health care totalitarianism & bureaucratic fraud). I suspect the power structure, if not this, it is something like what you see in this chart, in that most elected national officials are pawns. They have bosses above them. They don't see We the People as their clients. They see us as threats to their ideology and their job security. You can often hear them saying these things out loud (e.g., at the WEF).

Their #1 job is to censor and propagandize us by funding and controlling legacy news so that we believe that national elections still matter. A free and open internet, where we can exchange ideas with each other, is their #1 threat. If all of this sounds bizarre or conspiratorial to you, it's because you have limited your information diet to legacy news outlets, which have been controlled for years, through various government-funded carrots and sticks administered by so-called NGOs that are funded with your tax dollars by the likes of USAID, CEPPS and INTERNEWS.

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Mike Benz Explains USAID’s “Internews”

Stunning information from Mike Benz, being interviewed by Joe Rogan. It was a long detailed interview that is extremely important for everyone to read.  This is shocking, but we all knew that there was coordination in all of the "news outlets that have been marching in lockstep for the past five years to stamp out dissent, including stamping out true information that the government found to be inconvenient. I transcribed the portion of the interview provided in the following Tweet by KanekoaTheGreat. See below.

Mike Benz

On Internews, I've been talking about it for a long time, but now the stage is set to really show the extent of this. What we do is we create these pretty little predicates, these pretty little lie words, weasel words, to hide from the American people, and especially from foreign governments what we're really doing in the area. So we have a catchphrase at State and in state craft. It's called "independent media." You can think of that as the State Department's word for a good guy. Okay, doesn't mean independent. They are funded by us. They are not independent from the government. They literally submit their work and approval plans for their work plans, for what their cover, for review and approval to the US State Department. They are dog walked the whole way. But we call them independent because they are said to be independent from foreign governments who influence.

So basically, they're independent from the Chinese government, or they're independent from the Russian government. So there's just like with the word USAID itself that we talked about last time, it's your mind playing tricks on you. You're seeing "aid," but it's Agency for International Development. They do the same thing with independent media, which is that, internally to them, it means it's a good guy for us, because it's independent from our enemies, but when Americans see that, they think, well, "independent" that means it's a free actor who's not being sponsored by any government. But under the banner of USAID's independent media and media sustainability branches, we fund half a billion dollars a year to this network of, again, over 4000 media outlets. It reaches 778 million people, 9000 journalists "trained." Remember last time we went over the training? The Atlantic Council with seven CIA directors and annual funding from USAID as well as the State Department and pentagon, how they were holding up "I call BS" placards and putting Trump tweets on screen to flag for disinformation? If you remember, we went over that. Well, this is what training journalists looks like. Not only do they have the direct spawn of media octopus under their direct sub-grantee group, but they then go out and train the journalists who work at all the other ones who aren't directly sponsored. So they reach everywhere. And you'll see here, for example, it makes reference to to Jean Bourgault, who is making a half million dollars a year there. . . This has been going viral on X. I've been talking about USAID's role in the censorship industry forever. And if you look up, if you just look up "Internews," and you just plug in the name, you know, if you just copy paste that, you know, "Jean Bourgault" phrase, you'll see this in the video section, because it's everywhere now. She made speeches for a long time.

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