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| -Great Cultural Revolution |
| Surber: Ex-CIA agent: 'This freedom of speech is just nonsense' |
| 2022-11-30 |
| Bob Baer, an ex-CIA grifter who pushed the Russiagate nonsense in an attempt to overturn the 2016 election, attacked free speech on CNN. That Baer is a columnist for Time and Vanity Fair as well as an author makes his call for censorship hypocritical as well as anti-American. If the man is against freedom of speech, why did we hire him to protect our country? The CIA needs to do a better job vetting applicants. He is upset that Elon Musk is stopping the censorship of conservatives on Twitter. Baer said, "Putin is going to be all over Twitter if there’s no regulations on this, fake accounts, spoofed accounts … And so when he’s talking about the popular voice, Musk, he’s really talking about Russian intelligence. "It’s not right. And you know, this freedom of speech is just nonsense because you can’t go into a movie theater and yell ‘fire.’ It’s against the law. What Putin is going to do & the Russians is they’re going to use this as a vehicle to save himself in Ukraine." Actually, you can yell fire in a crowded theater. Emma Camp made this clear in a column three years ago. She wrote, "The erroneous idea comes from the 1919 case Schenk v. United States. The case concerned whether distributing anti-draft pamphlets could lead to a conviction under the Espionage Act—and had nothing to do with fires or theaters. "In his opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that 'the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.' However, this idea was introduced as an analogy, meant to illustrate that, as Trevor Timm wrote in The Atlantic in 2012, 'the First Amendment is not absolute. It is what lawyers call dictum, a justice's ancillary opinion that doesn't directly involve the facts of the case and has no binding authority.' The phrase, though an oft-repeated axiom in debates about the First Amendment, is simply not the law of the land now, nor has it ever been—something made all the more apparent when Schenk v. United States was largely overturned in 1969 by Brandenburg v. Ohio." Schenk was wrong. You should be able to protest the draft during wartime without being subject to being jailed (or worse) as a spy. If anyone is yelling fire, however, it is Baer. Let us take a stroll down memory lane. Read the rest at the link |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #7 If someone promotes lies and nonsense on any public medium, the obvious recourse of lovers of truth is to refute that false information., Suppression is only rational when the information cannot be refuted. That occurs always when the information is truthful. Thus the only rational purpose to censorship is the suppression of truth. here are times when that can be appropriate. such as when in world war 2 we were able to read some Japanese communications. Publicizing that truth would have been idiotic. Other truths were suppressed during that war, for the purposes of preventing panic in our population. However most suppressions in recent years have been only for political reasons, and are a disgrace to their perpetrators, who control most sources of information in this country and strive to control them all. |
| Posted by: i forgot it 2022-11-30 17:22 |
| #6 CIA = Deepstate |
| Posted by: Mad Eye Omeretch7959 2022-11-30 16:08 |
| #5 Russia!Russia!Russia! ...No, Putin!Putin!Putin! |
| Posted by: magpie 2022-11-30 11:54 |
| #4 Ref 2 Personally, I'd suggest some late night kayaking on the Chesapeake Bay. |
| Posted by: Cesare 2022-11-30 10:50 |
| #3 People who fear freedom of speech don't fear "disinformation" (despite their specious claims to that effect.) They fear access to the truth. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2022-11-30 08:37 |
| #2 Bob desperately needs to go fishing. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2022-11-30 07:08 |
| #1 Everyone I don't like is Putin. Don't forget kids - be on the side of the deep state's endless wars, or you're in the pay of the FSB! |
| Posted by: Spike the Hairy6811 2022-11-30 03:28 |