Jimmy Dore Points to the Biggest Liar – The Government.

Comedian Jimmy Dore recently commented a "news" cast where Jen Psaki argued that social media needed to be censored. Governement lies during COVID provide endless evidence that Psake could not be more wrong, but there is a lot more. First, Jen Psaki's claim that social media needs to be censored:

But even if Trump is defeated tomorrow, he is exposed during his time out, there some serious limitations within our system, and it may be time to ask ourselves things like whether social media platforms should have the freedom to operate at a lower level of accountability than local television networks.

Jimmy Dore's response:

First of all, how do you get lower accountability than zero? This is this? Is that wanting to censor social because they don't have any accountability, you don't have any fucking accountability. Is there? Is there anything they haven't lied about in my they lied about Iraq twice. They lied about Afghanistan for 20 years. Lied about Syria, they lied about Libya, they lied about Ukraine. They're currently lying about Ukraine. They lied about COVID. They lied about lockdowns. They lied about where the virus came from, mass transmissibility, contraction, herd immunity, natural immunity. There wasn't a fucking thing that side effects. There's not a goddamn thing that they haven't lied about in the last 20 years of my life, 40 years of my life. And these motherfuckers want to censor other people because they might be spreading misinformation.

The biggest liar, as we all know, is the government. Second is the corporate, owned media, and a distant third are randos on social media. That's the fucking fact, okay, and if it wasn't for social media, we wouldn't know about any of those lies about the Syrian war, the Ukraine war, or COVID, or the vaccines or masks or lockdowns, or all the shit they did to children during COVID, or all the shit they're doing to children who are confused about their gender identity before they had fucking puberty. We wouldn't know any of that shit if it wasn't for social media ...

That was a direct hit by Dore, as evidence by many of the articles I have been posting over the past 5 years (and more). But let's also hear from Max Blumenthal.

I do not believe @RobertKennedyJr would have ever gained national celebrity and been able to launch a national campaign that vaulted him to the heights of Trumpworld had The Science(TM) that informed the Covid response proven even remotely correct.

If the mRNA "vaccine" had not failed on every stated promise; had the CDC and WHO not changed the very definition of vaccine to accommodate its failure to prevent transmission or infection; had countless working class Americans not lost their jobs for refusing to take the jab, while others were forcibly injected in order to keep their livelihoods, sometimes suffering injury as a result; had mainstream news hosts and politicians including Joe Biden not proposed isolating The Unvaccinated from society, preventing them from traveling, and even from buying food in markets; had the lockdowns not set a generation of children across all social strata back years in their education, while doing nothing to stop the spread; had once-vibrant city centers not transformed to terrifying zombie scenes, shattering countless small businesses, while we were assured by Fauci that it would take just another week or two to flatten the curve; had a dystopian state censorship regime not consolidated its hold over social media platforms, disappearing dissenters from our digital commons those who protested in the streets were often beaten and arrested – had none of this occurred, RFK Jr. would be comfortably ensconced in his home in West LA, still loyal to the Democratic Party, a welcome presence in the world of affluent liberals, and nowhere near the political celebrity he is today.

But all this happened and worse. Americans were lied to and abused on a massive scale, and RFK was one of the first to tap into the public's anger. And thanks to his Children's Health Defense, he already had an established platform to promote his jeremiads (which focused heavily at the time on the erosion of constitutional rights, not always on vaccine-related issues).

Though the Covid event was hardly discussed during the 2024 presenting campaign – largely because the corporate media that got almost everything wrong wanted the issue to disappear – it loomed like a heavy cloud. RFK's presence as a Trump surrogate enabled 47 to channel the simmering anger, giving rise to the Make America Healthy Again movement, which became a magnet for alt media-oriented independent voters.

Now RFK stands to take over a gargantuan federal agency that has traditionally served as an instrument of Big Pharma and the agribusiness lobby, and which is currently led by a Democrat political operative with no medical or scientific background. The pundits who paint RFK's ascension as an unfortunate triumph of the paranoid style in American politics are whitewashing the failures and sordid deceptions of the credentialed class they represent, while denying the experiences of the millions who paid the price for them.

One more thing for Jen Psaki: How would she feel if the government started interrupting our private phone calls and telling us that we can no longer discuss certain topics or that we are forbidden from talking to certain people because they are "bad"? Censoring social media is no different from this in concept, but only in scale.

Continue ReadingJimmy Dore Points to the Biggest Liar – The Government.

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.

Continue ReadingPolitical Power and the Need for Free Speech

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.

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

Only 20% of Americans Deny that “Words Can Be Violence”

Remember the old chant many of us said as kids? The website "US Dictionary" indicates it was already considered to be an old adage in 1862 when it appeard in a publication of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. US Dictionary describes this adage further:

The phrase "sticks and stones may break my bones" is a well-known children's rhyme. It is often used as a retort to verbal insults or name-calling, suggesting that physical harm from sticks and stones might injure one, but words will not cause any physical harm.
I remember using this saying when I was a kid into adulthood.

How was this adage used over the years? US Dictionary:

The phrase "sticks and stones may break my bones" is a classic saying that serves as a defense against verbal bullying or insults. It's often completed with the line, "But words will never hurt me." The idea behind the phrase is that physical objects, like sticks and stones, can cause physical harm, but intangible words cannot cause physical pain. This phrase is frequently taught to children as a way of coping with name-calling or verbal bullying, encouraging them not to be hurt by hurtful words.

More about the phrase's meaning:

It's often used to encourage resilience against verbal abuse or insults.

The phrase emphasizes the distinction between physical and emotional harm.

It serves as a reminder that words, while potentially hurtful, cannot inflict physical pain.

It is often used in educational settings to teach children about coping mechanisms for bullying.

Similar phrases include "Words can never hurt me" and "I'm rubber, you're glue."

In other words, the Sticks and Stones saying is time tested wisdom, but then something happened. In a recent poll by FIRE, "SHOCKING: 4 in 5 Americans think ‘words can be violence’"

The poll results:

In a new FIRE poll, 4 in 5 Americans (80%) agree at least slightly with the idea that “words can be violence.”

Democrats and women were most likely to agree words are violence, and Republicans and men were least likely to agree.

Only slightly more than a third of Americans (37%) think citizens should have the right to use profanity when speaking to elected officials.

PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 31, 2024 — In a disturbing new finding from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, 4 in 5 Americans agree to at least some degree with the idea that “words can be violence.”

In the latest edition of the quarterly National Speech Index, FIRE asked 1,000 Americans, “How much, if at all, does the following statement describe your thoughts: ‘Words can be violence.’”

Nearly half of Americans said that statement describes their thoughts either “mostly” (23%) or “completely” (22%).

Around a quarter responded that it describes their thoughts “somewhat” (22%). Another 12% responded that it matches their thoughts “slightly.”

Only a fifth (20%) responded that the statement “does not describe my thoughts at all.”

FIRE's poll results show that women who are democrats are the biggest advocates for this widespread idea that words can be violence.

Based on these results, one might conclude that words can actually be a form of violence. As FIRE explains, however, this is not true:

“Equating words with violence trivializes actual physical harm, shuts down conversations, and even encourages real violence by justifying the use of force against offensive speech,” said FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff. “Free speech isn't violence, it's the best alternative to violence ever invented.”

Similarly, consider this statement on the topic by Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt:

Lukianoff and Haidt argue that equating stress-causing speech with “violence,” as Feldman Barrett does, isn’t simply an overstatement. Instead, it’s students’ overblown perception of their own fragility — not exposure to the occasional offensive viewpoint — that’s causing widespread mental health problems among today’s college students.

Their prescription is sure to spark discussion in our nation’s college classrooms — and beyond.

“Free speech, properly understood, is not violence. It is a cure for violence.”

The above excerpt comes from an article in the Atlantic: "Why It's a Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence: A claim increasingly heard on campus will make them more anxious and more willing to justify physical harm." Here is the opening paragraph href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-its-a-bad-idea-to-tell-students-words-are-violence/533970/">to that article:

Of all the ideas percolating on college campuses these days, the most dangerous one might be that speech is sometimes violence. We’re not talking about verbal threats of violence, which are used to coerce and intimidate, and which are illegal and not protected by the First Amendment. We’re talking about speech that is deemed by members of an identity group to be critical of the group, or speech that is otherwise upsetting to members of the group. This is the kind of speech that many students today refer to as a form of violence.

Continue ReadingOnly 20% of Americans Deny that “Words Can Be Violence”