Why Progressives are Leaving Twitter (X)
This Tweet sums it up:
A reminder that folks who are leaving Twitter are doing so not because they were not permitted to express their opinion, but because you *are* permitted to express yours.
This Tweet sums it up:
A reminder that folks who are leaving Twitter are doing so not because they were not permitted to express their opinion, but because you *are* permitted to express yours.
We should be questioning everybody, including our tribes and our selves and then make our choices based solely on the best evidence, especially for things we are "sure" of. That is our duty as citizens. We need to dramatically remake our intensely propagandized world. Rich/powerful people are often the puppeteers of "experts" and corporate media for their own benefit, not ours. When we disagree with others, our first question should be "Where are you getting your information?" That explains differences of opinion most of the time. Consider also Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:
We live in a democracy. We don't have a priesthood here. We don't have high priests who are telling us, we're in charge of our own lives, and Americans need to do their own research. And, you know, listen, people say trust the experts. That became a mantra during COVID. I brought over 500 cases. and almost all of them involved in scientific controversy.My job is to read science, to learn it, and to be able to read it critically. In every case I've ever brought, there's an expert on that side and an expert on this side. When I brought them, when we brought them on Santo case, there were three experts from Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and we had three experts from Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and they were saying exactly the opposite thing.
Oh, you know, saying trust the experts to me. Makes no sense at all. Trusting the experts is a function of religion and totalitarianism, it is not a function of democracy. In democracy, we question everybody.
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.
This paragraph from an article in the New York Times speak for itself:
Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many artificial ingredients, questioning why the Canadian version has fewer than the U.S. version. But he was wrong. The ingredient list is roughly the same, although Canada’s has natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used “for freshness,” according to the ingredient label.
It's wild out there in the lands of Politics and Culture. I've been doing some collecting and I'd like to offer some of the things that especially caught my attention recently.
Glenn Greenwald is on fire. Here he is once again pointing out DNC/Corporate Media Hypocrisy:
I've lost count of the people who have told me that they don't know what Robert F. Kennedy actually says and they don't want to find out. And then They claim that he is "anti-vax" and a "conspiracy theorist," as though saying that is a substitute for knowledge. Michael Shellenberger comments:
This really happened. How could EVERYONE in the corporate media forget?
The Ukraine war (which has killed 600,000 Ukrainians so far) must must must go on because . . . trust us . . . says Anthony Blinken, neocon in Joe Biden's cabinet and one of the architects of the Iraq War.
Tulsi Gabbard was really put on this list this year after she expressed a political position in support of Trump. Everything else here is absolutely true. Does this sound like America?