Increasing Numbers of Left Wing Voters Side with the U.S. Government on Censorship and Spying

Modern day Democrats have become much more pro-censorship and much more in favor of U.S. government spying on its own citizens. You won't hear the full import of these stories from the NYT/WP/MSNBC/CNN or NPR. They treat you like infants, protecting you from "harmful" ideas. God forbid that they might fall off-narrative, thus incurring the wrath of the DNC. Glenn Greenwald operates differently. He treats his followers like adults. He recently did a two-hour deep dive on both stories on his show, System Update, which you can see on Rumble. Not Youtube, which now has a long proud history of censoring information it doesn't like.

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FIRE Responds to Viral Video Claiming that it is Proper to Shout Down Speakers at Universities

Growing numbers of young adults, including law students at elite universities, claim that it is necessary and proper to shout down speakers who were invited to campus because their words are "violence." For these people, it is not an option to engage with these speakers civilly, to challenge them with questions and comments. It's not enough to refuse to attend a talk. They feel they are compelled to muzzle the speaker with the heckler's veto so that no one else can hear the talk.

Zach Greenberg of FIRE explains that shout-downs clash with the principle of free speech. This is true even in the absence of government involvement (e.g., at a private university). Zach did a good job explaining the king of problem previously and he also does a good job here:

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About the Use of the Word “CIS”

I completely agree with J.K. Rowling:

Recently, Elon Musk declared that "Cis" would be considered to be a slur on Twitter.

I oppose any censorship of the word "cis." Even if it is considered "hate speech," it would be protected by the First Amendment. FIRE explains:

There is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. So, many Americans wonder, "is hate speech legal?"

Contrary to a common misconception, most expression one might identify as “hate speech” is protected by the First Amendment and cannot lawfully be censored, punished, or unduly burdened by the government — including public colleges and universities.

The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly rejected government attempts to prohibit or punish “hate speech.” Instead, the Court has come to identify within the First Amendment a broad guarantee of “freedom for the thought that we hate,” as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes described the concept in a 1929 dissent. In a 2011 ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts described our national commitment to protecting “hate speech” in order to preserve a robust democratic dialogue:

Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.

In other words, the First Amendment recognizes that the government cannot regulate “hate speech” without inevitably silencing the dissent and dialogue that democracy requires. Instead, we as citizens possess the power to most effectively answer hateful speech—whether through debate, protest, questioning, laughter, silence, or simply walking away.

I want to see what other people are thinking, unvarnished, whether or not I approve of it, whether or not it is crude or wrongheaded. It gives me important information about that person.

"Profanity is the effort of a feeble brain to express itself forcibly."

Spencer W. Kimball

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Matt Taibbi: Free Julian Assange

From Matt Taibbi's latest article, "Why Julian Assange Must Be Freed."

[S]ecrets do not belong to governments. That information belongs to us. Governments rule by our consent. If they want to keep secrets, they must have our permission to do so. And they never have the right to keep crimes secret.

I’m an American. Many of you are from the U.K. In our countries, we’re building skyscrapers and huge new complexes to store our secrets, because we don’t have room to keep them all as is!

Why do we have so many secrets? Julian Assange told us why. From an essay he wrote:

'Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers.'

When governments become authoritarian, they inspire resistance. Techniques must then be developed to repel that resistance. Those techniques must then be concealed.

In short: the worse a country is, the more secrets it has. We have a lot of secrets now.

Julian Assange became famous as we were creating a vast new government-within-a-government, a system of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance, and drone assassination. Many of these things we know about only because of Wikileaks. Ostensibly, all this secrecy was needed to fight foreign terrorism.

The brutal irony now is the architects of that system no longer feel the need to hide their dirty tactics. My government, openly, wants to put this man in jail for 175 years, mostly for violations of the Espionage Act. These include crimes like “conspiracy to receive national defense information,” or “obtaining national defense information.”

What is “national defense information?” The answer is what makes this law so dangerous. It’s whatever they say it is. It’s any information they don’t want to get out. It doesn’t even have to be classified. What is conspiracy to obtain such information? We have a word for that. It’s called journalism.

My government wants to put Julian Assange in jail for 175 years for practicing journalism. The government of this country, the U.K., is going to allow it to happen.

If they did this to Andrei Sakharov, or Nelson Mandela, every human rights organization in the world would be denouncing this as an intolerable outrage. Every NGO would be lining up to lend support. Every journalist would be penning editorials demanding his release.

But because our own governments are doing it, we get silence.

If you’re okay with this happening to one Julian Assange, you’d better be okay with it happening to many others. That’s why this moment is so important. If Assange is successfully extradited and convicted, it will take about ten minutes for it to happen again. From there this will become a common occurrence. There will be no demonstrations in parks, no more news stories. This will become a normal part of our lives.

Don’t let that happen.

Free Julian Assange.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi: Free Julian Assange