By Steven Yates
May 10, 2022
Twenty twenty-two continues to be a most interesting year!
Almost two weeks ago as I write, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. Whether he’ll really make it a free speech site I’ve no idea, of course, but this isn’t what makes the event interesting.
Every leftist with a media platform flew into hysterics. One Small Step for Musk, began a headline on Medium that came to my attention, One Giant Leap for Fascist Trolls!
Leftists make one thing clear as crystal: they do not believe anyone should have free speech, without consequences, except them!
They are blind as ever about who they are really helping.
As if in counterpoint, the Bidenistas announced their real, live Ministry of Truth. They don’t call it that, of course. They call it the Disinformation Governance Board, and it will operate through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I don’t think there is much doubt about what this outfit will do, despite the aura of mystery some have tried to create around it.
The woman put in charge, Nina Jankowitz,is a real piece of work. A Bryn Mawr graduate, she has been in and out of elite “think tanks” and written approved narratives for corporate media publications. She supported the Russiagate hoax and was a loud shouter about how Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” She wrote a book about how the Internet is “toxic” for women, and another selling herself as a “disinformation researcher.” She thus established herself as a creature of both the far left and the super elite in one (well, two) fell swoop(s).
She is also, to put the matter politely, quirky. She refers to herself as “the Mary Poppins of disinformation,” whatever this means.
She’s also on TikTok, the site where juveniles with attention spans measurable in milliseconds make videos for other juveniles with attention spans measurable in milliseconds. Apparently no one disclosed this before DHS hired her.
This all makes me wonder if the folks at DHS have completely lost their minds and appointed a cartoon character to head their latest abomination. Perhaps we’re supposed to lose ourselves in the comedy and not notice that America just took a quantum leap toward Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four!
So let’s not get carried away. Even if Jankowitz looks for all the world like a marriage of mindless devotion of approved narratives and TikTok silliness, we’d be equally foolish to underestimate the potential of someone like this to damage whatever is left of the free flow of information, online or offline.
There are at least two moves underway in Congress to dislodge the Bidenista Ministry of Truth before it has time to get further lodged. One comes from Lauren Boebert (R-CO), the other from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO). The former told Fox News:
“This kind of stuff is terrifying. We in Congress have the power of the purse. It is our duty to shut down this department immediately. I’m calling on leadership in the Republican Party – Leader McCarthy, Whip Scalise, and others — to join me in calling for this department to be shut down and defunded.No tax dollars should go to where Biden can use the power of the federal government to silence truthful stories like what Big Tech did with the Hunter Biden story….”
Sen. Hawley was even more direct: “Biden’s so-called Disinformation Board is unconstitutional and must be dissolved immediately…. This is nothing short of a censorship committee vested with the full powers of the federal government to monitor dissenting speech and opposing viewpoints under the guise of national security. The American people need a full accounting of who signed off on this Board and who approved such a radical, anti-free speech activist to lead it.”
Twenty Republican-led states are also threatening legal action.
The trouble is,even very determined opposition has yet to stop the DHS when its upper echelons wanted something. Remember Real ID?
One of the reasons none of these people don’t want free speech is because they don’t want Constitutional limitations on an all-powerful central government. Most defenses of free speech are rooted in that ever-pesky First Amendment.
Speaking of the Constitution, even this is overshadowed by the third development of the past couple of weeks: the leaking of the Alito opinion strongly suggesting that the U.S. Supreme Court is about to overturn two of the worst decisions of the twentieth century, Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey.
What interests me here are two things. First, again, are the leftist hysterics, invoking images of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, back-alley abortions using coat hangers, and so on. We’ve gone beyond hysterics in this case and are entering the realm (again!) of open violence by leftists.
So then, second, there is the question of cui bono. Think this through, and you might be motivated to put down Margaret Atwood and pick up George Orwell.
I’ve never believed for a second that the superelites—GloboCorp—those with real power—care two hoots about “women’s reproductive rights” or “gender pronouns” or anything else presently being shouted about on the streets or pontificated in the halls of ivy. These are all too distant from the real centers of power in this world. One has to wonder what is going on in those centers, behind closed doors, while corporate media rivets the masses’ attention first on one bit of theater and then the next.
Not that the abortion issue isn’t real, and vital. Of course it is, but it is important to keep in mind that the even the reversal of Roe and Casey could leave us worse off if mass violence results. Could this be the intent of the leaker, to create an atmosphere of violence before the decision to that if the Supremes indeed overturn so-called abortion rights, the country will explode?
I’m not inside the person’s head, but we’ve come down a very dangerous road, and I don’t blame anyone for thinking we’ve passed the point of no return.
Nearly all the political violence of the past decade has come from leftists. They retain the kind of cultural power that comes from control over most mainstream media narratives, nearly all of academia, most Big Tech, a substantial fraction of the corporate world, very influential outfits like the Southern Poverty Law Center, and since January 20, 2020 the Executive Branch of the U.S. federal government. Hence many leftist perpetrators of violence get slaps on the wrist at best, even when they get caught.
Reactions to leftist-initiated violence are what will get demonized, prosecuted, and where possible, used as an excuse for still more centralized power (when “Joe Biden” or whoever is whispering into his earpiece tries to remind us how dangerous “extremist white supremacist groups” are). How can I say this? Because we are looking at the playbook with Charlottesville, and with the George Floyd riots. It remains the approved narrative that Unite the Right started the violence in the former, and it remains official doctrine that the thousands of George Floyd rioters were “mostly peaceful protesters” despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in damages done in over a dozen cities. Meanwhile, the few hundred people who invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021 are demonized as violent “insurrectionists” and remain incarcerated.
This is the cultural power of the left.
Who really benefits from this cultural power? This deadly combination — disruptions on top of disruptions, Orwellian linguistic reversals (where truth-telling becomes “disinformation,” plain biological facts are simply ignored, and responses to leftist violence become evidence of “white supremacism”), and continued gaslighting about all this — are how leftism has become a key tool of those who want to build a world government whose instruments are sowing confusion, causing economic disruption,and when these fail, brute force, to get a society based on surveillance and control.
When globalists are finally positioned to order governments to do whatever they have to in order to suppress dissent, free speech won’t be the only casualty. Not by a long shot.
Steven Yates’s new book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (Wipf and Stock, 2021) is available here and here.
Steven Yates blogs at Lost Generation Philosopher, and has begun writing a philosophy course centered on freedom, its preconditions, and the choices a person must make in order to have it.
Do you wish me to continue? Please consider supporting my work on Patreon.com.
© 2022 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
