Look who protects free speech

Billionaires now are doing the job that journalists quit

In my previous life as a newspaperman, I was rather smug about the First Amendment. The press pleasured itself about its support of a free speech. It stood up to allow Nazis to rally in Skokie, Illinois.

But that was last century. In this benighted century, the press has become insufferable HOA presidents who want the power to silence people in the name of freedom. All you have to do is call someone a liar to get him censored. It is the equivalent of calling a SWAT team on a neighbor.

But the First Amendment and the God-given rights it protects are not dead. New champions have arrived because nature hates a vacuum and Americans hate a censor.

The new guys replace the ink-stained wretches of the Fourth Estate. The new guys arrive just in time to sweep the press from burning the Constitution, just as Cubs outfielder Rick Monday ran in and saved The Flag from being burned in the outfield of Dodger Stadium. It was voted the greatest play in baseball history. The Dodgers later traded for Monday.

But first things first. Let us review the situation now as the Fourth Estate pours lighter fluid on the Constitution.

One month after Republicans nominated Trump in 2016, the New York Times — through a column by Jim Rutenberg — declared an end to objective journalism.

He wrote, “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

“Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”

On and on he droned as he pretended he was taking the high road into the sewer of censorship.

He ended the piece, “It would also be an abdication of political journalism’s most solemn duty: to ferret out what the candidates will be like in the most powerful office in the world.

“It may not always seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness. It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment. To do anything less would be untenable.”

Rutenberg spoke for NYT because it abandoned its long standing tradition of allowing conservatives to give their opinion through opinion columns. We know that because after the paper ran a column by Senator Tom Cotton, it fired the editor who ran it.

There is only one truth in Oceania and it is enforced by the Ministry of Truth. Its list of lies since the election of Donald Trump as president reflects the fascism of a deep-state government using corporate America to do the things the state cannot.

The lies the press ran include:

1. The lie that Putin fixed the 2016 election for Trump.

2. The lie that ivermectin is just a horse medicine.

3. The lie that the riots of 2020 were peaceful protests.

4. The lie that the 2020 election was on the up-and-up.

5. The lie that a protest in the Capitol was an insurrection.

Hundreds of other lies are out there. Any disagreement gets you banned online and eventually the deep-state and the corporations will turn conservatives into non-persons who cannot bank or even get an Uber driver as finger swipes replace credit cards.

But there is hope. I abandoned my Google blog for Substack because Google kept demonetizing (and occasionally deleting) posts. So far, so good.

As journalists abandoned their principles, others have stepped into the void to protect free speech. Elon Musk has become the savior of open debate online. He bought Twitter, which served the deep-state in censoring stories such as Hunter’s laptop. Your tax dollars went to Twitter to censor you.

Musk succeeded Jack Dorsey, the censoring CEO of Twitter. Before the sale was completed, Dorsey lamented in a tweet, “the days of usenet, irc, the web...even email (w PGP)...were amazing. centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet.

“I realize I'm partially to blame, and regret it.”

Journalists call those the days when the Internet was the wild, wild west — as if that were a bad thing. I get Dorsey’s remorse. The power to censor is overwhelming and toxic. I hope he recovers, finds and marries the woman of his dreams and they have babies by the litter like a cat.

Trump, DeSantis and Ramaswamy stand up to the press.

Trump’s latest escapade was comical. In situations where a pack of reporters cannot cover a candidate’s event, a pool of reporters select one reporter to cover the story and share his notes with everyone. He made the reporters whine on Sunday.

MSN reported:

Donald Trump's campaign refused to agree to let an NBC News correspondent travel with him on New Hampshire campaign stops today as the designated pool reporter, leading to access being cut off for the day.

According to a pool report obtained by Deadline, correspondent Vaughn Hillyard was informed “that if he was the designated pooler by NBC News that the pool would be cut off for the day.”

“After affirming to the campaign that your pooler would attend the events, NBC News was informed at about 2:20 pm ET that the pool would not be allowed to travel with Trump today,” the pool report stated.

It’s believed by sources at the network that the campaign refused to allow Hillyard in the pool because of his questions on Saturday to Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a Trump surrogate, about the E. Jean Carroll case. A jury last year found Trump liable for sexual assault of Carroll and later defaming her, and a trial is currently taking place in New York largely to determine additional damages.

“Do you believe E. Jean Carroll?” Hillyard asked.

Stefanik said, “They are all witch hunts against Donald Trump and the reason is he is pulling ahead of Joe Biden.”

She seemed to be irritated by the question and added, “The media is so biased. This is just another example of the media being out of touch.”

The story shows press bias. Where is the statement from Trump that he banned the reporter over a question? He has for some time criticized NBC and its MSNBC attack dog. Trump does not have the right to pick and choose the pool reporter, but then again, there is no right to access either.

Maybe I would feel more empathy if reporters had not cheered when Dorsey kicked Trump off Twitter.

Free speech isn’t always pretty. I don’t think skin tone kept her out of that beauty contest.

This goes beyond politics and spills over into something important, the UFC — Ultimate Fighting Championship — founded and run by Dana White. Back when White was starting out, no one would give him a venue for his matches. Donald Trump did. And White is grateful.

He also is a defender of free speech. Collin Rugg, co-founder of Trending Politics, tweeted an exchange between White and a Canadian reporter:

Reporter: You obviously give a long leash to your fighters about what they can say… you are getting into territory of homophobia, transphobia.

White: I don’t give anybody a leash. A leash? Free speech. To control what people say? Gonna tell people what to believe? I don’t fucking tell any other human being what to say, what to think. And there’s no leashes on any of ’em. What is your question?

Reporter: I was asking that question. I’ll move on though.

White: Probably a good idea. That’s ridiculous to say I give somebody a leash. Free speech, brother. People can say whatever they want and they can believe whatever they want.

The video is a little longer and worthy of your time.

The news media’s capitulation to the deep state comes at a price called credibility. Modernity News reported:

During a discussion titled Defending Truth, The editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal admitted to Davos elites that the legacy media no longer own the facts and people are much more likely to question what they report as truth.

Emma Tucker told a crowd at the World Economic Forum, “I think there’s a very specific challenge for the legacy brands, like the New York Times and like the Wall Street Journal.”

She continued, “If you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well.”

“If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact,” Tucker further stated, adding “Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying.”

That was back when WSJ and NYT still printed facts.

Trying to censor the news backfires, as the media’s crazed coverage of covid showed. The experts were wrong on every count (masks, social distancing, vaccines, ivermectin) and the conspiracy theorists were right.

Enter Musk, Trump and now White. None of these men are perfect but they are standing up for God. Yes, God. The Lord gave you free speech. Your government is supposed to protect that right. The press once did. Both have abandoned their duty. Some men are rising and standing in their place.

I thank this band of Rick Mondays. They offer hope to a weakened nation in a woebegone century.