Sunday, August 11, 2024

Calling Your Tongue Your Own - Clarice Feldman

 

by Clarice Feldman

Are runamok UK censors laying down the blueprint for a Harris/Walz administration crackdown?

 

Very scary things are happening in the United Kingdom. Sir Mark Rowley, Met Police Commissioner, has threatened to jail U.S. citizens over online posts he deems hateful or disinformation. At the same time, the UK is openly enforcing a two-tier system of justice where antisemitic rioters, pro-jihadi and pro-open borders thugs are given free rein to terrorize citizens, and those who object are beaten and jailed. One jurist has, in fact, just sentenced someone for being a just a looker-on and even retweets of anything the UK overlords object to subjects one to arrest.

I’m not worried about Rowley’s threat because, unlike the UK, the Founders recognized that without free speech citizens have no agency in their own governance. Recognizing its importance, they made the right to free speech the very First Amendment to the Constitution. If conduct in the U.S. is not illegal, no extradition request could be honored. But it is clear that many Democrats, like their autocratic Labour counterparts in the UK, would love to muzzle us and they have put forth untenable definitions of the parameters of this right. 

In an exceptionally brilliant essay, Professor Jonathan Turley sets out why the Harris-Walz team presents the greatest threat to free speech in two centuries.  

The Biden-Harris administration has sustained an unrelenting attack on the freedom of speech, from supporting a massive censorship system (described by a federal court as an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth“) to funding blacklisting operations targeting groups and individuals with opposing views.  

President Biden made censorship a central part of his legacy, even accusing social media companies of “killing people” for failing to increase levels of censorship. Democrats in Congress pushed that agenda by demanding censorship on subjects ranging from climate change to gender identity -- even to banking policy -- in the name of combatting “disinformation.”

The administration also created offices like the Disinformation Governance Board before it was shut down after public outcry. But it quickly shifted this censorship work to other offices and groups.

As vice president, Harris has long supported these anti-free speech policies. The addition of Walz completes a perfect nightmare for free speech advocates. Walz has shown not only a shocking disregard for free speech values but an equally shocking lack of understanding of the First Amendment.

Walz went on MSNBC to support censoring disinformation and declared, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

Ironically, this false claim, repeated by many Democrats, constitutes one of the most dangerous forms of disinformation. It is being used to convince a free people to give up some of their freedom with a “nothing to see here” pitch. 

Turley notes that other Democratic politicians like Ben Cardin and Stacey Plaskett have echoed this view, and even some dictionaries have espoused this, but as he reminds us, the Supreme Court has consistently rejected this  bizarre reading of the First Amendment,

The Supreme Court has consistently rejected the claim of Gov. Walz. For example, in the 2016 Matal v. Tam decision, the court stressed that this precise position “strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.'”

Harris specifically threatened that she will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms, because they have a responsibility to "help fight against this threat to democracy" and made a similar claim to Facebook’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg.

His is a fine exposition of how dangerous the Harris-Walz threat is to free speech, noting that in addition to censoring hate speech and misinformation that they also commit to ban “malinformation,” information ‘based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm and manipulate’.” As opposed to the tyrannical views of the Democrats’ present leaders, there’s the great Benjamin Franklin, 

"In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech. Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as liberty without freedom of speech which is the right of every man."

If you doubt that the Harris-Walz stated views are likely to be carried out or the extent to which they would go to muzzle those who oppose them, bear in mind the context in which they are made. Just to take one example of the Biden-Harris demonstrable overreach against those who oppose them, there’s the case of Tulsi Gabbard.

While the Biden administration placed  a military officer, former Congresswoman and presidential candidate, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard [who, not coincidentally, demolished Harris in their presidential debate], on a watchlist, the FBI released into the U.S. on a special parole the Pakistani man who sought to plan an assassination of Donald Trump and other politicians.

According to several whistleblowers, Gabbard -- a military officer and former Hawaii congresswoman and presidential candidate -- was placed on a watchlist under Quiet Skies, a TSA surveillance program designed to focus law enforcement resources on travelers that present an elevated risk to aviation security.

Yet, while the government surveilled Gabbard, the FBI allowed Asif Raza Merchant to enter the U.S. in April with special permission known as “significant public benefit parole” even though he was flagged on a terrorism watchlist and recently traveled to Iran, according to government documents reviewed and reported on by Just the News.

House Oversight Committee member Glenn Grothman, a Wisconsin Republican, said that FBI’s tactic to let Merchant enter the country to gather evidence on him created a “dangerous situation.”

The performance of the U.S. Secret Service, which in Butler melted away like bodyguards in a crime novel so that the assassin had an easy shot at the person they were hired to protect, grows more suspicious by the day. Stephen Bryen argues there is evidence supporting the hypothesis that there was a second shooter at Butler, that the Service’s account of events is unpersuasive, and independent forensic experts must be called in to handle the investigation.  

The Secret Service cannot conduct an objective investigation.  That is abundantly clear from the testimony of the former Secret Service director, Kimberly A. Cheatle, and her "Acting" replacement, Ronald L. Rowe, Jr.  Both were willing to admit that mistakes were made, but both also try to convince the public that they got the shooter and we can all rest easy.

Adding the FBI into the mix also won't work because the FBI is extremely anti-Trump and spends their time at the behest of their Justice Department overseers trying to incarcerate Trump for phantom crimes.  The raid on Mar-a-Lago, is a great example of how FBI thuggery was used against the former President.  

The FBI lives in fear Trump will win the presidential election and clean house in the agency.  

The Justice Department also has set up a team of investigators, but anything from the DOJ is not credible and should be dismissed out of hand.

There is a growing sense that Trump was set up at Butler. It is hard to believe that the Secret Service simply made "mistakes."  There are whistleblower reports, still to be run down and confirmed, that Secret Service agents were told to stand down and not take action against a threat that was known hours before the shooting happened.

The audio evidence and the location of victims also raises serious issues.

The audio records nine shots, eight that seems to originate in the same location and one shot that is the Secret Service sniper that killed the shooter, Thomas Crooks.

The first eight shots consist of three shots coming fairly slow and then a slight pause and the remaining five shots more rapidly.

Based on the audio and video evidence it is clear that it was the first shot that nearly killed Mr. Trump.  It may be that the next two shots were part of the series aimed at Trump.  We are missing information on where those shots ended up, but maybe they hit low down as Trump got down after his ear was hit.  The remaining burst of five shots could have been the ones that killed Corey Comperatore and wounded David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and James Copenhaver, 74, of Moon Township, Pennsylvania, They were seated in the stands to Mr. Trump's right. [snip] There has been a lot of speculation about the possibility of a second shooter.  There also is confusion on the presence of 8 shell casings on the roof near the deceased shooter Thomas Crooks.  We don't have reliable information to back up the Secret Service claim that they found 8 shell casings.  A video of the agents on the roof shows that officers initially found five shell casings on the roof near the dead shooter.  

We now have a fragmentary video that appears to show gun flashes coming from a window in the same building as the shooter, who was on the rooftop.  The source of the video is not stated, but it seems genuine.  This obviously needs follow up and should be taken very seriously.

Well, Stephen is a pleasant guy and if Police Commissioner Rowley succeeds in extraditing and imprisoning the two of us in the UK, he’d be a nice companion with whom to exchange tapped messages through the water pipes.


Clarice Feldman

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/calling_your_tongue_your_own.html

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

No comments:

Post a Comment