RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18486/twitter-elon-musk

Imagine if George Soros had bought Twitter? [Former Secretary of Labor Robert] Reich would be jumping up and down with joy, as would Musk’s other critics. I don’t recall the outcry when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, the most influential newspaper in our nation’s capital. To the contrary, Bezos was applauded for bringing a more liberal perspective to that newspaper.

The real reason, of course, is the fear by the hard left of losing their control over social media…. Indeed the greatest fear expressed by these pretextual defenders of free speech is that — God forbid — Donald Trump would be allowed back on Twitter so that the public might be able to read and evaluate his tweets. I don’t like a great many of Trump’s views…. Yet I don’t want some anonymous platonic guardians deciding whether or not I can read tweets of Trump or others with whom I may disagree.

What Robert Reich and his ilk are really afraid of is actual freedom of speech…. But Democracy and free speech require that all views be available in the marketplace of ideas. The answer to bad speech is not censorship by social media, but rather open platforms that permit responses. Donald Trump should be answered, not suppressed.

Elon Musk is a private citizen who is not bound by the First Amendment…. He can apply to Twitter what Chief Justice Rehnquist once said about our Constitution: “Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea.”

This would not mean no censorship at all: even the First Amendment allows censorship of narrow categories of expression, such as, direct incitement to violence, child pornography and malicious defamation. But that is not what the hard left fears. What people like Reich and Jackson are afraid of are ideas they don’t like, information that differs from their narrative, and hate speech, as defined by them alone?

I welcome Musk’s purchase of Twitter and fervently hope that he runs it in the spirit of our great experiment in liberty, namely the First Amendment.

The hard left is going absolutely crazy over Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter. One of their arguments, made loudly by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, is that no one person should own and control such an important media platform. But that argument, repeated by others, is totally phony and hypocritical. Imagine if George Soros had bought Twitter? Reich would be jumping up and down with joy, as would Musk’s other critics. I don’t recall the outcry when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, the most influential newspaper in our nation’s capital. To the contrary, Bezos was applauded for bringing a more liberal perspective to that newspaper.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2022/05/some-harsh-words-about-the-cult-of-kindness/

“We’ve established that kindness per se is not a sufficient condition for decent behaviour because political ideologies determine who can be treated with kindness and who can be treated with cruelty. This gets to the crux of the present situation because underpinning the current notion of kindness is the contemporary moral and ethical system of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), which has been introduced into almost every institution in Western liberal democracies. The HR department in your workplace, and workers’ rights legislation in your state or country, will almost certainly be infused with this ideology.”

One of the most witless, inane and paradoxically evil ideas to contaminate contemporary culture in recent years is kindness, or, as what amounts to a campaign slogan says, ‘Be Kind’. On the surface, what could possibly be wrong with being kind to each other? Only brutes and criminals would find something wrong with such an obviously decent notion. The problem, though, is that beneath its beautiful and superficially moral surface, kindness, in its contemporary iteration, is surreptitiously ideological and smuggles into everyday life entirely new ideas of metaphysics, logic and epistemology, ones that have profoundly negative consequences for liberal democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

The photo featured atop this article is of workers — colleagues, in fact — who are being respectful, courteous, and, yes, kind to each other. The scene is Central Europe in the summer of 1944. Apart from the uniforms, nothing is unusual; the photos could have been taken at any off-site staff training session anywhere in the world. What most people who view the photos won’t know, though, is that the happy, collegiate staff were taking a break from murdering 600,000 Hungarian Jews in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. They are members of the Schutzstaffel, abbreviated as SS or, in more simple terms, Nazis.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/01/the-new-disinformationists/

The Biden Administration feels that it must now use federal resources to attack “disinformation.” So the Department of Homeland Security recently announced the creation of a “disinformation governance board.”

The board’s executive director, Nina Jankowicz, at least has clear qualifications for the post. She previously had spread false rumors on social media that Donald Trump voters would show up at the polls in 2020 armed, and joined the mob’s chorus that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” Perhaps the idea behind her hiring was “it takes one to know one.”

Although the new board’s mandate is unclear, the idea seems to be that Jankowicz and her colleagues will use the federal government’s powers to adjudicate what Americans say as either true or false—and to suppress as “disinformation” anything it doesn’t find useful.

The new war against “disinformation” follows the narratives of the “insurrection” on January 6, the “democracy dies in darkness” return of Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin as a mastermind gasoline price-spiker. Such narratives are intended to distract us from the Biden disaster and the ongoing assault against constitutional freedom. 

When things turn south for the administration, Barack Obama—a sagging Netflix’s $50-million “idea man”—usually emerges from one of his three mansions in Hawaii, Martha’s Vineyard, or Kalorama to lecture clingers and deplorables on various threats they pose to the anointed. 

His sermons usually project his own transgressions. Recently, Obama went to Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, to admonish us that new free speech platforms might tolerate incorrect expression that he and the Left smear as “hate speech.” 

But is not Barack Obama ill-suited to lecture anyone on disinformation? Do we remember his Obamacare version of disinformation: “You can keep your doctor; you can keep your plan”? Do we recall “shovel-ready jobs”?

Obama was caught secretly promising Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev that the United States would deal away missile defense in Eastern Europe for Vladimir Putin’s good behavior (“but it’s important for him to give me space”) during his 2012 reelection bid. Was this transparency or another example of how, but for a hot mic, “democracy dies in darkness”? Could Eastern Europeans have used such a discarded anti-missile system today?

Who employed the misinformationist Christopher Steele to slander presidential candidate Donald Trump? Was it James Comey’s FBI? Or Hillary Clinton’s campaign? Or the Democratic National Committee? Or the Perkins Coie legal firm? Or Fusion GPS? Or all combined? And which president was briefed regularly on his administration’s disinformation war against Trump?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/master-misinformation-still-charge-lloyd-billingsley/

At the White House on April 5, former president Barack Obama introduced “vice president Joe Biden,” claiming “that was a joke!” Joe Biden wasn’t laughing. The Delaware Democrat is clearly incapable of exercising national office, and after the Afghanistan debacle openly said he was “instructed” to call on certain reporters.

“He is not in charge,” observed Stephen Miller of The Spectator, and as Tiana Lowe of the Washington Examiner wondered,  “who the hell is in charge here?” That became clear on April 5, but it was already apparent long before.

“The country was in better shape now than it had been when I’d started,” claims POTUS 44 in A Promised Land, released two weeks after the 2020 election. This 751-page auto-hagiography is a bloated rehash of the 2015 Believer, by “Obama’s narrator” David Axelrod. The former Barry Soetoro touts his “calling,” leaving little doubt that Biden is the front man in his current third term.

Joe Biden had a “handsome face always cast in a dazzling smile,” A Promised Land explains. On domestic issues Joe was smart and “his experience in foreign policy was broad and deep.” And so on, in vintage Axelrod style.

On Biden’s watch, Putin invades Ukraine. On the domestic scene crime, inflation and gas prices are soaring, and only 17 percent of Americans rank the economy as excellent or good, the lowest since 2014. Even so, two weeks after the Obama White House appearance, Biden let it slip that he is running for re-election in 2024. The way things are now, the Delaware Democrat says in effect, is the way they are going to be moving forward. That too relates to The Promised Land author.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/05/monster-who-sent-infected-patients-nursing-homes-daniel-greenfield/

This monster, not having a conscience of his own, would like to “shock your conscience”.

A state senator from Franklin County has called for the immediate resignation of Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Richard ‘Rachel’ Levine, saying his actions were a major factor in the large number of covid-19 cases and deaths in the state’s nursing homes.

Wolf’s Secretary of Health, Dr. Richard (Rachel) Levine, had transferred his own mother out of a nursing home and to a hotel.

To date, state figures show that nursing homes residents have accounted for 2,529 of the state’s 3,707 reported covid-19 deaths. That is a pattern that has been echoed in most states across the country, however.

In a policy guidance issued in March, the Health Department stated, in part: “Nursing care facilities must continue to accept new admissions and receive readmissions for current residents who have been discharged from the hospital who are stable to alleviate the increasing burden in the acute care settings. This may include stable patients who have had the covid-19 virus.”

The death toll is a good deal higher now. 

Biden decided to pick Dr. Rick, who wrongly identifies as a human being, as Assistant Health Secretary. Now he’d like to “shock your conscience”.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-implies-obama-devised-ministry-of-truth-disinformation-governance-board/

Former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard implied that former President Barack Obama devised the formation of President Biden’s recently announced Disinformation Governance Board, which critics have likened to the “Ministry of Truth” from George Orwell’s 1984.

“Biden is just a front man,” Gabbard tweeted Sunday. “Obama, April 21: social media censors ‘don’t go far enough,’ so the government needs to step in to do the job. Six days later, Homeland Security rolls out the ‘Ministry of Truth’ (aka Disinformation Governance Board).”

Gabbard’s tweet was in reference to Obama’s speech at Stanford University last week, where he declared that tech companies have an obligation to more strictly police disinformation and called for the government to facilitate that.

“Now the good news is that almost all the big tech platforms now acknowledge some responsibility for content on their platforms, and they’re investing in large team of people to monitor it,” Obama said during the speech. “Given the sheer volume of content, this strategy can feel like a game of Whack-A-Mole.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/02/bidens-loan-forgiveness-fraud/

His popularity flagging, President Joe Biden is using the oldest trick in the book to return voters to the Democrats’ fold: Don’t earn their future votes, buy them. And that’s exactly what Biden is doing with his $1 trillion plan to “forgive” student loans.

Biden had already allowed students to “postpone” paying their loans during the pandemic “emergency,” even those who have jobs and could make the payments.

So why now forgive the loans? The truth is, one of the biggest recent declines in Biden’s support comes among Americans of college age and slightly older, the very group most likely to have a pile of student loans.

What better, or more cynical, way to revive their flagging political support than to bribe them with a “free” education?

Hard-left Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley called Biden’s plan “a tremendous victory.” In fact, it is yet another betrayal of working Americans who will now be paying taxes to support rich kids’ higher education.

That’s not hyperbole. If anything, it’s understatement. As a devastating University of Chicago study conclusively shows, wealthy families disproportionately benefit from loan forgiveness programs.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/disinformation-for-dummies-governance-board-orwell-1984-mayorkas-homeland-security-11651431969?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

We realize public schools don’t teach the classics any more, but has no one in the Biden Administration read George Orwell ? Apparently not, because that’s the only explanation for its creation of a new Disinformation Governance Board.

We have to admit that when we first read about it, we thought the news was itself disinformation from the Administration’s political enemies. Surely, no one in this age of polarization and public mistrust of institutions would think it’s wise to set up a government shop with the job of telling Americans what is true.

We were wrong. No less an authority than Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, broke the news about the board last week in an appearance before Congress. He said the purpose of this new corner of the bureaucracy will be to warn Americans about falsehoods coming from foreign adversaries such as Russia, China and cartels that smuggle migrants into the United States.

“It works to ensure that the way in which we address threats, the connectivity between threats and acts of violence are addressed without infringing on free speech—protecting civil rights and civil liberties, the right of privacy,” Mr. Mayorkas told CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/30/the-great-american-free-speech-panic/

The American elites have come up with all kinds of convoluted reasons as to why it’s good and proper for Silicon Valley to wield its unprecedented power against those they disagree with. But those reasons keep changing in revealing ways. Before this week the argument was that Twitter can set whatever speech policies it likes because it’s a business and anyone who doesn’t like it can go elsewhere. Now they’ve suddenly changed their tune. And for all their deeply felt concern about misinformation the elites have turned a blind eye in recent years to how their war on misinformation has produced its own kind of misinformation – such as the hasty branding of the Hunter Biden story or the Covid lab-leak theory as bonkers conspiracy theories, only for it to turn out later that there was actually something to them.

This has become a vicious circle. Some of the genuinely mad movements unleashed in recent years – from QAnon to Stop the Steal to Covid anti-vax guff – are actually a demonstration of a well-worn argument against censorship. Namely, that censoring bad ideas doesn’t make them go away and can give them a glamour they do not deserve. Censorship has a way of making people think they’re on to something. Combine this with a mainstream media that now routinely prizes The Narrative over the facts – calling BLM riots ‘mostly peaceful’ and Kyle Rittenhouse a ‘white supremacist’ – and you’ve got a toxic mix. The crisis of trust in the mainstream has sent many looking for answers at the margins. And the more that do, the more censorship is meted out.

But then again this was never really about misinformation, was it? This is about America’s ruling class becoming deeply sceptical about one of America’s founding values, and deeply sceptical about their fellow citizens. So-called liberal elites simply do not believe that ordinary people can be trusted to sort truth from illusion and are now convinced that some higher power must vet their reading material for them. They believe that the answer to bad speech is not more speech, but ruthless corporate censorship. They have convinced themselves that free speech is a threat to civilisation, rather than the core of civilisation.

Remember the date: April 27, 2022

That’s when the mask came off the creaky Orwellian juggernaut that is the Biden Administration. 

The senile rictus disappeared and something far more threatening took its place. 

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell called the enforcement mechanism of his totalitarian propaganda regime the “Ministry of Truth.” Appearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee, the ironically named Department of Homeland Security was slightly more subtle. 

Too many people have read Nineteen Eighty-Four. Calling a government-funded effort to suppress criticism of the regime the “Ministry of Truth” would cause people to worry and complain. Instead, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the creation of the “Disinformation Governance Board.” 

No, I am not making that up. 

I sympathize with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who said he wondered whether this new assault on free expression was a “belated April Fools’ joke.”

Unfortunately, it’s not.  

Granted, it is as preposterous as an April Fools’ Day prank. So is its director, Nina Jankowicz, a 33-year-old anti-Trump hack, who is described—God help us—as an “internationally recognized expert on disinformation.” You can judge how expert by looking up her truly embarrassing videos on the subject (among many other subjects). 

So what will the Disinformation Governance Board actually do—besides, I mean, provide fodder for standup comics and incredulous commentators? In one sense, it is a little hard to say for sure since its actual duties and extent of its powers have yet to be spelled out.  

But one doesn’t need fine print to know that this new police force will have essentially two jobs.  

One job will be to suppress criticism. Former U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is right. This is exactly the sort of thing, she told Fox News, one expects to see in dictatorships, not in free countries. The board, she said, amounts to a “department of propaganda” promulgated by a government that is afraid of its own people. Did someone discover that the president’s son had a laptop full of compromising, and probably criminal, information?