A couple years ago, NPR offered a colloquium on free speech that did not have any participant advocating for free speech. Today, Steven Pinker schools NPR on cancel culture and free speech. I'll take this as a sign of progress.
Brett Weinstein is correct. Nazi doctors were hanged at Nuremberg for offenses based on lack of informed consent.
George Carlin summarizes the overall problem in "The American Dream":
[T]hey own this fucking place! It's a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club. By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people . . . continue to elect these rich cock-suckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you. They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on.
How many people got hurt and died because of the mRNA vax? Good luck finding out. The COVID-industrial complex is working overtime to keep us from finding out, as was exposed in New Zealand recently. It's the same strategy the CDC implemented in May 2023. No data, no problem!
Personal autonomy? Ah, such a quaint old idea. So impractical! Such flowery verbiage! We moderns no longer have the time or luxury to heed such poetry.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
And we're just getting started on wiping out informed consent . . .
During the height of COVID, corporate news couldn't stop pumping out (often incorrect and misleading) articles about COVID (see bottom of this article). Now that new information is available, corporate media has gone radio silent. Nothing to see here, even though new information points to U.S. government responsibility for one of the greatest societal disruptions ever. In contract, Public, founded by Michael Shellenbeerger, continues to vigorously investigate the cause and responsibility for COVID. Consider this excerpt from Alex Gutentag's recent article: "US And Chinese Scientists Made Plans To Engineer Coronaviruses Like SARS-CoV-2, New Documents Show: Was EcoHealth Alliance’s 2018 DEFUSE proposal a blueprint for bioweapons-related experiments that led to the Covid-19 lab leak?"
This historical evidence, as well as the scientific record, suggests that individuals involved in biodefense and pandemic preparedness may have been responsible for engineering the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The defense and preparedness push that gained funding and momentum after 9/11 appears to have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In attempting to stop pathogens from transmitting to humans, scientists appear to have achieved the opposite.What did Public Health get wrong about COVID? Consider this tweet thread by "Elizabeth Bennet,"a real-life pediatrician, commenting on Jay Bhattacharya's tweet:
The response to Covid-19 employed the same biodefense planning and structures. The National Security Council worked to craft Covid-19 policies, and Department of Defense officials were heavily involved in vaccine development and distribution. Out of 90 Operation Warp Speed leaders, 60 were military officials.
Despite the controversy surrounding Covid’s origin, the Department of Defense awarded a new $3 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance in December 2022. Gain-of-function research is largely continuing apace. Chinese scientists now claim to have created a mutated Covid-19 variant that killed humanized mice. The scientific value of this experiment is unclear.
Across the US, there are privately-operated “invisible” biolabs that slip through the cracks in federal regulation. Last year public health officials found that one of these secret privately-owned biolabs in California was mishandling 1,000 laboratory mice and samples of various infectious diseases.
According to the U.S. Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war. Modern U.S. Presidents keep forgetting to seek consent of Congress. It's only war. It's only our Constitution.
How long has it been since we followed the clear dictate of our own Constitution?
The last time the United States formally declared war, using specific terminology, on any nation was in 1942, when war was declared against Axis-allied Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, because President Franklin Roosevelt thought it was improper to engage in hostilities against a country without a formal declaration of war. Since then, every American president has used military force without a declaration of war.
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?