Tag: media

Alex Jones and the Right to Offend

On Dec. 14, 2012, a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six staffers.  Alex Jones, a controversial far-right talk show host, called the Sandy Hook massacre a U.S. government hoax, staged using crisis actors, to serve as a pretext for gun control.  Parents of one of the slain children filed a defamation suit against Jones, claiming that followers of Jones had harassed them and sent them death threats for years in the false belief that they were lying about their son’s death.

Jones’s defense was his right to free speech and that he was not responsible for the harassment.  He lost.  The jury awarded the parents $45.2 million in punitive damages on top of $4.1 million in compensatory damages — another example of outrageous damage verdicts that plague the legal system.

Freedom of speech is coming under attack from all directions.  The primary assault is based on the existence of a new “right”: the right not to be offended.  It is claimed by many on the left that the right not to be offended is more important than the right to free expression.

Our colleges and universities have fallen victim to this new “right.”  The feelings of students often constitute sufficient justification for campus censorship.  If a conservative speaker offends some of the students, that speaker can be denied a platform.  “The belief that free speech rights don’t include the right to speak offensively is now firmly entrenched on campuses and enforced by repressive speech or harassment codes,” wrote attorney Wendy Kaminer in The Atlantic.

The problem is spreading to the mainstream.  In the 2010 case of Nurre v. Whitehead, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld lower court rulings that school authorities can deny students’ rights to free speech just to keep other students from being offended.  The courts are “allowing schools the discretion to let an offended minority control a cowed majority,” constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead wrote in the Huffington Post.  “There is no way to completely avoid giving offense,” he said.  “At some time or other, someone is going to take offense at something someone else says or does.  It’s inevitable.  Such politically correct thinking has resulted in a host of inane actions, from the Easter Bunny being renamed ‘Peter Rabbit’ to Christmas Concerts being dubbed ‘Winter’ Concerts.”

In a democratic republic, there can be no right not to be offended.  If anyone can prohibit another person’s speech because it’s offensive, there is no limit to the restrictions that can be placed on free expression.  As the late author Christopher Hitchens said, “[f]reedom of speech must include the license to offend.”

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ESPN’s Jalen Rose: Stop Saying Mt. Rushmore, It’s ‘Offensive’

ESPN analyst and former NBA player Jalen Rose has launched a new campaign to cancel Mr. Rushmore because he says the name of “offensive” to all Americans.

Rose posted a video to social media insisting that the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians dumped their Native American names and imagery because it was “offensive.”

He then said he has a new piece of U.S. history he believes should be canceled: Mt. Rushmore.

“I want to continue to challenge myself and to challenge you to do something,” Rose said in his Twitter video. “Can we retire using Mt. Rushmore?”

“That should be offensive to all of us, especially Native Americans,” Rose exclaimed.

“The indigenous people, who were the first people here before Christopher Columbus. Their land was stolen from them when it was discovered that it contained gold,” Rose continued.

“And 25 years later — to add insult to injury — four American presidents were put on what we call Mt Rushmore. On the top of the dead bodies that is buried right underneath,” he added.

“So, I call for you — and for myself, I’m in on this too — let’s stop using the term Mt. Rushmore,” he concluded, “when we talkin’ about our favorite rappers, talkin’ about our favorite movies, we talkin’ about our favorite players.”

“I know you gonna see this video and I know you gonna take action,” he said.

It was unclear if Rose was speaking metaphorically about the faces of the four presidents carved “on top of the dead bodies” of Native Americans. Or if he mistakenly thinks Mt. Rushmore is some sort of burial ground. But no one is buried on the mountain or immediately below the carvings.

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New Media Are As Intertwined With Imperial Power As Old Media

Alan MacLeod has a new article out with Mintpress News showing how most of the supposedly independent “fact-checking” organizations which Facebook has partnered with to police the information people are allowed to see on the platform about the war in Ukraine are, in fact, funded by the United States government.

“Most of the fact-checking organizations Facebook has partnered with to monitor and regulate information about Ukraine are directly funded by the U.S. government, either through the U.S. Embassy or via the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED),” MacLeod writes.

NED is indeed notorious because, as MacLeod explains, it was set up to do overtly many of the operations which the CIA used to perform covertly, like circulating propaganda in empire-targeted nations, funding foreign uprisings, and facilitating the 2014 coup in Ukraine which set in motion the events that would eventually lead to Russia’s invasion of the nation this past February.

Macleod shows how US government money is funneled into Facebook’s “fact-checking organizations” through NED and other channels, the result being a US government-funded narrative management operation in a social media platform which has almost three billion active users.

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Shaun King threatens to dox New York Post reporters: ‘I know where you live’

Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King is threatening to doxx multiple New York Post reporters and their families after the journalists published a series of unflattering reports about the controversial activist’s lavish spending and purchases.

King posted photos of New York Post journalists Isabel Vincent and Kevin Sheehan on his Instagram and Facebook accounts, encouraging his followers to send him photos of their families and homes. King has since deleted the series of posts but not before they reached his 3.8 million followers on Instagram and 2.5 million followers on Facebook.

“The amount of pain this woman caused my family is incalculable,” King wrote about Isabel Vincent across his Instagram, Facebook, and website, asking supporters to send her home address, according to Daily Beast. “Send me details and photos. Of her. And her home.”

King made similar requests in a series of posts on his platforms about Kevin Sheehan and said, “This is Kevin Sheehan of the @NYPost. He has been attacking me and my family. Send me photos of his home. Send me photos of him. And his family,” Daily Beast reports.

Shaun King claims he advocates for the poor and disenfranchised communities. He is retaliating against The New York Post journalists whose reports exposed King’s lavish spending, including a lakefront property purchase.

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Reuters Runs Cover for Dementia Joe and ‘Fact-Checks’ Funny Meme Showing Biden Being Distracted by Ice Cream Truck Music

Reuters actually ‘fact-checked’ a funny meme of Joe Biden getting distracted by ice cream truck music.

Last September Joe and Jill Biden pushed Covid vaccines at Brookland Middle School in Washington DC.

At one point Dementia Joe got distracted by a shiny button and wandered off as Jill Biden was speaking.

Biden shuffled away then made his way back as Jill Biden addressed the school officials.

Twitter users made fun of Joe Biden by adding ice cream truck music to the video of dummy Joe wandering around.

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TV Host Says She Quit Because She Was Blocked From Questioning Fauci

A host of The Hill’s morning show says she abruptly resigned because she was blocked from taking part in a recent interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser.

Kim Iversen joined The Hill’s “Rising” in 2021. The show is described as a weekday morning program with bipartisan hosts that “breaks the mold of morning TV by taking viewers inside the halls of Washington power like never before.”

Iversen has repeatedly discussed COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines, the government response to the disease, and other related subjects.

She told supporters in a video on July 29 that she vowed when she joined the show that she would maintain independence and not be censored. The Hill is owned by Nexstar Media Group.

Some of the segments made colleagues uncomfortable, but executives and producers never approached Iversen to shift her tone.

On the evening of July 24, Iversen says, she was told that Fauci’s team asked earlier in the month who the hosts would be when he appeared on the show and that Iversen wasn’t included because the interview was going to take place earlier than she typically reports to work.

Iversen told the producers to go back to Fauci’s team and say Iversen had to be included. If the interview was then canceled, then The Hill could run a segment about the development, she proposed.

While an agreement seemed to be reached, Iversen received a call the next morning from the show’s executive producer.

“They had made the final decision not to approach Fauci’s team but to instead move forward with the interview without me. They wanted me to come on the show, record a couple of segments, and then ask me to leave so they could interview Fauci,” Iversen said.

During the actual interview, Fauci falsely said that he never recommended lockdowns over COVID-19.

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Fact Checkers Cover for Democratic Party’s Sordid History With the Ku Klux Klan

During a June 7th Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on white supremacy and domestic terrorism, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz stated that:

  • the Ku Klux Klan “was formed by elected Democrats.”
  • Klan “leadership was almost entirely elected Democrats.”
  • today’s Democrats “try very hard to erase the history” of their party’s involvement with the Klan.
  • today’s Democrats “politicize acts of violence.”

Conversely, “fact checkers” like PolitiFact and the Associated Press have repeatedly argued that the Democratic Party did not found the Klan, played a limited role in it, and that racist southerners fled to the Republican Party after 1964.

In reality, Cruz’s statements are a much closer reflection of the facts.

Origins & Leadership

The AP and PolitiFact correctly state that the Klan was started by a group of Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee as a non-violent, grassroots social club without political motivations.

What the AP and PolitiFact fail to acknowledge is that the Klan’s 1865–66 founding as a social club does not mark the beginning of the Klan as it is known today. Per the 1971 academic book White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, the “real beginning” of the “Ku Klux conspiracy” occurred at an 1867 meeting in Nashville that consolidated the Klan.

As explained by an 1884 book written by a founding member of the Klan, this meeting bound the “isolated dens together” with “unity of purpose and concert of action” to supposedly reign in rogue Klansmen that had turned violent toward black people just a year after the group’s founding. However, White Terror points out that if Klan leaders really wanted to eliminate violence, they would have disbanded altogether. Instead, they sought “tighter organization” and recruited leaders “of far greater prestige and authority whose influence extended throughout the state”—primarily ex-Confederate generals and Democratic politicians.

An investigation published by the Illinois General Assembly in 1976 explains that after the Klan “transformed into a political organization,” violence became more widespread under Democrat leadership. The men that guided the Klan’s reorganization and subsequent growth included:

However, the Illinois investigation also found that “central control over the actions of the various local Klan groups did not really exist,” and some of the figureheads above began “dropping out” to distance themselves from local terrorism. For example, Nathan Bedford Forest ordered the Klan disbanded in 1869 because he claimed a “few disobedient and bad men” had infiltrated the Klan, disgracing its “good name and honorable reputation.”

On the other hand, some prominent Democrats remained loyal to the Klan’s violent activities. For example, Fredrick Strudwick led a Klan attempt to assassinate a Republican state senator and was later elected as a Democrat to the North Carolina state legislature.

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AP Forbids Quoting People Who Say ‘Grooming’ About Teaching Children Transgenderism

One of the world’s most influential newspaper writing stylebooks on July 22 advised against quoting people who use the word “groomer” to describe those who teach children about transgenderism, homosexuality, and other mature sexual issues.

The guidance is part of a lengthy transgenderism update by the Associated Press to its voluminous stylebook. Similar to other sensitive issues, AP’s new transgender guidance aligns with the language used by the political left.

For example, the stylebook now advises journalists to avoid writing descriptions like “biological male” when covering transgenderism.

For a major portion of the news media, the rules in the AP stylebook are the final authority when deciding which words and terms to use. With more than 1,000 newspapers and broadcasters using AP content often without citation, the guidance will promote the transgender agenda to millions of people who knowingly or unknowingly consume the wire service’s content.

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