Protect the Censors!

I’m worried about the people who censor us. Who protects THEM from dangerous information? Who keeps THEM safe from words? They are constantly subjected to misinformation. We need censors for the censors!

My above attempt to mock the censors carries an important point: Censors think of themselves as immune from the danger of bad words and ideas. How could that possibly be? I'm sure they believe that they are intellectual superior or else they wouldn't risk their mental health and their LIVES to protect us. I suspect they don't worry at all about workplace self-contamination. It's much more likely that they laugh at what what they are paid to do: pretending to protect the rest of us. They think of us as rubes, as the hoi polloi. Just keep those paychecks coming! As Matt Taibbi recently stated in his Congressional testimony, they are part of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. They think they are super-smart, certainly smarter than the rest of us because they are being paid to be full of shit and anti-American.

The belief of censors that they are immune to the dangerous ideas they filter for us is a classic case of myopic, one-level reasoning. It is as bad as the traditional theologian "tennis without a net that many people have tried to jam down my throat my entire life. It goes like this:

Everything must have a cause.

The universe must have had a cause.

God caused the universe!

[At this point they are finished and they stare are you smugly]

Normal people should then speak up: "Hey, I thought your first premise is that EVERYTHING must have a cause, right? Who caused "God"?"

That's when they claim that "God" doesn't need to have a cause or some similar BS. Or they change the topic.

Censors who claim to be immune to the effects of dangerous words and cause-less causers are classic cases of motivated reasoning, social intuitionism, emotional security blankets dressed up in fancy words.

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FIRE’s Position on Government Attempts to Ban there Teaching of Divisive Concepts

FIRE's Position on government attempts to ban the teaching of divisive concepts in schools:

FIRE has been tracking and engaging with legislation that would regulate how race and sex is discussed on college and university campuses.

In the past few years, this typically came in the form of bans on training or teaching so-called “divisive” concepts. This legislative season appears no different as several states in the past three months have either issued executive orders or introduced legislation on this topic.

These states include Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

While FIRE takes no position on bill provisions that apply to the K-12 context, in which states generally have broader authority to set curricula, it’s worth noting that even with such broad authority, K-12 legislation could face vagueness challenges if it does not clearly set forth what it prohibits.

We also do not oppose provisions that would regulate or prohibit mandatory non-credit-earning training at institutions of higher education. Restrictions on the content and views expressed during non-credit-earning training doesn’t infringe on the First Amendment or principles of academic freedom because the content of those trainings constitute the government’s own speech. The government is allowed to regulate its own speech and that of government agencies under its control. We also acknowledge that the government can prohibit institutions from compelling students or faculty to communicate personal agreement with views they do not hold.

FIRE, however, does oppose legislation that would institute curricular bans on particular concepts or ideologies at institutions of higher education. These curricular bans threaten academic freedom — which protects the rights of faculty to teach and assert positions as they see fit — and disregards decades of judicial precedent confirming the critical importance of academic freedom in higher education.

FIRE will fight any legislation that crosses the bright line that prohibits the government from banning ideas in college classrooms. Indeed, FIRE is currently fighting Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” in federal court, a law passed last year that restricts instruction on eight concepts related to “race, color, national origin, or sex” in college classrooms. After we filed suit, the court halted enforcement of the law, recognizing that it violates the First Amendment rights of students and faculty."

Note about proposed Missouri legislation:

"Missouri’s HB 75 would prohibit an employee of an institution of higher education from requiring or making “part of a course,” eight concepts related to race or sex stereotyping. Like Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, this provision threatens free speech and academic freedom by regulating what faculty members are allowed to say in their classrooms.

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Michael Shellenberger’s Testimony to the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government

Michael Shellenberger testified before Congress on March 9, 2023. This is the Executive Summary of his presentation:

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower feared that the size and power of the “complex,” or cluster, of government contractors and the Department of Defense would “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” How? Through “domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.” He feared public policy would “become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Eisenhower’s fears were well-founded. Today, American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy. I am grateful for the opportunity to offer this testimony and sound the alarm over the shocking and disturbing emergence of state-sponsored censorship in the United States of America.

The Twitter Files, state attorneys general lawsuits, and investigative reporters have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations that are actively censoring American citizens, often without their knowledge, on a range of issues, including on the origins of COVID2 , COVID vaccines3 , emails relating to Hunter Biden’s business dealings4 , climate change5 , renewable energy6 , fossil fuels7 , and many other issues.

I offer some cautions. I do not know how much of the censorship is coordinated beyond what we have been able to document, and I will not speculate. I recognize that the law allows Facebook, Twitter, and other private companies to moderate content on their platforms. And I support the right of governments to communicate with the public, including to dispute inaccurate and misleading information.

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Censorship Czar Anthony Fauci Bans Discussion of the Lab Leak Hypothesis

Glenn Greenwald connects all the dots regarding the lab leak hypothesis.

Fauci knew lab leak was possible, but he and his $-conflicted pals denied this and summoned the power of the federal government to bar others from discussing lab leak in the "news" media and social media for many months. In addition to this being public health corruption, this is a free-speech disaster. This is your country's leadership keeping you safe by protecting you from ideas they consider harmful, even from true ideas they consider harmful.

You can watch Glenn's show every week-night on Rumble, the free-speech alternative to YouTube.

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Sharyl Attkisson Discusses the Official COVID Narrative

Sharyl Attkisson is a five-time Emmy Award winner and recipient of the Edward R. Murrow award for Investigative Reporting. She's the author of two New York Times bestsellers including “The Smear How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What you Think and How you Vote.” For 30 years Attkisson was a correspondent and anchor at CBS News, PBS, CNN and local news and she is now the host of a weekly show, “Full measure,” which focuses on investigative and accountability reporting. Excerpt from her discussion with Steve Kirsch.

Steve Kirsh: How are people being misled and how can we tell when people are telling you the truth?

Sharyl Attkisson : I think some important trends started in the past 15 to 20 years and have become more visible as time has gone on. Now you have to dig deeper. When you hear a prevalent narrative on the news, if you understand how the news has been co opted--like virtually every source of information that we use--you have to almost think two layers beyond what they're trying to tell you.

Number one, you have to assume that when everybody's on the same narrative, typically, if they're using the same language, interviewing the same experts all on board saying everybody knows something, then that's your cue that there's probably a really important piece of the puzzle that's being hidden by some important interest that would suffer if we knew the truth. So as you hear these narratives, your first thought should be "Who wants me to believe this and why?" And I know that ordinary people, including me, when I'm just leading my normal life, we don't have time to deeply research, every question that arises. We are used to counting on the news to help us do that. But I'm telling you today, you kind of have to rely on yourself, because there are very few sources you can go to where you can trust the information as being unfettered and dual-sided, presenting all viewpoints.

A lot of it is just purely strategic for the past five or six years, dishonest, not just even out of context, but completely false. But you'll never know if you're trusting your traditional source that we used to look to for such things.

This has never been truer than when we look at the COVID pandemic and the vaccines. And I certainly didn't know at the front end of the pandemic, what the truth was any more than anybody else did about how effective the vaccines might be, how bad the pandemic would be. But as time went on, this began to take on hallmarks of every other scandal that I've covered, including many non-medical scandals, where there are important interests, trying very hard to shape and censor information, trying to control the landscape where we get all of our information online, on the news, any source that we have. And I think it resulted in a lot of harm, number one, but number two, maybe irreparable damage to the credibility of the institutions that we rely on political institutions, medical institutions, law enforcement, whatever you're looking at, Department of Justice, media. People, by and large as a good chunk of the population, don't believe--nor should they--take at face value, what comes out of their mouths in terms of advice, and their fact checks, and so on.

Steve Kirsch: So what is your trusted sources that you rely on today?

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