Home » Democrats have become the enemies of free speech

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Democrats have become the enemies of free speech — 28 Comments

  1. the current govt in germany, has gone so far as to include a former member of the German Communists, now the Democracy Society sigh, as President, Gysi, yet the AfD is the real threat, (ht aegyptius) I’ve referred to other leftist figures like aldo spinelli, who designed the modern EU
    in the UK, theLabour Party which has demonstrated to be as extreme as the one in the 80, see the confiscatory tac regime they have introduced against farmer, saw with the NewSpeak framework instituted after the Stockport murder spree, carried out by an Al Queda terrorist, with the cooperation of the wet tory Dominic Grieve,
    now in this country, the organizer of at least some of these acts of repudiation against Musk*, is an associate of mis disinfo, Nina Jankewitz, what are the odds,

    *two minute hates,

  2. Back when the left was not in control of much of anything in the US, it was all for freedom of speech because it was guaranteeing its own freedom of speech.

    Forget where I first saw it but it has been kicking around the right-o-sphere for a couple decades now.

    For those who don’t click links, it’s Calvin’s babysitter quoting Frank Herbert in a game of Calvinball:

    When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.

    And this is what folks like the Bulwark and the Remnant and the other True and Principled Conservatives affect not to understand.

    A norm requires almost everyone to buy in; otherwise it’s a device to flush the chumps. You can’t have a norm that 50% of people pretend to believe in when it suits them and violate when they gain by it, and that 50% actually believe in it and stick to it no matter how badly they get taken advantage of.

    Some folks won’t understand the value of a norm until they have felt the consequences of losing it. And to quote Frank Herbert again, a little out of context,

    I promised them a lesson their bones would remember.

  3. What do leftists really desire?
    Well, yet again, Orwell said it best:

    “Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

    George Orwell, 1984

  4. You draw a distinction between ‘liberals’ and ‘the left’ which is factitious.. IMO, what you’re looking at is a generational shift in attitudes. An older generation (think Nat Hentoff or George McGovern) saw itself as a participant in public discussion that it did not control nor expect to control. They may have had little curiosity about the opposition’s ideas, but they weren’t terribly fazed that there was an opposition. They were also only ankle deep in the set of attitudes which refuse to recognize the distinction between an academic discipline and assumptions entertained or conclusions reached in such a discipline.
    ==
    Note also that the social vision of leftoids resembles that of a high school. They fancy their antagonists are disruptive adolescents and not what they actually are, which is people earning a living and running their own households.
    ==
    Agitating left has been that institutions they controlled – the schools, the media – have since 1995 seen severe erosion in their capacity to curate public discussion, By a social process which has yet to be elucidated, abusive leftoids were able to take control of gatekeeper positions at Google and Twitter and you had a critical mass of leftoids in tech who would launch denial-of-service attacks at centers of opposition. We know now the security state was leaning on these companies (and we can posit that Soros and Blackrock had a role in this). Musk has disrupted this effort to re-impose curated public discussion. A great many partisan Democrats are loosely wired people and people thinking and saying things they do not care for upsets them greatly.
    ==
    Something Turley has acknowledged from his own experience in academe is that there has been a concerted effort to prevent the hiring of faculty members who dissent from the official idea.

  5. Boy are they going to be surprised. Trump has enormous power that he refrained from using or even hinting at. So far he seems to be letting the big fish run until it tires out. Then comes the harpoon.

  6. Jamie Raskin is the son of Marcus Raskin, who with Richard Barnet founded the Institute for Policy Studies. I doubt a forensic audit of the Institute’s books back to 1962 would be anything but embarrassing to the Raskin and Barnet families, (It was a pro-Soviet outfit during the Cold War).

  7. And this is what folks like the Bulwark and the Remnant and the other True and Principled Conservatives affect not to understand.
    ==
    The Remnant is a Catholic traditionalist newspapers. Their concerns are quite otherworldly. The Bulwark is a collecting pool of shills.

  8. that remnant is erickson’s, quite apart from the bulwark and the dispatch,

  9. “Indeed, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has declared free speech is “tyranny.”

    It is always to be welcomed when traitors publicly announce wherein lie their true loyalties. As declaring free speech to be tyranny is to leave no doubt of their goal; to destroy all support for there even being such a thing as inalienable rights.

  10. I’ve had a suspicion for a number of years that Reich’s children should be monitoring him carefully. It’s only retrospectively that you realize it was the dementia talking.

  11. More than one thing can be called the Remnant.
    ==
    Evidently Michael Matt isn’t protecting his trademark.

  12. Has Robert Conquest’s Third Law come around for the Democrat Party?
    ________________________________

    Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics

    (1) Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
    (2) Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
    (3) The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

    ________________________________

    The propensity of today’s Democrats to double-down against free speech, closed borders, and deporting illegal migrant monsters, while supporting porn in school libraries and males competing in female sports suggests that Democrats are now controlled by a cabal of their enemies.

    If Democrats want to die on those hills, it’s fine with me.

    I’m wondering who the undercover MAGA operatives might be in that cabal. Or does it just appear that way?

  13. Freedom of speech has been rare in human history. The forces that oppose it are always present, always looking for a way to suppress it. It’s terribly inconvenient to rulers who don’t like having to court the consent of the governed, when their ideas are hard to defend in the context of free debate.

  14. It would appear that Bill Clinton and Robert Reich are giving the Rhodes Scholarship a bad name. Or has it always had that flavor baked in?

  15. If one really wants to know where this is going—in real time—have a gander at Starmer’s UK.

    And of course read and re-read Orwell (cf. the above quote) BUT one might fall into the false assumption that Orwell is merely theoretical ( though he most certainly isn’t); Starmer, OTOH, is most unfortunately (just one putrid example) of the real, if false, McCoy.

  16. Art Deco

    I’ve had a suspicion for a number of years that Reich’s children should be monitoring him carefully. It’s only retrospectively that you realize it was the dementia talking.

    That’s not dementia talking. That’s his political philosophy talking. I am old enough to remember Time Magazine featuring Robert Reich as one of a group of outstanding college graduates of 1968.

  17. They are so smug and self righteous about it.
    There is both the the attempt to ban saying things and the attempt to force verbal affirmation of things that are not true.

  18. That’s not dementia talking. That’s his political philosophy talking. I am old enough to remember Time Magazine featuring Robert Reich as one of a group of outstanding college graduates of 1968.
    ==
    I’m old enough to remember him writing rather amiable articles for The New Republic on industrial policy. (He was a law professor who had no business writing about business or economics, but that’s another matter). The man’s deteriorated over the years. Part of the deterioration has been divorcing his wife and decamping to the Bay Area.

  19. Hes a contemporary of bill clinton who tagged around on the boat to oxford so like a barnicle we cant get rid of him

  20. Hes a contemporary of bill clinton who tagged around on the boat to oxford so like a barnicle we cant get rid of him
    ==
    He’s 78 years old and hasn’t held a public sector position in 28 years. His CV has not been updated in six years. He’s written a great deal, but you’d have to scrounge on his CV to locate any scholarly publication. He has a faculty position at the school of public policy at Berkeley, but neither his CV nor his faculty page list any courses taught.
    ==
    The guy is his generation’s John Kenneth Galbraith. Stick a fork in him. He’s done.

  21. As far back as I can recall, which is not as far as it goes, liberals and those further left could hold both sides of a position in a single sentence if it were tactically necessary.
    This was done, of course, by flipping the definition of certain words. “free” might mean free to speak, or, if necessary, free from bad feelz on account of bad speaking.
    When you hear audio of “protestors” confronting cops or conservatives, the word barrage coming from them is meaningless. Every third word needs a definition because they’re using it to mean something it doesn’t mean and you’d get distracted arguing about that in which the process is repeated.. Going down that rabbit hole is a waste of time. I wonder if that’s how they think or if it’s a tactic.

    And in matters of freedom of speech, ill will is imputed so…you don’t want to be a big meanie, do you? In fact, there should be a law against it.

  22. It’s very, very bad.

    Young adults refuse to debate with people they disagree with.

    And then there’s the “no contact” movement where young liberal adults cut off all contact with family members they disagree with because of different political opinions.

  23. Young adults refuse to debate with people they disagree with. And then there’s the “no contact” movement where young liberal adults cut off all contact with family members they disagree with because of different political opinions.
    ==
    Waal, kids, you’re gonna miss us when we’re gone.
    ==
    In fairness, just this morning I told a family member who asked me a question about why I favored a certain thing that I would give a précis of why I held to my position but not discuss it with her further. From 29 years experience, I understand further discussion would lead into a rabbit warren, and I haven’t the patience or presence of mind at my age. (The leftoid males in my family are not any easier to talk to, just more supercilious).

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