RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-a-time-of-war?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When we planned this episode of Honestly, I thought we would be looking back at the past year from a slightly quieter vantage point. We were going to release it on October 7. But quiet is the last thing happening in the Middle East right now. The war that Iran outsourced to its proxies since October 7, 2023 has now become a war explicitly between Iran and Israel.

Hours before I sat down with Douglas Murray in New York City, Iran launched over 100 ballistic missiles toward Israel. As Israel’s 9 million citizens huddled in bomb shelters, a handful of them made a direct impact. For a lot of Americans, it still feels like a faraway war. But it is not.

There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil. This is one of them. This is a war between Israel and Iran. But it’s also a war between civilization and barbarism. That was true some 360 days ago. And it’s even more true today. And yet this testing moment has been met with alarming moral confusion.

Consider a few examples from the last week. At the United Nations, 12 countries, including the U.S., presented a plan for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon without mentioning the word Hezbollah. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib tweeted, “Our country is funding this bloodbath,” minutes after Israel assassinated the leader of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet, Hassan Nasrallah, who, The New York Times described as “beloved,” “a towering figure” and “a powerful orator.” Here in New York, students chanted for an intifada moments after the Jewish community memorialized six civilian hostages murdered by Hamas. At Yale this week, students chanted, “From Gaza to Beirut, all martyrs we salute.” That’s just a few examples from the past week.

No one I know understands the moral urgency of this moment better than Douglas Murray. Douglas isn’t Jewish. He has no Israeli family members, although I know a lot of Israeli families who consider him an adoptive family member. And it is Douglas, more than almost anyone in the world, who has articulated the stakes of this war with the moral clarity it requires.

Douglas’s work as a reporter has taken him to Iraq, North Korea, northern Nigeria, Ukraine, and most recently, of course, to Israel, where he has become a celebrity. When you walk down the streets of Tel Aviv with Douglas Murray, it’s like being with The Beatles. He’s also the best-selling author of seven books, a regular contributor at the New York Post, National Review, and most importantly, at The Free Press, where he writes the beloved Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering. There is just no one I would rather be sitting with as we watch the Middle East and, really, the world transformed before our eyes.

https://reason.com/2024/10/03/tim-walz-jd-vance-free-speech-censorship-debate-veep/

Toward the end of Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) argued with Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) about former President Donald Trump’s efforts to remain in power following his 2020 election loss. Trump’s conduct was indefensible, and thus Vance did not do a very good job defending it. Rather, he attempted to turn the tables on Walz, accusing the Democratic ticket of disrespecting the most important democratic norm of all: free speech.

“You guys attack us for not believing in democracy,” said Vance. “The most sacred right under United States democracy is the First Amendment.”

Vance went on to accuse Walz of wanting to criminalize misinformation, referencing previous, inaccurate comments the governor made about exceptions to the First Amendment. At that point, Walz actually interrupted Vance, and claimed that the First Amendment does not protect misinformation or “threatening or hate speech.”

In other words, misinformation, threats, and hate speech are all unprotected categories of speech, according to Walz.

But the governor is mostly, very wrong. He’s correct to note that true threats of violence lack First Amendment protection if they are specific enough. Misinformation and hate speech are absolutely protected by the First Amendment, however. And while the former is a relatively new category of expression facing explicit calls for censorship, the latter category—hate speech—has been exhaustively litigated before the Supreme Court.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/04/that-70s-show-2/

A widening war in the Middle East that includes a literally more explosive Iran. Russians and Ukranians killing each other for no reason in a conflict in which the former has threatened a nuclear strike. A belligerent China menacing Taiwan. A dockworker strike (possibly resolved?) that could thrash an economy already ravaged by inflation. A migrant stream that is more invasion than immigration. Rising antisemitism.

Are we back in the 1970s, when the world felt unstable and the future appeared grim?

The words typed above would have not been applicable in late 2019, as Donald Trump was about to complete his third year in office. Then came the novel coronavirus, leading to both economic and political disruption that was not necessary.

America and the world left the ugly 1970s behind when Margaret Thatcher was elected British prime minister in 1979 and Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980.

The details are different. In the 1970s Americans were ground down by an energy crisis, then-record postwar unemployment, stagflation, political upheaval, societal turbulence and a war that seemed intractable until it was over and then felt like a discouraging loss. There were legitimate concerns that America was losing its status. The Cold War raged and we feared the Soviets would launch nuclear missiles and start a conflict that might finish off all of us.

Our world today is causing similar frustration, uneasiness, and division. All were dropped on us, like a bomb, by the Biden-Harris administration, which has followed the instruction manual of the Obama regime.

Apparently some – maybe close to half of the country – favor, and likely savor, our decline. Polls keep telling us the presidential election is going to be close.

The other half, or so, believes that perpetuating these conditions, in fact, choosing to make them worse, is insane.

Voters have a choice in one month. They can choose concession, to approve the candidates who want the U.S. to be just another country, nothing special, to be a nation of a few elites and a lower class that’s there to serve them. They can send out another Democratic president on another apology tour, invite Washington to increase its influence over our lives, and give censorship and lawfare enormous boosts.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20987/us-losing-freedom-of-speech

What [Biden-Harris administration climate envoy John Kerry] does not mention, of course, is who decides what is “disinformation,” or if it is just whatever the current government wants the public to think.

Recently, a video of vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz has also been circulating in which he alleged that there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” Some have implied that Walz does not understand the First Amendment, but his statement, arguably, should not be viewed so much as being about what the First Amendment is, which he as Governor of Minnesota obviously knows, but what some political leaders would like it to be.

[Meta founder and CEO Mark] Zuckerberg also noted that he had agreed to kill the Hunter Biden laptop story on his social media platforms after the FBI, treacherously, falsely “warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.” As it turned out, it was 51 former US intelligence officials who deliberately lied in a 2020 letter that the laptop story was Russian disinformation — lies that signatories such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, ex-intelligence heads of the CIA and other analysts and officers still refuse to apologize for, with some of them instead referring to their treacherous behavior as “patriotism.”

Evidently, according to some of those in power, government disinformation is good — freedom of speech for the citizenry is bad.

In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration’s Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy demanded that social media stop certain people from publishing their expertise and views.

“We partnered with Google… For example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of U.N. resources.” According to Fleming, the partnership came about after U.N. officials were “shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top…. We’re becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do.” — Melissa Fleming, UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, yahoo.com, October 4, 2022.

In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration had attempted to do something similar in the US, when it actually created an Orwellian Ministry of Truth called the “Disinformation Governance Board,” under the Department of Homeland Security. The initiative met with so much backlash that it had to be scrapped just three weeks later.

No one can tell you that some politicians do not have totalitarian ambitions. They have not even tried to hide it.