Posts Tagged ‘misinformation’

Busting Some Freedom of Speech Myths

Posted: March 14, 2024 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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It is excruciatingly obvious that very few individuals living in the United States truly understand freedom of speech.  Those on the political left are not only clueless about this most fundamental right, they openly despise the very concept of it.  Thanks to our criminally atrocious educational system the younger generations are also clueless and also openly hostile to the concept of freedom of speech.  Unfortunately, those of us on the political right sometimes demonstrate a lack of understanding when it comes to freedom of speech.  It is now time to dispel the most common misconceptions about freedom of speech that I’ve encountered.

There is no hate speech exception to freedom of speech.

Someone asked me if I support the right of the KKK to hold rallies in public. My answer is: Even though I find the KKK absolutely reprehensible and I am completely disgusted by everything they stand for I support their right to say it in public. If I found out there was a KKK rally planned in my area I would work tirelessly to organize a PEACEFUL protest and I would make sure my protest would completely dwarf the KKK rally. That is the essence of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. No one has a right to silence others, no matter how much they disagree with what others have to say. No one has a right to prevent another person, or group, from holding an event, or to interfere with that event in any way. Everyone has a right to peacefully protest anytime they want.

Even the most reprehensible individuals have a right to say the most reprehensible things. 

Far too often those on the political left label speech that contradicts leftist orthodoxy as hate speech.  They then use the declaration of hate speech as a weapon to silence that speech they disagree with.

There is no misinformation exception to freedom of speech.

Each and every individual has a right to spread whatever lies they wish to spread, on whatever medium they wish to use.  Outright spreading of misinformation and disinformation is most definitely protected by freedom of speech. 

Labeling speech that contradicts the progressive narrative as misinformation, and then censoring that speech is a favorite tactic of the Marxists who masquerade as Democrats.

The First Amendment specifically prohibits the federal government from policing speech.

Each and every attempt at regulating speech by the federal government is a direct violation of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.  That includes so called hate speech and misinformation.  The federal government has zero authority to define those concepts, and zero authority to classify speech according to those criteria.  The federal government has absolutely no authority to ban any speech at all.

Every state has a Bill of Rights that protects the rights of those living there from the tyranny of the state government and the local governments.  That includes freedom of speech.

The Bill of Rights does not grant rights.

All rights are granted to each and every individual directly by God.  The Bill of Rights is merely a restraining order that prohibits the federal government from infringing on, or regulating, our most fundamental rights in any way.  There is no such thing as a First Amendment Right, only God-given Natural Rights.

Governments most definitely do not grant rights.

The Biden Regime Has Gone Full Dystopian Science Fiction

Posted: November 30, 2023 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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I am a huge fan of dystopian Science Fiction, especially those with a pronounced Libertarian slant.  My favorite authors in the genre are Robert Heinlein, George Orwell, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournell, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, and Suzanne Collins. 

Joe Biden’s handlers have been following the plot lines featured by those authors, all from the point of view from the villains.  They most likely have never read any of these great works.   Their dystopian playbooks are based on the collective works of Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Chairman Mao.  Joe Biden’s Cabal should have read the same works I have read; they would have learned some valuable lessons about the various levels of hell created by collectivist policies.

Robert Heinlein wrote a short story, Free Men, and a novel, Sixth Column, where communist nations launched nuclear strikes on the US, and then invaded.  In both stories, written in the late 1940s, the communist invaders completely curtailed travel to ensure control over the conquered US.  Curtailing the freedom of movement is one of the favorite ploys used by dystopian regimes to exert complete control over a population.   The Biden Regime is using safety and climate change as a justification to curtail the freedom of movement of Americans, as chronicled in the following two articles:

NTSB Recommends All New Cars Be Equipped With Technology to Make Speeding Difficult or Impossible (thefederalistpapers.org)

In a recent development, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has proposed a measure that has sparked considerable debate.

The recommendation is for all new automobiles to be equipped with intelligent speed assistance (ISA) technology, a system designed to make speeding difficult or impossible.

The proposed ISA technology works by utilizing GPS and sign recognition to adapt the vehicle’s speed to the local limit.

Its approach is distinct from traditional speed limiters as it varies the maximum speed based on the location.

‘Dystopian Science Fiction’: Thomas Massie’s Amendment to Stop ‘Kill Switch’ in Vehicles Fails (breitbart.com)

Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) amendment to stop what has been dubbed a “kill switch” in vehicles beginning in 2026 under the guise of “passive drunk driving technology” failed last week — something that largely fell under the radar as all eyes remain on newly-elected House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Congress passing his stopgap funding bill this week.

This battle broke out last week, as Massie presented an amendment, which essentially states that none of the funds made available in the Biden-approved Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed in 2021, may be used to implement Section 24220 of the bill.

George Orwell’s 1984 has long been the playbook for dystopian regimes: Biden Admin ‘Working With’ Social Media to ‘Counter Misinformation’ on Economy – The Political Insider

“The White House official said the administration is working with TikTok creators to tell positive stories of Biden’s economic stewardship while also working with social media platforms to counter misinformation.”

If it seems strange to you that the government would just brazenly admit to making naked propaganda, well, that’s just where we are now.

We’ve witnessed what that entails thanks to the release of the Twitter Files that uncovered that the administration, via the arm of the Department of Justice and various aspects of the Intelligence Community, manipulated and infiltrated social media companies to bury factual news stories and infringe on the First Amendment rights of countless users.

NewsGuard Sells Government-Funded Censorship Tool (thefederalist.com)

The for-profit censorship giant NewsGuard is now selling its “Misinformation Fingerprints” technology to private companies to silence Americans’ speech — technology the federal government helped NewsGuard develop to the tune of nearly $750,000 in taxpayer funding. So while NewsGuard is now making headlines for trying to take down Elon Musk’s X, the bigger story concerns the federal government’s funding of the censorship-industrial complex.

In September 2021, NewsGuard was awarded a grant through the Small Business Innovation and Research program, which funds early-stage companies to develop products and technologies that can be helpful for government,” NewsGuard announced in its 2021 Social Impact Report. “Under the grant,” the report explained, “NewsGuard plans to further develop the Misinformation Fingerprints tool and test the effectiveness of the Fingerprints in detecting state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.”

Federal records show the Department of Defense funded the Small Business Innovation and Research program’s award of nearly $750,000 to NewsGuard for the further development and testing of the Misinformation Fingerprints tool. And according to NewsGuard’s 2021 Social Impact Report, its “Misinformation Fingerprints” catalog traced “762 false narratives,” “providing one-of-a-kind tracking seeds for the AI tools used by defense industry clients.”

This whole transgender craze is right out of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: Even the Census Bureau Is Trying To Promote Radical Gender Ideology | The Heritage Foundation

The Census Bureau is asking Congress for $10 million to figure out how best to promote the fiction that sex is assigned at birth, rather than the scientific fact that it is present at conception. It is part of a new set of questions on sexual orientation and gender identity that the bureau wants to ask residents even as young as 15.

This expansion beyond race and ethnicity represents a new foray into sexual identity—one more step in the bureau’s decadeslong degeneration into an agency completely captured by the identity-mongering industry, and which produces the supposedly “victim” categories that the industry requires.

The Biden Administration Is Scheming To Take Your Kids Away (thefederalist.com)

Democrats have been suggesting taking children away from ‘non-affirming’ parents for years now, but Biden’s HHS is getting the ball rolling…The Biden administration has proposed new rules for foster care, which would treat any parent rejecting LGBT ideology as a child abuser.

Democrats’ attacks on what they call “disinformation” have their roots in Barack Obama’s Truth Squad

Posted: May 1, 2022 by John Ruberry in culture, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

While calling public figures “Orwellian” goes back decades, usually it’s an exaggeration. 

Not so with the new Misinformation and Disinformation Governance Board, whose existence was revealed by the soulless hack Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe Biden’s secretary of Homeland Security. The board’s executive director is Nina Jankowicz, a misinformationist. 

Among other things, Jankowicz in 2020 called into question the veracity of the Hunter Biden laptop revelations.

George Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” in 1984 of course propagandized lies. 

The Democrats’ Orwellian attacks on their opponents began during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, when he created groups such as “The Truth Squad.” 

This morning on Twitter, former Democratic member of Congress and 2020 presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, pointed her finger at the instigator on the Dems’ obsession with “disinformation,” Joe Biden’s former ticket-mate.

“Biden is just a front man,” Gabbard Tweeted. “Obama, April 21: social media censors ‘don’t go far enough,’ so the government needs to step in to do the job. Six days later, Homeland Security rolls out the ‘Ministry of Truth’ (aka Disinformation Governance Board).”

Obama’s “Truth Squad” made its first appearance in during the 2008 Democratic primaries. It was ramped up for the general election. A KMOV-TV St. Louis anchor reported that fall, “Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is asking Missouri law enforcement to target anyone who lies or runs a misleading TV ad during the presidential campaign.”

“Prosecutors and sheriffs from across Missouri are joining ‘The Barack Obama Truth Squad,'” reporter John Mills added, he then named Jennifer Joyce, St. Louis circuit attorney, and Bob McCulloch, the prosecutor for St. Louis County, as members.

Mills continued, “They will be reminding voters that Barack Obama is a Christian who wants to cut taxes for anyone making less than $250,000 a year.” 

What about those prosecutors?

“If they’re not going to tell the truth,” McCulloch told KMOV, “somebody’s got to step up and say, ‘That’s not true. This is the truth.'”

Jim Geraghty of National Review summed up the Missouri threat concisely at the time, “While the report never quite comes out and says that anyone running an ad saying those things would be subject to prosecution, that certainly is the message implied.” 

Truth, like knowledge, is nearly never a settled construct, especially in the political arena. 

Leftists, like Barack Obama, undoubtedly disagree with me. Rather, under the cloak of “truth,” they now label criticism of their policies, as well as reports that harm their side, such as the revelations from the Hunter Biden laptop, as “misinformation” and “disinformation.” The Obama quote referenced earlier comes from a Stanford University conference about “misinformation” held in April. Earlier that month, longtime top Obama campaign aide, David Axelrod, was a co-host of the “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference at the University of Chicago.

Obama, ironically, was the recipient of PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” award in 2013. That’s the truth.

Informers are an integral part of any un-free society. In 2009, an Obama administration media flack, Macon Phillips, under the guise of–wait for it–fighting “disinformation,” asked Americans to rat out any who disparaged ObamaCare. “If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy,” he said, “send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”

In 2012, the Obama-Biden campaign launched “the Truth Team.”

Never forget, the Democrats war on what they call “disinformation” began with Obama.

John Ruberry, and this is certainly the truth, regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Because of suppression and censorship by the media and social networks, the 2020 presidential election was not free and fair

Posted: March 20, 2022 by John Ruberry in Always look at the bright side of Trump, culture, election 2020, elections, elections, media, News/opinion, politics
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Salem, Wisconsin, October 11, 2020

By John Ruberry

Last week, in the 24th paragraph of a New York Times article about Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s tax problems and his emails, the Old Gray Lady sneaked in this line, “Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Biden in a Delaware repair shop,” the three authors of the story (why does the current media need to utilize multiple writers?) wrote. And they added, “The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

Flashback to October 2020. It was “October Surprise Time” again as a presidential election winded down. Yeah, I know what I wrote. With the over-reliance on early voting, drop-off ballot boxes, and ballot harvesting, Election Day is almost an afterthought, we now have Election Season. And the ’20 surprise was a shocker, as the New York Post revealed that it had obtained a copy of the hard drive of a MacBook Pro laptop computer that Hunter dropped off at the aforementioned repair shop and then apparently forgot about it, like an old suit left behind with a dry cleaner.

Besides embarrassing photos, emails discovered on the hard drive by the Post revealed what intelligent people with an open mind long suspected, that Hunter Biden was the head of an influence peddling ring that profited from the political career of his lifetime politician father. Or perhaps Joe Biden, “the Big Guy.” who might have been the recipient of 10 percent of a never-realized financial deal with a Chinese energy firm, was in charge, was the CEO of a Chicago-style political racketeering operation, a bit like this one.

Twitter, Facebook, and the mainstream media–Fox News was a major exception–immediately went on attack mode to block and suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

During his radio show on Friday, Dan Bongino said, “Hunter was working in Ukraine, his dad knew about it, his dad was the point man in Ukraine for the Obama administration. The corruption is back-breaking. There is no way Joe Biden would have won the last election if the media didn’t conspire to make that story–the Ukraine-Biden story and the laptop–go away.” He added, “They rigged the election through their censorship of the story.”

“Look at the polling data,” Bongino exclaimed. Let’s do just that. According to a Media Research Center post-election survey, of the voters Biden voters who weren’t aware of the Hunter Biden scandals, 16 percent of them would have changed their vote. Incumbent Donald J. Trump lost by less than one percent in these four battleground states: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. If those states went to Trump, then he still would be president.

Although he had no experience in the energy industry and he does not speak Ukrainian, Hunter Biden served on the board of directors of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, while his father was vice president.

Twitter was the worst offender in censoring the laptop story, blocking the posting of reports under the false belief that the laptop revelations were hacked, despite possessing no evidence that those suspicions were true. For nearly two weeks, as Americans daily voted for president, Twitter suspended the New York Post’s popular main Twitter feed.

Facebook, which funds fact-checkers at USA Today, PolitiFact, and LeadStories, suppressed the Hunter laptop story. “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post,” FB spokesperson Andy Stone Tweeted at the time, “I want [sic] be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.” No such fact-checks every were done by FB’s favored fact-checkers.

During the final presidential debate, moderated by NBC’s Kirsten Welker, and also while being interviewed by 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl, Trump tried to initiate a discussion about the Hunter Biden laptop. Welker deflected, and Stahl replied to Trump about the scandal, “Can’t be verified.” Well, now it has been, Stahl, by the paper that publishes “all the news that’s fit to print,” the New York Times.

Where is your apology, Lesley?

Government-funded NPR also dismissed the Hunter Biden story. On Twitter in 2020, in response to a question on why NPR hadn’t covered the laptop scandal, NPR’s managing editor Terence Samuels, who apparently is the kind of arrogant SOB that Groucho Marx used to justifiably torment, replied, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions. And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”

In preparation for the writing of this story I endured one hour of CNN’s ludicrously misnamed Reliable Sources, hosted by a circus clown masquerading as a journalist, Brian Stelter. Much of today’s broadcast was dedicated to policing “misinformation” and “disinformation” by Russian media sources as the war in Ukraine continues. But Stelter and his sycophantic guests didn’t utter a peep about the New York Times update on the laptop. “So slowly and surely,” Stelter said at the end of today’s episode, “media criticism can improve media diets.” How ’bout starting with criticizing yourself, Stelter? His latest email newsletter, which I hear is very popular among liberal journalists, omitted mention of the Times’ revision on the Hunter MacBook.

Here’s a flashback for you.

“This is a classic example of the right-wing media machine,” Stelter said about the laptop on October 18, 2020. “Fox and Trump have this in common: They want you to stay mad and stay tuned.”

A former host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz, on Fox News Sunday this morning declared, “It is an absolute embarrassment that the way that the way media downplayed or ignored or mocked or minimized this story, the New York Times now says [Hunter] is under active federal investigation for possible tax violations or lobbying violations by [him]–and they’re still not covering it.”

After some complaining about those commments from fellow Fox News Sunday panelist Juan Williams, Kurtz shot back, “It was censorship.”

A free and fair election process allows open distribution of information. The mainstream media, Twitter, and Facebook, by suppressing and censoring coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop revelations, prevented a free and fair election.

John Ruberry, just John and not two others, regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.