Posts Tagged → censor
What makes a good podcast
Podcasts are such a hot thing right now, and have been since the 2020 covid plandemic, that even people employed in the mainstream media are trying their hand at it. Part of the draw is cache, like la la I have a podcast, as though it confers personal specialiness and high intelligence, and the other part of it has to do with simple reach and monetary remuneration.
Everyone who thinks they are someone, or who wants to be a someone, “has” a podcast.
Podcasts are a big net benefit to the world, to humans, to public policy debates, to the spread of ideas (good and bad), information (good and bad). Podcasts have democratized the spread and flow of opinions (artful and bluntly foolish), and have drawn a lot of disenfranchised people, people dejected by the low quality of ubiquitous legacy mainstream media, back into the public marketplace of ideas and news information.
American culture and politics are arguably now informed more by podcasts than by corporate establishment outlets.
Since 2020, when the world was largely locked down and stuck inside, podcasts became the latest and greatest information outlet. Doctors sitting in their living rooms, describing in detail how their hospital administration had politicized their treatment of covid patients, covid survivors, parents finally seeing for the first time the utter slop being served up as “public education” by the politicized teachers’ unions, you name it, podcasts became the end-run around the censorship-industrial machine weaponized against We, The People by the legacy media, Big Tech, and the installed Big Brother Biden Admin.
The dam had to break, the river had to find its level, and the podcast world was the most creative way for people with information that countered the brazen lies of Doctor Mengele Fauci to feel heard. And so it was with people sick and tired of the establishment lies and narrative about covid, which was more about controlling people than it was about public health.
And now that a bazillion people have jumped into podcasting since 2020, a Jurassic-level leveling is taking place. No, no metaphoric meteor is streaking towards Podcast World, ready to hit the Yucatan square on its nose and re-assemble all podcast life on our planet. But simple market forces are beginning to play out. Some people, who had made a big name for themselves during the covid plandemic and the Biden years, are now struggling to find their place in podcasting. Others took a few Tucker Carlson punches to the head and fell down, only to climb back up and give Tucker a few in the kisser himself, and now he is fallen.
Point being that actual marketplace dynamics are determining the success or failure of the podcast world. Supply and demand, risk and reward, appear to be the main arbiters of a podcaster’s success.
Unlike the legacy mainstream media, which has long been propped up by one political party and its constellation of funders and, really, political donors. Market forces only lately seem to have become a factor in the staying power and eyeball presence of partisan mainstream media outlets like CNN, CBS, NPR, the Washington Post, the New York Times. Slowly, the water falls into the cracks, freezes, expands, and widens the cracks over at the MSM. But the cracks are becoming more apparent.
So what makes a good podcast? Here are some of my filters, or requirements, that keep me returning to a podcast:
- Knowledgeable and experienced hosts. Twenty-something-year-old podcasters may be cute, they may be smart, but honestly, these people have no real life experience that I can look to in order to trust and value their opinions. Alternatively, highly experienced adults who have maybe failed here or there in their adult career, now these people intrigue me the most. They are grounded in reality, and nothing trains like pain. I will spend my precious time listening to someone who has learned some tough life lessons, and is sharing them. Alternatively, I cannot spend my precious time listening to or watching someone who merely represents my own methodology or values. This is where political/ religious/ cultural ideology is least important.
- Smart, incisive, witty commentary is a must. Simply reciting a litany of complaints or critiques should be insufficient for every prospective listener who values their own time. Humor goes a long way with this listener.
- Understandable, measured cadence in delivery. One famous podcaster is smart and knowledgable, sometimes witty, but he speaks so damned fast I cannot understand what he says half the time. It is almost physically impossible to listen to such a person.
- Creative and able to link the mundane to the big picture. A great deal of podcasting is simply evaluating and relating news events through the eye of the podcast host, and their simple blunt reactions / analysis are not (or should not) suffice to get your attention. Looking for the meta-link between small facts on the ground and bigger body politic ripple effect is the sign of a true analyst. Someone who adds real value to our understanding of current events.
So, yeah, I thought we were done with the podcast thing a few days ago, but it is such a big and timely subject that this part of the discussion had to be addressed. Because Google / YouTube so aggressively censored political and cultural ideas that its far left staff did not like, Rumble became the go-to place for intellectual refugees. Give it a shot.
The drowning men of Europe
Most of Europe is drowning.
Drowning in debt they cannot afford, drowning in socialist economics like climate alarmism, drowning in power-mad authoritarianism that backwardly pits governments against the citizenry, drowning in cultural dissolution from uncontrolled mass migration by foreign people from failed nations who have zero interest in becoming European, but who simply want whatever quality of life goodies Europe can offer them for free.
Everyone around the world is watching this slow motion train wreck happen, and the worse it gets, the more the drowning governments refuse to change their policies to save themselves. This is the price of worshiping power and holding onto it at all costs. Drowning is the eventual cost.
Only a handful of European countries have resisted this drowning, namely Poland, Hungary, Russia. Border enforcement is the first and best method to ensure that Poland, Hungary, Russia remain themselves, and control their expenditures and streets. Russia obviously is a separate subject due to its invasion of Ukraine, but the fact is, Russia is still Russian, one of the greatest cultures in world history, in terms of art, literature, music, dance. There are no bongo drums at the Bolshei, yet, nor likely ever.
Spain, Ireland, England, and Germany are especially fraught, the water lapping at their lips, with their native citizens starting to engage in open street warfare with the invaders. But these same governments have strangely taken the side of the invaders, who do not pay taxes, commit endless violence, and are an unbearable financial burden. Censorship and repression of the native citizens for merely speaking about the lawless invasion is now common policy, so the governments can artificially, not legitimately, hold onto power. Everyone can see that confrontations between fed-up, repressed citizens and their corrupt governments are inevitable. And yet, the repression only tightens.
Governments in Germany, Spain, Britain, and France, especially, seem to be laser focused on Must…Hold…On…To… Power. At any cost. And so they continue to drown, going under from the weight of their increasing mistakes.
What do drowning people do, but grab onto anything or anybody around to keep from going under for the last time. A drowning person will pull down every rescuer with them, due to mindless panic and a primitive attempt at self preservation.
When I was young, I was a Water Safety Instructor. WSIs taught Red Cross lifesaving, and we certified lifeguards. I signed only those Red Cross lifeguard certification cards that I believed were truly earned. At any waterfront or pool, we WSIs were automatically the senior pro in charge, and I conducted many drills to prepare and train active duty lifeguards at many different lakes, pools, and beach fronts.
And I did rescue drowning people, many. Almost every time the drowning person would scratch me, claw at me, try to stand on me, in an attempt to climb on top of me so their lungs could reach the air. It is a dangerous moment trying to rescue a drowning person. Both the swimmer and the life saver can go down together, locked in a fatal embrace driven by panic.
The drowning men of Europe are doing the same thing right now as does a dying swimmer. They are all wildly splashing away at their own people, while trying to find something, anything, anyone, to prop themselves up onto. Here are some of the public policies the drowning men of Europe are doing that will in fact only hasten their death:
A) More unlimited mass migration, censoring and even jailing critics
B) More climate alarmism nonsense, censoring and even jailing critics
C) Siding with Islamic jihadis, the worst enemies of Western democracy, and thus pledging to “recognize” a new state of “palestine” in boundaries no one knows, under undefined conditions, with inevitably violent results. France, Britain, Spain, Ireland, and Germany are the leading proponents of rewarding jihadi terrorism by giving it another official place to call home. Just like they did with the new jihadi rulers of Syria.
That this new country would be created in the middle of an active war zone, not after the conclusion of a war as has been done in the past, does not daunt these drowning men. That it would be run by the avowed opponents of everything the drowning men used to stand on, does not daunt them. They are simply willing to sacrifice Israel and Middle East peace if it just buys them a few more minutes of life above the water closing over their heads.
I think Americans are going to end up riding in and saving Europe a third time, because the inevitable results of all of these self destructive policies by the drowning men is going to be that Europe goes under. And when Europe goes fully under water, all hell will break loose between the native Europeans and their would-be replacement invaders.
America is not going to stand by and let nuclear-armed England, France, and Germany become run by jihadis. Just ain’t gonna happen. We didn’t let Hitler drown Europe, and we sure won’t let the Mega Hitler jihadis do it, either.
Proving once again that Europe was always the rough prototype, and that America was the perfected implement, God’s gift to humankind.
“X” /Twitter still staffed by communists
Elon Musk might own X (formerly Twitter), and he might believe in free speech, and he might have tried to eliminate those former staff who are most visibly anti-conservative and anti free speech, but he is still failing. Every time I get onto X/Twitter, my account is unfairly hamstrung in some way or another, some of my posts are flagged for mysterious reasons and causes, and eventually my account is either locked or shadowbanned.
The latest just occurred tonight without any warning. And of course there is no recourse, no appeal process.
Apparently my account is now flagged as a source of “spam.” It is a ridiculous claim, because I hardly use X at all. And when I do I post my own unique content, repost a few other essays or memes I like, maybe put a new joshfirst.com blog post there, make a few salty comments along with all the other salty commenters there. For spam to occur, something has to be done a lot, and all I do is post my blog essay and then hit the re-post button a few hours or days later. This is both allowed by X and is done by virtually all content creators.
What I do is what X/ Twitter was created to allow.
My X censorshp experience is shared by many conservatives, whose sole violation on X is posting while conservative. As we all know well, liberals/ socialists/ woke/ communists cannot withstand competition in the marketplace of ideas, because their ideas are bad and hurt people. Vast majority of people reject hurtful leftist ideology and policies. So the left always have to artificially censor and suppress their opponents.
Thank God we have TruthSocial to rely on for actual free speech.
First X made me go through ten “Arkose challenges”, which is a deliberate waste of time and a form of harassment
My account met zero of the conditions X says will trigger an account lock or flag. This is just targeted harassment because the account is politically conservative
a thousand points of light, a thousand glorious small cuts
Watching a boat sinking out on the water because it was deliberately holed by its occupants is a curious thing.
Watching the people in the sinking boat then continue to deliberately punch more holes into the ruptured hull, even as water is being taken on, which expedites the boat’s failure as a floating refuge on water, is more than curious. Now, we are pretty certain that the self-destructive people in the boat either are stupid, suicidal, or do not even realize what they are doing.
They might think that adding more holes in the boat actually lets the water out…?
Thus is the recent statement by political activist George Stephanopoulos that media personalities having live interviews on TV with President Donald Trump is “journalistic malpractice“ perfectly framed.
George Stephanopoulos is the longtime political director for ABC “News.” As a former extremely politically partisan political activist employed by President Bill Clinton, Stephanopulous somehow seamlessly glided into the awkward and disbelievable role of “news reporter” and “journalist” at ABC. You know, as the kind of news reporter and journalist that is supposed to be accurate, fair, balanced, fact-based, truth-seeking no matter where it takes him. Ideally, and probably much more so in America’s distant past, journalism is done by fair-minded arbiters of truth and accuracy, not political activists.
These two roles are mutually exclusive: Political activists are by definition not fair minded arbiters of truth and accuracy, and so they cannot possibly communicate anything but one-sided political propaganda, narrative, and self-serving lies to their viewers and audiences. Which is what George Stephanopoulos does…speaking of journalistic malpractice.
George Stephanopoulos is not a journalist, he is an aggressive political activist masquerading as a journalist. And the reason he wants to prevent President Trump from having live interviews on mainstream media outlets is that George Stephanopoulos wants to deprive American audiences of having an honest and unfiltered view of Trump. Because Americans seeing and hearing Trump in his own words, as his own self, is going to be completely at odds with the lies, propaganda, falsehoods, and partisan political narrative that political activists like George Stephanopoulos try to paint Trump with all the time.
George Stephanopoulos is actually a censor, the opposite of a journalist. He is someone who tries to stop, limit, or blunt the dissemination of inconvenient facts or truths that undermine the political goals of the censor. Censorship runs totally at odds with the spirit and intent of America’s First Amendment, as well as the open and sometimes raucous format for all of our political discourse since our founding.
Recall that American politicians used to give a “stump speech” literally standing on a fresh tree stump surrounded by interested citizens, such was the nature of America’s rapidly expanding frontier and European settlement. So, a so-called “journalist” trying to prevent a politician from giving his live “stump speech” is actually doing the opposite of journalism: He is conducting censorship, at war with America.
All censors will tell you they are blocking you from having access to the truth, the facts, a certain point of view, for your own good. But they are never really doing this for your own good, or for mine. Like George Stephanopoulos, all censors throughout history engage in censorship for their own good. Whether it is personal monetary rewards or a political outcome favorable to a censor’s political views, censorship is conducted purely for the benefit of the censor.
Censorship is evil, and so-called journalists who are actually censors, like ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, are evil people. Censorship is un-American. Don’t be a censor, don’t support censors, don’t engage in censorship.
Here is an interesting very brief little video of President Trump at a small town hall, with an audience of Americans who had not heard him in person before. The audience members are stunned by the difference between President Trump in person, the actual President Trump, versus the false and heavily filtered/censored image of President Trump they had been fed by the mainstream media, like ABC “News” and George Stephanopoulos.
Here is why censorious political activists like George Stephanopoulos are becoming so bold about their political efforts under guise of “journalism,” which in the past would have itself been a headline: Totally partisan and politicized fake news legacy mainstream media outlets like ABC, CBS, NBC, MSDNC, NPR, PBS, New York Times, Washington Post, etc. are being engulfed in a maelstrom of alternative information outlets, and they are becoming desperate.
Hence shameless George Stephanopuslous in effect knocking holes in his own boat in full public view, destroying his own credibility as a “journalist” and as an American, when he openly admits that he has no other defense against President Trump than artificially filtering Trump, censoring him, stopping the public from viewing him as he really is, and outright lying about Trump.
A thousand points of light (to beneficially borrow a phrase from one of the worst, most corrupt establishment politicians in modern history) are shedding unceasing light on the lies of George Stephanopoulos et al. A thousand small, independent alternative information outlets have sprung up across the internet and anywhere else they are not artificially repressed, censored, or suppressed. They exist because of the truth vaccuum left by George Stephanopoulos and his ilk, and the marketplace of ideas abhors a vaccuum.
Sites like www.breitbart.com, www.thegatewaypundit.com, www.zerohedge.com, www.dailycaller.com, www.rebelnews.com, and a million small websites like this one at www.joshfirst.com, not to mention an incredibly diverse, rich, and interesting constellation of independent political commentary and analysis at www.rumble.com, are each making a tiny cut into the corpulant, stagnant, odiferous, and pus-filled rotting meat that is the body of mainstream media.
This thousand points of light alternative news sources is making it impossible for liars like George Stephanopoulos to get away with his lies any longer. And this thousand tiny cuts of alternative information sources is slowly bleeding out the lying mainstream media, exposing them, weakening them.
Of course every information and news outlet has its own flair, its own bend, its own flavor and goals. This goes without saying. But when I read someone actually bragging about getting their news and information from MSNBC, NPR, and CNN, I wonder how anyone could be so incurious about the wider universe or galaxy they live in. If you are addicted to fake news, like NPR, ABC and George Stephanopoulos, you owe it to yourself to at least add a little cream to your coffee, and see what other people are reporting about the same whatever subject that ABC-NBC-CBS-NPR-ProPublica-CNN happens to be talking about at the moment.
Only censors try to blot out the light that other people need to be able to see clearly. Only fearful, close-minded, incurious, purposefully ignorant people steadfastly choose to support censors and remain behind their own artificial curtain.
Let the sun shine in, America.
UPDATE: Goodness gracious, I was in such a rush to get this essay up that I neglected to include all of the amazing podcasts that Amerians are dialing into every day. There are a whole bunch of podcasts and interactive radio/internet shows, too, that are a blend of Libertarian/freedom/ constitutional/ just askin’ that are just smokin‘ the mainstream media. Shows like Joe Rogan (who I disagree with about 45% of the time, and who has occasionally said some racist stuff that leaves me shaking my head, but who nonetheless addresses important issues head-0n), Dan Bongino, whose uncensored balls-to-the-wall New Yawk accented bare knuckle bulldozer of a daily show is one of the highest rated in America for good reason, can be found on Apple and on Rumble. Dinesh D’Souza is my favorite faux felon, who is incredibly smart, quick, witty, and insightful. Ace interviewer Jan Jekeliek has the most incredible people from all walks of life on his American Thought Leaders podcast. Russell Brand has grown on me over the years, and while he is in no way a conservative, he is a witty, quick, and funny advocate for transparency, accountability, and honesty, which are all good and necessary things in any government, and especially in a government of, by, and for The People like ours. Russell Brand’s mocking of the corrupt FBI agents stealing people’s gold watches is hilarious and cutting.
I could go on and on, and in the interest of time, this short list is a “starter pack” for intelligent, curious, open minded, patriotic Americans. Give these folks a whirl or two and see if you aren’t hooked. Each has a different style and really different content, and yet each of these independent-minded people is providing a life-saving end-run around the rotten and corrupt establishment media complex like ABCNPRCNN…this is the thousand points of light exposing the lying mainstream media and the resulting thousand glorious small cuts bleeding out the fake news media.
Americans are naturally anti-government
America was created in response to tyranny, tyrannical government, overbearing government, invasive government, secretive government, lawless government, arbitrary and capricious government etc. etc. etc. And so, it naturally followed that when America followed through on its declaration of independence from Britain with maximum winning force, the resulting government in America was the anti-government.
A government meant to barely subsist on fumes and have a very limited reach or impact on our citizens.
Our 1787-1789 Constitution is a long list of things the government may not do, and a short but very broad and far-reaching list of all the things that the individual citizen can do. Our Constitution makes it clear that The People have all the rights, and the government has all the obligations and limits. America’s founding documents make it crystal clear that the federal government has a job to do, but that job is hindered by a zillion different barriers, hurdles, blocks, and barriers. The government is not powerless, but its power is hugely limited by all kinds of checks, in order to protect The People from government.
America’s founders understood from their immediate experience fighting tyrannical Britain that every government is a bad thing, an unfortunate necessity that must be controlled like nuclear fission, and that all government automatically seeks out maximum control over The People, and that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Thus, almost everything the American government does is supposed to be visible and challengeable by The People, whom the government serves.
So how (not so) curious is it that the Biden Administration is chock full of all kinds of secret documents, secret decisions, secret law enforcement interview notes (that usually turn out to be forged and not at all accurate), secret prosecutors trying to get secret limits on what kind of defense that President Trump can mount in court, gag orders by corrupt judges, heavy censorship (see the Twitter Files) of what you and I can say and which politicians we can criticize on social media, and so on.
This is a group of very bad individuals who do not believe in the Constitution, and who are abusing every lever of power they can to gain more control over the country and We, The People. Exhibit A is the FBI, which is now a brazenly partisan political force with guns and badges, enforcing political policy, not the rule of law.
Joe Biden has complained that the MAGA folks are anti government. Well, yeah, you dummy. You and the individuals you have surrounded yourself with are Exhibit A in why America was founded in the first place, and why the Constitution was written, and why Americans have always been anti-government, suspicious of government and suspicious of the individuals who make their career in government. From our very beginning in 1776, it has been natural for Americans to fear and loathe and reject government, and it is unnatural for anyone calling themselves an American to love, laud, elevate, and promote government.
Government is a necessary evil, and the best government is that which governs least. This Biden group, gang, mafia, whatever you want to call these Chinese pay-off receiving people, loooooves government and all the power it gives them. They worship government, especially the central government in Washington, DC. It naturally follows that these Biden people are not Americans, not in spirit and not in practice. Rather, they are evil fascists determined to use their brief time at the wheel to steer the car over the cliff. They are not making decisions that are good for America or Americans, but rather they are making decisions that serve their lust for power and control. Everything they do to and with America is the opposite of what America was founded to do.
Biden and the people around him are bad people. They should not be running the central government in Washington, DC. And as you may know, I am 100% certain they were not voted into office by the American voters in 2020. One person who would have emphatically and forcefully rejected over-reaching Joe Biden and his corruptacrats was General George Washington himself. He would have removed these evil scum from office one way or another, and I am absolutely certain he would have thoroughly cleaned up the rest of our messy house, as well. Because he, George Washington, was so anti-government that he rejected the ultimate power of being crowned as America’s monarch.
George Washington was as anti-government as anyone can be, and as we all know, he was the ultimate American. It is perfectly natural for all Americans to reject government, to be suspicious of government and its employees, and to be anti government. This focus on individual freedom is what makes us Americans!
Trans-conversation not allowed
“Trans” Definition: Across, beyond, through, changing thoroughly (Random House dictionary, 1987, the best printed book you can have in your home, because it represents the pinnacle of Western Civilization English language before it was thoroughly corrupted with non-definable nonsense which has resulted in the internal collapse of our nation).
To have a meaningful conversation and exchange of ideas (which results in increased understanding and personal growth) across, beyond, and through our natural personal and cultural differences and boundaries, all humans have historically talked to one another. Fifteen thousand years ago, the multitude of Mongolian tribes who had migrated across the climate change Bering land bridge into the Americas all ended up speaking different languages as a multitude of different Indian tribes, and yet interacting directly and honestly with one another across their differences.
In the 1400s, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, and Dutch explorers sailed their ships across the planet to meet, communicate, and trade with other cultures with different skin colors and languages. In the 1600s, different European tribes (primarily Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Franks, and Celts) who migrated into the Americas all joined together and amalgamated across their cultural and linguistic boundaries to form a singular national and several regional identities.
All of these humans from the beginning of modern humanity crossed physical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries to exchange ideas and items with one another, often joining together, sometimes disagreeing, but always communicating. No artificial boundaries were allowed. If a boundary or difference between them was unnecessary or served no healthy purpose, then that boundary and difference was discarded. Albeit sometimes by force of arms, but discarded nonetheless.
So, knowing these demonstrable, measurable, definable facts about humans historically communicating with one another, let us ask this important question: What realistic, healthy purpose is served by the unnatural gag order and discriminatory bar on honest conversations about the sexual ideology movement and its resulting trans-sexual assault on women’s rights?
Why can’t the majority of Americans, Canadians, or Europeans presently ask questions and talk fully about this non-sensical, destructive, censorious movement that has taken over academia, medicine, law, and much of government services?
To not only stop Americans from having a conversation about “Trans” athletes destroying women’s sports, but for the pro-Trans movement to then also utterly destroy the personal and professional lives of those people who merely try to have these important conversations demonstrates that this is not a natural human experience we are having right now. Knowing that humans have historically crossed every sort of boundary to reach one another, how can it be said that this aggressive censorship and brutal blocking of communication about the subject is natural and thus healthy?
The simple and honest answer here is that the pro-censorship side is made up of evil, intolerant, discriminatory authoritarians relying on 100% subjective and unprovable nonsense (that has a lot of scientifically proven data contradicting it). People who cannot have an honest debate or discussion, and who try to destroy anyone who even questions much less challenges their orthodoxy, are by definition really bad people. Sure, they try to cloak themselves in righteousness, and they claim that honest discussions cause “harm” to some tiny fraction of humans somewhere. But they are the ones committing the greatest and most widespread harm to the greatest number of people.
These inhuman censorship people must be confronted, shamed, and stopped. As they have pulled out all of the stops to destroy us, so should we pull out all of the stops to fight back. They started this fight; they purposefully undermined every First Amendment right we citizens have enjoyed for 240 years, and so we have every right to fight fire with fire. We are waging a just war back against injustices imposed on us by violent authoritarians. I see our situation as eerily similar to World War Two, where the side representing human freedom and good waged a just war against evil Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and Japan.
If you have a Woke university asking you for money, decline to contribute and instead support university board candidates who believe in the classical liberal idea of free speech. If you have a Woke township official making bizarre, un-American decisions about your property rights, or demanding that you accept their anti-English language pronouns while they reject your correct pronouns, then mount a strong effort to have them voted out or removed from office. If your kid has a Woke sports coach at school who makes scientifically indefensible decisions about sports competitions and shared locker rooms, then mount an aggressive effort to remove that coach (and similarly defend sports coaches who adhere to scientifically sound decisions). Same for school board members – Woke = bad = run for their seats.
Isn’t it ironic that the one crucial thing that the “Trans” movement does not tolerate is the full communication among all of us and across our different boundaries about the crushing slavery that the Trans movement truly represents and means for the vast majority of us? Even the gay and possibly Trans people in my own family, each of whom I love completely and welcome in my life absolutely and always, cannot tolerate an honest discussion about this subject. Such is the stuff of rigid religious ideologies!
This Trans movement – as it is currently structured and represented – is not a human thing. It is not an innately healthy or honest human experience. Rather, it is an anti-human artificial contrivance operating far outside historic human norms and much more aligned with Nazis, Fascists, and Stalinists.
Because the current Trans movement is an existential threat to you and your essential humanity, it is normal and justified for you to fear it and be phobic of it. It is just one more gruesome face of evil fascism that must be confronted and defeated to save our freedom of choice, freedom of conscience, and physical freedom.
Twitter staff are attacking conservatives again
We all thought that Elon Musk had brought great change to Twitter. More openness, more transparency, more fairness, more balance, less hostility to inconvenient facts that some people in power don’t like, less censorship.
Well, that honeymoon has ended as conservative Twitter accounts are being shut down this week in a brazenly partisan and double standard bloodbath. My own Twitter account, which I don’t use much, was locked without warning (see screenshot below) for supposedly violating the Twitter rules against “abusive behavior.”
What abusive behavior? When, against whom, under what circumstances?
And why lock an account without any warning?
Turns out my succinct, well-earned, and fair response on Twitter to an abusive leftist was misconstrued as “abusive behavior.” And bang, just like that, my account was locked. Oh, I was given the option of eventually re-opening it, if I delete the tweet I wrote back to someone who was abusing me. But I am not going to go through Twitter’s version of Mao’s re-education camp, and so my tweet will remain. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and the tweet is mild in comparison to the things the person it was aimed at was writing at the same time.
Commentator Dan Bongino is constantly harping on the liberal hypocrisy thing. He is constantly pointing out that liberals don’t care about being caught as brazen hypocrites. Rather, Bongino says, liberals like the raw, unadulterated, unlimited power they feel when they get to act unfairly and treat other people unfairly. He points out that when liberals hold themselves to zero standard, and then hold people like Josh First to an impossibly high standard, liberals don’t see a fairness problem. They see and really enjoy the raw exercise of power and hierarchy, the ability to simply crush someone’s free speech rights because of a made-up fake violation of some subjective rule that is never applied to one side of a debate and that is always mis-applied to the other side of the debate.
Liberals/ Leftists are at the top of the hierarchy, and people like Josh First are at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Hierarchy and power, that is what the Josh First Twitter account lock is about. Talk about abusive behavior! Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I am now the powerless victim of a power-crazed corrupt absolutist tyrant, some person who works at Twitter named Ella Irwin. Apparently she has been going after the accounts of other conservatives, too, including activist Michael Knowles and congresswoman Marjorie T. Green.
Here’s the thing about this latest censorship of conservative voices at Twitter: The people doing it are unfair, mean, abusive, bullies, censorious, against free speech, against ideas that scare them, and tyrannical. Any and all of these characteristics are negative. You would not normally choose to be around or subject to individual people who have these sorts of negative traits and broken personalities. And yet here we are again, pushed back into sharing digital space with people from Silicon Valley, California, where the overwhelming majority of people in control of the digital town square are just pure bad crap like Ella Irwin.
And take note: Not one Democrat Party person or official objects to this. Which means that the Democrat Party people have the same intention for governing America as their allies govern Twitter, FaceBook, etc. They all believe in using massive coercive force against people who disagree with them.
Twitter gives us a view into the souls of the people who oppose us. No wonder they want to take away our guns! Then we would be completely helpless against them. Give these people a huge swastika to wear proudly, because that is what they are.
Did the last humorist die yesterday?
Blazing Saddles was a movie that still defies categorization. In 1974, movies in America were highly regulated, and there were all kinds of seemingly artificial limits placed on what you could and could not see, or say, for people of all kinds of age groups. OK, normal people recognize that foul language, violence, and nudity are not appropriate for young people, but the censors then went far beyond these basic limits.
Somehow, Blazing Saddles made all kinds of end-runs around the film censors, without showing any naked bodies or using four-letter words, while still carrying a very adult social theme. One word in particular that is used throughout the movie is “The N Word“, and it is used to great effect in stabbing racism against blacks straight in the eye. And that’s the beauty of good art. Left to function properly without censorship or outside meddling, good art maximally tells its story and makes its best point.
Blazing Saddles may be funny, but it also addressed racism straight on in a way that has never been done since. And it moved the discussion about race relations farther ahead than all of the serious blather about feewings ever could. You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today, though, because of the censorship, and so you’d never benefit from its valuable message.
This subject of censorship and free speech has been brought to the fore by (among other direct assaults on free speech) recent revelations that PC Woke book publishers are going through existing books by Roald Dahl and other authors and actually, unbelievably, incredibly, re-writing them to fit today’s snowflake boo-boo word fearing man-child.
It seems that today’s censors and book burners are the same people who are publishing books, and they have taken it upon themselves to be like the scientifically illiterate church censors of old re-writing Galileo’s scientific theories. They are destroying important art in the name of protecting people. These same people today would never have allowed Blazing Saddles to be released, because of the “hurtful” boo boo words nonsense.
This is civilization-destroying stuff, because when the people who publish the books are also burning the original books and then re-writing the books, you really end up with, in effect, no books worthy of being called books. Real books of original creative content carry real messages and real information, real insights, not artificially dumbed-down, white washed, or filtered content that misses the entire purpose and point of the author’s original work.
Yesterday a man named Norman Steinberg died, at the age of 83. He was the humor-filled screenwriter for Blazing Saddles, among other funny and powerful message movies. I wonder if he died of old age or of a broken heart, because he surely must have been America’s last humorist. Today’s censors say that no one is allowed to say or depict certain things (except for pedophilia, or cross-dressing, or biologically impossible and socially implausible gay/trans/etc beings which all seems all the rage among the Left), because somewhere in the universe a person’s feewings will be hurt.
Today’s censors don’t mind hurting the feelings of religiously observant Christians, Muslims and Jews, the people who keep modern society functioning, but God help you if you hurt the feelings of some pathetic 20-year-old weenie college kid somewhere. Burn that book!
You couldn’t build America today with all of the outrageous and useless regulations (which I had a direct hand in when I worked at USEPA in Washington, DC) weighing down our nation, and you couldn’t film or write Blazing Saddles today, because of all of the censorious book-burning crap coming out of Hollywood and from the supposed caretakers and curators of American culture.
Rest in peace, Mr. Steinberg. Wherever you are now, I hope you have been able to travel across artificial boundaries and achieve your highest and best abilities and purpose. Lord knows, you couldn’t do any of that here on earth today.
Today’s cultural censors would never approve this silly poster because of the gun (“guns are bad”), the rope (supposed violence), the horse (supposed animal abuse) etc
Fake News John Micek leaves fake news “Patriot News” to create more Fake News
He is no “journalist.” Media fraud John Micek leaves political cover of old Patriot News, becomes publicly visible political propagandist
Patriot News devotes 45% of its editorial page to a Vogue-worthy celebrity photo of anti-American US Rep. Nancy Pelosi. And the media wonders why regular Americans have lost faith in the legacy media
Ever since fake news purveyor John Micek arrived at the Patriot News (now pennlive.com) about eight years ago (he had some role there before taking on the editorial page), the paper went from liberal-lean to all-out 24/7 partisan propaganda. The opinion page that Micek ran became a seething cauldron of popular notions of political correctness. Micek’s opinion page became an Exhibit A of how the establishment legacy media maintains a constant saturating Blitzkrieg barrage of intellectual garbage on trusting, good-natured Americans, long used to sitting down to read “the paper” after a day’s work.
Micek made national news several years ago by peremptorily banning all anti-gay-marriage opinions from being published on the Patriot News opinion page. When Micek appeared on national television shows where he was simply questioned about his censorious practices and intellectual dishonesty, he became a deer in the headlights. He literally could not find the words to articulate a why to his censorship. Not in a professional way. The guy was exposed as a puppet master, not a man of letters, as would be expected of a “highly educated, highly experienced media expert.” Media experts like Micek have been trained as Fascist mini Stalins, not as thinkers.
My own exposure to Micek was what free-thinkers have come to expect from official media censors across the nation in recent years. I have submitted pro-Constitution opinion pieces to the Patriot News, where Micek would eventually get around to accepting them. Weeks after the issue had left the headlines. But Micek wouldn’t just delay them, he would edit out the strongest parts of my op-eds, then post the essays digitally for about 15 minutes, and then pull them off of the pennlive.com editorial page. So he could truthfully say that he had technically published the letters, but unless a reader went searching for them using the search function on the website, they would not be visible as one scrolled down through past posts. It was a sleight-of-hand trick.
So let’s be honest about Micek: He is completely dishonest. As an editor, anyhow. Not that an honest, objective reader would be surprised at this. After all, Micek has done his misdeeds up front and in public view, where he has long misrepresented himself as a “journalist,” and therefore as a fair-minded arbiter of fact and truth, when he is so obviously the opposite.
Now John Micek has left pennlive.com to join another up-front fake news start-up. There, he will be able to more freely purvey his anti-America PC garbage and nonsense; his censorious ways will become de facto “the norm” for official media discussions. Micek is doing this to even further control the political and social narrative, to limit and shape the information and language available to curious people, and thereby, he hopes, to artificially control and shape the way Americans think about public policy issues.
John Micek embodies pretty much everything honest, patriotic Americans despise about liberals. He is a weak-kneed manipulative weasel with a feminized pseudo-intellectual affectation who hates America as it was founded, but who nonetheless enjoys and relies upon the Constitutional rights he is trying to destroy for everyone else.
If bowties were at all “in” today, Micek would festoon his entire body in them. Mister Peabody Knowitall Do-Good has now gone on to do more bad things, more often, more publicly. This move is about the most honest thing he has ever done in his career, as the cat is finally out of the bag and he is openly admitting he has been a fake news propagandist the entire time.
Congratulations, John.