The Branding Problem of Free Speech on Campus

Q: "I'm really curious to hear from you why you think free speech has the branding issue that you know it tends to have, and why for young people, there's this perception that you know is warped. "

Greg Lukianoff: "This is probably a rough thing to say in a group full of educators, but I do think that a lot of the quote, unquote, branding issue with freedom of speech came out of K through PhD. When I was working at the ACLU back in 1999 I could see something happening, what I called the slow motion train wreck on college campuses in particular. We qualified for public assistance when I was a kid, and then I ended up at a place like Stanford Law School. And this was definitely a very weird experience for me, and it was the first time I really ran into kids who were pretty mediocre, a little ambivalent about freedom of speech. Working Class liberals were very pro freedom of speech. I thought that's what made a liberal, a liberal. But it was only when I started meeting more upper class people who came from, you know, the 1% and tended to go to the fanciest schools, that I started really running into this very anti liberal kind of idea, and that's a very typical dynamic that essentially, once your politics become a super majority of an institution--you want free speech when you're the minority, because free speech protects minority opinions. You don't need it to protect the majority. The popular vote protects the majority power. And in higher ed, there was this intentional, clear shift that free speech started being problematized partially because the people in charge of higher ed kind of thought, well, if I'm the one deciding what will get you punished and what won't, I can be trusted with that. And that's the temptation of power always."

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About the Transgender Treatment Censorship Tsunami

The you remember the inorganic wave of brand new "obvious" things we were all supposed to believe and say about transgender topics? I agree with Greg Lukianoff that it was surreal. I spoke up with questions and concerns that were repeatedly blasted with religious fervor. But here we are now, and it's clear that the transgender religious movement distorted everything around it, including our First Amendment rights. One big moment to upright the ship was the Cass Report. Another was the mass closing of transgender clinics. And now a new Finnish study.

[You can see many many posts on this topic (I published more than 150 articles at this site) here:

Greg Lukianoff:

In my career defending academic freedom and free speech, I never saw anything become as immediately radioactive as views that ran counter to the narrative on trans issues. Papers were retracted, compelled speech was treated as normal, and people were canceled for saying things that would have sounded like common sense just a few years earlier. It seemed to become a kind of secular blasphemy overnight. And usually, that is a sign that the true believers know, at some level, that they are on shaky ground.

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The Narrative Creators (Censorship Team) Under Joe Biden

Mike Benz explains what we were up against when Biden was super-charging the censorship industrial complex.

There's one person, but that person by themselves is not going to have enough pull to do what needs to be done. That person is the wonderful Sarah Rogers. Sarah Rogers is great. She gets it, you get it. She gets it now. Sarah Rogers is the Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs branch. Yes, one person, and she's an undersecretary. Okay, so think about all the agencies that need to be deployed to take this on.

Let's pull up the list. Okay, let's pull up a list of all the different government agencies that the Biden White House coordinated to create the global censorship industrial complex. This was a full scale inter agency. The Biden White House created an interagency task force, and it was called the information integrity research and development interagency working group. Information Integrity, as we've covered many times, became the preferred phrase after the catastrophe of the disinformation governance board. Nobody knows what the fuck information integrity means.

Who doesn't like information with "high integrity?" How bad could it be? It's the worst. This term means that information can be chunked into two categories, high integrity meaning whitelisted, and low integrity, meaning blacklisted, meaning censored. So information integrity is total control over information, what information you can share on social media, what information can be amplified in algorithms, what information we want foreign countries to make illegal if it supports a political party that we don't want to win the election, etc, etc. So this task force set up in 2021 right away in the Biden administration, made it so that every one of the below US government, federal agencies and departments had the same policy goal they were driving towards, censoring Vaccine Information, censoring election information, censoring climate information, censoring gender information, censoring foreign policy opinions about Ukraine, etc.

Okay, you have your Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, controlling the media, the White House, Domestic Policy Council, DARPA DHS, the Justice Department, The State Department, the FBI NIST. Hello, 911. pancake theory. NIH, the National Science Foundation, the National Security Council, the NSA, goddamn Office of Naval Research, the White House, OSTP, Office of Science and Technology Policy, the ODNI, the friggin Surgeon General's office, USAID, all the way down, down to the damn Census Bureau for censoring immigration information, the gender Policy Council, the Food and Drug Administration, they were all coordinated top down by the White House. ... then it tied together a bunch of civil society partners to help create this whole of society on the outside, including our favorites like Stanford, UW Rutgers, the home of Antifa, nonprofits, corporations, individuals, all answering to this task force, like fucking news guard and Bill Burns, the CIA director's Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Aspen Digital, who ran the Hunter Biden censorship pre censorship strategy meeting to pre censor the Hunter Biden laptop story all the way down to the American Association of Retired Persons. This thing hit every demo, black, white, old, young, gay, straight, cis, trans, CIA FDA,

You know what we've got right now, guys, and I'm sorry to say it, I'm not trying to black pill you. I'm trying to white pill you. That you. A tiny little glimpse of a fire is being started. We'll see where it goes. We know we have against all of this, the CIA, the NSA, the ODNI, the State Department, fucking DARPA, Naval Research, every friggin agency, the Justice Department, the FBI, against all this a trade, every intelligence agency, military and statecraft organ of the United States government. For us on the other side, I offer, I offer a fair trade. I offer we but we have a Sarah Rogers. That's where we are right now.

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Epstein, Power, Money, Ubiquitous Corruption

We are being kept in the dark. We elect what is really a pretend government. The majority of the people calling the shots lurk in the shadows. We've always known that big donors and corporations have an outsize influence on our politicians, but it's much worse than we suspected. It's now clear that at least hundreds of rich and powerful people worked with Jeffrey Epstein on behalf of the US security state and the Israeli government. This has been true through many administrations, as evidenced by recently released documents connecting Jeffrey Epstein's power and money to the Clintons and to Obama's WH Attorney Kathryn Ruemmler. It involves many of the DNC's most powerful funders: Reid Hoffman, Glenn Dubin, Tom Pritzker, Leslie Wexner and Bill Gates. as well as some of Trump's highest-placed people, including Howard Lutnck, Steve Bannon, William Barr and Alan Dershowitz. It involves many hundreds of documented incidents where your voice as a citizen has been nullified. You did not vote for this corrupt and degenerate plutocracy. Nor will you ever be given the opportunity to get rid of it by any sort of vote. The people who have really been in charge don't care about you or me. They laugh at our Constitution.

And have you ever noticed how there are so many news media narratives that run counter to common sense? Those narratives are being driven by corrupt power and money.

I never thought I'd say this, but the U.S. government is more than corrupt. Our country has been completely occupied by unelected people (many of them operating through NGOs) who make many of the biggest decisions, including in the areas of domestic policy, public health, finance and foreign policy. In the area of foreign policy, we already knew this from years of US obeisance to the Israeli government's political arm, AIPAC, especially evidenced by our willingness to pour unlimited $ into wars at the direction of Israel. All of this has become distressingly more clear based on the recently released Epstein files. It is equally clear that we haven't yet seen the vast majority of the Epstein documentation. Most of Epstein's data has been meticulously and obediently redacted or withheld from U.S. Citizens by unknown people on behalf of their unknown bosses. See the post/video below (by Shadow of Ezra) for more on that.

An investigation has found that the Department of Justice has released just two percent of the material the FBI seized from Jeffrey Epstein’s properties.

The report says Epstein’s electronic devices, including computers, hard drives, and servers, are largely missing from the files made public.

It concludes that the three million and even six million figures shared with the public represent only a fraction of what authorities actually possess.

You might think that what I have written sounds crazy. I would agree with you that this sounds completely crazy. If you are brave and courageous, however, visit X, search for "Epstein" and start reading the who's who list of all the rich and famous people who have been exercising their political muscle in the shadows. The more you read, the more you will appreciate the courage of a handful of our elected representatives who know that we the citizens have a right to know what has been going on. Thank you to Thomas Massie, Ro Khanna, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Nancy Mace, who led or supported the bipartisan discharge petition and legislation to compel the Justice Department to disclose the Epstein files.

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