Between COVID restrictions and a full time Job It’s getting a tad rare for me to get out to cover events, however yesterday I managed to get to the Catholic Men’s conference at Assumption College where I recorded this week’s Your Prayer Intentions Show for WQPH 89.3 FM (Every Saturday at Noon and Midnight) and managed to get a few of my old fashioned short interviews in that I’ll be posting on and off for the next week or two.
Today’s interview is with folks from Thomas Aquinas College which provides that rarest of products, an actual Catholic Education at a Catholics College.
I would venture to bet that if you send your offspring to be educated there. They will not only graduate with a solid opinion on the existence of natural rights but will be able to define what a woman is in one try even without a biology degree.
The mainstream media has been a propaganda machine for leftists since the rise of Barack Obama. Prior to then, the media had reliably liberal, but at least attempted to appear unbiased.
For instance, the mainstream media showed minimal interest in investigating Obama’s ties to former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, as well as the role of political fixer Antoin “Tony” Rezko early in Obama’s political career, as well as the Obamas’ purchase, with Rezko’s help, of their Chicago mansion. By that time Obama admitted he knew there was a cloud over Rezko, who later served time in prison for fraud and other charges. Obama in 2008 called his decision to work the Rezko on that purchase “bone-headed” in his murky explanation of that deal. A decision he made in 2008 was much more bone-headed, his naming of Joe Biden as is running mate. Had that not happened, Sleepy Joe would be enjoying a quiet, but rambling, retirement wandering the sands of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Hey fact-checkers: Are you going to attack me on that last statement?
I was unaware of fact-checkers as a political force until the 2008 presidential campaign; oh sure, I knew about Snopes debunking juicy urban legends, but the fact-checkers, such as PolitiFact, which was founded in 2007, got to work attacking during that campaign such stories as the Obama-was-born-in-Kenya canard. The fact-checkers were less enthusiastic in 2008 about defending John McCain after the New York Times claimed the Republican senator had an affair with a lobbyist.
That “report” was published last Monday, when America was still buying Russian oil; the following day, under pressure from the left and right, Biden announced America would no longer be purchasing Russian petroleum.
Kind of a conservative and Christian alternative to the Onion, the Babylon Bee is a satire site. Not getting the joke was USA Today fact-checker Ana Faguy, who apparently discovered the story on the Being Libertarian Facebook page. She even sought a comment from the Being Libertarian FB group. Faguy labeled the Bee story “satire.”
Duh!
Do USA Today fact-checkers investigate the Onion too?
Last year another USA Today reporter, Daniel Funke, fact-checked the internet memes, since proven true, that Biden looked at his watch several times during the ceremony when the remains of soldiers killed during a terrorist attack in Afghanistan were returned to American soil, calling it “mostly false.” After being confronted with facts, USA Today edited the story and it was upgraded, not to “true,” but to “missing context.” How brave.
Dan Bongino on his radio show and his podcast regularly tells his listeners that a reliable gauge that the left is getting desperate is how they protect sacred cows, such as the Biden White House, with fact-checks. One such story is the report from Russia that there are US-funded bio-labs in Ukraine.
“This story was real,” Bongino told Fox News’ Jesse Watters last week. “Yet the fact-checkers, who had no special access to information at all, came out and said: ‘No, no – no, no, no – that’s a bad story for the Biden administration – Obama may have been involved – so that’s a hoax and you’re banned from Facebook if you put it up. And you wonder why we are where we are right now with the information crisis in the country.”
Remember when Facebook, another priestly temple of truth [warning-satire!], used to routinely ban posts that claimed that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China? They don’t anymore.
Beneath ever fact-check entry at USA Today is this revealing note, “Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.”
Here’s a story that the big-time fact-checkers, Snopes, PolitiFact, and USA Today are ignoring, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the name of which is actually “Parental Rights in Education.” But leftists use the first name as they demonize the legislation.
Governor Ron DeSantis says he will sign the bill, which is aimed at primary school kids. Here’s a revealing passage from the legislation: “A school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.” You know what I think? Let kids be kids, particularly in primary school.
However, this is true. The word “gay” is not mentioned in the so-called “Don’t Say Gay Bill.”
Most fact-checkers, like their brethren elsewhere in journalism, are propagandists.
I’m old enough to remember when the Fatwa was put on Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses.
Unlike today when phrases like “freedom of speech” are routinely redefined to suit whatever agenda the left happens to have that day in 1989 the idea of the A death sentence being publicly demanded for an author for writing a book a particular Ayatollah didn’t like was rather new and there were plenty of free speech advocates who loudly proclaimed such actions a travesty.
Much to my shock at the time there was also considerable pushback from some in the west those who attacked Rushdie. It was the beginning of what we are seeing today.
At the time I was outraged (and still am at the bounty still on his head) and considered buying the book in response to said threats. but then it hit me:
What is the difference between buying a book I don’t want in response to Islamic threats and not buying a book I do want in response to Islamic threats?
The answer: THERE ISN’T ONE. Either way I would be allowing a bunch of savage barbarians to drive me to an action I had no interest in doing. The essence of freedom is the ability to do something if one chooses or not. So I asked myself a key question: If there was no FATWA on Rushdie would I had any interest in buying this book?
The answer is and remains no.
I haven’t bought the book, I have no interest in buying the book and I don’t see myself buying the book in the future…
…but I have the RIGHT an the ability to buy the book and that right is worth fighting for.
And that brings us to Joe Rogan.
I don’t have a subscription to Spotify and never had plans to get one before the Joe Rogan business.
I am not one of the millions of subscribers who listen to Joe Rogan. I’ve listed to a clip here and there but I have little interest in his podcast in general and had no plans to listen to jump in and start listening.
When the attempt to censor his came out I was as you might guess outraged. I don’t like the idea of people trying to force someone off the air because they don’t like what he’s saying or who he is interviewing.
You can’t have freedom of speech and if you don’t have freedom to listen. I think the attempt to take away that ability to listen is unamerican totalitarian and frankly evil and the people who are pushing that need to be fought because just like redefining words didn’t stop with “marriage” censoring speech and the ability to listen won’t stop with Rogan.
All that being said you can’t have freedom to listen without the freedom to not listen and as much as I want to make sure he has a platform so the people who want to hear him can do so I have no interest in joining that crowd because I freely choose not to.
Some might object saying that is it my moral duty to listen to jump in, perhaps I will like it, perhaps I would be this harkins back to one of the best statements in history concerning this type of thing.
Chancellor James Kent, author of Kent’s Commentaries, and one of the most influential American legal minds of all time, had a personal story that illustrates how foreign this impulse is to American law. According to Kent’s grandson: [He was] waited upon by a temperance committee and urged to give his authority and sanction to the principles and aims of a mass meeting by adding his name to the list of those who had pledged themselves not to use intoxicating liquor, being unduly pressed after his first polite negative, he made the following reply, declining the request:
“Gentlemen, I refuse to sign any pledge. I never have been drunk, and, by the blessing of God, I never will get drunk, but I have a constitutional privilege to get drunk, and that privilege I will not sign away.”‘
Kent never had the inclination to grant legislative authority over his sobriety.
I have no intention of granting either my political enemies or my political allies the authority to determine what can can’t or what I must listen to.
If some day Rogan has a guest I’m really interested in and I choose to jump in or even subscribe, fine but nobody is going to make that judgement but me.
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