RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2024/01/02/aclu-nra-supreme-court-free-speech-case/72047487007/

Biden administration tries to censor free speech

Under the Biden administration, there has been a consistent attack on free speech through the censorship and blacklisting of opposing groups. Even facts are now deemed dangerous “malinformation,” if used in a way that the administration deems misleading or harmful. 

For example, according to an investigation by the Washington Examiner, the federal government helped to fund the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which discourages advertisers from supporting sites accused of promoting disinformation.

All 10 of the sites that GDI claimed were the riskiest are popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. GDI warned advertisers that they were accepting “reputational and brand risk” by “financially supporting disinformation online.”

The “risky” sites included Reason, a libertarian-oriented source of news and commentary about the government. Conversely, HuffPost, a far left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation. (GDI included USA TODAY in this group.)

A triumvirate of government, corporate and academic institutions are involved in efforts to control free speech by throttling the funding for its exercise. If you want to be heard in a large context, you either stay within the lines set by these groups or face pariah status. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/2024-freedom-or-tyranny/

Ever since consensual governments were invented in Greece 2700 years ago, one question has been repeatedly debated: Are citizens, no matter their birth, wealth, or brains, capable of managing the political community? Or must we rely on “managerial elites,” whether aristocrats, plutocrats, or technocrats, to control collective power and determined the actions and purposes of the state?

But this question has always had a corollary one: Freedom or Tyranny?

This debate has been going on since ancient Athens, and ultimately influenced the creation of the  United States. The Founders created the unprecedented structure of our Constitutional order to avoid the various excesses of the old regimes, especially those ruled by elites, which typically degenerated into tyrannies. The ultimate goal of the Founders was to avoid both the tyranny of the elite few, and the tyranny of the volatile many, both of which are toxic for freedom.

The rise of the leviathan federal government and its technocratic agencies, and its expansion under Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and subsequent presidents from both parties, has now under Joe Biden’s Potemkin Administration reached a level of intrusive power that if left unchecked much longer, will end up in full-blown tyranny.

On November 5, 2024, we the people will have a chance to impose a reckoning on the Biden regime that, in addition to egregious policy failures both at home and abroad, has brought us dangerously close to tyranny.

The struggle between freedom and tyranny comes down to the question of authority, or as Lewis Carroll’s Humpy Dumpty put it, “which is to be master—that’s all.” Hence all aspiring tyrannies seek to aggrandize authority and neutralize or demonize alternative sources. That’s why the progressives at the turn of the 20th century started targeting the Constitution, our supreme political authority.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/31/the-pitfalls-of-benevolence-unpacking-the-toxic-mix-of-universal-good-intentions-and-political-correctness-in-the-new-year/

New Year’s is traditionally a time for reassessment and meditation. Wise sayings and saws are dredged up for reconsideration even as the chorus is getting ready to reprise “Auld Lang Syne.” It is easy to dismiss such scraps of wisdom, especially as they tend to come glazed with an unpalatable frosting of sentimentality, not to mention familiarity.

But it is important to note that many clichés are clichés precisely because they articulate important truths.  Consider, for example, the admonition, which you probably first heard from your mother or father, that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Why should that be the case? Regular readers will not be surprised to hear that I believe a large part of the answer involves the metabolism of benevolence.

Benevolence is a curious creature. Its operation tends to be more beneficent the more specific it is. This was a point that James Fitzjames Stephen, the great nineteenth-century critic of John Stuart Mill, made in his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. “The man who works from himself outwards,” Stephen wrote,

“whose conduct is governed by ordinary motives, and who acts with a view to his own advantage and the advantage of those who are connected with himself in definite, assignable ways, produces in the ordinary course of things much more happiness to others… than a moral Don Quixote who is always liable to sacrifice himself and his neighbors. On the other hand, a man who has a disinterested love of the human race—that is to say, who has got a fixed idea about some way of providing for the management of the concerns of mankind—is an unaccountable person . . . who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular.”

“A moral Don Quixote”: that is a line worth remembering. Political correctness tends to breed the sort of unaccountability that Stephen warns against. At its center is a union of abstract benevolence, which takes mankind as a whole as its object, with rigid moralism. It is a toxic, misery-producing brew.

The Australian philosopher David Stove got to the heart of the problem when he pointed out that it is precisely this combination of universal benevolence fired by uncompromising moralism that underwrites the cult of political correctness.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/02/americans-overwhelmingly-frustrated-angry-with-federal-government-ii-tipp-poll/

As nearly all parts of the political spectrum agree, average Americans are extremely unhappy these days. The latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows that a hefty majority sees the federal government’s recent performance as the cause of their disgruntlement.

With news stories regularly highlighting widespread anger among voters, we asked the following question for our December national online poll, taken from Nov. 29-Dec. 1 by 1,464 adult registered voters: “Which of the following best describes how you feel about the federal government?”

Respondents were then given four possible responses: “satisfied,” “frustrated,” “angry,” and “not sure.”

“Satisfied” never had a chance. Overall, just 14% said they were satisfied with Washington. A shocking 55% called themselves frustrated, and another 23% said they were angry, for a total of 78% of all responses. 

Another 9% responded that they were not sure. The poll has a +/-2.6 percentage-point margin of error.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/30/2023-has-exposed-the-moral-depravity-of-the-radical-left/

What does it mean to be radical, left-wing, progressive? Well, in 2023, it meant making excuses for a genocidal anti-Semitism, refusing to believe evidence of mass rape and naysaying about the terroristic murder of infants. This was the year the ‘right side of history’ brigade exploded their phoney moral superiority for good.

When Hamas sent men on paragliders, motorbikes and in jeeps into southern Israel on 7 October – murdering, raping, mutilating and kidnapping as many Jews as they could find – I thought those on the anti-Israel left would be forced to reassess. Forced to rethink their years of Hamas apologism – their thinly veiled support for these Jew-hating maniacs, who they have long whitewashed as a ‘legitimate resistance movement’ in Palestine.

After all, that dark day these supposed leftists were – or rather should have been – confronted by the barbaric consequences of their own luxury beliefs. They were shown, beyond doubt, that Hamas’s genocidal founding charter was not just talk – that Hamas was not in fact ‘dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and long-term peace and social justice in the whole region’, as one Jeremy Corbyn once put it.

But they didn’t reassess. Many leftists openly celebrated the pogrom, hailing it as a ‘day of celebration’. The Socialist Worker called on its nine readers to ‘rejoice’. Many initially giddy tweets were deleted, as the more savvy left-wingers settled in to blaming Israel for being attacked and refusing to believe women were raped. It was victim-blaming on a geopolitical scale; atrocity denial for the Twitterring, TikToking age.

These supposed anti-racists happily provided cover for the world’s oldest bigotry. Many openly engaged in it themselves. Meanwhile, these supposed anti-fascists turned a blind eye as ‘pro-Palestine’ protests turned our streets into an open sewer of Jew hatred. Genocidal slogans were chanted. Swastikas were brandished. Hate crime soared. And they just didn’t care.

https://pjmedia.com/john-stossel/2023/12/27/markets-and-miracles-n4925036

In this season of giving, I’ll donate to the Doe Fund, a charity that helps drug abusers and ex-cons find purpose in life through work.

Doe’s approach doesn’t include many handouts. It’s mostly about encouraging people to work. “Work works!” they say. 

It does. Most Doe Fund workers don’t go back to jail. 

I’ll also donate to Student Sponsor Partners, a nonprofit that gives scholarships to kids from low-income families so they can escape bad public schools. SSP sends them to Catholic schools. 

I’m not Catholic, but I donate because government-run schools are often so bad that Catholic schools do better at half the cost. Thanks to SSP, thousands of kids escape poverty.

Yet some on the left say giving time and money to charity is a mistake. Their trust in government leads them to think that government programs are much better at lifting people out of poverty. 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/29/the-unholy-alliance-between-wokeism-and-barbarism/

My favourite story about Spinoza concerns the time he lost his cool. A philosopher, a Jew and history’s finest defender of Enlightenment, Spinoza was normally a picture of quiet reason. But when he heard about the lynching of Johan and Cornelis de Witt he became gripped by an uncommon fury. The de Witt brothers were key political figures in the Dutch Republic, the enlightened new nation in which Spinoza enjoyed such great liberty to think and write. On 20 August 1672, at The Hague, they were set upon by a ferocious mob that held them responsible for the invasion of the republic by a French-English alliance. They were murdered, mutilated and clumps of their flesh were eaten.

Spinoza was enraged. He made a plan to visit the site of the mob’s savagery to hold a one-man protest. Think Greta Thunberg, but enlightened. He prepared a placard to hold up. But his landlord restrained him, fearing he too would be slain by the mob. And so history was denied the image of one of our great philosophers staging a lonely, angry protest. What did his makeshift placard say? It had two words on it. ‘Ultimi barbarorum.’ Rough translation: ‘You are the greatest of barbarians.’

This year more than any other I’ve understood how Spinoza felt. On numerous occasions in 2023 I’ve been tempted to go places with a placard saying ‘Ultimi barbarorum’. To the kibbutzim of southern Israel following Hamas’s fascistic savagery against the Jews there on 7 October. To George Washington University after students projected the words ‘Glory to our martyrs’ on the side of the library building: young Americans of unimaginable privilege taking pleasure in the butchery of Jews. To the lovely, leafy campus of Columbia in New York City where students planned to hold a meeting on Hamas’s stirring ‘counter-offensive’. To those ‘pro-Palestine’ marches in London at which the morally treacherous middle classes marched alongside individuals dressed as Hamas terrorists and extremists chanting for yet more slaughter in Israel: ‘Jihad, jihad, jihad!’

To New York University where students shouted, ‘We don’t want no Jew state / We want all of it’: a cry by the comfortable for Hamas to finish the genocidal job of eliminating Jews in the Middle East. To the streets of Manhattan where protesters shouted ‘Shame on you!’ at an Israeli woman whose daughter was kidnapped and brutalised by Hamas. Shaming the victims of racist terror – a low even for the unhinged woke. To any gathering of politically minded Gen Zers, to be frank, after polls found that huge numbers of them view Jews as an ‘oppressor class’ and believe Hamas’s pogrom was ‘justified’. And to the Sydney Opera House, where radical Islamists chanted ‘Gas the Jews’ and ‘Fuck the Jews’ mere days after Hamas murdered the Jews. Nazi-style parades, uncontained glee at genocidal violence, on the streets of a Western city.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/decolonisation-and-the-closing-of-the-western-mind/

EXCERPT:

It is nearly forty years since the University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom warned us about the stealthy takeover of US universities since the 1960s by intellectual relativism. In a prescient observation, he detected that it was leading to the “closing of the American mind”. There had been an increasing rejection of the foundations of a liberal education, namely the vigorous pursuit of objective truth through free and rational inquiry and the fundamental importance of great books and ideas for the understanding and defence of Western civilisation. It was being replaced by a new culture which fixated on group identity and historical grievances which saw the United States as the prime enemy. As Bruce Bawer pointed out in 2012, in an updated version of Bloom, this new ideology was destroying not only US universities but “the America of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the melting pot”. “Grievance studies”, namely women’s studies, black studies and queer studies, metastasised quickly in universities in America and abroad. They have produced several generations now of indoctrinated students, or “pod people”, who have gone on to spread in their places of work the seed of the ideology of white “oppression” of ethnic and other minorities. Regarded by its adherents as a great awakening (hence the term “woke”) of US society to the need for social justice, it has led to the denigration of US culture, the polarisation of its politics and the coarsening of public debate. It has torn the very fabric of American society.

The woke takeover of US universities and other institutions received a boost during the outbreak of mass hysteria and rioting which followed the death at police hands of a black petty criminal and drug addict, George Floyd, in Minneapolis in 2020 and its exploitation by the race hustlers of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is in the wake of this seemingly catalytic event that Doug Stokes takes up the story. He notes how President Biden on his first day in office in January 2021 signed the “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities” act. It is intended to tackle “the enormous human costs of systemic racism, persistent poverty and other disparities”. It was, in reality (and Stokes could have pointed this out) a reward to those notables who had got out the black vote for Biden in the recent election. The aim now was to transform American society in such a way as to benefit the 12.4 per cent of the US population who are black.

Federal law was to be used to force US institutions, including the universities, to change their allegedly “white supremacist” culture. In effect, this comes down to hiring more blacks for high positions in the US government, the universities and corporate America.