Tulsi Tells an Inconvenient Truth

No other Democrat will admit it, but the Left poses a far greater threat to Liberty than the Right.

Tulsi Gabbard is, in a word, interesting. A retired congresswoman and a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, she was a thorn in the Democrat Party’s side throughout its presidential primary, and she continues to be as much. Why? Because she’s a woman of color who obliterates the stereotype of the down-the-line leftist, and because she’s wildly unafraid to tell inconvenient truths.

Truths like this one: “The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 to try to stop Congress from carrying out its constitutional responsibilities were behaving like domestic enemies of our country. But let’s be clear: The John Brennans, Adam Schiffs, and the oligarchs in Big Tech who are trying to undermine our constitutionally protected rights and turn our country into a police state with KGB-style surveillance are also domestic enemies — and much more powerful, and therefore dangerous, than the mob that stormed the Capitol.”

So, from Tulsi, a pox on both your houses: the fringy far-righters who went to Washington and stormed the Capitol, and the mainstream Left that thinks silencing a sitting president and his like-minded supporters is somehow acceptable in a constitutional republic.

Yes, this is the mainstream Left — which we might also now dub the authoritarian Left. That’s where lying scoundrels like Representative Adam Schiff and commie sympathizers like John Brennan make their living, and it’s where the damage to our civil liberties is now being done by all manner of cancel-culturing foot soldiers, from Internet service providers to book publishers to hotel chains to insurance companies to global banks to professional sports leagues.

Schiff, we know, is an easy target for Gabbard, even if he was, until just a few weeks ago, her congressional colleague. But if you think we’re being too hard on Brennan, ask yourself how many folks you know who, during the height of the Cold War, voted for the Communist Party USA’s candidate for president as a way of signaling his “unhappiness with the system.” Let’s see … Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, or the commie?

And one look at Brennan’s recent remarks — the remarks that prompted Gabbard to call him out — indicate that his authoritarian streak is as strong as ever. “The members of the Biden team who have been nominated or have been appointed,” he said, “are now moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas, where they germinate in different parts of the country and they gain strength, and it brings together an unholy alliance frequently of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, Nativists, even libertarians.”

Even libertarians? Yes, John Brennan just smeared millions of Liberty-loving Americans by lumping them in with authoritarians, fascists, bigots, and racists. Thus, if you appreciate lower taxes and less government, John Brennan’s people would like to have a word with you.

“President Biden,” Gabbard concluded, “I call upon you and all of Congress from both parties to denounce efforts by Brennan and others to take away our civil liberties endowed to us by our Creator and guaranteed in our Constitution. If you don’t stand up to them now, then our country will be in great peril.”

We’re not sure what the future holds for Tulsi Gabbard, who’s just 39 and seems far too young and far too engaged to be without some sort of political future. In the meantime, though, we’re happy to have her on the right side in the fight for civil liberties.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/77328-tulsi-tells-an-inconvenient-truth-2021-01-28

UK: Now the supporters of cancel culture are being cancelled: We warned you this would happen

Brendan O'Neill

‘Freeze peach!’ That has long been the mocking, infantile cry of the middle-class left whenever anyone complains about clampdowns on freedom of speech. There is no ‘free-speech crisis’, radicals insist. No Platforming right-wingers on university campuses is not censorship – it’s just students freely choosing not to associate with people who have horrible views. And alt-right types being turfed off Twitter and Facebook is not censorship, either – that’s just private companies enforcing their terms and conditions. (Who knew lefties were so supportive of private property rights?)

Will these censorship deniers change their tune now that the left itself is coming under censorious attack? Amazingly, probably not. But perhaps there will be a smidgen of self-reflection. Some of the left-wing architects and cheerleaders of contemporary censorship, including Britain’s Socialist Workers Party, which has backed the No Platform policy for decades, are now being No Platformed themselves. ‘This is a disgrace!’, they cry, which would be funny if censorship were not so serious. These people helped to build the infrastructure of modern censorship, with its determination to crush ‘hate speech’ and ‘offensive’ views, and now they’re shocked to find themselves falling victim to it? Have they not read any history books at all?

On Friday, the SWP, one of the largest left-wing organisations in the UK, was taken off Facebook. The party’s own page was removed and so were the pages of dozens of SWP activists. The SWP described FB’s actions as a ‘silencing of political activists’. They’re right. This was a unilateral act of ideological censorship carried out by the capitalist elites of Silicon Valley against a perfectly legal party based in the UK. It demonstrated the terrifying power of the Big Tech oligarchy, which clearly has no respect whatsoever for borders, territory or democratically made national laws and feels that it can reach into any nation state it chooses and switch off the oxygen of publicity to any party, group or individual it disapproves of. The attack on the SWP was indeed a disgrace, and it’s good that the SWP’s FB pages have now been restored.

But there is something spectacularly hollow about the SWP’s complaints. The SWP has played a key role in promoting No Platform policies on campus, which essentially blacklist certain groups and individuals from speaking to students, whether that’s leaders of actual racist organisations, like Nick Griffin, or decent, liberal securalists like Maryam Namazie (perversely branded ‘Islamophobic’).

What’s more, the ideological justifications that the SWP and other leftists have put forward for these acts of censorship – the idea that ‘hateful’ speech must be suppressed, the idea that offensive ideas are wounding, the nasty patrician notion that minority groups need to be protected from difficult discussion by the authorities – have helped to shape the broader, off-campus culture of censorship. Modern ‘hate speech’ laws and police interference in discussions about genderfluidity and other difficult topics, as well as Silicon Valley’s embrace of ever-tighter restrictions on ‘hate speech’ and its No Platforming of right-wing presidents or feminists who say ‘he’ when referring to someone who has a penis – all of this has been influenced by the modern left’s cultivation of a new form of therapeutic, paternalistic censorship that is designed to protect allegedly vulnerable individuals from the hurtful ideologies of right-wingers, critics of Islam, ‘transphobes’, etc etc.

So for the SWP now to complain about being No Platformed is rich indeed. Did these people seriously believe they could nurture a policy of No Platform and that it would only ever be applied to people they dislike? To think in that way shows a grave ignorance of history. It is more than 200 years since the great radical Thomas Paine observed that, ‘He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will one day reach to himself’. SWP, you established a precedent, a precedent of platform removal, and now it has reached you. Why are you shocked? Tom Paine told you this would happen. So did many other warriors for liberty over the centuries.

Or surely our friends in the SWP have read some Trotsky. In 1938, he ridiculed leftists in Mexico who were seeking to ‘curb’ reactionary right-wing voices, ‘either by submitting [them] to censorship or by banning [them] completely’. Any leftist who ‘arms the bourgeois state with special means to control public opinion’ is a fool, said Trotsky. Worse, he is a ‘traitor’. Why? Because he should know that powers used against your enemy might one day be used against you. We should know from ‘historic experience’, he said, that ‘any restriction to democracy in bourgeois society is eventually directed against the proletariat’.

What would he have made of the buffoons in the Socialist Workers Party who failed to see that empowering university authorities, governments and even capitalists to curb ‘extremist’ right-wing voices would one day backfire and lead to the curbing of ‘extremist’ left-wing voices too? Once you accept the logic of censorship – the logic that says some ideas are too dangerous for public expression – you immediately open yourself up to censorship. It is astonishing that some people still don’t realise this.

Much of the left has actively cheered Silicon Valley’s growing willingness to banish ‘problematic’ voices. They ignored those of us who pleaded with them to recognise the folly of empowering unelected, unaccountable capitalist elites to exercise such control over what is essentially the public square of the 21st century – social media. Left-wingers celebrated the removal of everyone from alt-right loudmouths to principled feminists like Meghan Murphy, from nobodies spouting abuse from their bedrooms to the freely elected president of the United States, never twigging that they were laying the foundations for their own censorship.

And it isn’t only the SWP. Many other lovers of cancel culture now find themselves cancelled. Some Antifa pages are being removed from social media. Will Wilkinson, a contributor to the New York Times, was sacked from the think-tank the Niskanen Center after joking on Twitter that ‘If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence’. Mr Wilkinson has previously made light of cancel culture; now he is swallowed up by it. Meanwhile, YouTube has taken down the channel of La Marea, a leading left-wing website in Spain, on the grounds that its critiques of anti-refugee campaign groups were ‘inciting hatred’. Again, one must ask the left: did you really think that handing the powers-that-be the moral and technological power to censor and punish ‘hatred’ wouldn’t blow back against you?

It’s tempting to engage in Schadenfreude. Agitators for censorship being censored. Supporters of No Platform having their platforms removed. Mockers of the idea of cancel culture being cancelled. But of course, this is too serious for Schadenfreude. What we need to do is reiterate, loudly, this very simple point about freedom of speech: it is either enjoyed by everybody or it is enjoyed by nobody. The clue is in the name: freedom of speech. All must have it, from the ‘dangerous’ to the polite, from the right to the left, from fascists to saints, from American presidents who claim the election was stolen from them to Iranian theocrats who say menacing things about Israel, from trans activists to feminists who think transgenderism is a load of bollocks. Everyone.

The freedom to say only things that the state, Silicon Valley or the SWP approves of is not freedom at all. We need full freedom of speech, unfettered by state interference, capitalist-class meddling and cancel-culture mobs, in order that everyone may express themselves and, more importantly, that everyone else may weigh up what is being said and decide for themselves if it is right or wrong, good or bad. As the SWP and others must surely now realise, if you set the trap of censorship, it will one day ensnare you. The solution is clear: defend liberty of thought and speech for all, including your enemies.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/25/now-the-supporters-of-cancel-culture-are-being-cancelled/

Cancelled for having a Parler account

Simply using Parler is now enough to get you fired.

A literary agent has lost her job after her employer discovered she had accounts with Parler and Gab.

On Monday, in tweets seen by Newsweek, the president of the agency said: ‘The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency was distressed to discover this morning, 25 January, that one of our agents has been using the social-media platforms Gab and Parler. We do not condone this activity, and we apologise to anyone who has been affected or offended by this.’

‘The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency has in the past and will continue to ensure a voice of unity, equality and one that is on the side of social justice’, she continued, before concluding that Colleen Oefelein, the agent in question, was no longer part of the company. There is currently not any suggestion that Oefelein actually posted anything objectionable on either of these platforms.

Parler and Gab have become associated with the political right, largely because they have become a refuge for those who have been censored on more mainstream social-media sites, or who object to the censoring of others. Oefelein is essentially being punished for guilt by association: her crime is to have used the same social-media platforms as other, perhaps objectionable, people.

Increasingly, it is not the actual things that people might say on Parler but Parler itself that is being targeted for censorship. Earlier this month, Parler was removed from the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store and, crucially, from Amazon Web Servers, meaning it can no longer properly function.

The Big Tech firms insisted that Parler was not doing enough to tackle objectionable content on its site. But according to its chief policy officer, Amy Peikoff, even Parler’s job adverts for content moderators were censored when it was banned from advertising on the jobs app, Workable. You couldn’t make it up.

It’s a similar story in the UK. After Parler was taken offline, numerous British media outlets ran exposé-style articles reporting that some Conservative MPs used the app – as if that was in itself a problem.

Now anyone who merely uses an app is automatically tarnished thanks to the content others might have posted on it. We have reached the stage of cancel culture where you can be cancelled for what others might have said. This is sinister.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/28/cancelled-for-having-a-parler-account/

Donald Trump: The Last-Second Racist

Why would the "most racist president ever" pardon a bunch of blacks on his way out?

What a benevolent racist. A racist white man with power on his way out of the most powerful position in the free world took the time to pardon black rappers, black politicians, black drug dealers, and black hip-hop moguls. What kind of racist would go out of his way after being robbed of an election to reach back and free the very ones who, generally speaking, considered him a racist? Enter, or should I say, exit, President Donald J. Trump.

Even on his last leg, with 1.2 seconds left on the clock, President Trump pardoned a friend of his enemy, Snoop Dogg. The famous Snoop Dogg made no qualms about his hate, as he depicted himself in a video shooting President Trump in the face. He depicted the president with a toe tag on his foot, pronounced dead in an assassination.

No matter what, Trump will get no credit in forgiving the prison debt many owed to society because, somehow, he’s still racist. If Trump is a racist for pardoning black inmates from prison after serving hard time, then tell me, what is Joe Biden for implementing ways for black “super predators” to be put on a conveyor belt into prison? Doesn’t this sound absurd to anyone except me?

The former president even pardoned a local former drug dealer, Darrell Frazier, who was serving over 30 years and counting for drug conspiracy. Today, Frazier, a black man, dons the “Make America Great Again” hat made famous by the Donald. He formed a nonprofit in prison called the Joe Johnson Tennis Foundation, which he established in 2005. He named it after his stepfather. Will local Chattanooga leftists send their regards to Trump? I doubt it.

With everything around the seemingly “black community” crumbling like American apple pie crust, President Trump began his first campaign by telling black folks to “Try Trump.” His campaign for a second term literally ended with him giving people from the urban community one more chance.

I don’t know what else to tell you, but Trump wasn’t a racist until he ran as a Republican candidate. This four-year cyclical magic trick that Democrats pull off is a sight that creates sore eyes. Just like that, abracadabra, the white liberal made the world believe the Republican candidate was the scum of the earth. Mission accomplished. Nonetheless, ever since the Klu Klux Klan was founded in Tennessee, raiding my ancestors for their voting power under the Republican ticket as they were becoming free, the Democrats have continued to intimidate blacks into voting against their own personal interests.

Ask an average black person why he or she voted for Biden and I guarantee you he or she will mention Trump. They are unable to articulate purposeful, political, or intelligent dialogue about how Biden has or will benefit America or even the black community.

The great delusion is happening, and I believe it has been happening for the past 65 years in America. When you see the truth, but it’s still portrayed as a lie, you know the end is closer. Welcome to 2021. The illusion doesn’t seem to be stopping any time soon.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/77356-donald-trump-the-last-second-racist-2021-01-29

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

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http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

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