By Clarice Feldman | American Thinker
Democrats in Congress and their legacy media enablers dropped their veils this week, revealing how dear they hold their desire and capacity to censor truth. The drop came during Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s testimony about vaccines and shows how frightened they are that he may out-primary their demented puppet Joe Biden and his cackling numbskull veep.
The New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg tweeted:
“Despite the theater, the hearing raised thorny questions about free speech in a democratic society: Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment. When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?”
Her comment was apparently inspired by Rep. Deborah Wasserman Schultz, who sought to hide his testimony from the public by moving it to executive session. When that failed, she and other Democrats on the committee peppered him with questions and denied him an opportunity to respond. Ranking Democrat Stacey Plaskett, in the context of an investigation of the censorship by the FBI and other agencies, said in her opening statement “I hope that [all members] recognize that there is speech that is not constitutionally protected,” referencing “hate speech.” Her views, wrong as they are, echo similar censorship fan Senator Ben Cardin.
Professor Jonathan Turley took strong issue with this distortion of the First Amendment. Surveys show that college students are especially indoctrinated to believe the Schultz-Plaskett-Stolberg fallacy about the limits on free speech. (Students surveyed indicate it should be a criminal offense to misgender someone.) You might want to read his very sound rebuttal. Misinformation is protected, “simply stating something that others view as misleading or wrong [ed: or offensive to the listener] is protected under the First Amendment.”
That Amendment makes no distinction between different types of speech:
“Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech.”
The idea that you can permit the government to decide true from false statements will always be selectively enforced to protect the interests of the officeholders.
“What is so troubling,” he concludes, “is how the ‘legacy media’ has jettisoned the most noble aspects of its legacy and has become the enabler of censors.”
Censorship, whether it is direct or indirect through threats to social media (enjoined by Judge Terry A. Doughty in Missouri v. Biden a few weeks ago) is a danger to us. We saw how the serious concerns about the COVID vaccine by reputable scientists were blocked from public view; how bad medical treatment (use of ventilators for COVID victims) and denial of alternative therapies cost lives; how exaggeration of COVID mortality locked down schools, businesses, and place of worship, magnifying terror in those who misunderstood the degree of risk. Indeed, the overblown coverage paved the way for overriding sensible election integrity laws and surely enabled fraud.
For almost three years the extensive videotapes of the J6 Capitol riot were kept hidden from the public. Now they are released and people are closely examining them. What they show in clear relief is that the crowd of thousands peacefully assembled for thirty minutes on the Capitol’s West Plaza, and were brutally and deliberately attacked for exercising their right to freely assemble.
Here is the timeline of the beginning of events there, and it is matched by videoframes of the event.
- It begins at 1:13 when Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Thau arrives and requests “blast munitions.”
- Four minutes later he orders the police snipers to continue firing into the crowd.
- Eleven minutes later he tased a random protestor.
- At 1:25 blast and incendiary munitions arrive and for about one hour “Capitol and DC police incite the crowd with an unrelenting barrage of grenades and mortars.”
- Three minutes into the attack, Kevin Greeson, part of the crowd, drops dead, witnesses alleging he was killed by one of the grenades.
- Without giving the three warnings required by D.C. protocol, the police use their long-range acoustic device to clear the crowd. This conduct, which incited the peaceful crowd, violated the law. “DC police Sgt. Edwards admits to his Commander that they are inciting ten protestors for every person they hit.”
- At 2:25 more 40 mm munitions arrive and Thau orders “Officer ‘Rich’ to shoot a CS mortar ‘over the scaffolding. Rich “misfires and gases the entire DC police line, causing them to retreat.”
It looks like something out of the Three Stooges. If you think this was not deliberate, but understandable because these officers were ill-trained, remember that outgoing President Trump asked the mayor for permission to call up the National Guard, which has better training for such things, and she refused. So did “security officials at the House and Senate” when the then-chief of the Capitol Police six times requested it.
Former chief Steven Sund — who resigned his post last week after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for him to step down — made the assertions in an interview with The Washington Post published Sunday.
Sund contradicts claims made by officials after Wednesday’s assault on Capitol Hill. Sund’s superiors said previously that the National Guard and other additional security support could have been provided, but no one at the Capitol requested it.
Sund told the Post that House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving was concerned with the “optics” of declaring an emergency ahead of the protests and rejected a National Guard presence. He says Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger recommended that he informally request the Guard to be ready in case it was needed to maintain security.
Like Sund, Irving and Stenger have also since resigned their posts.
Irving was appointed by Nancy Pelosi, who used the occasion to invite her daughter in to videotape the event.
This is the true story of how a peaceful assembly led protestors to enter the Capitol. It has been bottled up for years, even though for many of the J6 defendants who have been jailed for years without trial, it is exculpatory evidence. It has been kept locked from view for one main reason: to advance the Democrats’ narrative that this was an “insurrection” ginned up by Trump. In fact, it was a peaceful gathering, incited by outrageous and illegal conduct by the D.C. and Capitol police.
Starting prior to the 2020 election and lasting until this week, the FBI bottled up evidence that President Biden, beginning in 2009 when he was vice-president, received substantial bribes from foreign governments that he had threatened. Last week Senator Chuck Grassley made public a redacted version of FBI Form 1023 detailing a number of damaging accusations from an FBI informant, accusations buttressed by bank records, with a promise of more to come.
Grassley wants to know why the FBI failed to investigate these credible allegations and hid them from Congress and the American people. Guess!
I think it’s for the same reason the FBI never investigates what appear to be multiple crimes by Hunter Biden on his laptop, which the agency knew was authentic at the time that 51 fomer IC officials publicly claimed it was “likely Russian disinformation,” a claim concocted by the Hillary Clinton campaign. And for the same reason the reporter who broke the story about the laptop Hunter left at a computer repair shop was muzzled by the government, social media, and legacy media.
Almost everything you have read or viewed by legacy media has been damn lies. Almost everything that is truthful has been kept hidden by the government, Democrat officials, and social media. Now you know why they all insist the First Amendment doesn’t say what it says.