Want to take a moment to note that free speech is not just the right of the speaker; it is also the right of the listener(s). If there is no audience, free speech is meaningless.
Those who wish to suppress speech are suppressing those who wish to hear something, even if they may disagree.
As Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in Kleindienst v. Mandel, “The freedom to speak and the freedom to hear are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin. The activity of speakers becoming listeners and listeners becoming speakers in the vital interchange of thought is the means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.”
I feel like the, “it’s different this time,” argument needs a bit of pushback. The underlying presumption is that some people are impressionable and believe dumb stuff and then do dangerous stuff and this is somehow amplified by the Internet and social media.
I don’t believe that, but let’s assume it’s true. The issue still stands that someone, somewhere has to make the determination and become the censor and that’s always the crux of the issue: you can never trust the censor.
Without a doubt we’re in the midst of a cultural shift that seems to be catalyzing around information and memetic spaces. It’s scary, the information space has been flattened and weaponized. That makes it all the more important to hew to the founding principles and to hike up our britches.
Bad things are going to happen, it can’t be avoided. The same mistake was made with Covid. In Feb 2020 we knew it was spreading with an insanely high transmission rate and an unknown fatality rate. A person with even rudimentary understanding of pandemics would have predicted at least a million dead. Not because one needed to know about Covid-19, but because a hyper transmissible, novel disease had entered the environment and there was no way to avoid the deaths. Everything the media said was an attempt to pretend there was some alternative, which there wasn’t. Herd immunity was the only thing that was ever going to work and it was going to suck.
It’s the same thing with bad speech . It’s out there and always will be. Dumb and smart people alike are going to be fooled and manipulated. We can pretend we can control it, but then we get bad speech + authoritarianism which is double-plus bad. It’s why we gotta be the home of the brave.
What especially bugs me about this is the assumption that 'some' people, that is deploables, are the impressionable ones who will do dumb stuff. We, the good people, the vanguard, need to protect them from bad ideas. It reeks of elitism. And it usually doesn't end well.
NO. There's no exception. Claiming an exception means you've destroyed free speech. And you are claiming it is no longer applicable because of the internet. No doubt your forefathers said the same thing when the printing press arrived.
Why not? People pay to lie on the Internet and the media moguls take their money and extend their reach. Why are some lies monetizable and others not? Do you doubt me? Just scroll through your FB feed and look at anything related to nutrition. Do you think that none of that runs the risk of adverse consequences? If you do you are a fool.
I could go on. We had major campaigns to legalize marijuana. Do you think that the Internet was not a factor? The health consequences will be catastrophically greater than disputes over vaccine hesitancy.
Why did this attitude about the Internet seem to sprout from nowhere in 2016? When did you first have this belief?
I've been on the Internet for 20+ years prior to 2016 and it was fine. Just as throughout time - some people talk like to talk about some crazy things.
We had "9/11 truthers" posting that jet fuel can't melt steel beams and that the WTC must be a controlled demolition, that no plane crashed into the Pentagon, etc. Nobody cared. Most people just laughed.
People believed unproven things en masse prior to the Internet. For example, many people believe it is healthier to wash your chicken before you cook it.
Every single person in America, including our top scientists, likely has unproven beliefs.
Bingo! This is what I tell folks who say they don't care. It's your right to determine what's true and what's false (untrue?), and when someone is censored, they've taken that away from you.
If they are so uneducated why are they even allowed to vote-but I guess there has been an active movement afoot to "help" people vote the "correct" way.
Yes, this has always been the problem. You can't take away someone's right to vote, and it appears, we can't stop evil people from manipulating people who aren't informed or don't understand. No good answer, though I tend to put my faith in the ultimate wisdom of people. You have to or you get elitist liberals.
I don't think it's an education thing as much as a life experience thing. Their behavior seems genuinely based on fear of difference, and fear of 'the other', just like a child that keeps one arm around it's Mom's leg when a stranger is too near. Maybe this is the coddled, helocoptered, etc, generation(s)? Maybe life is just too scary without that leg to wrap their arm around?
My generation itched to get away as fast, and far away from home and parents as was economically possible. We couldn't wait to get out from under that big thumb. I think these generations are comforted by 'the thumb'.
I guess only people cut of your cloth can decipher truths. Yours is the common battle cry of people that are used to having their biases stroked by a media devoid of critical thinking and journalistic integrity. The new media didn't happen in a vacuum. It's a response. It's not going away but not to worry, you can go back to the comfort zone of your truths.
They make the distinction the same way all of us have learned to discriminate between truth and lies: we pay attention to what is claimed and then we pay attention to whether or not that eventually is proven true or false by actual events. Obviously there is no short easy path to learning who to trust; one must live awhile and remain keenly observant.
OTOH, the internet is a highly beneficial tool to research credibility of sources by finding out if what they've claimed in the past (using multiple sources) ultimately was proven to be correct or false. There are no "Clif Notes" to this process. However you can ask others whose opinion you DO trust (because they have previously given you information that turned out to be accurate.) The more often their information is proven accurate, the more reliable source they may be.
There may be lies and more lies but there is also truth and more truths. Didn’t really understand your statement that the US is uneducated I found that to be a ridiculous statement.
But maybe many of the "educated" are just indoctrinated. I'm old enough to remember when the joke was that a liberal arts degree qualified you for a job where you asked "do you want fries with your burger?"
So YOU are the one to distinguish between truth and the lies? Like lockdowns are scientific? Like masks work? Like if you are vaccinated you don't get sick and you don't transmit? Like everyone is at risk from covid? Like those "truths"?
Giving ANYONE the power to determine truth is the same thing as ceding totalitarian power to that person. Seriously are you this uninformed? You call others uneducated, but I'm afraid you should look in the mirror?
And my guess is most of the ppl you say that to remain unmoved. This is why I like these forums and social media because it demonstrates that there are many, many ppl who see the same things in the same way that I do. It’s the 21st century version of the town square.
By that logic, everyone in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany had freedom of speech, as long as they restricted their unauthorized speech to talking to themselves alone in the woods.
Yes Elon has repeated that quote. And that tells me all I need to know about just how much things have changed at Twitter. I'm glad we're getting a conservative perspective but it's not the new free speech platform that was promised. My statements on Twitter are shadowbanned as before. I read an interesting observation that stated it's the people who look for middle ground that get shadowbanned while inflammatory rhetoric is amplified.
I'm guessing you already have a platform. The new censorship paradigm is especially hard for those who have no audience. Hardly an ideal situation for those simply trying to have an interesting conversation. Social media platforms in conjunction with the hyper-elite and deep-state will make sure no new voices are heard. They have no interest in getting rid of the notion that freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach. I have no right to be heard on Elon's Twitter. He is making no bones about that. This is a very unfortunate situation as it drives a sense of community off the platform and leaves a set of self-limiting and self-reinforcing ideologies.
Likewise the censors never mention that you don’t have to listen to speech you don’t like. Never explained is how your safety can be in peril from speech you can ignore.
This is the point that is not much written about. Limiting the right of one speaker limits the right of potentially millions of listeners (RFK Jr for example). To me, it has always been about the listeners.
Biologist Richard Dawkins made this point sometime ago. Freedom to listen. This is what is wrong with focusing on the 1st amendment, ignoring where the true harm is. If a speaker is prevented from speaking, he/she is just one person, but an untold number of people were harmed by not hearing the speech. Same applies to an author whose book can’t get published or is banned. Literally millions of readers deprived of information, knowledge, or pleasure. It’s about preserving an individual’s ability(right) to discern and discriminate(choose) rather than being forced to accept someone else’s opinion.
Agreed. As a voting citizen in an ostensible democracy (I know, but try not to laugh), I'd kind of like to know what the leader of a powerful country with nuclear weapons is saying about the war "he" is having against "us". No matter that he is not a U.S. citizen, and no matter what "our" state thinks of his "misinformation".
You have the right to free speech, you do not have the privilege of getting only response that affirm your particular feedback loop-but many do not understand this.
There sure are, Jennifer. For example, almost all the talking heads on the night-time news, reading their press releases issued by our privatized political class, and declaring, loudly, that any other opinion on today's issue is a LIE. See, I can read 'unprovoked attack' - and I, knowing history - can prove that, while illegal, the attack was certainly provoked. However, should I utter such a "LIE™" publicly, I am put on lists, my FB and Twitter accounts many be shadow banned or shut down, and all my followers are likewise now suspect. So - who decides what is a lie? That's a good question. But honestly, I don't want our government making that call.
Certainly there are. Faucci lied and admitted it. Biden lies whenever he opens his mouth. And yet it is those who call out those lies who are censored.
Such as lockdowns are absolutely necessary (despite the official WHO position immediately before the pandemic having been that there was very little evidence to suggest they were effective)? Such as school children will not be adversely impacted by part-time remote learning? Such as cloth masks are effective? Such as if you get the vaccines you will absolutely not contract the virus nor transmit it?
These were all lies, yet the censorship was of the dissenting accurate, views.
No, even stupid people have Constitutional rights. A surprisingly large number of 1st and 4th amendment cases are brought to the SC on behalf of individuals who are, by any rational standard, idiots who happened to find themselves in a bad spot-and this is as it should be-the Constitution is for every citizen, not just Harvard or TED Talk approved elites.
This statement is very elitist. The bill of rights defines the rights of everyone, not just the “educated”. No country has a perfectly educated populace.
The first time you wrote this appeared to be sarcasm. Repeating it five times has dispelled that misapprehension, but the claim has become no more convincing.
USA has more college graduates (and "some college" non-graduates who still owe on their student loans) than ever before. You're right that education is a fine venue for gaining experience in dealing with lies, but these are not the only Americans who have the fortune of such exposure. There are also plenty of lies in every other facet of human life: church, business, news media, social gatherings, children's playgrounds, etc. Far more dangerous than this ever-changing cacophony of various lies, would be a single lie heard forever. (Or maybe five times in a single thread?)
Jennifer, are you really saying that the very government that has blatantly lied us into every war during your lifetime should be responsible for determining what narratives and information are available to the broader, uneducated public?
What would you say defines "educated?" I hold no college degree, but have spend my 65 years reading extensively, on a wide range of subjects, from authors with wide-ranging socio-political views, and in converse with highly intelligent people with varying areas of interest and study.
I suggest that a recent B.A. in Grievance Studies is unlikely to produce as well-educated an individual - nor as well-developed an intellect - as my path has.
I have to say this again since you keep making this nonsense statement - the "educated" are most often merely indoctrinated into groupthink. As we saw the past 3 years. They believed the most astounding rubbish - like lockdowns are science-based, masks are science-based, natural immunity doesn't exist for covid etc ad nauseum - and persecuted the people who were right.
So - you're 100% wrong, and are making yourself look silly.
And most "educated" people in most "educated" countries did exactly the same thing as the US "educated." Buckley was right - better to be governed by names randomly drawn from a phone book than this "educated" class.
They get the podcast out first, then video snippets on YouTube, then the entire video. They may split the news/current events portion from the literary analysis. That's my hypothesis. Go to YT Racket News channel.
Simple democracy and you get Egypt post Arab Spring, w/ Beardo the Weirdo running things on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. Not good.
A country needs strong democratic institutions-property rights, an independent/effective judiciary, a free media sector-before it can begin to think about voting systems.
To judge someone by a single fact or attribute based on values from 300 years in the future is ridiculous. Thomas Jefferson was a visionary who helped lay the foundation of the greatest nation on Earth.
The complaints that contemporary authoritarian so-called "Leftists" have against the founders are absurd, if only for the reason that -- at the time those founders acted -- their U.S. had, and had *fought* to have, not the worst, but the most *progressive* government in the world ... by today's democratic standards. The complainants leading this charge are utterly disingenuous.
What country are you moving to to show your belief in a better way of life?
What country in the history of humanity ever didn't make war or conquer other lands but still achieved any sort of success?
Show me a country that didn't or doesn't make war, and I'll show you a country that is under the protection of another country that does.
Conflict and war are human nature. Can't get away from it unfortunately. As long as you criticize your fellow man / woman, there will be war. The 7 sins are our downfall.
Regardless of our faults, America is still the greatest nation in the history of the world and has done more for humanity than any other nation. This ties to my original comment. To evaluate anyone or anything by a single vector is inappropriate. I have lots of complaints about the USA including its slide into idiocracy as you alluded to. But overall it's still at or near the top, and again it has the power to defend itself and determine its own course, whereas any other place you may prefer likely doesn't and relies on political alliances for its defense.
I’ll give you unique. America began with great promise and a wealth of intellect. But making the argument that we’re still the greatest country on earth sets the bar low. We have no superiority politically, morally or culturally regarding our values over anyone and with the passage of time a lot less wisdom. Great empires endure, but our great American brand of hubris isn’t selling well as of late. Too many of our neighbors around the globe have lost respect for us and rightfully so. Hell, I’m not as proud to be American as I once was. I’m just glad the bastards haven’t silenced the independent press yet though not for lack of effort.
Ask the people of Venezuela about how much America had done for them; or the millions slaughtered in Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria,Libya etc. America is a failed state, lawless and murderous.
Jennifer, if you actually want to persuade people to your point of view, why not respond to their rebuttals rather than repeat the same thing over and over?
It is a logical fallacy called a "fallacy of composition" to argue that if a man has some shortcoming then his entire character is equally deficient. Further, it is an ad hominem argument to argue against the ideas a man expressed by disparaging his moral character. Arguing fallaciously does not lead to accurate conclusions. Woke people don't care about that, however, because they are not interested in the truth, only power. The above two fallacies serve well as power strategies that silence dissent, as in, "Thomas Jefferson was a racist pedophile and so are you for agreeing with any of his ideas."
Matt - have you considered anthologizing your longform Substack posts since 2020 in a print book? Those of us worried about the approaching end of the free internet and who see owning a print book as a bastion of freethinking against the digital censorship machine would love to have such a volume on our shelves.
Keeping hard copies of text will be the key to remembering the story of human societies and ensuring future generations escape this current digital tyranny, but it only works if millions do it (three years ago I would have thought myself insane for thinking, much less typing this). Doing so also serves as a deterrent for the worst of the made up nonsense to be mistaken for reality. The first thing I bought for both my kids after realizing this was the constitution and federalist papers in summer 2020.
I have a set of encyclopedias from when I was a kid in the 1990s I demanded my parents legally put on my name. I’m insanely protective of them these days. When the crazy started happening during Covid, I also ordered print 2020 World Book set, and I’ve spent over $12,000 on Amazon since June 2020 just on buying books. For my kids, I bought both a used dictionaries from 2010. My 11 yo reads faster than I do, and is now at 900 real books (I started counting every so often with Harry Potter). I buy her the books so she has them as they were actually written. I buy 2 copies of many books I think are important for both our kids. The little one recently fell in love with reading too. Even if he reads a book on his Kindle, I buy the physical book. Just in case of a fire at one house, we are splitting them between our main home and mountain house. Keeping an accurate historical record and history of fiction as it was actually written is so important.
Google worked when I got out of grad school in 2005. Now it’s just a giant propaganda algorithm that is useless for finding true information. Based on the entertaining arguments I’ve had with ChatGPT, it’s the same thing, but more fun because you can tell the program it’s wrong and watch it produce squirmy answers and picture the techie who programmed it to generate 💩 sitting right there. If someone had said I’d do any of this in 2019 I would have called that person mad. Now I think I was a fool for not starting sooner so I’m doing as much as I can as fast as I can.
I began doing this about a decade ago, when I first noticed stories, pictures and articles disappearing or being significantly modified without a "blockchain" of change.
Wiki was of course the worst offender, but articles from the New York Times to The Atlantic to The Economist and others began rewriting history that I knew well to be different than their digital presentation.
I've not yet checked microfiche to see if/how it may be at keeping the public record, but I have begun keeping paper copies of original publications and old history books.
I would welcome this or something along the lines of "the Censorship Industrial Complex for dummies"etc.
when my Neo-lib friends inquire about my conclusions around this issue, there really isn't a good 101 type explainer out there. if they Google The Twitter Files, for instance, all they will see is the approved propaganda, nothing burger take and that's the end of it. I can't really ask them to pay for a subscription to Matt's and Michaels Substack and insist they read 40+ essays about a complex topic or worse, 2000 Twitter threads. the Wikipedia page is a joke.
maybe this exists already? prolly not, but one of these guys should do it. perhaps even a standalone website, unchained to Substack or Twitter.
"Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
First they came for my privacy, but I didn't care because I had nothing to hide. Then they came for my free speech......
That’s the thing though—‘privacy’ and ‘free speech’ conflict with each other, insofar as guaranteeing the former also means guaranteeing private individuals and entities the right to censor the latter on their own property.
'Elites' I think is too complimentary these days. They love that. We need to just start calling them criminals or the cartels. Traitors works for many too.
Education has little to do with critical thinking. Much of what passes for education these days is just symbol manipulation and learning what will win the approval of superiors and the respect of peers, aka "jumping through hoops".
The problem imo is that much of the current elite is stuck in abstract thinking with not enough time spent in the real world which has led to the mistake that the world of abstract ideas is the real world. Abstraction upon abstraction has led to postmodernism and critical theories. Training one in crit lit or any of the "studies" does not make one suitable to lead anything. In other words the "elitists" have lost touch with reality to the point they believe it is all in our minds and is whatever we want it to be. There was an interesting substack article last year which framed the left vs right split as virtuals vs physicals meaning those who spend their time working with ideas vs those who spend their time working with real things. Very persuasive distinction.
I watch the Chicolini Defense from Duck Soup and despite protests that you couldn't script today's events Duck Soup 1933 it was too preposterous it was prophetic.
Bravo for defending free speech in an Orwellian state that has no first amendment. Like many cities in the “liberal democratic West”, London is a hotbed of radical Wokism and Islamism. They both crush dissent and share many uncanny similarities. This marriage of convenience is heading for a messy divorce, which has consequences for all of us: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-wage-a-progressive-jihad
London, the City of the most CCTV cameras in the world, but still didn't have the film to show Gabriel Magee did NOT jump from the JPMorgan Chase building in the London financial district. He was head of Chase's IT dept during global financial crime spree. He had no history of depression or suicidal thoughts. So who pushed him? Still a vital question.
Because England gave the world the concept of civil liberties, the US constitution and, in particular, the Bill of Rights are heavily influenced by the Levellers and “freeborn” John Lilburne from the time of the English civil war and now it’s the English and the British who are the most monitored people on the planet, whose right to free speech has been destroyed, whose freedom of assembly has gone, where people are preemptively detained without charge or warrant. Once, we defined freedom and now we are subjugated by a fascist elite and you’re travelling down the same path.
I didn't really understand the 2nd Amendment until recently. Then, I understood that we can't protect our other inalienable rights without the 2nd Amendment. Free speech- number 1, but the right to remain free---number TWO!
Great example of doublethink. We're supposed to believe the Russians destroyed their own pipelines even as we're told the Ukrainians did it alone with U.S. knowledge but with no U.S. help. Believe both!
But we're not supposed to ask who's been making loads of money from the destruction of those pipelines. Cui bono? Well, I did hear something about record profits by U.S. companies exporting gas to Europe this past winter, but I think it's wise I should forget that. Someone said something about Room 101.
Wow, William Astore. I've read, enjoyed and learned from scores of your articles. Thank you.
I don't think there's been a better example of doublethink than the west's response on Nordstream. Except perhaps for WTC7, the 47 story skyscraper that decended at free-fall speed on 9/11/2001. There was no mention of it in the 9/11 Commission report.
The part about self censorship really resonated with me.
By pure coincidence I was working in an Ophthalmology clinic and saw someone who exemplified exactly this yesterday morning.
15 months ago she developed Guillain Barr Syndrome bilaterally. It is really rare, and despite rehab she still finds walking and writing very difficult indeed.
The problem started with an upset stomach. After a week it wasn't settling, but she got her Pfizer booster anyway. A few days later her arms and legs became weak. She was admitted to hospital and kept in for several weeks.
In the 15 months under Neurology care and rehab not a single person has made the link with the vaccine she told me. Nobody had asked.
In medicine most of the diagnoses come from listening to the patient and asking the right questions.
I can't prove that it was the vaccine not the stomach infection that caused the condition, but I will send a Yellow Card to MHRA. It does at least deserve investigation and to be part of a national database of cases to see if there is a correlation and possibly causation.
My questions for everyone those who saw her is:What stopped you sending a Yellow Card? Were you scared of putting your head above the parapet? Did you simply believe what you were told by your bosses and peers about safe and effective vaccines? What happened to your medical training?
I may be wrong, but dogmatically ignoring evidence is anti-scientific and dangerous.
I said somewhat the same thing on an RFK Jr. piece the other day. I have respiratory illness and was happy to get vaxxed. Afaik i have never had covid. But a dear relative declined overnight after the second vax, it was permanent. Many people in her assisted living facility also became ill afterwards, including some of the young staff. Someone replied that they wished they had a nickel for everyone who had an anecdote. Which proved my point, if there were that many anecdotes, maybe it actually adds up to something?
I had the first two as well, but I saw more complications of the various vaccines in 2021 than I had seen with any other medication. I saw more Bell's Palsies in 6.months than in the previous decade. Each was within a few weeks of vaccination.
It is still possible that these were related to Covid infection but less.likely given the time courses.
We need honest national statistics to try to prove causation, but unfortunately I think there is a strong financial incentive to corrupt the data.
I actually think it's for once even more than the financial incentive. I think they got off on the control freakery. And also, these people are very loathe to admit that they were wrong about anything.
Good for you on the yellow card. I suspect you already know the answers to your questions and they aren’t pretty - for medicine in general or for the patient. It’s disgusting.
All vaccines contain poisons. They can hurt or even kill you. The idea is that it is the lesser evil. The vaccine gives you better odds of a good result than does taking your chances with the disease.
When the vaccine took hold the hospitals and graveyards stopped overflowing. That's what counts.
I knew from the beginning that the crisis would be managed in order to maximize profits. For the simple reason that everything They do is to maximize corporate profits and stock prices. Hence endless dubious boosters, inoculating preschoolers, enforcement of patents even for poor countries, etc. It's no coincidence that members of the government may own those stocks and benefit from said price increases. It's also no coincidence that reporting of this fact has been censored.
However it does not follow from all this that the vaccine caused more harm than good.
It's not just censorship. They're mandating you support and even celebrate what your eyes, ears, and brain, and education tell you can't possibly be true. And they're replacing historical facts and artifacts with perverted fantasies and absurd proclamations.
That's what cultural marxists do.......they shove their fantasy ideology down your throat through intimidation and force then call you a fascist for objecting.
Our right of free speech in the U.S. includes both the freedom from censorship and the freedom from being compelled to say things that the government approves.
Diversity of identity is matched by conformity of opinion. And all of those believers are just as terrified as any Calvinist was of finding out they were no longer of the elect.
Yes, men still get to name themselves as they always have. The trans-identified male activists apparently don't care if men are called men, unless it is themselves being called that. They do not want women to be able to name ourselves, and they claim the title to steal our names and rename us with objectifying labels, as if we were only a mechanical function, "womb havers." I suspect this reveals the envy and rage trans-identified males must feel, knowing they can never have what we as women have.
When someone has the power to steal my names, appropriate them to himself, then rename me as a mechanical object, that is male privilege being supported by class power.
"It's the ideologically captured institutions and their useful idiots versus independent thinkers."
It seems to me that most of the arguments between the woke cultists and dissenters are mainly arguments about whether there can be more than one valid opinion, or even more than one that deserves to exist. Dissenters always have to recognize that there are at least two opinions, whereas the ruling class has the privilege of recognizing only one.
Don't be surprised if you get detained at the airport.
H.M. Government takes the suppression of free speech seriously, especially free speech that might not support the goals of the United States' Empire and Great Britain as America's loyalest little lackey.
Interesting! What specifically do you notice about the content of the suppressed speech? I imagine there is also compelled speech, right? The use of state power to force people to agree out loud and in writing with official beliefs about various things?
Various critics of British foreign policy (Vanessa Beeley, CJ Hopkins, Glen Greenwald and others) have reported being detained for questioning when attempting to enter GB, held for the legal limit of six hours, and their effects searched.
That is a clear attempt to send a message.
As to compelled speech, try to find MI5's visit to the office of The Guardian, shortly after The Graun published the Snowden revelations. That paper's editorial line has since hewed very closely to the neocon position favored by H.M.Government.
Incredible! I didn't know about the detentions. The British have tipped even farther into tyranny than the U.S. in certain ways, but Americans aren't far behind.
The UK government and military are weak, but do not underestimate the British banking system, think tanks, higher education and other private institutions. They remain powerful and have spent vast sums of money to spread ideas and influence, to do their bidding.
One obvious and long-lasting example: racist sociopath and anti-American Cecil Rhodes hatched plans to destroy the United States from within, aiming to bring the “colonies” back under control of the UK.
Considerable damage was done to society by Rhodes scholars such as Bill Clinton, Rachel Maddow and Pete Buttigieg. I daresay that Cecil Rhodes’ nefarious scheming has achieved some success. He continues to attack North America from the grave, as one writer put it. So does Andrew Carnegie, who was like-minded and set up a foundation with the same goal.
“What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. “
I’ve come to believe that people have always used speech to create reality, but that the internet easier for people to create their own little echo chambers that allow them to live in their own reality separate from the the elite’s agreed upon reality. The government realizes this is a problem for control and has started to crack down, but it might be too late. The elites also have the problem that their reality is obviously a fantasy. For me, TDS and Covid were the breaking points. My hope is that more people find a breaking point before the elite’s fantasy drives humanity off the cliff.
I enjoy the substack so much because it allows me intellectual and moral comfort to say what I want and to read civil exchange even when comments do not 100% sync with my ideas. Compare it to poisonous and aggressive atmosphere of Twitter and FB. But then I have to remind myself that this is just another echo chamber. This substack comments section is not a real world. We are clever, but we are virtual, not real LOL
Education does make a lot of people educated. It doesn't necessarily make them smart. Some of the most droolingly stupid sheep i've seen are very educated and dwell in their own bubble divorced from a lot of reality.
True, but somehow it does not sound like a good argument in favor of ignorance. If I had to choose, I would take education against backwardness and illiteracy. Won’t you?
You're proving Matt's point about being unable to see beyond binaries. If someone isn't well educated, it doesn't follow that they're backwards, ignorant, and illiterate. I know many, many people who didn't get a college education (and some that didn't even graduate high school) who work hard, own businesses, are very successful. Here in Massachusetts, the old school New England Republican seems to be becoming extinct, we have a lot of MIT libertarian type Repubs looking to fill the slots not. Educated and smart, yes, more than i and most likely you will ever be. And completely out there with regard to most other people's reality. Listen to commenters on Democratic media, so many of them just parrot the party line verbatim. Educated, but dumb as posts in terms of critical thinking, just pompom wavers. And haven't got a clue about what life is like outside of their bubble. There is a very vast spectrum between educated and backward and illiterate.
Just as an aside, i have to laugh when people laugh at Rep. Thomas Massie, with his hick accent and whole family posing with guns for their Christmas cards. Somebody somewhere told him to brush up on his STEM and get back to them. Dude has a Masters in Engineering from MIT and started a business, made his money and got out. He was a case study in one of their textbooks on Entrepreneurship. And pretty much demolishes anyone who tries to argue with him.
We have a vast range of educational attainment in out populace. Are you educated? Are you a Democrat? Because you seem to be spouting the same talking points as any other educated random Democrat. So maybe you actually don't even realize you may not be thinking for yourself?
Are you defining educated as having obtained a degree? Lots of people have done that but that demonstrates nothing other than they completed some requirements. I don’t think more than 4-5 out of the next 100 people with graduate degrees I could pull off the street could name a single logical fallacy or have read a single book since they left school or could cogently explain BOTH sides of a controversial issue. “Educated” doesn’t mean anything.
I have recently rediscovered the importance of being able to immediately recognize, label and understand the logical fallacies. Woke activists employ these fallacies constantly as manipulations against dissent and resistance. The activists have a limited range of power strategies they use over and over because they tend to work well, and besides, the activists actually can't think very well.
It’s telling that you immediately comment on education when you mention elites. It does seem that elites use education as one of their primary methods of gate keeping, but the true power comes from using the massive wealth inequalities to make sure that money flows towards the groups and people that maintain their fantasy. Sure, there are some people with “F you” money that can buy their own elite status, but everything else is just a matter of gate keeping.
Education isn't magic. What skills people are educated in matter a lot.
A danger in education is that it can lead you to believe you 'know" a lot more than you actually do.
As Plato recounts in Apology, Socrates said:
"I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know."
This complete lack of humility common amongst the highly educated likely is part of what led William F. Buckley to state:
"I would rather be governed by the first 1,000 people listed in the phone book than by the faculty members from an Ivy League University."
I can't like this comment enough. Unfortunately, I fell for his phony persona until he exposed himself by stating too many lies, "the bankers did nothing illegal only immoral." Yeah, fuck you Barack CIA Obama!
Those who have made Obama a saint might like to ask themselves this question, but they won’t. How has Obama gotten so rich, so quickly? How is it that he can afford to buy a house in Washington and a summer residence in Martha’s Vineyard the combined prices of which are almost 20 million dollars? Where has all of this money come from and why?
Obama hasn't "bought" anything. I'm certain that those "mortgages" have been paid by JPMC, BofA, WF, Citi and USBank. As thanks for standing between them, the crooks, and the populace. Remember Obama said to the bankers, "I am the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks." Meaning, "I got you." So, in turn, the crooks had Obama's back. He is the biggest con man alive.
He appointed Holder and Bruer, (not sure I got that name right), as US Attorney general and deputy. Both of these arseholes came from the same Washington law firm most of whose clients were the criminals who caused the 2008 financial crisis. A leaked email showed that Obama was told by the CEO of CitiBank to appoint these two guys. Once they had prevented any prosecution of the criminals they returned to the Washington law firm from whence they had come and both were made partners. All Obama did was take the Clinton model and improve it. And he’s still doing it through his foundation just as the Clintons do. Still, better than paying taxes.
Want to take a moment to note that free speech is not just the right of the speaker; it is also the right of the listener(s). If there is no audience, free speech is meaningless.
Those who wish to suppress speech are suppressing those who wish to hear something, even if they may disagree.
As Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in Kleindienst v. Mandel, “The freedom to speak and the freedom to hear are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin. The activity of speakers becoming listeners and listeners becoming speakers in the vital interchange of thought is the means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.”
This may have been true before the internet..it is not OK now.
I feel like the, “it’s different this time,” argument needs a bit of pushback. The underlying presumption is that some people are impressionable and believe dumb stuff and then do dangerous stuff and this is somehow amplified by the Internet and social media.
I don’t believe that, but let’s assume it’s true. The issue still stands that someone, somewhere has to make the determination and become the censor and that’s always the crux of the issue: you can never trust the censor.
Without a doubt we’re in the midst of a cultural shift that seems to be catalyzing around information and memetic spaces. It’s scary, the information space has been flattened and weaponized. That makes it all the more important to hew to the founding principles and to hike up our britches.
Bad things are going to happen, it can’t be avoided. The same mistake was made with Covid. In Feb 2020 we knew it was spreading with an insanely high transmission rate and an unknown fatality rate. A person with even rudimentary understanding of pandemics would have predicted at least a million dead. Not because one needed to know about Covid-19, but because a hyper transmissible, novel disease had entered the environment and there was no way to avoid the deaths. Everything the media said was an attempt to pretend there was some alternative, which there wasn’t. Herd immunity was the only thing that was ever going to work and it was going to suck.
It’s the same thing with bad speech . It’s out there and always will be. Dumb and smart people alike are going to be fooled and manipulated. We can pretend we can control it, but then we get bad speech + authoritarianism which is double-plus bad. It’s why we gotta be the home of the brave.
What especially bugs me about this is the assumption that 'some' people, that is deploables, are the impressionable ones who will do dumb stuff. We, the good people, the vanguard, need to protect them from bad ideas. It reeks of elitism. And it usually doesn't end well.
the people who believe others are dumb don’t seem particularly self-reflective in my experience. You have to attack from a different vector.
NO. There's no exception. Claiming an exception means you've destroyed free speech. And you are claiming it is no longer applicable because of the internet. No doubt your forefathers said the same thing when the printing press arrived.
Why not? People pay to lie on the Internet and the media moguls take their money and extend their reach. Why are some lies monetizable and others not? Do you doubt me? Just scroll through your FB feed and look at anything related to nutrition. Do you think that none of that runs the risk of adverse consequences? If you do you are a fool.
I could go on. We had major campaigns to legalize marijuana. Do you think that the Internet was not a factor? The health consequences will be catastrophically greater than disputes over vaccine hesitancy.
So, this is a joke, isn't it? I mean, you cannot be expecting to be taken seriously.
Why did this attitude about the Internet seem to sprout from nowhere in 2016? When did you first have this belief?
I've been on the Internet for 20+ years prior to 2016 and it was fine. Just as throughout time - some people talk like to talk about some crazy things.
We had "9/11 truthers" posting that jet fuel can't melt steel beams and that the WTC must be a controlled demolition, that no plane crashed into the Pentagon, etc. Nobody cared. Most people just laughed.
People believed unproven things en masse prior to the Internet. For example, many people believe it is healthier to wash your chicken before you cook it.
Every single person in America, including our top scientists, likely has unproven beliefs.
You support, then, the censorship of truths inconvenient to the prevailing narrative, as crafted by a handful of top level elite 1-percenters?
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
Bingo! This is what I tell folks who say they don't care. It's your right to determine what's true and what's false (untrue?), and when someone is censored, they've taken that away from you.
This maybe true before the Internet BUT now we have lies and more lies! IF you are uneducated like the US how do they make the distinction?
If they are so uneducated why are they even allowed to vote-but I guess there has been an active movement afoot to "help" people vote the "correct" way.
This is their ideal "voter". A dead or incarcerated person, whose votes they can cast on their behalf.
Yes, this has always been the problem. You can't take away someone's right to vote, and it appears, we can't stop evil people from manipulating people who aren't informed or don't understand. No good answer, though I tend to put my faith in the ultimate wisdom of people. You have to or you get elitist liberals.
Totalitarians calling themselves liberals, you mean
Yes, but the problem is there are no old school liberals anymore and the "liberals" are buying the totalitarian crap.
I don't think it's an education thing as much as a life experience thing. Their behavior seems genuinely based on fear of difference, and fear of 'the other', just like a child that keeps one arm around it's Mom's leg when a stranger is too near. Maybe this is the coddled, helocoptered, etc, generation(s)? Maybe life is just too scary without that leg to wrap their arm around?
My generation itched to get away as fast, and far away from home and parents as was economically possible. We couldn't wait to get out from under that big thumb. I think these generations are comforted by 'the thumb'.
Maybe wealthy families have the luxury of helicopter-style parenting.
Every generation wants to blame the younger one.
But, for us un-wealthy, we must rely on the state to help us parent, or go broke.
True that. My parent's generation looked at us like hoodlums just because we wanted to have some fun.
Education does not confer good judgment.
I guess only people cut of your cloth can decipher truths. Yours is the common battle cry of people that are used to having their biases stroked by a media devoid of critical thinking and journalistic integrity. The new media didn't happen in a vacuum. It's a response. It's not going away but not to worry, you can go back to the comfort zone of your truths.
They make the distinction the same way all of us have learned to discriminate between truth and lies: we pay attention to what is claimed and then we pay attention to whether or not that eventually is proven true or false by actual events. Obviously there is no short easy path to learning who to trust; one must live awhile and remain keenly observant.
OTOH, the internet is a highly beneficial tool to research credibility of sources by finding out if what they've claimed in the past (using multiple sources) ultimately was proven to be correct or false. There are no "Clif Notes" to this process. However you can ask others whose opinion you DO trust (because they have previously given you information that turned out to be accurate.) The more often their information is proven accurate, the more reliable source they may be.
Don't pay attention to any of the "fact checkers". They are the exact opposite.
There may be lies and more lies but there is also truth and more truths. Didn’t really understand your statement that the US is uneducated I found that to be a ridiculous statement.
But maybe many of the "educated" are just indoctrinated. I'm old enough to remember when the joke was that a liberal arts degree qualified you for a job where you asked "do you want fries with your burger?"
If you read her post in the best possible light, I think she has a point.
So YOU are the one to distinguish between truth and the lies? Like lockdowns are scientific? Like masks work? Like if you are vaccinated you don't get sick and you don't transmit? Like everyone is at risk from covid? Like those "truths"?
Giving ANYONE the power to determine truth is the same thing as ceding totalitarian power to that person. Seriously are you this uninformed? You call others uneducated, but I'm afraid you should look in the mirror?
So...educated and uneducated? ;-)
And my guess is most of the ppl you say that to remain unmoved. This is why I like these forums and social media because it demonstrates that there are many, many ppl who see the same things in the same way that I do. It’s the 21st century version of the town square.
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
Modern commissars love the phrase freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.
By that logic, everyone in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany had freedom of speech, as long as they restricted their unauthorized speech to talking to themselves alone in the woods.
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
Yes Elon has repeated that quote. And that tells me all I need to know about just how much things have changed at Twitter. I'm glad we're getting a conservative perspective but it's not the new free speech platform that was promised. My statements on Twitter are shadowbanned as before. I read an interesting observation that stated it's the people who look for middle ground that get shadowbanned while inflammatory rhetoric is amplified.
I’ve been fine on musk’s twitter!😎
I'm guessing you already have a platform. The new censorship paradigm is especially hard for those who have no audience. Hardly an ideal situation for those simply trying to have an interesting conversation. Social media platforms in conjunction with the hyper-elite and deep-state will make sure no new voices are heard. They have no interest in getting rid of the notion that freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach. I have no right to be heard on Elon's Twitter. He is making no bones about that. This is a very unfortunate situation as it drives a sense of community off the platform and leaves a set of self-limiting and self-reinforcing ideologies.
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
Likewise the censors never mention that you don’t have to listen to speech you don’t like. Never explained is how your safety can be in peril from speech you can ignore.
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
This is the point that is not much written about. Limiting the right of one speaker limits the right of potentially millions of listeners (RFK Jr for example). To me, it has always been about the listeners.
I always take the censoring, banning, suppression of someone, anyone, as an attack against me. It’s personal.
That’s why I’m here …
Biologist Richard Dawkins made this point sometime ago. Freedom to listen. This is what is wrong with focusing on the 1st amendment, ignoring where the true harm is. If a speaker is prevented from speaking, he/she is just one person, but an untold number of people were harmed by not hearing the speech. Same applies to an author whose book can’t get published or is banned. Literally millions of readers deprived of information, knowledge, or pleasure. It’s about preserving an individual’s ability(right) to discern and discriminate(choose) rather than being forced to accept someone else’s opinion.
Agreed. As a voting citizen in an ostensible democracy (I know, but try not to laugh), I'd kind of like to know what the leader of a powerful country with nuclear weapons is saying about the war "he" is having against "us". No matter that he is not a U.S. citizen, and no matter what "our" state thinks of his "misinformation".
Nice. Hadn't thought of it that way. I like new thoughts.
You have the right to free speech, you do not have the privilege of getting only response that affirm your particular feedback loop-but many do not understand this.
What about lies?
who decides whether something is a "lie"?
Hard to imagine anyone other than a Stalinist or American right-winger posing that question.
that suggests a limited imagination....
How do you know they are lies if you aren't exposed to them?
We live in an age of non truth so no such thing as a lie. Everybody has their own truth.
Post-truth!
NO. There are people who lie!
There sure are, Jennifer. For example, almost all the talking heads on the night-time news, reading their press releases issued by our privatized political class, and declaring, loudly, that any other opinion on today's issue is a LIE. See, I can read 'unprovoked attack' - and I, knowing history - can prove that, while illegal, the attack was certainly provoked. However, should I utter such a "LIE™" publicly, I am put on lists, my FB and Twitter accounts many be shadow banned or shut down, and all my followers are likewise now suspect. So - who decides what is a lie? That's a good question. But honestly, I don't want our government making that call.
Certainly there are. Faucci lied and admitted it. Biden lies whenever he opens his mouth. And yet it is those who call out those lies who are censored.
Says the liar.
Such as lockdowns are absolutely necessary (despite the official WHO position immediately before the pandemic having been that there was very little evidence to suggest they were effective)? Such as school children will not be adversely impacted by part-time remote learning? Such as cloth masks are effective? Such as if you get the vaccines you will absolutely not contract the virus nor transmit it?
These were all lies, yet the censorship was of the dissenting accurate, views.
This is wonderful IF you have an educated populace which you do ot have in the US
No, even stupid people have Constitutional rights. A surprisingly large number of 1st and 4th amendment cases are brought to the SC on behalf of individuals who are, by any rational standard, idiots who happened to find themselves in a bad spot-and this is as it should be-the Constitution is for every citizen, not just Harvard or TED Talk approved elites.
You claim education confers discernment and good judgement and wisdom? I'm afraid you are seriously uneducated on the realities of life.
This is a complicated issue. Who is doing the "educating?" The wrong people, it seems.
How does someone get educated if they cannot hear speech with which they may disagree?
Well it's labelled education but if you look inside the tin it's good old fashioned indoctrination.
Understood, there's institution education and there is independent, individual education. Truly free speech helps the latter.
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
This works IF you have an educated populace BUT you don't!
This statement is very elitist. The bill of rights defines the rights of everyone, not just the “educated”. No country has a perfectly educated populace.
The first time you wrote this appeared to be sarcasm. Repeating it five times has dispelled that misapprehension, but the claim has become no more convincing.
USA has more college graduates (and "some college" non-graduates who still owe on their student loans) than ever before. You're right that education is a fine venue for gaining experience in dealing with lies, but these are not the only Americans who have the fortune of such exposure. There are also plenty of lies in every other facet of human life: church, business, news media, social gatherings, children's playgrounds, etc. Far more dangerous than this ever-changing cacophony of various lies, would be a single lie heard forever. (Or maybe five times in a single thread?)
Jennifer, are you really saying that the very government that has blatantly lied us into every war during your lifetime should be responsible for determining what narratives and information are available to the broader, uneducated public?
What would you say defines "educated?" I hold no college degree, but have spend my 65 years reading extensively, on a wide range of subjects, from authors with wide-ranging socio-political views, and in converse with highly intelligent people with varying areas of interest and study.
I suggest that a recent B.A. in Grievance Studies is unlikely to produce as well-educated an individual - nor as well-developed an intellect - as my path has.
I have to say this again since you keep making this nonsense statement - the "educated" are most often merely indoctrinated into groupthink. As we saw the past 3 years. They believed the most astounding rubbish - like lockdowns are science-based, masks are science-based, natural immunity doesn't exist for covid etc ad nauseum - and persecuted the people who were right.
So - you're 100% wrong, and are making yourself look silly.
And most "educated" people in most "educated" countries did exactly the same thing as the US "educated." Buckley was right - better to be governed by names randomly drawn from a phone book than this "educated" class.
Is there somewhere we can watch the video?
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
They get the podcast out first, then video snippets on YouTube, then the entire video. They may split the news/current events portion from the literary analysis. That's my hypothesis. Go to YT Racket News channel.
You should be able to tap on the link to open it and push the sound button it’s on you tube
Oops sorry thought u were asking about the link I posted
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%." - Thomas Jefferson
This is what I think about when all of the worst people talk about the need to restrict speech to protect "our democracy"
As the founders said: " Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch".
Benjamin Franklin added: "Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote".
Complicated stuff. Our forefathers were afraid of a simple democracy and thought a Republic a bit safer.
Simple democracy and you get Egypt post Arab Spring, w/ Beardo the Weirdo running things on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood. Not good.
A country needs strong democratic institutions-property rights, an independent/effective judiciary, a free media sector-before it can begin to think about voting systems.
Any thoughts on why they constantly reference "our democracy" despite that fact?
What they really mean is “my democracy”.
Manipulation
And rightly so building safeguards around democracy for its protection.
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
I think about the “as short in their implementation as violent in their deaths” quote.
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
That piece of Dreck took away the Rights of ~400 people, a real champion of hypocrisy and the oligarchies of today aren't much better.
To judge someone by a single fact or attribute based on values from 300 years in the future is ridiculous. Thomas Jefferson was a visionary who helped lay the foundation of the greatest nation on Earth.
The complaints that contemporary authoritarian so-called "Leftists" have against the founders are absurd, if only for the reason that -- at the time those founders acted -- their U.S. had, and had *fought* to have, not the worst, but the most *progressive* government in the world ... by today's democratic standards. The complainants leading this charge are utterly disingenuous.
NO. It was always about money!
“The greatest nation on earth” and just what nation might that be, pray tell??
(I am so sick of hearing that lie spouted. Talk about a “superiority complex”!! What Delusions of Grandeur!)
The 'greatest nation on earth' will go down in History as warmongers.
IF you had educated people this would not be happening!
What country are you moving to to show your belief in a better way of life?
What country in the history of humanity ever didn't make war or conquer other lands but still achieved any sort of success?
Show me a country that didn't or doesn't make war, and I'll show you a country that is under the protection of another country that does.
Conflict and war are human nature. Can't get away from it unfortunately. As long as you criticize your fellow man / woman, there will be war. The 7 sins are our downfall.
Regardless of our faults, America is still the greatest nation in the history of the world and has done more for humanity than any other nation. This ties to my original comment. To evaluate anyone or anything by a single vector is inappropriate. I have lots of complaints about the USA including its slide into idiocracy as you alluded to. But overall it's still at or near the top, and again it has the power to defend itself and determine its own course, whereas any other place you may prefer likely doesn't and relies on political alliances for its defense.
I’ll give you unique. America began with great promise and a wealth of intellect. But making the argument that we’re still the greatest country on earth sets the bar low. We have no superiority politically, morally or culturally regarding our values over anyone and with the passage of time a lot less wisdom. Great empires endure, but our great American brand of hubris isn’t selling well as of late. Too many of our neighbors around the globe have lost respect for us and rightfully so. Hell, I’m not as proud to be American as I once was. I’m just glad the bastards haven’t silenced the independent press yet though not for lack of effort.
Ask the people of Venezuela about how much America had done for them; or the millions slaughtered in Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria,Libya etc. America is a failed state, lawless and murderous.
Nation-states are neither bad nor good, they're merely interesting to varying degrees.
Wonderfully Stated!👏🆓🇺🇸
Telling the"if you had educated people..." either excluding or excusing yourself
You have to be a troll account. No one could be this absurd.
I suppose you mean Germany? or the UK? or who?
You keep parroting this silly statement. Gaslight on!
Jennifer, if you actually want to persuade people to your point of view, why not respond to their rebuttals rather than repeat the same thing over and over?
It is a logical fallacy called a "fallacy of composition" to argue that if a man has some shortcoming then his entire character is equally deficient. Further, it is an ad hominem argument to argue against the ideas a man expressed by disparaging his moral character. Arguing fallaciously does not lead to accurate conclusions. Woke people don't care about that, however, because they are not interested in the truth, only power. The above two fallacies serve well as power strategies that silence dissent, as in, "Thomas Jefferson was a racist pedophile and so are you for agreeing with any of his ideas."
I’d like to put you in the same place and circumstances and see if you do better.
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
Matt - have you considered anthologizing your longform Substack posts since 2020 in a print book? Those of us worried about the approaching end of the free internet and who see owning a print book as a bastion of freethinking against the digital censorship machine would love to have such a volume on our shelves.
Make hard copies. We'll go 'samizdat' on them.
Keeping hard copies of text will be the key to remembering the story of human societies and ensuring future generations escape this current digital tyranny, but it only works if millions do it (three years ago I would have thought myself insane for thinking, much less typing this). Doing so also serves as a deterrent for the worst of the made up nonsense to be mistaken for reality. The first thing I bought for both my kids after realizing this was the constitution and federalist papers in summer 2020.
I have a set of encyclopedias from when I was a kid in the 1990s I demanded my parents legally put on my name. I’m insanely protective of them these days. When the crazy started happening during Covid, I also ordered print 2020 World Book set, and I’ve spent over $12,000 on Amazon since June 2020 just on buying books. For my kids, I bought both a used dictionaries from 2010. My 11 yo reads faster than I do, and is now at 900 real books (I started counting every so often with Harry Potter). I buy her the books so she has them as they were actually written. I buy 2 copies of many books I think are important for both our kids. The little one recently fell in love with reading too. Even if he reads a book on his Kindle, I buy the physical book. Just in case of a fire at one house, we are splitting them between our main home and mountain house. Keeping an accurate historical record and history of fiction as it was actually written is so important.
Google worked when I got out of grad school in 2005. Now it’s just a giant propaganda algorithm that is useless for finding true information. Based on the entertaining arguments I’ve had with ChatGPT, it’s the same thing, but more fun because you can tell the program it’s wrong and watch it produce squirmy answers and picture the techie who programmed it to generate 💩 sitting right there. If someone had said I’d do any of this in 2019 I would have called that person mad. Now I think I was a fool for not starting sooner so I’m doing as much as I can as fast as I can.
I began doing this about a decade ago, when I first noticed stories, pictures and articles disappearing or being significantly modified without a "blockchain" of change.
Wiki was of course the worst offender, but articles from the New York Times to The Atlantic to The Economist and others began rewriting history that I knew well to be different than their digital presentation.
I've not yet checked microfiche to see if/how it may be at keeping the public record, but I have begun keeping paper copies of original publications and old history books.
It's a sick new world we live in.
nice!
virtually all of my surplus money now goes to the giant used book store.
I have a hard copy of all my favorite books films and music.
mostly because it brings me joy, but also in case I need to restart civilization single handedly, the world would be alright..;)
yes like Winston Smith not putting something in the "memory hole"
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
I would welcome this or something along the lines of "the Censorship Industrial Complex for dummies"etc.
when my Neo-lib friends inquire about my conclusions around this issue, there really isn't a good 101 type explainer out there. if they Google The Twitter Files, for instance, all they will see is the approved propaganda, nothing burger take and that's the end of it. I can't really ask them to pay for a subscription to Matt's and Michaels Substack and insist they read 40+ essays about a complex topic or worse, 2000 Twitter threads. the Wikipedia page is a joke.
maybe this exists already? prolly not, but one of these guys should do it. perhaps even a standalone website, unchained to Substack or Twitter.
someone do this!
Everyone in this thread is talking about (or doing) the equivalent of the Encyclopedia Foundation from Foundation. It does seem to be necessary.
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
Thank you. I am sharing.
Yes I like this idea!
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
"Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
First they came for my privacy, but I didn't care because I had nothing to hide. Then they came for my free speech......
That’s the thing though—‘privacy’ and ‘free speech’ conflict with each other, insofar as guaranteeing the former also means guaranteeing private individuals and entities the right to censor the latter on their own property.
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
'Elites' I think is too complimentary these days. They love that. We need to just start calling them criminals or the cartels. Traitors works for many too.
elitists
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
What is an 'elitist.' Is it a person (because of education) can think for themselves?
The Dictionary is your friend: "A person who believes that a society or system should be led by an elite."
Every system of GVT. has been led by elitists.
Why? Because they are educated?
Education has little to do with critical thinking. Much of what passes for education these days is just symbol manipulation and learning what will win the approval of superiors and the respect of peers, aka "jumping through hoops".
The problem imo is that much of the current elite is stuck in abstract thinking with not enough time spent in the real world which has led to the mistake that the world of abstract ideas is the real world. Abstraction upon abstraction has led to postmodernism and critical theories. Training one in crit lit or any of the "studies" does not make one suitable to lead anything. In other words the "elitists" have lost touch with reality to the point they believe it is all in our minds and is whatever we want it to be. There was an interesting substack article last year which framed the left vs right split as virtuals vs physicals meaning those who spend their time working with ideas vs those who spend their time working with real things. Very persuasive distinction.
You just don't seem to understand that this all depends on the definition of "education." Who is the arbiter of truth and a good education?
I am not educated but neither am I elitist . I am just an old one eyed autistic Jewish fart.
In 1970 I was singing along with Kinky Friedman The Ballad of Charles Joseph Whitman. It was 53 yeaRS AGO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU-UI4lHjds
I watch the Chicolini Defense from Duck Soup and despite protests that you couldn't script today's events Duck Soup 1933 it was too preposterous it was prophetic.
The Chicolini Defense
Poor Chicolini
HE looks like an idiot .
He talks like an idiot.
Don't let that fool you. Chicolini is an idiot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEabC9WzHck
a group of elites has curated or controlled every civilization in history, for better or worse.
America was supposed to be the first country to shake off this phenomenon.
unfortunately, that didn't work out so well...
It wasn't designed to get rid of elites. It was designed to constrain them.
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
Bravo for defending free speech in an Orwellian state that has no first amendment. Like many cities in the “liberal democratic West”, London is a hotbed of radical Wokism and Islamism. They both crush dissent and share many uncanny similarities. This marriage of convenience is heading for a messy divorce, which has consequences for all of us: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-wage-a-progressive-jihad
London, the City of the most CCTV cameras in the world, but still didn't have the film to show Gabriel Magee did NOT jump from the JPMorgan Chase building in the London financial district. He was head of Chase's IT dept during global financial crime spree. He had no history of depression or suicidal thoughts. So who pushed him? Still a vital question.
Amen to that brother.
Why do you look at Britain?
Because England gave the world the concept of civil liberties, the US constitution and, in particular, the Bill of Rights are heavily influenced by the Levellers and “freeborn” John Lilburne from the time of the English civil war and now it’s the English and the British who are the most monitored people on the planet, whose right to free speech has been destroyed, whose freedom of assembly has gone, where people are preemptively detained without charge or warrant. Once, we defined freedom and now we are subjugated by a fascist elite and you’re travelling down the same path.
Generally what is "radical wokeism?" One of those things indescribable but one knows it when one sees it?
Damn good speech.
Matt............please listen.
You are always speaking to people with education.
You need to talk "down."
Somebody who left education at age 16yrs has NO idea what you are saying!
Speak for yourself. Not everyone is as dumb as you are.
😂
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
https://youtu.be/UMibzjsXWQU
I didn't really understand the 2nd Amendment until recently. Then, I understood that we can't protect our other inalienable rights without the 2nd Amendment. Free speech- number 1, but the right to remain free---number TWO!
Bud, that's exactly the thing. It's like nobody knows their own heritage in this country. Wtf.
This proves my point about education?
Great example of doublethink. We're supposed to believe the Russians destroyed their own pipelines even as we're told the Ukrainians did it alone with U.S. knowledge but with no U.S. help. Believe both!
But we're not supposed to ask who's been making loads of money from the destruction of those pipelines. Cui bono? Well, I did hear something about record profits by U.S. companies exporting gas to Europe this past winter, but I think it's wise I should forget that. Someone said something about Room 101.
I believe Seymour!
Hear hear!
Wow, William Astore. I've read, enjoyed and learned from scores of your articles. Thank you.
I don't think there's been a better example of doublethink than the west's response on Nordstream. Except perhaps for WTC7, the 47 story skyscraper that decended at free-fall speed on 9/11/2001. There was no mention of it in the 9/11 Commission report.
As you say, cui bono? Thanks again.
Thankyou for the talk last night.
The part about self censorship really resonated with me.
By pure coincidence I was working in an Ophthalmology clinic and saw someone who exemplified exactly this yesterday morning.
15 months ago she developed Guillain Barr Syndrome bilaterally. It is really rare, and despite rehab she still finds walking and writing very difficult indeed.
The problem started with an upset stomach. After a week it wasn't settling, but she got her Pfizer booster anyway. A few days later her arms and legs became weak. She was admitted to hospital and kept in for several weeks.
In the 15 months under Neurology care and rehab not a single person has made the link with the vaccine she told me. Nobody had asked.
In medicine most of the diagnoses come from listening to the patient and asking the right questions.
I can't prove that it was the vaccine not the stomach infection that caused the condition, but I will send a Yellow Card to MHRA. It does at least deserve investigation and to be part of a national database of cases to see if there is a correlation and possibly causation.
My questions for everyone those who saw her is:What stopped you sending a Yellow Card? Were you scared of putting your head above the parapet? Did you simply believe what you were told by your bosses and peers about safe and effective vaccines? What happened to your medical training?
I may be wrong, but dogmatically ignoring evidence is anti-scientific and dangerous.
I said somewhat the same thing on an RFK Jr. piece the other day. I have respiratory illness and was happy to get vaxxed. Afaik i have never had covid. But a dear relative declined overnight after the second vax, it was permanent. Many people in her assisted living facility also became ill afterwards, including some of the young staff. Someone replied that they wished they had a nickel for everyone who had an anecdote. Which proved my point, if there were that many anecdotes, maybe it actually adds up to something?
I had the first two as well, but I saw more complications of the various vaccines in 2021 than I had seen with any other medication. I saw more Bell's Palsies in 6.months than in the previous decade. Each was within a few weeks of vaccination.
It is still possible that these were related to Covid infection but less.likely given the time courses.
We need honest national statistics to try to prove causation, but unfortunately I think there is a strong financial incentive to corrupt the data.
I am sorry to hear about your experiences.
Thank you.
I actually think it's for once even more than the financial incentive. I think they got off on the control freakery. And also, these people are very loathe to admit that they were wrong about anything.
When anecdotes have sex they make data
A Star Trek fan?
Good for you on the yellow card. I suspect you already know the answers to your questions and they aren’t pretty - for medicine in general or for the patient. It’s disgusting.
All vaccines contain poisons. They can hurt or even kill you. The idea is that it is the lesser evil. The vaccine gives you better odds of a good result than does taking your chances with the disease.
When the vaccine took hold the hospitals and graveyards stopped overflowing. That's what counts.
I think that will prove wrong in the long term, but I will let specialist academics find the truth.
All medicines carry risks, as you say. Even water can be dangerous.
I have never known one to be given to all age groups with no contraindications at all.
I knew from the beginning that the crisis would be managed in order to maximize profits. For the simple reason that everything They do is to maximize corporate profits and stock prices. Hence endless dubious boosters, inoculating preschoolers, enforcement of patents even for poor countries, etc. It's no coincidence that members of the government may own those stocks and benefit from said price increases. It's also no coincidence that reporting of this fact has been censored.
However it does not follow from all this that the vaccine caused more harm than good.
It's not just censorship. They're mandating you support and even celebrate what your eyes, ears, and brain, and education tell you can't possibly be true. And they're replacing historical facts and artifacts with perverted fantasies and absurd proclamations.
That's what cultural marxists do.......they shove their fantasy ideology down your throat through intimidation and force then call you a fascist for objecting.
They behave like narcissists and use exactly the same manipulations.
Exactly.
Our right of free speech in the U.S. includes both the freedom from censorship and the freedom from being compelled to say things that the government approves.
So gender is a spectrum but political opinion is binary, according to the censors/moderators/overlords, Got it.
I guess in a sense, that's true. It's the ideologically captured institutions and their useful idiots versus independent thinkers.
Diversity of identity is matched by conformity of opinion. And all of those believers are just as terrified as any Calvinist was of finding out they were no longer of the elect.
"We must look like America!" ... they say. As long as we think like Cambridge.
See this piece by Eugyppius today is related: https://open.substack.com/pub/eugyppius/p/the-administrative-man?r=qjiuo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I think it’s moving back to binary now. Wasn’t it John Hopkins that recently published something calling women “non-men”?
Yes, specifically Lesbians are non-men according to their alphabet people glossary.
Good point! (But interestingly, men were not non-women.)
Yes, men still get to name themselves as they always have. The trans-identified male activists apparently don't care if men are called men, unless it is themselves being called that. They do not want women to be able to name ourselves, and they claim the title to steal our names and rename us with objectifying labels, as if we were only a mechanical function, "womb havers." I suspect this reveals the envy and rage trans-identified males must feel, knowing they can never have what we as women have.
When someone has the power to steal my names, appropriate them to himself, then rename me as a mechanical object, that is male privilege being supported by class power.
"It's the ideologically captured institutions and their useful idiots versus independent thinkers."
It seems to me that most of the arguments between the woke cultists and dissenters are mainly arguments about whether there can be more than one valid opinion, or even more than one that deserves to exist. Dissenters always have to recognize that there are at least two opinions, whereas the ruling class has the privilege of recognizing only one.
Don't be surprised if you get detained at the airport.
H.M. Government takes the suppression of free speech seriously, especially free speech that might not support the goals of the United States' Empire and Great Britain as America's loyalest little lackey.
Interesting! What specifically do you notice about the content of the suppressed speech? I imagine there is also compelled speech, right? The use of state power to force people to agree out loud and in writing with official beliefs about various things?
Various critics of British foreign policy (Vanessa Beeley, CJ Hopkins, Glen Greenwald and others) have reported being detained for questioning when attempting to enter GB, held for the legal limit of six hours, and their effects searched.
That is a clear attempt to send a message.
As to compelled speech, try to find MI5's visit to the office of The Guardian, shortly after The Graun published the Snowden revelations. That paper's editorial line has since hewed very closely to the neocon position favored by H.M.Government.
Incredible! I didn't know about the detentions. The British have tipped even farther into tyranny than the U.S. in certain ways, but Americans aren't far behind.
My son said to me 2yrs ago. He lives in Britain. 2yrs after the US everything changes to meet the desires of the US.
Lambs in sheeps clothing.
It ain't just Britain, although the British take their subservience even further than most Europeans.
The UK government and military are weak, but do not underestimate the British banking system, think tanks, higher education and other private institutions. They remain powerful and have spent vast sums of money to spread ideas and influence, to do their bidding.
One obvious and long-lasting example: racist sociopath and anti-American Cecil Rhodes hatched plans to destroy the United States from within, aiming to bring the “colonies” back under control of the UK.
Considerable damage was done to society by Rhodes scholars such as Bill Clinton, Rachel Maddow and Pete Buttigieg. I daresay that Cecil Rhodes’ nefarious scheming has achieved some success. He continues to attack North America from the grave, as one writer put it. So does Andrew Carnegie, who was like-minded and set up a foundation with the same goal.
“What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. “
I’ve come to believe that people have always used speech to create reality, but that the internet easier for people to create their own little echo chambers that allow them to live in their own reality separate from the the elite’s agreed upon reality. The government realizes this is a problem for control and has started to crack down, but it might be too late. The elites also have the problem that their reality is obviously a fantasy. For me, TDS and Covid were the breaking points. My hope is that more people find a breaking point before the elite’s fantasy drives humanity off the cliff.
I enjoy the substack so much because it allows me intellectual and moral comfort to say what I want and to read civil exchange even when comments do not 100% sync with my ideas. Compare it to poisonous and aggressive atmosphere of Twitter and FB. But then I have to remind myself that this is just another echo chamber. This substack comments section is not a real world. We are clever, but we are virtual, not real LOL
It’s also much more better(Jen that’s for you) interesting when, thanks to the internet, the evidence remains.
Does it occur to you that SOME 'elites' may be right?
In an uneducated US the thinking is abysmal.
They know nothing and EDUCATION in the US is the key?
Education does make a lot of people educated. It doesn't necessarily make them smart. Some of the most droolingly stupid sheep i've seen are very educated and dwell in their own bubble divorced from a lot of reality.
True, but somehow it does not sound like a good argument in favor of ignorance. If I had to choose, I would take education against backwardness and illiteracy. Won’t you?
You're proving Matt's point about being unable to see beyond binaries. If someone isn't well educated, it doesn't follow that they're backwards, ignorant, and illiterate. I know many, many people who didn't get a college education (and some that didn't even graduate high school) who work hard, own businesses, are very successful. Here in Massachusetts, the old school New England Republican seems to be becoming extinct, we have a lot of MIT libertarian type Repubs looking to fill the slots not. Educated and smart, yes, more than i and most likely you will ever be. And completely out there with regard to most other people's reality. Listen to commenters on Democratic media, so many of them just parrot the party line verbatim. Educated, but dumb as posts in terms of critical thinking, just pompom wavers. And haven't got a clue about what life is like outside of their bubble. There is a very vast spectrum between educated and backward and illiterate.
Just as an aside, i have to laugh when people laugh at Rep. Thomas Massie, with his hick accent and whole family posing with guns for their Christmas cards. Somebody somewhere told him to brush up on his STEM and get back to them. Dude has a Masters in Engineering from MIT and started a business, made his money and got out. He was a case study in one of their textbooks on Entrepreneurship. And pretty much demolishes anyone who tries to argue with him.
Nevertheless YOU in the US have an uneducated populace?
We have a vast range of educational attainment in out populace. Are you educated? Are you a Democrat? Because you seem to be spouting the same talking points as any other educated random Democrat. So maybe you actually don't even realize you may not be thinking for yourself?
In an “educated” US the thinking is abysmal.
Are you defining educated as having obtained a degree? Lots of people have done that but that demonstrates nothing other than they completed some requirements. I don’t think more than 4-5 out of the next 100 people with graduate degrees I could pull off the street could name a single logical fallacy or have read a single book since they left school or could cogently explain BOTH sides of a controversial issue. “Educated” doesn’t mean anything.
I have recently rediscovered the importance of being able to immediately recognize, label and understand the logical fallacies. Woke activists employ these fallacies constantly as manipulations against dissent and resistance. The activists have a limited range of power strategies they use over and over because they tend to work well, and besides, the activists actually can't think very well.
It’s telling that you immediately comment on education when you mention elites. It does seem that elites use education as one of their primary methods of gate keeping, but the true power comes from using the massive wealth inequalities to make sure that money flows towards the groups and people that maintain their fantasy. Sure, there are some people with “F you” money that can buy their own elite status, but everything else is just a matter of gate keeping.
Yes, some elites are right (whatever that means), and on some occasions. So is everyone else. What's your point?
Education isn't magic. What skills people are educated in matter a lot.
A danger in education is that it can lead you to believe you 'know" a lot more than you actually do.
As Plato recounts in Apology, Socrates said:
"I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know."
This complete lack of humility common amongst the highly educated likely is part of what led William F. Buckley to state:
"I would rather be governed by the first 1,000 people listed in the phone book than by the faculty members from an Ivy League University."
On this, I'm with him.
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As A Country
We Are Still
Shitting Obama Out.
The Body Politic
Will Recover.
And Our Immunity
To His Kind
Will Strengthen.
.
I can't like this comment enough. Unfortunately, I fell for his phony persona until he exposed himself by stating too many lies, "the bankers did nothing illegal only immoral." Yeah, fuck you Barack CIA Obama!
Those who have made Obama a saint might like to ask themselves this question, but they won’t. How has Obama gotten so rich, so quickly? How is it that he can afford to buy a house in Washington and a summer residence in Martha’s Vineyard the combined prices of which are almost 20 million dollars? Where has all of this money come from and why?
Book sales are a great way to launder payments. Just saying
Book advances, for books that are bought by "friends" of the author and never read.
As are Netflix deals.
Obama hasn't "bought" anything. I'm certain that those "mortgages" have been paid by JPMC, BofA, WF, Citi and USBank. As thanks for standing between them, the crooks, and the populace. Remember Obama said to the bankers, "I am the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks." Meaning, "I got you." So, in turn, the crooks had Obama's back. He is the biggest con man alive.
He appointed Holder and Bruer, (not sure I got that name right), as US Attorney general and deputy. Both of these arseholes came from the same Washington law firm most of whose clients were the criminals who caused the 2008 financial crisis. A leaked email showed that Obama was told by the CEO of CitiBank to appoint these two guys. Once they had prevented any prosecution of the criminals they returned to the Washington law firm from whence they had come and both were made partners. All Obama did was take the Clinton model and improve it. And he’s still doing it through his foundation just as the Clintons do. Still, better than paying taxes.
Yep, you're proving my point that CIA Obama is the biggest con man alive!
Me too. The 2008 financial crisis was a real wake up call. I think for Taibbi too based on his past work. He did a lot of great reporting!
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I Will Pay
For The Funeral
Of Anyone
Who Demands
To Be Buried
With Their Mask On.
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We need to shit out Jarrett first, as she is the blockage causing the pain.