RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/08/why-the-joe-rogan-spotify-fight-will-define-free-speech-for-us-all/

Remind us again what it was that Joe Rogan said that got the left so apoplectic. Did he spew hate speech? Call for an insurrection? Say mean things about a protected minority?

No? The left wanted him canceled because he supposedly aired misinformation about COVID? Are you kidding? If this is the new standard for censorship, you can kiss free speech goodbye.

After all, anything can be labeled “misinformation.”

Would you dare to say climate change hysteria is unfounded? Or government-provided daycare is a bad idea? Or Joe Biden’s massive welfare expansion is a bad idea? Election fraud is real? Dogs are better pets than cats? Misinformation! Misinformation!! Misinformation!!! Misinformation!!!!

What information did Rogan spread about COVID that has so alarmed the left? That masks are ineffective? That all we needed was a 15-day lockdown to “slow the spread”? That there was no way the virus resulted from Chinese lab experiments? That schools had to be shut down? That this was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”?

Oh, wait, those were all uttered by people like Anthony Fauci.

No, the left claims that Rogan, by not being sufficiently panicked about COVID and not toeing the line on the vaccination mandates, is guilty of second-degree murder, with Spotify being an accessory. As Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan put it, “People are dying because of COVID misinformation that Spotify packages as glib podcast fodder.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/02/08/famed_alzheimers_researcher_john_hardy_is_a_knight__but_not_in_shining_armor_813737.html

The celebrated Alzheimer’s Disease researcher John Hardy was among the British doctors and medical researchers honored by Queen Elizabeth II with knighthoods at the dawn of the new year. It was just the latest on a long list of prestigious awards Hardy has collected, including the Potamkin Prize for his work identifying genetic aspects of Alzheimer’s disease, the MetLife Prize, the Thudichum medal, the Robert A. Pritzker Prize, and the Breakthrough Prize.

In 2018, Hardy added the Brain Prize to his list of accolades. Awarded by the Danish Lundbeck Foundation, it is regularly referred to as the “Nobel of neuroscience.” Winners are assumed to be on the short list for the Nobels themselves.

Missing among all the flattering kudos and attendant news coverage has been any mention of the geneticist’s leading role in a conspiracy that held Alzheimer’s research hostage to fraudulently acquired gene patents. The sordid affair mired efforts to find a cure in tangled, resource-sapping litigation. The last of the courthouse wrangling that began in 2003 wouldn’t be resolved for more than a decade – a resolution that came with a ringing rebuke from the bench expressing the judge’s outrage at the scheme, the schemers, and the damage they caused.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/bidens_administration_wants_to_make_life_easier_for_minority_crack_addicts.html

In times past, the American government stood with productive people and pushed back against the forces of corruption and decay. In Biden’s America, though, the opposite is true. Big cities are becoming concierge services for hard-drug addicts and Biden’s administration is joining in, with a multi-million plan to provide crackpipes for addicts. And here’s the kicker: In the name of equity, the administration will make a special effort to bring these instruments of destruction to Blacks and members of the LGBTQ+ crowd.

There’s a growing trend on the left to facilitate drug addiction. Just recently, under ex-Mayor de Blasio’s aegis, New York opened legal shooting galleries—or, as they’re politely called, “Overdose Prevention Centers.” On the very first day, five people overdosed in the Harlem site—although they were brought back to life.

The theory is that, if the drug addicts have a nice, safe place to shoot up, fewer will die. This is the same belief system that sees parents offer their kids pot and alcohol at home so that they’re not on the mean streets doing drugs. Either way, with a green light from those who would ordinarily try to protect them from vice, the kids end up seriously addicted and heading downhill fast. (Just ask Robert Downey Jr., who ended up in federal prison after his dad got him started on drugs; or ask Mackenzie Phillips, whose father did the same for her.)

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/07/no-shot-at-a-fair-trial-for-january-6-defendants-in-the-swamp/

The first set of trials for the hundreds of protesters charged in the Justice Department’s sweeping criminal investigation into January 6 begins later this month. Since the Capitol building is considered the scene of the crime, every trial will be held in the District of Columbia—which means the jury pool will be composed solely of residents living in the nation’s capital.

To say this is a problem for Trump supporters facing even minor charges is a huge understatement.

January 6 defendants already have suffered the wrath of D.C.-based federal judges who’ve imposed unusually harsh prison sentences for low level misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies while routinely berating defendants from the bench.

For example, before sentencing a man who pleaded guilty to “parading” in the Capitol to serve 14 days in prison, D.C. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, declared that January 6 protesters were “told lies, told falsehoods, told our election was stolen when it clearly was not.” The defendant, Mehta claimed, “was a pawn in a game directed and played by people who should know better.”

Now the fate of hundreds of January 6 defendants is in the hands of biased judges like Mehta and a city populated with government workers who voted nearly 94 percent for Joe Biden in 2020, prompting some defense attorneys to try to move trials out of Washington. In July, a defense lawyer in one high-profile case filed a change of venue motion before Judge Mehta that explained why January 6 defendants could not get a fair trial in such a heavily Democratic, politically obsessed  city. “The level of antipathy towards Trump and his supporters in the District is off the charts and makes it impossible to find an impartial jury,” David W. Fischer, the attorney representing Thomas Caldwell, charged in the multi-defendant Oath Keepers prosecution.

Politicians and the media continue falsely to portray January 6 defendants as racists, Fischer continued, an accusation certain to enrage potential jurors in a city evenly split between blacks and left-wing whites. “President Biden, in a speech ironically advertised as intended to heal America’s racial divide, referred to January 6th Trump protesters as ‘thugs, insurrectionists, political extremists, and white supremacists.’ At his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Merrick Garland pledged to ‘supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on 6 January.’”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/08/the-chilling-effect-of-big-tech-censorship/

Over the past few years, we have witnessed a growing trend amongst social media companies and other tech giants to censor content. “Big Tech censorship” has become a rallying cry for conservative content creators. This practice has the overt effect of silencing conservative voices, but it also has a potentially more powerful consequence – a chilling effect on speech.

The chilling effect is often defined as “a usually undesirable discouraging effect or influence.” In politics and policy, the term is mostly used to label the actions of a government that intentionally or even inadvertently stifles free expression. An example of this practice can be seen in Cuba. When the Cuban government cracks down on a journalist critical of the ruling regime, this sends a warning to other journalists in the country to tread lightly on certain topics out of fear they may be the next to be targeted. The effect of the original specific crackdown is to stifle speech more generally across all media in the country.

Like it or not, the censorship of conservative voices by Big Tech is having the same effect.