“Solving hate by banning hate speech is like solving global warming by breaking all the thermometers. All it does is make the hate harder to hear, harder to identify, harder to confront, harder to root out.” Jonathan Rauch
From a legislative or regulatory standpoint, the single biggest threat I have seen to free speech and academic freedom on campus has been the DEI requirements implemented by the California Community Colleges system. In an effort to combat these requirements, FIRE sued the California Community Colleges Chancellor and the members of its Board of Governors, as well as the State Center Community College District.
In the case, FIRE is representing six tenured professors, each of whom teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching and pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. This includes requiring professors to “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.”
Under these regulations, faculty performance and tenure will also be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of these government-mandated viewpoints. As our client, Reedley College professor Bill Blanken, said, “I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction? What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?
Dr. Peter A. McCullough is board certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular diseases, and clinical lipidology. He cares for advanced patients with common medical problems including heart and kidney disease, lipid disorders, and diabetes.
Here's more on McCullough from his page at Linked In:
After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Baylor University, Dr. McCullough completed his medical degree as an Alpha Omega Alpha graduate from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. He went on to complete his internal medicine residency at the University of Washington, cardiology fellowship including service as Chief Fellow at William Beaumont Hospital, and master’s degree in public health at the University of Michigan. Dr. McCullough is a practicing internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist in Dallas Texas and the volunteer Chief Medical Advisor of the Truth for Health Foundation.
Dr. McCullough has broadly published on a range of topics in medicine with > 1000 publications and > 680 citations in the National Library of Medicine. His works include the “Interface between Renal Disease and Cardiovascular Illness” in Braunwald’s Heart Disease Textbook. Dr. McCullough is a recipient of the Simon Dack Award from the American College of Cardiology and the International Vicenza Award in Critical Care Nephrology for his scholarship and research. He served on the editorial boards of multiple specialty journals. He has served as member or chair of data safety monitoring boards of 24 randomized clinical trials.
Now consider this testimony McCullough gave to Congress. Here is a description of the hearing:
Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green (Representative (R-GA 14th District) since 2021) will host a second hearing on COVID-19 vaccine injuries and for the first time, the House will hear from medical subspecialists who have managed patients first hand, extensively published and presented on the topic, and have been recognized as the clinical leaders in pandemic response. Testimony will begin on January 12, 2024, at NOON ET, in the The Rayburn House Office Building, US House of Representatives, 45 Independence Ave SW, Washington, DC 20515.
Clicking on the following image will allow you to see and hear 7 minutes of McCullough's testimony at the above-described hearing:
Peter McCullough:
I never supported these vaccines. I never told a single patient that it was safe to take a vaccine. I didn't take a COVID 19 vaccine myself because it wasn't safe. And I published an op-ed in The Hill in August of 2020 before they came out. The title of that op-ed is "The Great Gamble of a COVID-19 vaccine pandemic. The reason why it was a gamble is because of the vaccines. Of Americans who took the vaccine, roughly 75% of Americans took at least one shot according to COVID State's program. Of those, 94% took a messenger RNA vaccine, so we can restrict our comments to messenger RNA vaccines provided by Pfizer and Moderna.
These vaccines are a brand new technology that installs the genetic code for the lethal part of the virus, which is the spike protein, the spine on the surface of the virus. This was an extraordinary gamble, because there was no knowledge of what was going to turn this off. Once the genetic code gets in the body, there was no knowledge of: Does the body get rid of the genetic code? What shuts it off? Will some people produce too much genetic code and have it keep moving from cell to cell and too much spike protein?
It was known then that the spike protein was lethal. And to give a genetic code for a potentially lethal protein that was devised in a Chinese biosecurity lab to Americans was the most dangerous proposition our government agencies could have ever put forward to our country. And what we've learned on this is extraordinary.
Kastriudah and colleagues has published that the messenger RNA is physically circulating in the blood for at least 28 days. That's as long as they've looked. Cassin and colleagues from Harvard has shown the messenger RNA is stuck in the human heart 30 days after the vaccine when people die. And there's inflammation around it presumably due to the spike protein. Vohlken and colleagues from Stanford have shown the messenger RNA is stuck in human lymph nodes for at least two months and that's as long as they've looked.
Now the spike protein which is produced by the messenger RNA is widely circulatory in blood as showed by hybrid by Ogata and colleagues, Swink and recently Brogna in Germany. Now Brogna in Germany looked six months afterwards and at least half the people that took the shots had vaccines by proteins circulating in their bloodstream. That's as long as they've looked and they can identify it because Pfizer and Moderna have an amino acid signature on their spike protein to let us identify it. We know that it's Pfizer, Moderna doesn't come from the natural virus is coming from the vaccine. That's proven.
The spike protein now in 3400 peer reviewed papers, and growing, is proven to cause heart damage and myocarditis. Our regulatory agencies agree every regulatory agency in the world agrees--there's actually guidelines now in the UK and Australia about how to diagnose and manage vaccine myocarditis. That's how common this is. It accelerates atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, causes tremendous swings in blood pressure and heart rate called Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome or POTS, causes neurologic injury, stroke, both ischemic and hemorrhagic, paralyzing syndromes, including Guillain-Barre Syndrome, small fiber neuropathy, ear ringing.
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As with many disturbing things these days, I don't know how to proceed. Once again, it is being creditably suggested that our government engaged in reckless or intentional wrongdoing. This latest concern about Lyme disease is being reported on X by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University), based on Bitten: The Secret history of Lyme disease and Biological Weapons, a 2020 book by Kris Newby.
This latest concern merely deepens my already deep suspicions about the conduct and intentions of the U.S. government, especially given the fact that the U.S. government, in coordination with the corporate media, has been caught red-handed engaging in pervasive dishonest narrative control regarding many topics, including public health. For a deep dive on the evidence that the United States has been illegally and pervasively censoring its own citizens through illegal "jawboning," see this 2023 opinion in the case of Missouri v Biden, by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Excerpt from Bhattacharya's Tweet:
I just finished @krisnewby's Bitten, which tells the history of the US government's secret program in the 1950s and 1960s to weaponize ticks to deliver deadly bacteria to incapacitate unsuspecting populations.
Newby, a talented journalist and science writer, structures her history around a biography of WIlly Burgdorfer, the Swiss-American scientist who discovered borellia burgdorferi, a spirochete bacteria often found in Lyme disease patients.
It's an incredible, infuriating, well-written book worth your time.
A few lessons:
1. The mid-20th century US biomedical research establishment was psychopathic, whole-heartedly embracing reckless, deadly investigations in the name of developing vaccines and bioweapons.
2. It is possible (& perhaps likely, though not proven) that the emergence and spread of Lyme disease may have been caused by this research program, which included large open-air testing of intentionally infected ticks on US soil.
3. The bioweapons program used combinations of viruses and bacteria infecting the same tick to hide the body's immune response to infection from detection by standard medical tests. . . .
Excerpt from "It’s Time To Save Civilization From The Pathocratic StateRescuing democracy and free speech from nihilism and psychopathologies will require new institutions — and your support," by MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER, LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE, ALEX GUTENTAG, AND ZAID JILANI at Public. . An excerpt:
[T]he events of the last year make clear that the media and political establishment in the US and other Western nations pose a far greater threat to democracy than the populist movements they relentlessly defame.
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the release of the Twitter Files, and the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit revealed how widespread and near-total the Western establishment’s control of the media environment was and is. The picture it presents of itself as neutral, objective, and balanced is a lie. The media and political establishment are anti-populist, elitist, and anti-democratic. They deeply resent the rise of new independent voices through social media because they have long held undeserved influence over what ideas can be discussed, what’s important, and who can hold elected office.
The single word that best describes the professional-managerial class-dominated “deep state” agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, FBI, and others, along with news media corporations that engage in character assassination and disinformation, is “pathocracy.” ...
The good news is that the public increasingly distrusts the news media. Just 32% have some or a lot of trust in the news media compared to 29% who report “not very much” trust and 39% who say they have “none at all.” Nearly every major media organization saw its digital audience decline 13% to 35%. News media corporations will lose $2 billion between 2021 and 2026 due to a decline of print advertising spending from $7 billion to $5 billion, and flat digital spending. And mainstream news media companies laid off 2,681 people in 2023, a nearly 50% increase from 2022.