RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19677/end-of-free-speech

[M]edia polling from Harvard-Harris showing that Americans hold almost diametrically opposing viewpoints from those that news corporations predominantly broadcast as the official “truth.”

Americans have correctly concluded that [with the “Russia Hoax” and suppressing reported influence peddling in Hunter Biden’s laptop ] journalists and spies advanced a “fraud” on voters as part of an effort to censor a damaging story and “help Biden win.” Nevertheless, The New York Times and The Washington Post have yet to return the Pulitzer Prizes they received for reporting totally discredited “fake news.”

“Under the current approach to journalism, it is the New York Times that receives a Pulitzer for a now debunked Russian collusion story rather than the New York Post for a now proven Hunter Biden laptop story.” — Professor Jonathan Turley, George Washington University Law School, Twitter, May 15, 2023.

The government apparently took the public’s censorship concerns so seriously that it quietly moved on from the collapse of its plans for a “disinformation governance board” within the DHS and proceeded within the space of a month to create a new “disinformation” office known as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which now operates from within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Although ostensibly geared toward countering information warfare arising from “foreign” threats, one of its principal objectives is to monitor and control “public opinion and behaviors.”

As independent journalist Matt Taibbi concludes of the government’s resurrected Ministry of Truth: “It’s the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from Congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets.”

Democrat Senator Michael Bennet has already proposed a bill that would create a Federal Digital Platform Commission with “the authority to promulgate rules, impose civil penalties, hold hearings, conduct investigations, and support research.”

Effectively, a small number of unelected commissioners would have de facto power to monitor and police online communication. Should any particular website or platform run afoul of the government’s First Amendment Star Chamber, it would immediately place itself within the commission’s crosshairs for greater oversight, regulation, and punishment.

Will this new creation become an American KGB, Stasi or CCP — empowered to target half the population for disagreeing with current government policies, promoting “wrongthink,” or merely going to church? Will a small secretive body decide which Americans are actually “domestic terrorists” in the making? US Attorney General Merrick Garland has gone after traditional Catholics who attend Latin mass, but why would government suspicions end with the Latin language? When small commissions exist to decide which Americans are the “enemy,” there is no telling who will be designated as a “threat” and punished next.

It is not difficult to see the dangers that lie ahead. Now that the government has fully inserted itself into the news and information industry, the criminalization of free speech is a very real threat. This has always been a chief complaint against international institutions such as the World Economic Forum that spend a great deal of time, power, and money promoting the thoughts and opinions of an insular cabal of global leaders, while showing negligible respect for the personal rights and liberties of the billions of ordinary citizens they claim to represent.

If Schwab’s online army were not execrable enough, advocates for free speech must also gird themselves for the repercussions of Elon Musk’s appointment of Linda Yaccarino, reportedly a “neo-liberal wokeist” with strong WEF affiliations, as the new CEO of Twitter.

In an America now plagued with the stench of official “snitch lines,” censorship of certain presidential candidates, widespread online surveillance, a resurrected “disinformation governance board,” and increasingly frequent criminal prosecutions targeting Americans who exercise their free speech, the question is not whether what we inaudibly think or say in our sleep will someday be used against us, but rather how soon that day will come unless we stop it.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/25/regime-apparatchiks-and-sadists-inflict-their-punishments/

Matthew Graves wasted no time doing the political dirty work of the man who appointed him to serve as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia: Joe Biden.

The Biden regime, Attorney General Merrick Garland in particular, faced heat in late 2021 for failing to bring harsher charges against Americans who protested Biden’s election on January 6. Garland was on the defensive for seeking mostly misdemeanor charges, giving the Right ammunition to mock the media’s description of the four-hour disturbance as an “insurrection.”

Enter Graves, the man responsible for prosecuting every January 6 case. 

Shortly after taking the reins of the powerful office, Graves charged 11 members or affiliates of the Oath Keepers, including founder Stewart Rhodes, with seditious conspiracy, the most serious charge brought by the Justice Department in the unprecedented criminal investigation. Created during the Civil War as an alternative to treason to punish supporters of the Confederacy, seditious conspiracy is tantamount to waging war against the United States government. 

Graves’ indictment not only broke new legal ground to criminalize political speech but lent credence to Biden’s claims made during his speech on the afternoon of January 6 that what was happening at the Capitol “border[ed] on sedition.” Garland’s office announced the indictment in a lengthy press release on January 13, 2022 to great fanfare. Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin awarded Garland with her “distinguished pol of the week” prize for “dramatically ratchet[ing] up the investigation.”

Considering a federal judge tossed the exceedingly rare charge out of court in 2010, the last time the government attempted to prosecute Americans for seditious conspiracy, one might assume the Justice Department would have an uphill battle to make the indictments stick. In fact, prosecutors recently admitted that only a “handful” of individuals, all tied to Islamic terror cells including al-Qaeda and the Taliban, have been convicted of seditious conspiracy in the past several decades. For example, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and nine others were charged and convicted of seditious conspiracy for the 1993 World Trade Center bombings that left six dead and more than 1,000 injured.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/26/americas-dangerous-shortage-of-free-thinkers/

“A society without free thinkers, dissenters and contrarians is not only one that lacks color and vibrance, it is accelerating toward a wreck. Some might recognize that happening right in front of them.”

Our country has become a conformist society where free expression is rewarded with the swing of a truncheon. We’re on a road that leads to repression, and we are not far from the destination.

This nation owes its existence and its never-seen-before prosperity to free thinkers. The founders were men of the enlightenment. They stand in stark contrast to our ruling class of today, a corrupt and depraved cabal of politicians, state media, institutional leaders, militant activists and corporate executives that is hurtling us into an era of darkness. In the 2020s, the only “truth” is what the narrative, invariably fabricated by the worst people who have ever held power and influence in this country’s history, says it is.

We see those yard signs, the ones that proclaim their occupants’ unwavering grand tolerance and thirst for diversity. But we know that those who put up those signs are the most intolerant, limited thinkers among us. They don’t believe in diversity of thought. Their objective is to force conformity to their way of thinking while immodestly displaying their superior virtue.

“​​There is a new use for tolerance today, and, quite frankly, it is self-serving and hypocritical,” says Paul Chappell, a pastor and president of the West Coast Baptist College in Lancaster, California. “It doesn’t mean tolerance in the traditional sense of the word at all. It means, ‘You must condone and support my choices – even at the expense of your beliefs.’”

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Time is both precise and ambiguous. Computer scientists measure it in zeptoseconds, the time it takes a particle of light to cross a hydrogen molecule, which has an ionic radius (don’t ask) of 0.208 nanometers, one billionth of a meter. The longest measurement of time is a supereon, three billion years. For us, time is finite. In my 83rd year, I have lived just under 730,000 hours, barely a nanosecond for a paleontologist.

Stopwatches are used to measure the time it takes a runner, skier, race car, or horse to cross the finish line. But the word can be vague: ‘She won’t give me the time of day,’ ‘Will the doctor have time to see me?’ ‘My love for Caroline, my children and grandchildren is timeless.’ “And indeed there will be time,” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “to wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and Do I dare?’” A Tale of Two Cities begins: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” While ambiguous, we know what Dickens meant. And then there is this quote from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, which reflects his time in the trenches during the Great War: “‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”

While every hour has sixty minutes and each minute sixty seconds, hours and minutes spent in childhood seemed longer than those spent in adulthood, probably because each hour of childhood was a larger percent of our lives. And time continues to accelerate as we age. Nevertheless, we have more time than did our great grandparents. In 1860, life expectancy in the U.S. was 39.4 years. By 2020 it had doubled to 78.9 years. Will it double again for our great grandchildren? And time varies by species. An hour represents about 4% in the life of a Mayfly, while for Jonathan, a 190-year-old Seychelle giant tortoise, an hour represents only 1/1,664,400th% of his life. It is possible that future scientists might learn from the immortal Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish, which, once it reproduces, reverts to a polyp stage and starts life all over again.