Carrot or Stick?

Mike Johnson's reversal makes no sense here unless he was bribed big-time or he (or someone he cares about) was threatened with grave physical or financial harm. I have no idea what could turn a person so quickly, but it tells you that it doesn't matter what your intentions are when you first go to Congress. It doesn't matter how strongly you hold to your principles. The system will eat you up and laugh at you.You will dance when they tell you to dance.

Glenn Greenwald:

We interviewed Mike Johnson last year, a couple of months before he became Speaker.

It was the day he grilled FBI Director Christopher Wray on spying and censorship abuses.

Listen to what he told me: only to completely reverse himself and lead renewal of NSA/FBI spying powers:

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Rep. Mike Johnson in 2023: Says the unchecked power of intelligence agencies “keeps us up” at night.

@SpeakerJohnson in 2024: Plots with the Biden administration to ensure these agencies can spy on Americans without a warrant.

What happened?

Continue ReadingCarrot or Stick?

Chris Rufo Assembles Profile of NPR CEO Katherine Maher Based on her thousands of Tweets

What can we tell about NPR CEO Katherine Maher based on a review of her tweets?  Chris Rufo notes that she has tweeted more than 29,000 times. He has found a few themes:

What you notice first about Maher’s public speech are the buzzwords and phrases: “structural privilege,” “epistemic emergency,” “transit justice,” “non-binary people,” “late-stage capitalism,” “cis white mobility privilege,” “the politics of representation,” “folx.” She supported Black Lives Matter from its earliest days. She compares driving cars with smoking cigarettes. She is very concerned about “toxic masculinity.”

On every topic, Maher adopts the fashionable language of left-wing academic theory and uses it as social currency, even when her efforts veer into self-parody. She never explains, never provides new interpretation—she just repeats the phrases, in search of affirmation and, when the time is right, a promotion.

Maher understands the game: America’s elite institutions reward loyalty to the narrative. Those who repeat the words move up; those who don’t move out.

This is the person in charge of NPR. As you can see from Rufo's article, she has also taken a hard stand in favor of censorship.

As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.”

Rufo's article is titled, "Quotations from Chairman MaherNPR’s new CEO exemplifies the ideological capture of America’s institutions."

Continue ReadingChris Rufo Assembles Profile of NPR CEO Katherine Maher Based on her thousands of Tweets

Majority Democrat Position: The Government Should Decide What is True.

Glenn Loury's introduction to his podcast interview of Dan Shellenberger:

Maybe my least surprising political position is advocacy for free and open discourse. Without free speech as a bedrock principle, democracy would mean little. If we can’t, as private citizens, receive, judge, and debate ideas and information, the decisions we make on the basis of that information cannot themselves be considered “free” in any meaningful sense. If some central authority prevents me from discussing information—or even the possibility of the existence of information—that could change people’s minds about that authority’s course of action, all of our rights have been damaged.

But over the last five years, a whole raft of ideas potentially threatening to dominant media and government narratives have found themselves shut out of “legitimate” discourse. Having concerns about the side effects of COVID vaccines, advocacy for the chosen presidential candidate of the Republican Party, and opposition to funding Ukraine would seem, in another time, like normal positions any person in the US could hold. And yet many legacy media outlets treat those positions as anywhere from delusional to treasonous. Such positions are often labeled as sources of “misinformation,” dangerous ideas to which, we’re told, ordinary First Amendment protections may not apply.

In an age when almost all of us rely, to some degree, on web-based platforms for our information, the line between government censorship and platform terms of service can seem vanishingly thin. In fact, in this week’s episode, the journalist Michael Shellenberger suggests the line may not exist at all. In this clip, he draws my attention to a startling poll that finds a huge increase in the number of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters who want to see the government censor “misinformation” online. But who decides what counts as misinformation? When platforms seek government guidance on that definition, we have good reason to ask whether the apparent freedom they offer is government censorship by another name.

Continue ReadingMajority Democrat Position: The Government Should Decide What is True.

Damon Imani Barges into Democrat-Elite Bullshit Sessions to Drop Truth Bombs

Clever and Cathartic mashup by Damon Imani (also available on Rumble):

I'm waiting for the day when Democratic Elites acknowledge that they became adamantly pro-war, pro-censorship, shamelessly partisan, race-obsessed, cheering wide-open totally unregulated borders, anti-empiricist, anti-merit and opposed to hard-earned Enlightenment principles.

For many more examples of how corporate "news" sites work hard to A) prevent you from knowing things that are true and B) deprive you of critical context for stories and C) insist that you believe untrue things, check out the hundred of posts here at DI under the category of "Narratives in Media."

Continue ReadingDamon Imani Barges into Democrat-Elite Bullshit Sessions to Drop Truth Bombs