Mark Steyn on totalitarianism in the West

Glenn Greenwald on censorship via "Fake news or misinformation" laws

 A major escalation in official online censorship regimes is progressing rapidly in Brazil, with implications for everyone in the democratic world. Under Brazil's new government headed by President Lula da Silva, the country is poised to become the first in the democratic world to implement a law censoring and banning "fake news and disinformation" online, and then punishing those deemed guilty of authoring and spreading it. Such laws already exist throughout the non-democratic world, adopted years ago by the planet's most tyrannical regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. 

If one wishes to be generous with the phrase "the democratic world" and include Malaysia and Singapore – at best hybrid "democracies" – then one could argue that a couple other "democratic" governments have already seized the power to decree Absolute Truth and then ban any deviation from it. But absent unexpected opposition, Brazil will soon become the first country unambiguously included in the democratic world to outlaw "fake news" and vest government officials with the power to banish it and punish its authors. 

Ineffective Maltruism

 

Important essay.  Read the whole thing.  Excerpt.

A key aspect of this “maltruism” is its ability to extend control through soft-sounding enterprises – how can something with “open” and “democracy” and “save” in its name – and be a “nonpartisan – nonprofit” entity to boot – be anything but good?  

Happy squishy-sounding NGOs and “philanthropic LLCs” then extend their actual real hard power as funders and networkers and “third party validators” in ways that mere mortals cannot. We have yet to see an organization intended to create a global hive zombie mind call itself “Wicker Basket Full of Yawning Golden Retriever Puppies,” though the very fuzzy term “philanthrocapitalism” – also used to describe this approach – comes close. ...

The politics of this putative philanthropy are brazen. If one looks at those who have taken the “Giving Pledge,” one sees a list that one could easily mistake for the list of the owners of the private planes that jet to Davos for the annual World Economic Forum meeting.

Asking genuinely: has one single Dem member of Congress raised concerns about this major story yesterday proving that DHS/FBI/CIA pressure Big Tech to censor for them? I haven't seen one.

Yes, it's been known for awhile but these docs are explosive:https://t.co/X9fyihCBsK

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 1, 2022

JOURNALISTS: TOOLS OF SATAN OR JUST MENACES TO CIVILIZATION?

 “The Associated Press published a piece this week casting the confessional seal as sinister. That its reporters would even think to turn a prosaic defense of this venerable privilege into a scandal is a measure of our secularized times. Only until recently would anyone dare suggest that priests be coerced into revealing what they hear in confession. That cause over the years has been restricted to a handful of rabidly atheistic politicians. But now, apparently, the AP has joined it.”

Klaus Schwab

Twitter pulled down this video. It would be a shame if even more people saw it now. pic.twitter.com/elUUY4zzPs

— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) February 22, 2022

What the Biden has planned for you

pic.twitter.com/VVB2BrcbKq

— Cornalicious (@Corn_Actual) November 25, 2021

Defending the Indefensible

 

The Ashli Babbitt killing may open the underlying question about the truth of the narrative by which an oligarchic regime has largely substituted its sovereignty for that of the voters. 

 By precluding criminal proceedings against the unnamed officer who killed Ashli Babbitt as she tried to climb through a window into the House speakers’ lobby on January 6, the U.S. government meant to shield itself from embarrassment. Instead, its indefensible manipulation of the justice system further confirms the patent dishonesty of the narrative by which it tries to frighten potential critics. 

The Babbitt family’s $10 million lawsuit against the Capitol police and the officer who killed Ashli will force the government to defend an obviously indefensible act, and the even more indefensible attempted coverup thereof. Unless Babbitt’s attorneys and Republican elected officials prove to be extraordinarily stupid, the lawsuit will discredit the pseudo-security narrative our oligarchs are using to rule us. 

The hard facts are not in dispute. On January 6, Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old woman weighing around 110 pounds and carrying no weapon of any kind, tried to fit through a broken window. As she struggled to get through, an armed male officer, who was presumably much bigger and stronger, shot her in the neck and killed her...

... she was killed while posing no physical threat to anyone or anything...

What did the government do with the fact that one of its big, strong, armed agents had killed a small, weak, unarmed woman who was not harming anyone? 

If ever there was a frontal attack on the Constitution, of which the First Amendment’s safeguards of freedom of speech and of the press provide the bedrock, this is it. Any politician who claims to represent the republic’s remnants must begin by calling out the official narrative’s fraudulence for what it is: the oligarchy’s attack on our democracy.

How social media giants are shaping and changing our world. Do you approve of where you are being led?

Consider how Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple are manipulating the world and its people to their view of their goals. This is very dangerous because the people doing the shaping and reshaping,  and manipulating are moral maniacal monsters.

 

Opinion: I Now Better Understand the ‘Good German’

 

Dennis Prager:

As my listeners and readers can hopefully attest, I have been on a lifelong quest to understand human nature and human behavior. I am sad to report that I have learned more in the past few years, particularly in 2020, than in any equivalent period of time.

One of the biggest revelations concerns a question that has always plagued me: How does one explain the “good German,” the term used to describe the average, presumably decent German, who did nothing to hurt Jews but also did nothing to help them and did nothing to undermine the Nazi regime? The same question could be asked about the average Frenchman during the Vichy era, the average Russian under Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, and their successors, and the millions of others who did nothing to help their fellow citizens under oppressive dictatorships.

These past few years have taught me not to so quickly judge the quiet German, Russian, etc. Of course, I still judge Germans who helped the Nazis and Germans who in any way hurt Jews. But the Germans who did nothing? Not so fast.

What has changed my thinking has been watching what is happening in America (and Canada and Australia and elsewhere, for that matter).

The ease with which tens of millions of Americans have accepted irrational, unconstitutional, and unprecedented police state-type restrictions on their freedoms, including even the freedom to make a living, has been, to understate the case, sobering.

The same holds true for the acceptance by most Americans of the rampant censorship on Twitter and all other major social media platforms. Even physicians and other scientists are deprived of freedom of speech if, for example, they offer scientific support for hydroxychloroquine along with zinc to treat COVID-19 in the early stages. Board-certified physician Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, who has saved hundreds of COVID-19 patients from suffering and/or death, has been banned from Twitter for publicizing his lifesaving hydroxychloroquine and zinc protocol.

Half of America, the nonleft half, is afraid to speak their minds at virtually every university, movie studio, and large corporation—indeed, at virtually every place of work.

Antifa Is Not Fighting For Freedom, But For Communist Revolution

 Short for the German phrase, “Antifaschistische Aktion,” Antifa served as the paramilitary arm of the German Communist Party (KPD), which the Soviet Union funded. In other words, Antifa became the German Communists’ version of the Nazis’ brown-shirted SA.

And so is BLM.

Mark Steyn: "The Reset Jet Set"

 One of the themes of our summer audio entertainment The Prisoner of Windsor is that most of the chaps who matter in this world are people you've never heard of - by which I mean they are other than the omnipresent pygmies of the political scene: In a settled democratic society such as Canada, for example, if you wind up with an electoral contest between a woke mammy singer with a banana in his pants and a hollow husk less lifelike than his CBC election-night hologram whose only core belief is that he has no core beliefs other than that party donations should pay for his kids' schooling, you can take it as read that the real action must be elsewhere.

A lot of those chaps you've never heard of turn up in this video from the "World Economic Forum" - ie, the Davos set. After five months of Covid lockdown, you'll be happy to hear that all the experts have decided that 2021 will be the year of "The Great Reset":

I see my chums at the Heartland Institute headline this the "World Leaders' 'Great Reset' Plan". But, if by "leader" you mean an elected head of government accountable to the people, there is a total dearth. Indeed, it's a melancholy reflection on the state of "world leadership" that the nearest to anyone accountable to the people in this video is HRH The Prince of Wales, in whom one day in the hopefully extremely far distant future the executive authority of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc will be nominally vested but which cannot be exercised without the consent of the people's representatives. Yet even that token accountability is, as noted, in the future. So right now he's just another guy who's a "world leader" because he gets invited to Davos and you don't - and, even if you were minded to show up anyway, you'd need a private jet because all the scheduled flights have been Covid-canceled and the world's airports are ghost towns.

Warrant Served On St. Louis Couple Who Defended Private Property, Rifle Confiscated, Report Says

Mark McCloskey, who guarded his private property with an AR-15, told a local news station following the incident, “We were threatened with our lives, threatened with the house being burned down, my office building being burned down, even our dog’s life being threatened. It was about as bad as you can get. You know, I really thought it was the storming of Bastille, that we would be dead and the house would be burned and there was nothing we could do about it. It was a huge and frightening crowd and they broke in the gate and they were coming at us.”

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, a Democrat, claimed that the McCloskey’s defending their private property was a “violent assault” and that authorities “will use the full power of Missouri law to hold people accountable.”

Albert Watkins, the McCloskeys’ attorney, told Fox News that “If Kimberly Gardner wants to press charges against two attorneys who are protecting their home and their family and themselves on their own property, I will tell you that it will be nothing short of the proverbial cluster f***.”

“Gardner, one of four Democrats running for St. Louis circuit attorney in the Aug. 2 primary, is taking heat for a new political ad paid for with money from a national super PAC that is at least partly funded by liberal billionaire George Soros.”