Author of Be Ready for Anything and Bloom Where You’re Planted online course
Welcome to the United States of Censorship.
Your tour guide today is Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, tweeted some pro-censorship nonsense the other day. In doing so, Murphy proved that (a) he doesn’t understand the First Amendment, (b) he wants the internet to be an echo chamber, and (c) he must have slept through high school civics class.
Murphy tweeted that “the survival of our democracy” was dependent upon even MORE censorship.
(Psst: NOT a democracy. I Googled it for you, Chris. How the heck did you get elected when you don’t even know this? I guess there isn’t a quiz you’ve gotta pass to be a Senator.)
Anyone north of a Hillary-Clinton-loving liberal knows that there’s war on our opinions, while the folks who control the media can say practically anything they want. (Like when CNN anchor Chris Cuomo defended Antifa and freaking compared them to WWII soldiers storming the beach at Normandy, even though he says he didn’t.)
Some background information on the wave of censorship
At the center of this brouhaha is Alex Jones’s InfoWars, an ultraconservative, conspiratorial media outlet who was recently deplatformed by anyone who matters in the media world.
While I’m personally not a fan of Jones or his website, I’m even less of a fan of censorship. Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube all removed Jones’s accounts within hours of one another, which is blatantly a colluded effort to silence his opinions. And whether you like Jones or not, this should scare the crap out of you if you don’t wish to live in an America that only allows one philosophy.
But it didn’t start with Infowars. The purge has been going on for quite some time.
Since mid-2016 the big 4 tech companies – Google, Facebook, Twitter and, the biggest social media platform in the known universe, YouTube, have engaged in secretive/open policies of censorship. It began with Amazon-owned, Washington Post running an article announcing Prop-Or-Not in which some unknown shadowy people had decided there were 200 different websites that were engaged in spreading Russian propaganda. Nothing could have been further from the truth and this experiment actually unleashed unintended consequences that took more than a year for these tech giants to reign in. Each of the 200 websites traffic exploded to the upside, in some cases doubling there traffic from the previous month.
The next step was unleashed by YouTube in what was dubbed “AdPocalypse” due to the way YouTube began systematically stripping ad revenue from content creators. Not all content creators and not all videos published by these select content creators were affected, but it was devastating to some of us…
…There was no rhyme or reason behind this on-going attack to our revenue base. AdPocalypse continues to this day with the added bonus of shadow banning. More about shadow banning in a moment.
When Natural News was first threatened and then had 140,000 pages de-indexed, Mike Adams took action, hired an attorney and had everything put back into place in short order. This was the warning shot to all other websites, including The Daily Coin, that something major was coming down the pike.
This is now the third phase of what seems to be a coordinated effort among these companies. Google began de-indexing pages from established websites like InfoWars and Natural News. This practice is alive and well today. (source)
And remember when Milo Yiannopolis got deplatformed? He was on top of the world for his alt-right commentary, he had a book deal, he was filthy rich, and he was everywhere. Until suddenly he wasn’t. He was all but erased by the Gods of the Internet. Media outlets like Mashable are filled with glee. “Deplatforming works,” they crowed, overjoyed about the fates of Yiannopolous and Jones.
For a few years there, Yiannopoulos was a reigning troll of the alt-right. He championed the ability to demean anyone anywhere, and called it free speech… Yiannopoulos’ rise and influence crystallizes how social media can amplify a fringe voice by coalescing followers and normalizing once-abhorred opinions and groups, which leads to real world violence.
Eventually, however, Yiannopoulos took it too far for social media, his speaking sponsors, and even his bosses to handle…
“My events almost never happen,” Yiannopoulos wrote.. “And when I get dumped from conferences, BARELY ANYONE makes a sound about it — not my fellow conservative media figures and not even, in many cases, you guys.”
Milo’s events don’t happen because his words, and the real world action they’ve inspired, triggered “de-platforming.” De-platforming is the idea that the best way to combat hate and vitriol in the real world is to take away amplification, usually online. It most recently regained prominence amidst the wide scale ban of Alex Jones and InfoWars from every major platform he had, except Twitter.
…The fact that Yiannopoulos has found his reach and influence so depleted that he can’t get new gigs and takes to comments on Facebook to complain shows the real world effect that de-platforming a toxic public figure can actually have. Indeed, the pro-InfoWars fervor surrounding Alex Jones’ ban from social media lasted about 24 hours; much more enduring is his silence. (source)
Again, whether you love or hate these websites and people that have been attacked doesn’t matter. I’m not a fan of Jones or Yiannopolous, but I am a fan of their freedom to say what they want, even if it’s abhorrent. The folks who run the information world are starting with the sites that are the most blatantly controversial because that’s how they get people on board with this purge.
They will not stop there, with the most abhorrent. The rest of us are next.
A quick segue into the protections of the First Amendment
One quick point I’d like to insert here so that it’s perfectly clear. There is a difference between censorship and violating the First Amendment.
Yes, Google, Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and the like are all private entities. They’re allowed to have whatever they want on their platforms. Their censorship is NOT covered under the First Amendment.
BUT…when they collude to silence a point of view that they don’t like, we’re at the top of a greasy slide straight into a pit of complete and utter censorship. While it isn’t covered by 1A, it is no less dangerous.
Ben Shapiro explains:
…it is a problem. It’s a problem because these policies are extraordinarily vague. These policies aren’t merely designed to crack down on speech openly advocating or threatening violence, or containing obscenity. These policies are deliberately unclear as well as political.
What, for example, constitutes “hate speech”? Much of what Jones and his employees say is absolutely rotten pig excrement, but there’s no definition of hate speech that has a limiting principle. Is it “using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender” to state that transgender people suffer from a mental disorder? Or that they are not in fact members of the gender to which they claim membership? What constitutes “hate speech” when discussing the relationship between radical Islam and terrorism? None of this has been made clear.
Furthermore, it won’t be made clear, because the political Left has no clear standards. … How exactly are we supposed to trust in free and open debate when those setting the limits are openly setting them up with embedded double-standards?
The answer is, we don’t. Trust in social media is declining nearly as fast as trust in media overall. There’s a reason for that. And it’s not because social media tolerates voices like Jones. It’s because they don’t tolerate voices like Jones while tolerating voices who are just as bad on the political Left – and they show no signs of limiting their censorship to Alex Jones. (source)
So when you’re arguing about this, just remember, it isn’t the First Amendment being breached here, but it is still insidious. Just because it isn’t unconstitutional doesn’t mean that it isn’t censorship.
Censorship is defined as the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that it’s considered by the government or a private institution to be objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient.
So yes, call it what you want, but it is classically, totally, absolutely censorship.
Back to Senator Murphy’s Twitter rant
So, anywho, let’s go back to Senator Murphy, who really is only saying what a whole bunch of other people believe. It’s just scarier because he has the political oomph to make his Orwellian dreams a reality.
It all started when he tweeted this:
Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart. These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it.”
Trust me when I tell you it won’t stop at Alex Jones. Senator Murphy doesn’t want it to stop at Alex Jones. He wants the sweep to continue and scoop up anyone with whom he disagrees. And not just on social media. Did you notice he was saying that he wanted entire websites to disappear? This is a totally different ballgame, friends. This is the beginning of the end.
John Nolte wrote for Breitbart (please swallow your disdain for Breitbart, commenters. I quoted CNN too):
InfoWars being silenced tightens the free speech circle, brings the line closer to you and I, especially in a terrifying and chilling climate where the left-wing establishment are deciding what “lies and hate” are.
Killing the InfoWars canary, however, will also embolden the censors at CNN and those like Murphy in the political world. They see that dead canary as a success, and as a blueprint to come after the rest of us. And make no mistake, we are all next.
Finally, and this is important, what Murphy is calling for is even more extreme than what happened to InfoWars.
Murphy is calling for “websites” to be taken down — entire websites.
In deleting their accounts, what Facebook and YouTube did to Infowars is bad enough, but Jones still has his own site, his own outlet; and now we have a sitting United States Senator is calling for that to be removed. (source)
But, even CNN is nonplussed about the disappearing of Jones from the internet. CNN. Columnist LZ Granderson wrote:
But that doesn’t mean I view systematically scrubbing him from the internet, as Apple, Facebook, and YouTube have tried to do, as a victory. Why? Because I enjoy hip-hop, Elvis Presley, and “The Catcher in the Rye” — and at some point in our country’s history, all three were in the sights of people who didn’t approve of its content (or in Elvis’ case, hips).
Restricting offensive or harmful language for the greater good is all fine and dandy until you become beholden to a definition of “greater good” you don’t agree with. Or when you oppose a politician’s view of “offensive.”
Today the mob is for you, but tomorrow you could be Larry Flynt, who endured decades of court cases and was shot because people thought the content in Hustler Magazine was not worthy of First Amendment protection. Times are obviously different today — paging Kim Kardashian — but the tendency to cherry pick the Constitution remains.
Again, I don’t like what Alex Jones has to say. But I do like the fact I can call him an idiot. That’s America, baby. (source)
When even CNN, that bastion of anti-Trump groupthink, agrees that this is a dangerous, horrifying slippery slope, I think we can all agree we’ve gone way beyond dangerous.
The man is obviously a liberal, left-wing, libtard. There is something mentally wrong with him.
Hate speech and incitements to riot or kill should be prohibited. You can’t yell “fire” in a theatre. There have always been some restrictions on speech and they are for a good reason. Sure, it can go too far. But even Hitler would not have been even a footnote to history if he hadn’t had a platform and people hadn’t elevated his hate speech to be accepted by millions of desperate Germans. So we guard against specific haters for good reasons. Certainly most people are allowed to spew whatever they want but usually we don’t elect them. We don’t pay attention to them as they scream their craziness on a street corner. When they incite others to do horrible things, then it’s time to take them down.
Who gets to define “hate speech,” Linda?
Is it hate speech if it calls out a certain group of people?
Is it hate speech if it calls out Antifa? What if it calls out Conservatives?
Is it hate speech if it’s an unpleasant truth?
I agree no one should incite violence, but “hate speech” isn’t so just because you disagree with it.
As I wrote in my article, I’m not a fan of Yiannopolois or Jones, but I’m a big girl. I can scroll past. They have just as much right to have their voices heard as do the people who hate Trump.
AMEN!
i live in ct….Chris Murphy (and DICK Blumenthal) do not represent the people of ct. These two clowns as well as our governor and all of our congressmen are all died in wool liberals and vote that way 100% of the time. They are elected into office by a combination of welfare/govt assistance leaches residing mostly in hartford, new haven and bridgeport, latte liberals on the gold coast who vote for corrupt democrats for corrupt reasons, and (I can’t prove it but I’m right) illegal ballots in a state where the national republican party has given up for obvious reasons. Really sad because politics (and the associated taxes) aside it’s a great state! I couldn’t be more ashamed or disheartened by the politics of the state I love and have lived all of my almost six decades in. God help us.
That’s IT!! I am tired of your attitude. The beatings will continue until morale improves!
Censorship: really got a foot hold in this Republic when the Bush 2 admin and congress passed the Patriot Act, in Oct of 2001. A document that took two years to write. I know first hand, I wrote an article, in March 2002, accusing the Bush 2 and the Clinton admin and the Mossad for Sept 11, 2001, a year later I was on the no fly list, 6 months ago I was denied a passport. BTW: do not just blame the DINOs, the RINOs are in on it too, just in the back room.
What do Alex Jones and the Twin Towers have in common?
1) Jewish assets
2) Controlled demolitions
3) Destroy the Bill of Rights
The goal is not simply selective censorship, but to regain control of the narrative, and through it control of the people. Control what people are allowed to know, and you can control their opinions, beliefs and actions. Since the early part of the 20th century, the so called elites had control of all media outlets, which amounted to a few national newspapers, five television networks and several major publishing houses. They’ve been using that control, along with economic manipulation through the FED, to drive us toward technocracy (yet another, and perhaps the most dangerous, form of collectivism; to understand it, read up on Zbigniew Brzezinski. To see what it has in store for us, study what is happening right now in China and India). Their control began to crack with the end of the Fairness Doctrine and consequent rise of talk radio, and was shattered by the coming of the Internet and independent media.
They (as to ‘they’, a little digging generally leads back to names like Rothschild, Rockefeller, Soros, etc.) desperately want their control back. The Daily Coin article called this the third phase. I’d say the fourth phase has already started. A little less than a month ago, WordPress flat out deleted several blogs, caving to pressure from the tech-opoly (Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. and their military/industrial complex connections), one of which is back up with a new service, but they lost years of archived material. I find myself routinely resubscribing to political newsletters, which suddenly vanish at random, apparently into the abyss of Spectrum’s spam filters. I also have a tiny, insignificant website I set up a couple of years ago, but so far have never found the time to do much with, at Weebly. Weebly was recently purchased by Square, an online payments company with a decidedly technocratic lean to its management. They have just announced new policies, complete with a very vague “hate speech” guideline and an equally vague anti-weapons policy. My blog tends to the political, and my personal pursuits tend to be non-PC. I spent a few hours yesterday carefully archiving, as I fully expect my work to vanish into the Aether without warning, very likely right along with dozens of other sites, in the near future.
Daisy is correct, this is not a 1st Amendment issue, but these corporations are not invulnerable. Their behavior is the very definition of economic collusion. They have blatantly, even proudly, violated both the Sherman Anti Trust Act and RICO. Prepping is more than just passively preparing, it must also be dynamically proactive and preventative, especially when it comes to governments. As Milton Friedman said, “it is not necessary to replace Congress. It is only necessary for us to make it politically profitable for them to do the right thing.” The tech-opoly is only getting away with this because Congress has not yet seen enough torches and pitchforks. It’s true that the outrage over Alex Jones turned to grumbling in less than 24 hours. That must change.
Warm up the fingers, and burn up those keyboards. Any prepper who thinks they can sit on the sidelines is deluding themselves. Remember the Snowden revelations. “They” know who you are. Technocracy will tolerate no dissent, not even passive dissent. If we don’t remind our supposed leaders and their elitist cronies that if needs be, we can and will come for them at ballot box and in the courts, it is a certainty that they will be coming for us. One by one.
I think it’s going to take [redacted] for the ‘chat giants’ to get the idea that the people are sick of their censorship. Crying about fixes nothing. A bully only learns from a punch in the face.
A – A Ron – I’m sorry that I had to redact part your comment. In this day and age, certain things in the comments section will get both of us a visit from the FBI.
I understand your position Daisy. But considering I am not / did not threaten anyone, tell someone else to do something to anyone, isn’t that caving into their politically correct garbage?
The left has resorted to violence to make their point. Cuddling a terrorist does not work, that is why we went (supposedly) into their territory, to fight fire with fire. Look at Saddham Hussein, while I certainly do not agree with the way he ruled his people, I most certainly understand WHY he ruled them that way. That is the only thing / way they understand. The radical left has essentially put themselves into that position. They practice that method and that is the only thing they seem to understand anymore. The child is too used to getting what it wants with tantrums, so now it’s time for the spanking to get their attention.
They are past the point of reasoning, you can’t talk with them, they are like rabid animals at this point. They won’t listen to you or your point because they don’t care about you…. or your point. Something very bad is going to happen to someone, or someones because this country is at a boiling point. It’s already happening at these so called ‘marches’. How long do you think it’s really going to take for someone to say, Im sick of FB, or Twit, or Insta, or whomever silencing me, I’ll show them!!
I can easily see some idiot trying to take out a corporate head to prove their point, whether that point is, Censorship is evil (yet killing you somehow isnt???), Capitalism is evil (yet they love their mass produced stuff which would not be possible without capitalism) The press throws gasoline on this fire as well.
The Ironic thing is, these talk giants created this demon with their very product. You gave everyone a voice, and let them build a pathetic, vapid little world where they were the most important thing. The universe revolved around THEM!! An attention whore’s paradise…. a drug addicts jackpot. You got them hooked on this digital crack and now you are going to take it from them and say no more. What do you THINK they are going to do at that?
If you feel the need to redact this comment as well, then do so but I will not comment further. I have made my point.
If you have read this to this point, thank you for your time.
No redactions here. 🙂 You have a lot of great input and I hope you stick around.
There is an uncensored site if you look for it.
The trouble with it is it costs cash to post, albeit microscopic amounts.
The cost keeps people from over-running it with the drivel seen elsewhere.
It also lacks the ability to downvote or flag – this keeps things mellow.
Anyway – as I recently posted elsewhere:
We should let those who communicate what we do not like
commit their message in public for all to recognize.
‘Free speech’ has several bullet point values:
1.
Uncensored, we can recognize and name perceptions we disagree with.
Otherwise such problems can fester in obscurity to become harsh realities.
2.
We must allow those who offend us to demonstrate their folly (or genius ! )
in order that everyone can recognize their product for what it truly is.
Only by this can we be allowed to know who to discount by our own devices.
Only by this can we learn of better perspectives unappreciated by ‘authorities’.
3.
The fear of lies (or truth ! ) increases when voices are silenced.
It is the caustic odor of this fear which corrodes the thin fabric of civilization.
Under censorship we cannot know who to trust or distrust:
whatever is censored may be hiding information revealing trust issues.
4.
Censorship is, ultimately, the imposition of a very cultural and personal filter.
It matters not whether by tedious hand,
or by automated algorithms unleashed by software:
The reasoning behind such algorithms is personally skewed at best.
It begins somewhere inside the
brain of someone who has an agenda for your beliefs and perspectives.
Censorship is like having
your breakfast prechewed for you by some hairy
ogre sitting at your morning table,
who also gargles your morning juice
before spitting it back into your cup for you to drink.
5.
Those who censor reveal their mental condition for all to witness.
Supporting the views at
https://www.yours.org/content/censorship-and-why-it-kills-freedom-92a0f73c4794
I am in complete agreement with Daisy on this. However, to comprehend how insidious this is I think it is important to understand the arguments of the other side, not at the political level, but at the philosophical level. The origin of the current efforts at censorship are based on arguments by Herbert Marcuse. Who was he? According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
“Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was one of the most prominent members of the Frankfurt School or The Institute for Social Research (Institute für Sozialforschung) in Frankfurt am Main. The Frankfurt School was formed in 1922 but went into exile in the United States in the early 1930s during the reign of the Third Reich. Although most of his colleagues returned to Germany after the World War Two, Marcuse remained in the United States.
The Frankfurt School has had an enormous impact on philosophy as well as social and political theory in the United States and around the world.” (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/)
His complete argument can be found here: Herbert Marcuse, 1965: http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/60spubs/65repressivetolerance.htm
He reaches the following conclusion:
“Withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements before they can become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally, intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right–these anti-democratic notions respond to the actual development of the democratic society which has destroyed the basis for universal tolerance. The conditions under which tolerance can again become a liberating and humanizing force have still to be created. When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted.
These same conditions render the critique of such tolerance abstract and academic, and the proposition that the balance between tolerance toward the Right and toward the Left would have to be radically redressed in order to restore the liberating function of tolerance becomes only an unrealistic speculation. Indeed, such a redressing seems to be tantamount to the establishment of a “right of resistance” to the point of subversion. There is not, there cannot be any such right for any group or individual against a constitutional government sustained by a majority of the population. But I believe that there is a “natural right” of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate. Law and order are always and everywhere the law and order which protect the established hierarchy; it is nonsensical to invoke the absolute authority of this law and this order against those who suffer from it and struggle against it–not for personal advantages and revenge, but for their share of humanity. There is no other judge over them than the constituted authorities, the police, and their own conscience. If they use violence, they do not start a new chain of violence but try to break an established one. Since they will be punished, they know the risk, and when they are willing to take it, no third person, and least of all the educator and intellectual, has the right to preach them abstention.”
One more quote from the annals of history. This from Benito Mussolini:
“The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State [referring to classical liberalism] is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality — thus it may be called the “ethic” State….
…The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone…”
http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/mussolini-fascism.asp
There’s a war on for your mind. The domestic enemies want to limit your freedom of choice in information to their purview alone, with no dissent aka comments section that goes against their narrative. Their narrative being that wich harms America is good and just. They want their military wing, the anti fascist fascists, to injure you into compliance if need be.
Public schools and many institutions of “higher education” are today and have been for decades teaching not how to think but rather what to think, and empowering those who swallowed the poison to attack any dissenting opinion as insanity. I never thought there’d be a time when we saw young people come to their senses and depart from their programming, but the #walkaway movement is evidence of this actually taking place.
I find it fitting, however, that a hoax alternate media outlet (the bill hicks show disinfowars) is being used to crack the armor of the first amendment.
If it wasn’t for your first sentence I’d think you were agreeing with me. It makes me wonder if you read my opening sentences. At any rate you are right on. The progressives of a century ago realized that an open revolution could never work in America. They also knew that the Constitution would make it very difficult to implement their policies politically. As Obama once lamented, “…the Constitution tells the government what it can’t do, not what it must do.” For an idea of what the left thinks the government must do look up FDR’s Second Bill of Rights.
In what seems like a coordinated effort the left has taken control of most of higher education and most news sources. Whether this is the work of folks like George Soros, or if the conservatives have just been asleep at the switch, this takeover has been virtually complete. If it wasn’t for the likes of Rush Limbaugh, other talk radio voices and more recently the conservatives of the internet I think the nation would have been lost.
I posted the Marcuse thing because I want people to realize that this isn’t just Senator Murphy and a handful of kooks. It is a built in part of progressive ideology which is almost identical to Mussolini’s fascism. By the way, fascism and Nazism are not the same thing. Fascism had no anti-sematism. It was a form of corporatist socialism. It was Russian propaganda that called the Nazis fascist. Antifa is fascist. But that is for another discussion.
The current attack on freedom of speech fits right in with Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
Rule 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
Rule 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
Rule 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
Alex Jones is a soft target. The left knows that conservatives don’t agree with him and don’t want to support him, but will have to “live up to their own book of rules”.
Hi Daisy,
Love your posts. You had one a while back talking about be careful what you do to others, it will get done back to you, and I think that deserves repeating.
As a math and physics guy, I think you have to beat up ideas in order to see what survives. When you come up with a hypothesis in science, you don’t promote it, you attack it. The ones that survive you publish and other scientists attack. The ones that survive that are called theories and people start to respect those ideas. This process of developing new ideas in science quickly removes the trash.
People who have a brain know that free speech is simply a science based attack on stupid ideas. People who put forth garbage, might sway a few fools, but eventually, as their idea gets bigger, smarter and smarter people will examine it, if they shoot a million holes in it, it will die. Free speech therefore is the fastest way to get good ideas promoted and bad ideas killed. The only people who are against free speech are those that want to control the narrative.
Unfortunately, there are people on both the red team and the blue team that love censorship. They just feel they should be in charge of censoring others. Right now, its the blue team that is deciding who gets censored and the red team is up in arms over that, but it is pretty obvious that if the red team were in charge, they would gladly censor the blue team. Which makes it hard for me to feel sorry for either group.
Hey Dan:
Unfortunately you are a relic from days past where critical thinking and honest actual science was taught in our institutions that actually taught higher education. Nowadays it’s mostly brainwashing, indoctrination, and he who yells loudest, or can add the most drama and pictures of dead puppy’s, is the winner. If I yell loud and often enough, people will believe the sky really IS falling.
On the Red and Blue thing, I have to disagree with part of your assessment, or maybe just the dissertation of it. I don’t think there really is a Red and Blue team anymore. They both work WITH each other under the same roof. They are both heavily invested in each other’s companies. They ALL are corrupt. (please don’t be the fool who says, oh but not MY congressman). You are correct though, the DO want each to control the entire game, censorship, net neutrality, book burning, each has their own pet name and code word for what essentially are the same basic acts of freedom removal.
It’s like the old World Wrestling Federation garbage. On the TV they are going to kill each other bla bla woof. As soon as the camera’s are off, they both bust out laughing at the shills who actually believe their act, and they go out and have a beer with each other. Congress and The Senate is the same freakshow
The thing is, if we watch them closely, it gets really difficult to move money around under the shells and make it go poof into someone’s bank account, so they have to distract us, like any other magician would. So, they create this us .vs. them atmosphere, get us all amped up on the us .vs. them, R .vs. D and while we are busy fighting and screaming at each other, they are slithering around in the background getting richer and more powerful at our expense. Have to keep the fan base agitated, if they start agreeing with each other that’s not good for the ruling class, so let’s say some more stupid stuff to rile them up again.
When it hits the fan, I sure hope people remember that it was the politicians who brought us to this point to begin with, and sure hope they make the politicians pay for it first of anyone. Granted, it was WE the people who keep electing these morons to office but it is THEY who are supposed to know and act better. I say get rid of every single one of them.
Here’s an idea.
Obama – Hope and Change
Trump – Make America Great Again
Trump Part 2 – Make Incumbents Extinct. THAT is the only way to drain the swamp.
Will someone let that clueless Senator that we are NOT A DEMOCRACY! What we were founded as, and should be living as, is a CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC. Democracy is mob rule: 51% of any set of idiots get to decide issues. A Constitutional Republic has a set of guiding principals, by which citizens decide issues. Big. Huge. Difference.
Facebook, Twitter, and the other idiots should be regulated just like utilities. They make millions of dollars and users have very few options to leave.
I suggest that people try Gab. They do not censor your speech and do not block people.
Reminds me of what happened in the Balkans…censored first, attacked for their religious beliefs, killed en masse for not thinking or believing as the majority did.
The increase in the attacks from the Left on the Right, is under reported and minimized by the media. Or they call the attacks a result of a “provocation”.
Politicians are not the sharpest tools in the shed…nor do they have a steadfast sense of morality, for if they did, the goalposts of decency and respect wouldn’t be moving all the time.
Hypocrisy is the overall condition which afflicts the left…what is acceptable behavior by them is never reciprocated to us…priceless behavior.
TDS…has to be the most recognized condition ever defined.
I wrote to Murphy and told him that since he takes a sworn oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, he should be indicted for treason. I also told him that free speech = free thought but that the left doesn’t want free thought, only sycophants who completely follow the party line to become little worker bee cogs in the wheel and can’t think for themselves.
I also wrote Ron Wyden of my state, Oregon, and told him he was a libtard. I’m going to email him again and tell him that he should be indicted for treason.
Except for a couple of congressmen and senators (Trey Goudy is the only one I can think of right now), Congress should be shut down and reworked. The founders intended citizen legislators, not entrenched professional politicians. This is why we need term limits and to return to state legislatures electing senators, then we could get rid of them more easily when they go astray.