RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/redefining_masculinity_kamala_s_hubby_doug_emhoff_

Democrats have been gushing about Kamala Harris’s husband of four years, Doug Emhoff, as a model for American men.

He’s a “wife guy.” He ‘redefines masculinity,’ as MSNBC host Jen Psaki put it. He’s a “dreamboat,” “a hunk,” a “fantasy man” and a “sex symbol,” as Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell put it, unable to control herself.

That was after news broke that Emhoff had gotten his previous family’s nanny pregnant and apparently paid her off to keep quiet about it, the very thing that leftist prosecutors put President Trump in the dock for. For Emhoff, that episode flushed his marriage to his first wife and their two teenage kids down the toilet, freeing him up to go get ‘girlfriends.’

For Democrats, that news made him a male role model, and a lot of them couldn’t stop publicly swooning about it, which is precisely when the gushings started.

Now just in time for ‘Domestic Violence Awareness Month,’ as Breitbart columnist John Nolte noted, Emhoff is back in the news, credibly accused by an anonymous woman lawyer in New York who had been his girlfriend in 2012 of slapping her so hard she “spun around.”

According to the Daily Mail:

Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband assaulted his ex-girlfriend, three friends have told Dailymail.com.

The Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, 59, allegedly struck the woman in the face so hard she spun around, while waiting in a valet line late at night after a May 2012 Cannes Film Festival event in France.

One of her friends told DailyMail.com that the woman called him immediately after the incident, sobbing in her cab, and described the alleged assault.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/why_they_hate_trump.html

If you’re old enough to vote in the United States, then you’re old enough to remember a time when Americans of all political stripes liked Donald Trump.  A public figure for most of his adult life, a businessman with a taste for luxury, and a showman who embodied the “American dream,” Trump appeared in television shows and movies because people enjoyed seeing him.  For decades, he was an American icon with universal name recognition, a global brand, and even a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 

Then he moved into the political arena, and everything changed.  Actors, musicians, and politicians who had once jumped at the chance to be photographed with him pretended they had never met.  Writers and entertainers who had always praised him for his generosity began calling him filthy names.  Television networks that had made boatloads of money from his goodwill with the public started slandering him as a “wannabe dictator,” a “Nazi,” and a “threat to democracy.”

What happened?  Donald Trump dared to challenge the political status quo.  By publicly questioning the economic and foreign policy decisions of the Establishment Class in Washington, D.C., he became an existential threat to a system that has long worked against the interests of the American people.  As David Plouffe, one of Barack Obama’s closest advisers, inveighed before the 2016 presidential election: “It is not enough to beat Trump.  He must be destroyed thoroughly.  His kind must not be allowed to rise again.”  Plouffe had harsher words for the guy with a wholesome cameo in Home Alone 2 than he ever had for the leaders of China, Hamas, or Iran.

Why is this one American’s voice so threatening to the old guard?  It’s simple: President Trump is (1) a political outsider who (2) rejects the supremacy of the administrative state and (3) prioritizes Americans over foreign nationals.  

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/03/is-anyone-here-competent-responses-to-hurricane-port-strike-add-to-white-house-failures/

Hurricane Helene has wrought deadly and destructive havoc across the South and Appalachia, killing dozens and doing billions in property damage. Fast on Helene’s heels, we now have another disaster hitting the U.S.: The longshoreman strike that now threatens to shut down much of the U.S. economy.

And very conspicuously, Joe Biden did nothing about it. No jawboning. No ideas. No attempt to cool tempers and bridge differences to get a deal. Apparently Biden’s leaving it to others as he whiles away the remainder of his only term as president at his beloved Rehoboth Beach vacation home.

Kind of like his administration’s reaction to the devastation from Hurricane Helene, the second-deadliest hurricane of this century. A complete failure.

As for the port shutdown, Biden as president has the authority and political clout to help mediate a dangerous strike that has both economic and national security implications. But he did nothing to stop the potentially devastating walkout. He apparently has left it in the hands of anonymous aides and incompetent Cabinet members to deal with the mess.

They are failing spectacularly. Yes, Biden did nothing. Nor did Vice President Kamala Harris, a likely preview of what’s in store if she becomes president. How about Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg? Is he on a second paternity leave? If not, why has he done zip about this?

How about Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo? Don’t the nation’s ports have something to do with “commerce”?

Here was her response when asked about it in a television interview. “I have not been focused on that,” she said in a CNBC interview, in which she was appearing as a campaign “surrogate” for Harris.

“Not been focused”? Is that a sick joke? That’s her job. No, instead of doing her job, she’s chosen instead to join Harris’ election campaign, while still being paid by public tax dollars. By the way, the strike could cripple our economy, costing by some estimates as much as $4.5 billion a day.