Speech and Being Offended

Two of my favorite memes on speech. People who don't sometimes use words that cause others to be offended are failing to engage meaningfully with others. They are not having real conversations.

Once we realize that ALL of us are, some of the time, fonts of misinformation, it should put up big red flags to anyone who advocates for censorship. This goes both for formal and informal censorship. Both are dangerous, whether it is by operation of government or whether it comes from your well-meaning finger-wagging friends and acquaintances who are scolding you to stop saying 'offensive" things, falsely suggesting that it is possible for a respectable person to avoid offending others. Especially in this day and age of fragile adults and even more fragile young adults and teenagers. It is impossible to communicate meaningfully without sometimes contesting/challenging the facts and ideas of others, and that is quite often what growing numbers of people consider "offensive."

So let's all agree, shall we, that it is our civic duty as good-hearted people to sometimes offend others. Without the free-exchange of ideas, what makes us human is destroyed. And it is equally the our duty to hear each other out, at least some of the time, instead of tsk-taking each other, trying to cancel each other and pretending that words and ideas are the moral equivalent of physical harm. We need to take to heart the playground chant: "Sticks and stones will hurt my bones but words will never hurt me." It's time for all of us to grow up, to get some thicker skin, and to courageously engage with others who think differently.

Only weak and lazy people refuse to do these things. If we fail to grow up, we will destroy what is left of human flourishing in this country. There will still be plenty of human animals roaming around, but we will no longer have a functional society.

Continue ReadingSpeech and Being Offended

Today’s Go-To Political Formula

Karl Rove said the quiet part out loud here. It is a very powerful strategy, especially when fortified with widespread censorship and sophisticated U.S. Security State Psyops. That's why it is the Democratic Party's bread and butter on all major issues today. Congratulations, Democrats. You have become that abhorrent thing that Republicans have been for decades!

RFK, Jr.:

I saw Kamala, you know, at the convention and she gave a speech that was very bellicose and belligerent. It was a kind of speech that was written by neocons and the CIA. The first time in history they had the CIA former director speaking right before, Leon Panetta, and military people speaking at the Democratic Convention. Democrats were the anti-war party. They were the pro-Constitution Party. They were the party that was against Wall Street and representing the little guys, the cops, the firefighters union and labor people. In the 2020 election, roughly 50% of the people in this country voted for Donald Trump. But that group that voted for Donald Trump represented 30% of the wealth in our country. The 50% of the people that voted for Joe Biden represented 70% of the wealth.

There's been an inversion now, where the Republican Party has become the party of the common man, of working people of the middle class, the Democratic Party has become the party of Wall Street, of the military industrial complex, a Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, Big Tech, the Big Banking systems and all of Donald Trump calls the deep state, which is this, this web of financial interest that not is unnecessarily a little conspiracy, but it's a conspiracy of self interest that functions together in tandem to shift wealth upward, to clamp down totalitarian controls and to transform this country and from the world's exemplary democracy into a corporate kleptocracy and A very, very oppressive oligarchical system, the kind of system we fought a revolution to overthrow in 1776.

Continue ReadingToday’s Go-To Political Formula

What Does the DOJ Think of Alvin Bragg’s Case Against Donald Trump?

The U.S. Department of Justice Chief of Public Affairs Nicholas Biasi just admitted on video that Alvin Bragg's Trump indictments are a Politically Motivated "Perversion of Justice"; travesty, mockery and disgusting.

Let's see what news outlets covered this. NOT the NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC or NPR.

Continue ReadingWhat Does the DOJ Think of Alvin Bragg’s Case Against Donald Trump?

The Silence of the White House While Speech is Being Muzzled World Wide

The silence of the White House is Deafening, too horrible for most Americans to contemplate even though it deeply affects every American.

David Sachs:

"American politicians speak constantly about the indispensable role of the United States in leading the free world against authoritarianism. If that is true, why is the White House so silent in the face of new global threats to free speech? In January, American citizen Gonzalo Lira died in a Ukrainian prison for posting YouTube videos; the State Department didn’t lift a finger to help. Last week, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France for the crime of insufficient content moderation. Now Brazil has banned X for resisting the diktats of a tyrannical judge, who salivates over the possibility of jailing @elonmusk.

The EU is one step behind, with Eurocrat Thierry Breton pursuing a criminal investigation against Elon for “platforming disinformation,” which Breton defines to include a conversation with Donald Trump.

In the UK, the government of Keir Starmer imprisons critics of open borders with more zeal than it prosecutes violent crime. In Canada, Justin Trudeau crushed a trucker protest against vaccine mandates by asserting sweeping new powers to freeze bank accounts.

At no point has the White House expressed concern about this new iron curtain that seems to be descending across the West. Quite the contrary, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the Biden-Harris administration repeatedly pressured Meta to censor during Covid. Worse, the FBI primed Facebook to censor true stories about Biden Family corruption by suggesting that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation (even though the FBI knew it was authentic).

Barring court intervention, TikTok will shut down in the U.S. on January 19, 2025 thanks to a new power authorized by Congress to ban websites and applications that the President determines are subject to the influence of a foreign adversary. X may not be far behind if liberal elites and deep state apparatchiks like Robert Reich and Alexander Vindman get their wish. They have called for the U.S. to adopt Brazil’s and the EU’s approach and “rein in” Elon Musk.

Hypocritically, the same voices demanding this crackdown are also the loudest in proclaiming the West to be engaged in a “war on authoritarianism” against countries like Russia and China. But whatever their other sins, Russia and China are in no position to deprive American citizens of their free speech rights; only our own government can do that.

Similarly, if Western leaders truly wanted to prevent authoritarianism, the easiest place to start would be at home, protecting the civil liberties of their own citizens. Instead they seem obsessed with deflecting the public’s attention onto foreign enemies, as Orwell depicted in the Two Minutes Hate in 1984.

As this battle over free speech heats up in an election year, where do the candidates stand? Donald Trump has declared his support for free speech whereas Kamala Harris has said nothing and can be expected to continue her administration’s policy of tacit approval of creeping censorship. In just two months, Americans will decide. Do we actually lead the free world in standing up for free speech, or do we accept the authoritarianism we claim to detest so much?"

Continue ReadingThe Silence of the White House While Speech is Being Muzzled World Wide