Cut all Government-Funding to Kneecap the Censors
The five-minute answer is civil society organizations [must] prepare for public knowledge and education a comprehensive list of every single censorship program, every single censorship grant, every single censorship contract, every single censorship Task Force, every single censorship initiative at the US Department of Defense, the US Department of State, US Agency for International Development, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, DHS, HHS, FDA, CDC, FEMA, CISA. You basically have a comprehensive executive order that bars all federal funding, all procurements, all grants, all contracts. And you basically kneecap the entire censorship industry through cutting the funding, because these people don't work for free. This is a censorship war. It's carried out by a censorship army. The censorship army is composed of censorship mercenaries, and those censorship mercenaries need government money to do their work.
Why Martin Gurri is Voting for Trump
Martin Gurri's thoughtful analysis of the considerable flaws of both candidates. The Founders of this Country must be weeping in their graves.
"Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—the empty pantsuit of elitism or the eternal master of disaster? We must pick one or the other on November 5."
Here is Gurri's overview of the Democrats:
There are only two vital forces in American politics today: those who wish to control everything, and those who wish not to be controlled. The antagonists are roughly equal in number but vastly disproportionate in strength. True to its nature, one side controls virtually all the institutions that hedge the life of the voters. Also true to its nature, the other side spends most of the time fighting with itself.The forces of control own the White House, the Senate, the media, the universities, the mainstream churches, the federal and state bureaucracies, most corporations, most digital platforms, and the entirety of American culture. Homegrown control freaks can also rely on assistance from Control International, the cabal of like-minded elites that runs the United Nations, the European Union, and any number of nation-states from Britain to Brazil.
Why the itch to control? Nietzsche would explain it as pure will to power, and that’s a perfectly adequate account.
The Democratic Party is the party of control.
Excerpt re Harris:
So here is the most compelling reason I will be voting against Harris and the Democrats in November. I was born in Cuba. I recognize the stench of hypocrisy emanating from those who conceal lust for power behind a buzz of salvationist jargon.If the control accumulated by the administration had been used for good—if the world were calm and at peace, say, or the American public brought to unity as was promised—we might have been convinced it has some merit. But there’s a reason Biden is no longer on the ballot. There’s a reason Harris is running away from her administration’s policies. At home and abroad, the last four years have been a rolling disaster—and the voters know it. This crowd understands institutional control and nothing else. Out in the world, failure has been habitual, horrendous, epic in its dimensions.
Where to begin? For motives I am hard put to explain, the Biden-Harris people encouraged millions of illegal aliens to swarm into our urban centers. They mismanaged the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, relying (naturally) on harmful school closures, lockdowns, and mandates, all based on contrived falsehoods, and they utterly botched the persuasion campaign for the vaccines. They inflated, indebted, and overregulated the economy. They spent trillions but were unable to build or achieve much beyond a handful of charging stations: We can guess where the money went. They promoted grotesque stereotypes based on race and sexual preference, a policy that sowed division and reaped distrust...
China is aggressively expanding its military, particularly its navy, even as our own military has atrophied because of antique equipment and low enlistment rates. We can’t even deploy all our warships because we lack the personnel to do so.
There are too many leaks in the dike and not enough fingers—not to mention an absolute dearth of strategic thinking to identify where our priorities lie in a dangerous world.
This, then, is my secondary reason for voting against Harris. I’m not sure we can survive four more years of such toxic levels of incompetence.
Harris is not helped by her recent interviews. Brett Baier tells her the numbers: 79% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track and you and Joe Biden have been in charge for the past 3 1/2 years. Harris: It's Trump's Fault.
DNC Panicking in Desperation
Maybe the DNC should have had a real primary, so they weren't stuck with a pro-war, pro-censorship, open-the-gates-to-unvetted immigrants, anti-law & order, pro-Big-Pharma and Big-Ag candidate who can't think on her feet.
I say this as one who has voted democrat in national elections for many decades. Not this time. Harris is a pathetic puppet for a nameless/faceless group of rich fucks who, somehow, think they haven't yet done enough damage to the people institutions of this country.
Chris Hedges Comments on the U.S. Security State and the DNC
Chris Hedges was recently on Glenn Greenwald's System Update offering a wide-ranging analysis of current events. I copied the following excerpts concerning the U.S. Security State and the disturbing transformation of the DNC:
G. Greenwald: Anyone covering foreign policy and covering wars as you did for so long, obviously has to deal with, in all sorts of ways, the U.S. security state, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and sort of how it influences a lot of these policies. There's no way to understand one without the other. After 9/11, we saw this series of whistleblowers from within the U.S. Security State, and people like William Binney, Thomas Drake, and, of course, culminating with Edward Snowden, all have the same grievance, namely, that the whole foundation of this secret part of our government that would act without democratic accountability and outside of any transparency would be the one taboo would ever be turning their power inward to manipulate the American population and domestic population. And a lot of that came forward primarily based on their grievance, that that was the thing that they thought would never happen. And they were seeing that more and more and more and more, that almost as much as these agencies were focused on foreign governments, they were focused on our domestic politics as well. I know there's been a lot of that since the creation of the U.S. Security State, but do you agree that that has gotten worse and more dire, more evident – the idea that the U.S. Security State now plays a bigger role than ever before in our domestic politics?Chris Hedges: Yeah, it's completely unaccountable and you can't control it. That's the problem. And Arnold Toynbee when he writes about the decline of the Empire, talks about these rogue intelligence, military complexes, institutions that essentially can no longer be regulated, can no longer be constrained. All of the people who led us into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, you know, there should be accountability there. Not only is there no accountability, but the same people are leading us into the disasters in Ukraine and funneling weapons to sustain the genocide in Gaza. And that's very dangerous because, at the beginning of an empire, empires are very judicious, usually about the use of force. What characterizes declining dying empires is military adventurism, where they seek to gain a diminishing or a loss to Germany through a military fiasco. And I think we can start with Vietnam and go basically right through just one military debacle after another. What we've done in the Middle East is probably the greatest strategic blunder, you know, in American history.