I think we are devolving the government back to the authoritarian model, like monarchy, etc., where everything starts with the ruler (central government) who graciously (sic) grants rights to the favored. I understand Western Europe is even worse. I suspect it's like the 1930s, which resulted in Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, FDR, etc.
Freedom of speech means little if corporations are considered persons and money is considered speech. I strongly urge everyone to read or listen to the eye-opening series called "The Master Plan" at The Lever: https://the.levernews.com/master-plan/ which outlines exactly how the awful situation of corruption we have now was by design starting with a memo outlining it from soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell back in the Nixon days.
There was once a Federal Election Reform Act (FERA) that prohibited more than a $1000 contribution to a federal election campaign, exactly what we need now, and it was overturned by the Supreme Court with Lewis Powell on the bench. I can't recommend this series enough as it shows that it is no accident that Congress is now corrupt and it names all the personalities involved in making it happen.
I saw this morning that YouTube deleted Larry Johnson's channel with no warning for "hate speech." The assault against free speech is ramping up horrifyingly so.
He is one of the regulars on Judging Freedom and Dialogue Works (Nima), and is an ex CIA analyst. He is a consistent voice against the proxy war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. I've never heard anything he's ever said that is remotely "hate speech."
And he said on today's post on his web site that he asked YouTube what of his content caused him to be banned - and received no reply. This is the world of Kafka.
I think it was Jimmy Dore, or maybe the Redacted guy, who wondered if you had someone on your show who was banned on YT would you be demonetized or banned too?
That's exactly correct. I've listened / read elsewhere some of the content allegedly banned for hate speech or related and never once found anything offensive to anyone other than those wanting to suppress truth.
Youtube has been ramping up the censorship of journalists and others of influence lately. Especially targeted are those who criticize Israel's actions w/r/t the genocide in Gaza; or the fueling and escalating of the Ukraine proxy war against Russia. I'd subscribed to Youtube TV a while back but with their last act of censorship I cancelled and explained exactly why it was. Of course, a single such protest may matter little... but ultimately, it's about $$ so I hope enough others will eventually do the same. Of course, YT isn't alone in this. FascistBook has been doing the same for quite some time. I had posts deleted there because they were deemed a violation of community standards- by their third-party 'trusted advisor', which a little research proved to be a NGO funded by the Ukr. gov't. Not one of my posts or those of others with similar incidents had any violation of any stated standard.
We're in a very new and dangerous period of suppression.
if our rights are so chiseled in the constittion than why is all this shit coming down that denies us of our civil rights: Surveilance, free speach, right to peaceful protest, unlawful incarceration....
This is another area where I believe the Democrats are now behaving worse than the GOP. The authoritarianism implicit in the Biden Administration is most clearly seen in their efforts to 'stop disinfo' (with disinfo being anything that contradicts the State Dep't's official statements), and 'hate speech' - which is again, anything contradicting an officially approved position - most often applied to any criticism of genocide as "antisemitism'. Surveillance is part of it, as Tulsi Gabbard found when learning that she is routinely shadowed by air marshals when flying.
They care nothing for constitutional rights, and as there is no entity really fighting to protect freedom of speech and press, or of assembly, protest, etc. (ACLU apparently feeling there are more important issues these days), they are effectively getting away with ever more aggressive rescission of these 'inalienable' rights. The first victims are those who hold the biggest audiences, of course and/or who challenge the most outrageous stories coming out of the security establishment or those who are part of its proxy wars.
One of the primary causes of the dismal state of standing up for the natural and constitutional rights of all humans is the betrayal of the academic establishment from elementary through university. I think we are experiencing what Julien Benda, French philosopher and essayist, described in his 1927 treatise LA TRAHISON DES CLERCS (The Treason of the Intellectuals). He particularly denounced (very pertinent today), nationalism, warmongering, racism and power. He concluded with „And history will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died.“ I could add a score of luminaries who advocated for human freedom and justice. In Benda‘s days the appeal of European intellectuals for authoritarian and dictatorial regimes was widespread. Today we are facing a very similar situation. Independent, critical thinking is too often discouraged, if not outright forbidden. I was recently told by a middle aged woman who is from Latin America and tried to get a Masters in history and was astonished by the American „exceptionalism“ attitude of her professors. She became so disillusioned that she changed to a different discipline for her graduate education. The American people, as a supposedly free people, have a serious education problem.
For most of my early life, the Ivy League schools in the U.S. were held up as the temples of education available to only the best and brightest; having the most renowned faculty, and producing future leaders in academia, business, and government. It didn't take long into relative maturity to see, as the late Lewis Lapham observed, the 'best and brightest' often turn out to be the biggest crooks.
Their true purpose, while living the illusion, were primarily to provide connections and indoctrination among the children of the elite in preparation for them assuming control. It's not a surprise that woman observed the 'exceptionalism' beliefs being taught - the ruling class reeks of it.
It was a former Ivy League president who gave the American people World War I. And it was the collection of the best and brightest that led America into the quagmire of Vietnam.
New England „Brahmins“ like the Dulles brothers, the Kenned boys. Upper class Ivy League educated individuals. FDR certainly came from that background. The Vietnam War planners like McNamara that advised JFK and LBJ came from the same background. The forever war advocates were and still are from that educational environment.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about the concerns for censorship by social media platforms as it depends on who is doing the censoring.
Clearly, the first amendment prohibits Congress (and therefore all of government) from abridging our freedom of speech. But that is limited to government and does not apply to private citizens or organization.
For all practical purposes, social media platforms (all of them) are the modern equivalent of the old fashioned bulletin boards you would find on the walls of grocery, hardware and other stores in your neighborhood. (Some even still exist.) So let me ask, does the store owner of one of these bulletin boards have the right to take down (what he considers) an offensive post on his bulletin board? Is that censorship? The answer is obviously, yes, it is censorship. But it's private censorship, not government censorship. And while I might not like his decision to remove a post, I still believe he has the right to do so.
Now let's go the next step. Supposing that a large number of the store owner's customers found a post on the bulletin board particularly offensive and pressured the store owner to take it down. Is that censorship? Yes it is. But again, it's private censorship, not government. If a government official told the store owner to take it down, that would be government censorship in violation of the first amendment.
So, having equated social platforms to private store owned bulletin boards, I have to honor their (whoever owns the platform) right to remove any and all posts they find offensive (whether I like it or not). However. if pressured by any government official to remove any posts or prevent any contributors from posting on any social media platforms, that is a clear violation of the first amendment and is illegal.
The difficulty, wrknight, comes when we discuss "huge" sites like FB, Twitter, YouTube, and the like. Are they truly private, or are they more akin to a public utility?
YouTube, for example: When they censor or block someone, they may be denying that person not only speech but their livelihood. (Lots of people make their income from YouTube.) So, can YouTube as a "bulletin board" block a person just because the site wants to?
We also know the U.S. government has applied and is applying pressure to these huge sites to censor, as with the Covid crisis.
So I think we need to be very careful here with the "bulletin board" analogy.
Finally, I have to say that if someone was using me or my possessions as a means of his livelihood, I would want the right to terminate that. So, in all fairness, I have to grant that right to anyone else.
Whether I like it or not, I have to respect the right of anyone, however big, to refuse to broadcast to the world someone else's message. The individual has not been prevented from speaking out, he has simply been prevented from using someone else to amplify his message.
That's something that should be included as a footnote to the First Amendment: While you are guaranteed freedom of expression, no one has to pay the slightest bit of attention to what you say or write (something the "I need to speak MY truth" crowd will never understand), nor is anyone obligated to provide a "soapbox" for you.
Secondly, while they are big, they are not monopolies and one also has the option of starting one's own blog on any of several platforms like this one.
I suppose, that until it happens to you, these censorship actions won't bother you to much. But bad actions, left unchallenged, become 'normalized' and then cascading way beyond any control.
Frankly, I would never equate them to a public utility because, in the first place, public utilities are useful, and their utility far outweighs their bullshit.
On the other hand, the bullshit proliferated by most of the social media platforms far outweighs any utility.
The ongoing debate related to the large social media companies - and likely true of smaller ones too - is whether they are platforms or publishers.
A platform can not be sued under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act; publishers may be.
The issues multiply from there - the big social media companies do not want any restrictions on who uses their sites, claiming first amendment rights (and increasing their user base), while censoring content they deem offensive - less to the government it seems to me than the moneyed interests who are actually in charge. They are in effect, making editorial choices.
Consider the increasing use of AI. Does a social media company that uses AI for content creation become responsible for the content it publishes? Or is the aggregation of content from other publishers by the AI system merely an act of being a platform with the actual publishing being a single 'entity' (the AI application)? (Corporations have legal status as 'persons'; how long before an AI application is?)
According to the English language definition (not the lawyer definition) a publisher is simply one who publishes. But the definition of publish is, "to prepare and issue (a book, journal, piece of music, etc.) for public sale, distribution, or readership". So I guess the only distinction between a publisher and the social media companies is that the social media companies are not involved in the preparation of the material. Other than that, I personally think the distinction is moot.
Now if a social media company uses AI in any manner to generate content, then it is clearly involved in the preparation, and is totally responsible and is therefor a publisher by the English language definitions.
The problem I see with this debate is that the f'king lawyers either don't understand the English language or they choose to make up their own cockamamie definitions to serve their own purposes.
PS Don't start me on the topic of AI. I have always said, "There is no invention of the human mind, intended to do good, that hasn't been used to do evil". And AI tops the list.
Yes, fair points. For example, I will remove offensive posts, by which I mean posts where someone attacks me or another commenter using vulgarity and demeaning language. So I serve as the "censor" of my private site. Of course, the poster I "censored" can still go to thousands, if not millions, of other sites and swear and insult to his heart's content. He is "free" to do so.
I think you minimize the outsized role that the government has had in terms of pressuring the ownership of these private social media platforms. As one who has had a few posts (usually on Ukraine war, or on the genocide in Gaza) deleted by FB without any reasonable cause or explanation, I began reading of very many others who were encountering the same problem.
Just recently, FB's Mark Zuckerberg made public statements that explain just why that was. Just as had been divulged in the Twitter files, government agents from the FBI and other entities had been for quite some time been pressuring them... using intimidation of implied threats about a government response (such as the imposition of draconian steps- new restrictions, penalties, etc. - (or perhaps a possible outright ban, as they threatened TikTok with). In Zuckerberg's case, he admitted that he was wrong to cave in (implying he should have risked the federal legal harrassment and/or resisted in other ways).
It isn't a case of "IF the government pressured"... these are well-documented parts of the evidence that it is now routinely engaged in this kind of suppression.
Believe me, I don't minimize the role of government in anything; and I am fully aware of what certain government officials are doing to suppress dissent in our country. And it's not just the Feds.
In the above discussion, where I said "if", I am addressing a principle, not describing something that happened.
I suppose I misinterpreted what you were saying in other comments. It sounded like you were defending the censorship because it is most directly a private entity doing it. My whole point is that when the government 'leans on' private entities such that they are pressured to censor, THAT IS effectively government censorship. In the cases at hand, evidence shows that government agents identified specific content and specific speakers whom they wished to have removed.
Of course I'd have little cause for arguing a violation of First Amendment rights if it the publishers / platforms were, independent of any such government pressure. Because that's NOT the case, I do have grave concerns. And the frequency and numbers of incidents appear to me to be swiftly growing.
Is it only in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address that “Government by the people” etc appears, or is it in the Bill of Rights? I ask because if the people in the government are officially part of The People, it would be unconstitutional to censor them when they, like perhaps Ed Snowden, exercise their freedom of speech about things they would rather not keep secret. I suppose they would of course get fired for having goals not in keeping with those of the organisation, but if they too are part of The People, they should not be locked up. In the famous Monty Python sketch, John Cleese asks: “So, you want to join the Secret Service? Can you keep a secret?”
We’ve gone from Secretary of State Stimson’s declaration that “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail” and his closing of Yardley’s cryptanalysis bureau to Secretary of War Stimson’s request for information on the Japanese coded traffic six months before Pearl Harbour, as per the NSA website. Did the Japanese realise that sneaking around the back was the New Frontier if the US was now doing it, I wonder? They certainly waited with pulling the diplomatic plug until their ‘planes were in the air on the way to attack Pearl. And did F.D. Roosevelt leave Pearl Harbour to look after itself rather than have them warned in time, (stitching up its commander who might have expected to receive intelligence of any threats) for a more long range goal such as getting the public’s blood up for the war in Europe?
"The best way to protect our rights is to exercise them." Profoundly true. Without exercising our rights, the space left vacant gets filled. In America/Canada that space gets filled more by corporate growth than by government with the corporate world controlling more of the levers of government. Civics-civic education-life- long civics engagement-activism is they key-the exercise needed to keep that space free for exercising rights. And to possibly increase the size of public space with rights to not just rights from. We understand the right to have guns...how about increasing that space for rights to universal health care -housing....
I think we are devolving the government back to the authoritarian model, like monarchy, etc., where everything starts with the ruler (central government) who graciously (sic) grants rights to the favored. I understand Western Europe is even worse. I suspect it's like the 1930s, which resulted in Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, FDR, etc.
Freedom of speech means little if corporations are considered persons and money is considered speech. I strongly urge everyone to read or listen to the eye-opening series called "The Master Plan" at The Lever: https://the.levernews.com/master-plan/ which outlines exactly how the awful situation of corruption we have now was by design starting with a memo outlining it from soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell back in the Nixon days.
There was once a Federal Election Reform Act (FERA) that prohibited more than a $1000 contribution to a federal election campaign, exactly what we need now, and it was overturned by the Supreme Court with Lewis Powell on the bench. I can't recommend this series enough as it shows that it is no accident that Congress is now corrupt and it names all the personalities involved in making it happen.
I saw this morning that YouTube deleted Larry Johnson's channel with no warning for "hate speech." The assault against free speech is ramping up horrifyingly so.
I'm not familiar with Larry Johnson. Why do you think this happened, Tom?
He is one of the regulars on Judging Freedom and Dialogue Works (Nima), and is an ex CIA analyst. He is a consistent voice against the proxy war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. I've never heard anything he's ever said that is remotely "hate speech."
He's against war and genocide, so obviously he hates America. <sarc>
And he said on today's post on his web site that he asked YouTube what of his content caused him to be banned - and received no reply. This is the world of Kafka.
I think it was Jimmy Dore, or maybe the Redacted guy, who wondered if you had someone on your show who was banned on YT would you be demonetized or banned too?
I'm surprised Larry gets canceled and Dore does not. I'm sure his day is coming.
Hate speech apparently means the censors hate what he says.
That's exactly correct. I've listened / read elsewhere some of the content allegedly banned for hate speech or related and never once found anything offensive to anyone other than those wanting to suppress truth.
Youtube has been ramping up the censorship of journalists and others of influence lately. Especially targeted are those who criticize Israel's actions w/r/t the genocide in Gaza; or the fueling and escalating of the Ukraine proxy war against Russia. I'd subscribed to Youtube TV a while back but with their last act of censorship I cancelled and explained exactly why it was. Of course, a single such protest may matter little... but ultimately, it's about $$ so I hope enough others will eventually do the same. Of course, YT isn't alone in this. FascistBook has been doing the same for quite some time. I had posts deleted there because they were deemed a violation of community standards- by their third-party 'trusted advisor', which a little research proved to be a NGO funded by the Ukr. gov't. Not one of my posts or those of others with similar incidents had any violation of any stated standard.
We're in a very new and dangerous period of suppression.
if our rights are so chiseled in the constittion than why is all this shit coming down that denies us of our civil rights: Surveilance, free speach, right to peaceful protest, unlawful incarceration....
This is another area where I believe the Democrats are now behaving worse than the GOP. The authoritarianism implicit in the Biden Administration is most clearly seen in their efforts to 'stop disinfo' (with disinfo being anything that contradicts the State Dep't's official statements), and 'hate speech' - which is again, anything contradicting an officially approved position - most often applied to any criticism of genocide as "antisemitism'. Surveillance is part of it, as Tulsi Gabbard found when learning that she is routinely shadowed by air marshals when flying.
They care nothing for constitutional rights, and as there is no entity really fighting to protect freedom of speech and press, or of assembly, protest, etc. (ACLU apparently feeling there are more important issues these days), they are effectively getting away with ever more aggressive rescission of these 'inalienable' rights. The first victims are those who hold the biggest audiences, of course and/or who challenge the most outrageous stories coming out of the security establishment or those who are part of its proxy wars.
One of the primary causes of the dismal state of standing up for the natural and constitutional rights of all humans is the betrayal of the academic establishment from elementary through university. I think we are experiencing what Julien Benda, French philosopher and essayist, described in his 1927 treatise LA TRAHISON DES CLERCS (The Treason of the Intellectuals). He particularly denounced (very pertinent today), nationalism, warmongering, racism and power. He concluded with „And history will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died.“ I could add a score of luminaries who advocated for human freedom and justice. In Benda‘s days the appeal of European intellectuals for authoritarian and dictatorial regimes was widespread. Today we are facing a very similar situation. Independent, critical thinking is too often discouraged, if not outright forbidden. I was recently told by a middle aged woman who is from Latin America and tried to get a Masters in history and was astonished by the American „exceptionalism“ attitude of her professors. She became so disillusioned that she changed to a different discipline for her graduate education. The American people, as a supposedly free people, have a serious education problem.
Karl, excellent points.
For most of my early life, the Ivy League schools in the U.S. were held up as the temples of education available to only the best and brightest; having the most renowned faculty, and producing future leaders in academia, business, and government. It didn't take long into relative maturity to see, as the late Lewis Lapham observed, the 'best and brightest' often turn out to be the biggest crooks.
Their true purpose, while living the illusion, were primarily to provide connections and indoctrination among the children of the elite in preparation for them assuming control. It's not a surprise that woman observed the 'exceptionalism' beliefs being taught - the ruling class reeks of it.
It was a former Ivy League president who gave the American people World War I. And it was the collection of the best and brightest that led America into the quagmire of Vietnam.
i'm curious, Karl: What pedigree were the folks who who gave the American People World War II?
And after Vietnam, what about "The Forever War" triggered by 9/11?
Or the Proxy Wars in Ukraine and Gaza today?
New England „Brahmins“ like the Dulles brothers, the Kenned boys. Upper class Ivy League educated individuals. FDR certainly came from that background. The Vietnam War planners like McNamara that advised JFK and LBJ came from the same background. The forever war advocates were and still are from that educational environment.
Thank You.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about the concerns for censorship by social media platforms as it depends on who is doing the censoring.
Clearly, the first amendment prohibits Congress (and therefore all of government) from abridging our freedom of speech. But that is limited to government and does not apply to private citizens or organization.
For all practical purposes, social media platforms (all of them) are the modern equivalent of the old fashioned bulletin boards you would find on the walls of grocery, hardware and other stores in your neighborhood. (Some even still exist.) So let me ask, does the store owner of one of these bulletin boards have the right to take down (what he considers) an offensive post on his bulletin board? Is that censorship? The answer is obviously, yes, it is censorship. But it's private censorship, not government censorship. And while I might not like his decision to remove a post, I still believe he has the right to do so.
Now let's go the next step. Supposing that a large number of the store owner's customers found a post on the bulletin board particularly offensive and pressured the store owner to take it down. Is that censorship? Yes it is. But again, it's private censorship, not government. If a government official told the store owner to take it down, that would be government censorship in violation of the first amendment.
So, having equated social platforms to private store owned bulletin boards, I have to honor their (whoever owns the platform) right to remove any and all posts they find offensive (whether I like it or not). However. if pressured by any government official to remove any posts or prevent any contributors from posting on any social media platforms, that is a clear violation of the first amendment and is illegal.
The difficulty, wrknight, comes when we discuss "huge" sites like FB, Twitter, YouTube, and the like. Are they truly private, or are they more akin to a public utility?
YouTube, for example: When they censor or block someone, they may be denying that person not only speech but their livelihood. (Lots of people make their income from YouTube.) So, can YouTube as a "bulletin board" block a person just because the site wants to?
We also know the U.S. government has applied and is applying pressure to these huge sites to censor, as with the Covid crisis.
So I think we need to be very careful here with the "bulletin board" analogy.
Finally, I have to say that if someone was using me or my possessions as a means of his livelihood, I would want the right to terminate that. So, in all fairness, I have to grant that right to anyone else.
Whether I like it or not, I have to respect the right of anyone, however big, to refuse to broadcast to the world someone else's message. The individual has not been prevented from speaking out, he has simply been prevented from using someone else to amplify his message.
That's something that should be included as a footnote to the First Amendment: While you are guaranteed freedom of expression, no one has to pay the slightest bit of attention to what you say or write (something the "I need to speak MY truth" crowd will never understand), nor is anyone obligated to provide a "soapbox" for you.
Secondly, while they are big, they are not monopolies and one also has the option of starting one's own blog on any of several platforms like this one.
I suppose, that until it happens to you, these censorship actions won't bother you to much. But bad actions, left unchallenged, become 'normalized' and then cascading way beyond any control.
It has happened. I've had posts removed and while I find it annoying, I don't go around claiming my first amendment rights have been violated.
If the same person does it multiple times, I will simply stop reading that source.
Frankly, I would never equate them to a public utility because, in the first place, public utilities are useful, and their utility far outweighs their bullshit.
On the other hand, the bullshit proliferated by most of the social media platforms far outweighs any utility.
The ongoing debate related to the large social media companies - and likely true of smaller ones too - is whether they are platforms or publishers.
A platform can not be sued under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act; publishers may be.
The issues multiply from there - the big social media companies do not want any restrictions on who uses their sites, claiming first amendment rights (and increasing their user base), while censoring content they deem offensive - less to the government it seems to me than the moneyed interests who are actually in charge. They are in effect, making editorial choices.
Consider the increasing use of AI. Does a social media company that uses AI for content creation become responsible for the content it publishes? Or is the aggregation of content from other publishers by the AI system merely an act of being a platform with the actual publishing being a single 'entity' (the AI application)? (Corporations have legal status as 'persons'; how long before an AI application is?)
According to the English language definition (not the lawyer definition) a publisher is simply one who publishes. But the definition of publish is, "to prepare and issue (a book, journal, piece of music, etc.) for public sale, distribution, or readership". So I guess the only distinction between a publisher and the social media companies is that the social media companies are not involved in the preparation of the material. Other than that, I personally think the distinction is moot.
Now if a social media company uses AI in any manner to generate content, then it is clearly involved in the preparation, and is totally responsible and is therefor a publisher by the English language definitions.
The problem I see with this debate is that the f'king lawyers either don't understand the English language or they choose to make up their own cockamamie definitions to serve their own purposes.
PS Don't start me on the topic of AI. I have always said, "There is no invention of the human mind, intended to do good, that hasn't been used to do evil". And AI tops the list.
Yes, fair points. For example, I will remove offensive posts, by which I mean posts where someone attacks me or another commenter using vulgarity and demeaning language. So I serve as the "censor" of my private site. Of course, the poster I "censored" can still go to thousands, if not millions, of other sites and swear and insult to his heart's content. He is "free" to do so.
I think you minimize the outsized role that the government has had in terms of pressuring the ownership of these private social media platforms. As one who has had a few posts (usually on Ukraine war, or on the genocide in Gaza) deleted by FB without any reasonable cause or explanation, I began reading of very many others who were encountering the same problem.
Just recently, FB's Mark Zuckerberg made public statements that explain just why that was. Just as had been divulged in the Twitter files, government agents from the FBI and other entities had been for quite some time been pressuring them... using intimidation of implied threats about a government response (such as the imposition of draconian steps- new restrictions, penalties, etc. - (or perhaps a possible outright ban, as they threatened TikTok with). In Zuckerberg's case, he admitted that he was wrong to cave in (implying he should have risked the federal legal harrassment and/or resisted in other ways).
It isn't a case of "IF the government pressured"... these are well-documented parts of the evidence that it is now routinely engaged in this kind of suppression.
Believe me, I don't minimize the role of government in anything; and I am fully aware of what certain government officials are doing to suppress dissent in our country. And it's not just the Feds.
In the above discussion, where I said "if", I am addressing a principle, not describing something that happened.
I suppose I misinterpreted what you were saying in other comments. It sounded like you were defending the censorship because it is most directly a private entity doing it. My whole point is that when the government 'leans on' private entities such that they are pressured to censor, THAT IS effectively government censorship. In the cases at hand, evidence shows that government agents identified specific content and specific speakers whom they wished to have removed.
Of course I'd have little cause for arguing a violation of First Amendment rights if it the publishers / platforms were, independent of any such government pressure. Because that's NOT the case, I do have grave concerns. And the frequency and numbers of incidents appear to me to be swiftly growing.
Is it only in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address that “Government by the people” etc appears, or is it in the Bill of Rights? I ask because if the people in the government are officially part of The People, it would be unconstitutional to censor them when they, like perhaps Ed Snowden, exercise their freedom of speech about things they would rather not keep secret. I suppose they would of course get fired for having goals not in keeping with those of the organisation, but if they too are part of The People, they should not be locked up. In the famous Monty Python sketch, John Cleese asks: “So, you want to join the Secret Service? Can you keep a secret?”
We’ve gone from Secretary of State Stimson’s declaration that “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail” and his closing of Yardley’s cryptanalysis bureau to Secretary of War Stimson’s request for information on the Japanese coded traffic six months before Pearl Harbour, as per the NSA website. Did the Japanese realise that sneaking around the back was the New Frontier if the US was now doing it, I wonder? They certainly waited with pulling the diplomatic plug until their ‘planes were in the air on the way to attack Pearl. And did F.D. Roosevelt leave Pearl Harbour to look after itself rather than have them warned in time, (stitching up its commander who might have expected to receive intelligence of any threats) for a more long range goal such as getting the public’s blood up for the war in Europe?
"The best way to protect our rights is to exercise them." Profoundly true. Without exercising our rights, the space left vacant gets filled. In America/Canada that space gets filled more by corporate growth than by government with the corporate world controlling more of the levers of government. Civics-civic education-life- long civics engagement-activism is they key-the exercise needed to keep that space free for exercising rights. And to possibly increase the size of public space with rights to not just rights from. We understand the right to have guns...how about increasing that space for rights to universal health care -housing....
On the topic of the first amendment, I wonder how far we get posting statements like, "Palestinians have the right to defend themselves".