Whether this is the right taking the opportunity to kick their opponent while they're down or a more permanent move to illiberalism has yet to be determined.
Asking the left to reclaim the mantle of free speech is asking a generation of indoctrinated leftists to abandon the principles they've lived by for a decade. I suspect the cognitive dissonance will be too much for them. Suppressing speech was always about power, and I suspect the current batch of lefty Millennials and Zoomers will conclude instead that the real lesson is that they didn't have enough of that. How they address that imbalance will have interesting implications for the stability of the country for the next few years.
I should have qualified my statement to make clear that I was referring specifically to older Zoomers, especially those on the left.
It does appear to me that the current generational definitions are flawed. In terms of cultural shifts, we should be referring to younger Boomers and older X'ers, younger X'ers and older Millennials, younger Millennials and older Zoomers.
This is utter nonsense. When did you ever see the left advocating use of government power like this? Even if some of them did, did a Democrat president or politician ever try to effect it?
The *extreme online left* lost its mind for a few years when they still had cultural relevance. They don't anymore. They always punched far above their weight anyway, and now thanks to that brief spasm people are sick of them.
But that doesn't hold a candle to what we're seeing now. This is not just a violation of the "spirit" or the "culture" of free speech by private citizens choosing, however poorly or recklessly, to participate in a cultural revolution of online naming and shaming.
What you are seeing now are real, actual violations of the First Amendment by *the government*. If "the left" had applied similar standards and actions to right-wing media when Democrats were in power, Fox News would be gone, to say nothing of Newsmax and OAN. But now these networks are all caving to Trump so he'll approve their mergers, because in the end rich people will play along with fascists to keep their money.
Before this, the most someone could lay at the feet of a Democratic administration was the bullshit "Twitter Files" scandal. Social media platforms voluntarily seeking advice on dealing with vaccine disinformation during a pandemic doesn't constitute a violation of free speech just because Mark Zuckerberg whines that he "felt pressured" so he can dodge responsibility for another one of his own decisions after heavy criticism.
Liberals can absolutely stand against this, and it doesn't require anyone to repudiate anything, because liberals never advocated government silencing of our political opponents. And even if we had, nobody in power would have taken us seriously, because we didn't put hacks and cretins in charge of our institutions.
Zuckerberg testified that the feds would call up FB and literally scream at them to remove posts. Google "Mark Zuckerberg says Biden officials would 'scream' and 'curse' when seeking removal of Facebook content". That doesn't sound like social media companies "voluntarily seeking advice". That sounds government taking an active hand in suppressing the free speech of private citizens.
In addition, this is early days. What concretely has the Trump administration done in terms of suppressing free speech? Perhaps we will see grievous violations, but first the Trump team has to start putting their plans into effect.
And the Republicans were censoring people before that. All of American history has seen threats to freedom of speech from both sides. If you know your history, and not just partisan agitprop. But there have also been champions of free speech on both sides. Those champions do not include Donald Trump.
For how much slander and libel has been directed at him, I'd say he's pretty much the top free-speech politician of our time. It's astonishing he hasn't gone farther than he has. He'd be justified to.
He has done literally nothing to defend the free speech rights of anyone who disagrees with him on anything. Even Idi Amin was in favor of the speech of people who liked him.
"He has done literally nothing to defend the free speech rights of anyone who disagrees with him on anything."
I Don't Care. He's a saint compared to Biden. I'll take someone who does nothing, over someone who uses the FBI as his personal army to take down social media posts he doesn't like.
I mean right now Trump is using the DOJ and FCC as a personal army to take down people he doesn't like based solely on their speech. That's...the exact same thing? Maybe a little more effective even?
Biden didn’t do that with his disinformation governance board? Doctors and scientist were fired during Covid for daring to have a different opinion that actually turned out to be true quite often. I voted specifically for free speech, which is why I voted for Trump. I can’t stand the guy, but the censorship that was going on under Biden was downright frightening.
Is the speech slander or libel? Then it's not protected, and shouldn't be.
Like, if I publish an article claiming that you eat live kittens, in an attempt to make you lose your job or reputation, that is a crime, and not protected free speech. It IS protected free speech if you DO happen to eat live kittens. Whether the accusation is TRUE or FALSE makes all the difference.
And there are a hell of a lot of media outlets, journalists, and late-night comedians who deserve to lose their jobs for making and spreading false accusations. Protecting people from lies is a reasonable exception to free speech.
Trump’s government is actively getting people fired over speech. He is suing media and trying to shut down media for speech, he’s threatening universities over speech, he is suing and trying to shut down law firms for speech. He is punishing people who speak about Israel in ways he doesn’t like. His government is trolling social media to investigate and punish individual citizens for speech they don’t like. This isn’t even a complete list.
I hated the Twitter files stuff also. The government shouldn’t be involved in anyone’s speech at all. Trump’s government is doing the same thing Biden’s did but way, way, way worse. If you can’t see that, your level of ignorance at the reality staring you in the face is actually impressive.
So what you mean is he’s doing everything that the Biden administration did. It’s almost as if it didn’t occur to the Democrats that another party might be in control someday and the crap they were doing was being turned back on themselves. The Twitter files were barely the beginning of what Biden did. He had doctors and scientists fired from their jobs for having dissenting opinions about Covid, many of which turned out to be true. Democrats online try to expose anyone who dared to have a different opinion about Covid so that they could get them fired from their jobs. That is the first time I ever saw that in my entire life.
And then there was the disinformation governance board. And the lawfare. I didn’t like Trump, but the Democrats had to be stopped and so that’s who I voted for. Yes, now I have to worry about him doing exactly the same thing that the Biden ministration did go figure. So far he is not worse.
This is the point: Arguing about who is or was worse, Biden or Trump, is the wrong way to go forward. We need real advocates for free speech, who will forcefully defend people of either (or any) side against those who would shut them down, from any side. It isn’t easy to prove you mean it or meant it when your perceived side has or had power. It wasn’t easy for honest people who opposed the cancel culture and censorship under Biden to be effective- and liberal voices like the ACLU who in the past did so, defending the rights of rightists, sadly fled from that role. I’m encouraged by FIRE speaking up now exactly because they lean right, but have credibility with liberals/the left who truly embrace freedom of speech. The comments here show how much work we have on any side to re-establish real credibility on this issue (free speech).
You won't get "the left" or "the right" to support free speech, but you can get a substantial minority of each to do so, which is enough to keep it alive.
And there were no champions for free speech coming from the Democratic Party under the Biden administration either. I don’t even care about Trump or Biden. I didn’t really pay much attention to politics at all until the Biden administration started censoring people and using our government to silence anll dissenting opinions on social media, to influence an election. Prominent doctors and scientists were fired from their jobs for daring to have a dissenting opinion about Covid. I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I voted for free speech, which means I voted against the Democrats. Never in my entire life Ihsve I ever seen so much censorship and canceling until the last four years. Trump may be just as bad, but the Democrats had to be stopped because they were the biggest threat to the freedom of speech I have ever seen. Now I will have to worry about Trump, but the Democrats were completely out of control and they still are.
I have a feeling this is how everything works. Everything.
The young people with new ideas come in and smash the old, entrenched, tyrannical establishment. They are convinced by their victory that they are Always Right about everything. As time passes, they become the old, entrenched, tyrannical establishment. Never allowing dissent, because they are so sure they are morally-pure angels. They must now be taken down by young people with new ideas. And so on.
It's a paraphrase, but Max Planck said, essentially, 'Science advances one funeral at a time.' Likely true of every hierarchy anywhere.
One more problem for the Dems: there is a widespread perception that they resorted to extralegal measures in an attempt to defeat Trump. For example, trying to bankrupt his companies through bogus civil lawsuits or to imprison him based on abuses of the court system.
Given that I think the public will harbor a tremendous amount of skepticism for any move where the Democrats attempt to don the mantle or democratic principles in opposing Trump. Isn't the more likely reaction that the D's are just cynical politicians who will seize on anything to attack their political opponents, and who will abandon their newfound principles when it is convenient for them?
I am merely suggesting that moderates are unlikely to accept that Democrats have experienced a sudden conversion to the cause of democratic principles, given their recent history.
Kimmel got the axe for trying to portray Kirk's assassin as a right-winger. I think the adults in the room at Nexstar quickly realized that was a non-starter and stepped in to restore some sanity.
"It's called soft power. The Left uses it all the time," he wrote on X. "Thanks to President Trump, the Right has learned how to wield power as well."
Literal censorship would be the feds sending cops down to Disney to tell them to pull the plug. Carr putting public pressure on a private studio is far from ideal, but it is also not a police state.
It's government pressure, and we have no idea how influential it actually was. Mitigating factors are that Kimmel wasn't making much money, if any, and a wider cultural shift that is apparent to pretty much everyone at this point.
If the pendulum is going to swing back anyway, and the cycle will repeat; where the Right now becomes its ascent to tyranny, so on and so forth, then let it be over this. This moment is worth that.
I looked at comment after comment of people cheering for the murder of Charlie Kirk, justifying the murder, calling for more murders, saying conservatives should be afraid to speak in public, and FOUR SEPARATE TIMES I saw a memorial to Charlie that had been Willfully Destroyed. I don't recall ever seeing that before. But I watched this escalate for a long time. I left my party in 2019, largely because of the Nick Sandmann incident, where I saw how normalized it was to wish death on a kid who did literally nothing to harm anyone. He wore the other side's hat; that was enough for people to pass around the phrase, "MAGA kids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper." I've seen people repost that, and worse, with ZERO self-awareness that their behavior is unacceptable and insane.
The Left's behavior has gone beyond indecent. I used to belong to them as well. I grew up when the Right was tyrannical. But this is the point where, the insufferable bar patron who's been antagonizing and provoking and needling everyone else all night long finally goes one insult too far, and someone grabs him by his collar and turns his face into a purple cauliflower, and the rest of the bar all applauds their hands raw.
There's free speech, and then there's behaving like an undisciplined child for so long that you run out of provocative taunts, and now you have to desecrate the last, most basic form of human dignity.
The Left deserves every bit of punishment that is coming to them. More, even. But as viciously angry as the Right is, I don't think they'll stoop to spray painting "NO EMPATHY" across the memorials of the dead. I don't think the Right is even _capable_ of reflecting back to the Left what the Left has done to them.
Yes, in fact, let's bring back a cultural standard where we no longer respect deliberate misinformation, libel, slander, vandalism, arson, and murder, as free speech. I'm okay with people losing their jobs and social standing for being bloodthirsty delusional lying psychopaths.
Dear god, this is the worst 'fallacy fallacy' I may have ever seen. The point of a gish gallop is that it's SPOKEN. It's a bunch of words said too fast to respond to.
My response is IN TEXT. You can take as long as you want to reply to the individual points in it.
> and FOUR SEPARATE TIMES I saw a memorial to Charlie that had been Willfully Destroyed. I don't recall ever seeing that before.
Knowing that people are assholes, it took literally 30 seconds to learn this. Granted, I had to *want* to learn it.
> In Brooklyn, New York, a statue of George Floyd created by artist Chris Carnabuci was unveiled on June 19, 2021, as part of the Juneteenth celebrations.
Just five days later, on June 24, the statue was defaced with black spray paint and marked with the logo of Patriot Front, a white supremacist group.
This act was investigated as a hate crime, and surveillance footage identified four suspects.
The statue was later moved to Union Square Park in Manhattan, where it was vandalized again on October 3, 2021, when an unidentified man on a skateboard threw paint on the bust.
This second act of vandalism occurred just two days after the statue was installed in Union Square.
The New York Police Department's Hate Crimes Task Force investigated both incidents.
> A similar incident occurred in Newark, New Jersey, where a George Floyd statue outside City Hall was defaced with black paint and spray-painted with the Patriot Front symbol on the same day as the Brooklyn vandalism.
Authorities in both cities were investigating the attacks as hate crimes.
> In Houston, Texas, a mural of George Floyd in downtown was vandalized with racist graffiti in April 2021, shortly after Chauvin's conviction on three charges.
The artist later covered the slurs and restored the mural.
> In Palm Springs, California, a mural honoring George Floyd was vandalized in June 2024, and city officials announced plans to restore it, noting that the artwork could not be moved.
> An actor was arrested in connection with the vandalism of the Union Square statue in October 2021, marking a significant development in the investigation.
I genuinely- no sarcasm- appreciate you responding to my post using specifics.
Lock up everyone who did that. In my experience, one of the most-consistently-true moral rules I've ever observed is that, people who destroy art are the bad guys. Any side; any conflict.
That said, didn't Patriot Front turn out to be the FBI? The guys covering their faces in sunglasses and white masks, wearing identical clothing; all of them with that 'cop build' body type? The guys who announced they were disbanding the instant that Kash Patel became FBI director? If they were defacing memorials with the intent of inflaming race division, then lock them up for thrice as long.
> That said, didn't Patriot Front turn out to be the FBI?
No. If it had, Kash Patel would have been able to tell us. You can't keep a conspiracy like this secret when the boss changes and wants to hear about it and will reward people to bring him evidence.
It's fine to be suspicious of them because they act so squirrelly. They could just be non-fat conservatives, though.
> The guys who announced they were disbanding the instant that Kash Patel became FBI director?
Meanwhile Mr. Free Speech champion Matt Taibbi, who you wrote about recently, feels Trump is the lesser of two evils (despite Trump using government to suppress speech to a far greater degree than the Democrats did) on this issue and feels the Democrats are getting their just deserts.
Democrats have a storied tradition of upholding speech rights and now the chance to reclaim that mantle. I would so love to see it. The problem is looking at their current leadership I don't see anyone with credibility. Who will step up?
Joke about whatever you want, just make it funny. At least the up-their-own-ass left did not set up websites designed to get random people fired from their jobs over mediocre jokes. I thought someone said comedy was now legal...
I feel like a sucker for defending the right-wingers from the cancel culture left. This pearl-clutching routine the right is now engaging in is embarrassing.
Ever think maybe Trump wants these guys fired because he’s a major shareholder of these companies hoping to goose a little more value out them?
These talkshow guys are ballast and if it takes a threat of a threat to get the big guys upstairs to pull the plug and juice the price of deal? —Well, that’s what we call a win-win.
Whether this is the right taking the opportunity to kick their opponent while they're down or a more permanent move to illiberalism has yet to be determined.
Asking the left to reclaim the mantle of free speech is asking a generation of indoctrinated leftists to abandon the principles they've lived by for a decade. I suspect the cognitive dissonance will be too much for them. Suppressing speech was always about power, and I suspect the current batch of lefty Millennials and Zoomers will conclude instead that the real lesson is that they didn't have enough of that. How they address that imbalance will have interesting implications for the stability of the country for the next few years.
I think that the big censorship wave of the 2010s was driven by younger millenials. It remains to be seen how zoomers feel about all this.
I should have qualified my statement to make clear that I was referring specifically to older Zoomers, especially those on the left.
It does appear to me that the current generational definitions are flawed. In terms of cultural shifts, we should be referring to younger Boomers and older X'ers, younger X'ers and older Millennials, younger Millennials and older Zoomers.
I think you underestimate how thoroughly the left ate their own, arguably much more so than any outside group.
It's hard to imagine a more dysfunctional coalition right now.
This is utter nonsense. When did you ever see the left advocating use of government power like this? Even if some of them did, did a Democrat president or politician ever try to effect it?
The *extreme online left* lost its mind for a few years when they still had cultural relevance. They don't anymore. They always punched far above their weight anyway, and now thanks to that brief spasm people are sick of them.
But that doesn't hold a candle to what we're seeing now. This is not just a violation of the "spirit" or the "culture" of free speech by private citizens choosing, however poorly or recklessly, to participate in a cultural revolution of online naming and shaming.
What you are seeing now are real, actual violations of the First Amendment by *the government*. If "the left" had applied similar standards and actions to right-wing media when Democrats were in power, Fox News would be gone, to say nothing of Newsmax and OAN. But now these networks are all caving to Trump so he'll approve their mergers, because in the end rich people will play along with fascists to keep their money.
Before this, the most someone could lay at the feet of a Democratic administration was the bullshit "Twitter Files" scandal. Social media platforms voluntarily seeking advice on dealing with vaccine disinformation during a pandemic doesn't constitute a violation of free speech just because Mark Zuckerberg whines that he "felt pressured" so he can dodge responsibility for another one of his own decisions after heavy criticism.
Liberals can absolutely stand against this, and it doesn't require anyone to repudiate anything, because liberals never advocated government silencing of our political opponents. And even if we had, nobody in power would have taken us seriously, because we didn't put hacks and cretins in charge of our institutions.
Zuckerberg testified that the feds would call up FB and literally scream at them to remove posts. Google "Mark Zuckerberg says Biden officials would 'scream' and 'curse' when seeking removal of Facebook content". That doesn't sound like social media companies "voluntarily seeking advice". That sounds government taking an active hand in suppressing the free speech of private citizens.
In addition, this is early days. What concretely has the Trump administration done in terms of suppressing free speech? Perhaps we will see grievous violations, but first the Trump team has to start putting their plans into effect.
Notice he said this the same month Trump was inaugurated. That doesn't mean it's not true. But he was trying to pander to conservatives at that point.
Or, alternatively, regime change meant that he could finally speak his mind.
You’re an idiot
Was there an argument or a point in there somewhere?
🤣The Democrats have been censoring free speech for years now. The creators of the Disinformation Governance Board!
And the Republicans were censoring people before that. All of American history has seen threats to freedom of speech from both sides. If you know your history, and not just partisan agitprop. But there have also been champions of free speech on both sides. Those champions do not include Donald Trump.
For how much slander and libel has been directed at him, I'd say he's pretty much the top free-speech politician of our time. It's astonishing he hasn't gone farther than he has. He'd be justified to.
He has done literally nothing to defend the free speech rights of anyone who disagrees with him on anything. Even Idi Amin was in favor of the speech of people who liked him.
"He has done literally nothing to defend the free speech rights of anyone who disagrees with him on anything."
I Don't Care. He's a saint compared to Biden. I'll take someone who does nothing, over someone who uses the FBI as his personal army to take down social media posts he doesn't like.
I mean right now Trump is using the DOJ and FCC as a personal army to take down people he doesn't like based solely on their speech. That's...the exact same thing? Maybe a little more effective even?
Biden didn’t do that with his disinformation governance board? Doctors and scientist were fired during Covid for daring to have a different opinion that actually turned out to be true quite often. I voted specifically for free speech, which is why I voted for Trump. I can’t stand the guy, but the censorship that was going on under Biden was downright frightening.
Is the speech slander or libel? Then it's not protected, and shouldn't be.
Like, if I publish an article claiming that you eat live kittens, in an attempt to make you lose your job or reputation, that is a crime, and not protected free speech. It IS protected free speech if you DO happen to eat live kittens. Whether the accusation is TRUE or FALSE makes all the difference.
And there are a hell of a lot of media outlets, journalists, and late-night comedians who deserve to lose their jobs for making and spreading false accusations. Protecting people from lies is a reasonable exception to free speech.
Trump’s government is actively getting people fired over speech. He is suing media and trying to shut down media for speech, he’s threatening universities over speech, he is suing and trying to shut down law firms for speech. He is punishing people who speak about Israel in ways he doesn’t like. His government is trolling social media to investigate and punish individual citizens for speech they don’t like. This isn’t even a complete list.
I hated the Twitter files stuff also. The government shouldn’t be involved in anyone’s speech at all. Trump’s government is doing the same thing Biden’s did but way, way, way worse. If you can’t see that, your level of ignorance at the reality staring you in the face is actually impressive.
So what you mean is he’s doing everything that the Biden administration did. It’s almost as if it didn’t occur to the Democrats that another party might be in control someday and the crap they were doing was being turned back on themselves. The Twitter files were barely the beginning of what Biden did. He had doctors and scientists fired from their jobs for having dissenting opinions about Covid, many of which turned out to be true. Democrats online try to expose anyone who dared to have a different opinion about Covid so that they could get them fired from their jobs. That is the first time I ever saw that in my entire life.
And then there was the disinformation governance board. And the lawfare. I didn’t like Trump, but the Democrats had to be stopped and so that’s who I voted for. Yes, now I have to worry about him doing exactly the same thing that the Biden ministration did go figure. So far he is not worse.
Stop drinking the Kool-Aid, bro.
Respond with substance, bro.
Well, he did sign an executive order.
He hasn’t done any of the censorship that Biden did. Yet. And if he does, he’ll only be doing what Biden already did.
No, he's going further. Stop rationalizing this shit.
Top free speech politician of our time? Put down the crack pipe.
Name a better one.
Bernie Sanders.
This is the point: Arguing about who is or was worse, Biden or Trump, is the wrong way to go forward. We need real advocates for free speech, who will forcefully defend people of either (or any) side against those who would shut them down, from any side. It isn’t easy to prove you mean it or meant it when your perceived side has or had power. It wasn’t easy for honest people who opposed the cancel culture and censorship under Biden to be effective- and liberal voices like the ACLU who in the past did so, defending the rights of rightists, sadly fled from that role. I’m encouraged by FIRE speaking up now exactly because they lean right, but have credibility with liberals/the left who truly embrace freedom of speech. The comments here show how much work we have on any side to re-establish real credibility on this issue (free speech).
You won't get "the left" or "the right" to support free speech, but you can get a substantial minority of each to do so, which is enough to keep it alive.
And there were no champions for free speech coming from the Democratic Party under the Biden administration either. I don’t even care about Trump or Biden. I didn’t really pay much attention to politics at all until the Biden administration started censoring people and using our government to silence anll dissenting opinions on social media, to influence an election. Prominent doctors and scientists were fired from their jobs for daring to have a dissenting opinion about Covid. I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I voted for free speech, which means I voted against the Democrats. Never in my entire life Ihsve I ever seen so much censorship and canceling until the last four years. Trump may be just as bad, but the Democrats had to be stopped because they were the biggest threat to the freedom of speech I have ever seen. Now I will have to worry about Trump, but the Democrats were completely out of control and they still are.
And now they're out of power, in complete shambles, possibly permanently. The party needed to shed its old guard and embrace new ideas anyway.
I have a feeling this is how everything works. Everything.
The young people with new ideas come in and smash the old, entrenched, tyrannical establishment. They are convinced by their victory that they are Always Right about everything. As time passes, they become the old, entrenched, tyrannical establishment. Never allowing dissent, because they are so sure they are morally-pure angels. They must now be taken down by young people with new ideas. And so on.
It's a paraphrase, but Max Planck said, essentially, 'Science advances one funeral at a time.' Likely true of every hierarchy anywhere.
"The Democrats Get Hoisted On Their Own Petard!!!”
news at 11pm…
It might be time to finally admit that both sides of our broken system find free speech troublesome and have a vested interest in curtailing it.
They haven’t cancelled The Three Stooges, right? We should be okay.
One more problem for the Dems: there is a widespread perception that they resorted to extralegal measures in an attempt to defeat Trump. For example, trying to bankrupt his companies through bogus civil lawsuits or to imprison him based on abuses of the court system.
Given that I think the public will harbor a tremendous amount of skepticism for any move where the Democrats attempt to don the mantle or democratic principles in opposing Trump. Isn't the more likely reaction that the D's are just cynical politicians who will seize on anything to attack their political opponents, and who will abandon their newfound principles when it is convenient for them?
In other words, exactly what MAGA politicians are doing right now?
I am merely suggesting that moderates are unlikely to accept that Democrats have experienced a sudden conversion to the cause of democratic principles, given their recent history.
Plenty of CONSERVATIVES, including NATIONAL REVIEW, have pushed back against this.
Kimmel got the axe for trying to portray Kirk's assassin as a right-winger. I think the adults in the room at Nexstar quickly realized that was a non-starter and stepped in to restore some sanity.
By censorship. Cool, cool.
Nobody is under an obligation to rebroadcast your rants. Kimmel just discovered that.
He will no doubt end up here on Substack, or perhaps hosting a podcast from his kitchen.
He got the axe because the FCC pressured the Nexstar. Literal definition of censorship.
"It's called soft power. The Left uses it all the time," he wrote on X. "Thanks to President Trump, the Right has learned how to wield power as well."
Literal censorship would be the feds sending cops down to Disney to tell them to pull the plug. Carr putting public pressure on a private studio is far from ideal, but it is also not a police state.
I didn't say it was a police state, I said it was government censorship. Which it is.
It's government pressure, and we have no idea how influential it actually was. Mitigating factors are that Kimmel wasn't making much money, if any, and a wider cultural shift that is apparent to pretty much everyone at this point.
If the pendulum is going to swing back anyway, and the cycle will repeat; where the Right now becomes its ascent to tyranny, so on and so forth, then let it be over this. This moment is worth that.
I looked at comment after comment of people cheering for the murder of Charlie Kirk, justifying the murder, calling for more murders, saying conservatives should be afraid to speak in public, and FOUR SEPARATE TIMES I saw a memorial to Charlie that had been Willfully Destroyed. I don't recall ever seeing that before. But I watched this escalate for a long time. I left my party in 2019, largely because of the Nick Sandmann incident, where I saw how normalized it was to wish death on a kid who did literally nothing to harm anyone. He wore the other side's hat; that was enough for people to pass around the phrase, "MAGA kids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper." I've seen people repost that, and worse, with ZERO self-awareness that their behavior is unacceptable and insane.
The Left's behavior has gone beyond indecent. I used to belong to them as well. I grew up when the Right was tyrannical. But this is the point where, the insufferable bar patron who's been antagonizing and provoking and needling everyone else all night long finally goes one insult too far, and someone grabs him by his collar and turns his face into a purple cauliflower, and the rest of the bar all applauds their hands raw.
There's free speech, and then there's behaving like an undisciplined child for so long that you run out of provocative taunts, and now you have to desecrate the last, most basic form of human dignity.
The Left deserves every bit of punishment that is coming to them. More, even. But as viciously angry as the Right is, I don't think they'll stoop to spray painting "NO EMPATHY" across the memorials of the dead. I don't think the Right is even _capable_ of reflecting back to the Left what the Left has done to them.
Yes, in fact, let's bring back a cultural standard where we no longer respect deliberate misinformation, libel, slander, vandalism, arson, and murder, as free speech. I'm okay with people losing their jobs and social standing for being bloodthirsty delusional lying psychopaths.
Nice Gish Gallop there. Obamacare covers therapy, you know...
Dear god, this is the worst 'fallacy fallacy' I may have ever seen. The point of a gish gallop is that it's SPOKEN. It's a bunch of words said too fast to respond to.
My response is IN TEXT. You can take as long as you want to reply to the individual points in it.
Which you didn't do.
> and FOUR SEPARATE TIMES I saw a memorial to Charlie that had been Willfully Destroyed. I don't recall ever seeing that before.
Knowing that people are assholes, it took literally 30 seconds to learn this. Granted, I had to *want* to learn it.
> In Brooklyn, New York, a statue of George Floyd created by artist Chris Carnabuci was unveiled on June 19, 2021, as part of the Juneteenth celebrations.
Just five days later, on June 24, the statue was defaced with black spray paint and marked with the logo of Patriot Front, a white supremacist group.
This act was investigated as a hate crime, and surveillance footage identified four suspects.
The statue was later moved to Union Square Park in Manhattan, where it was vandalized again on October 3, 2021, when an unidentified man on a skateboard threw paint on the bust.
This second act of vandalism occurred just two days after the statue was installed in Union Square.
The New York Police Department's Hate Crimes Task Force investigated both incidents.
> A similar incident occurred in Newark, New Jersey, where a George Floyd statue outside City Hall was defaced with black paint and spray-painted with the Patriot Front symbol on the same day as the Brooklyn vandalism.
Authorities in both cities were investigating the attacks as hate crimes.
> In Houston, Texas, a mural of George Floyd in downtown was vandalized with racist graffiti in April 2021, shortly after Chauvin's conviction on three charges.
The artist later covered the slurs and restored the mural.
> In Palm Springs, California, a mural honoring George Floyd was vandalized in June 2024, and city officials announced plans to restore it, noting that the artwork could not be moved.
> An actor was arrested in connection with the vandalism of the Union Square statue in October 2021, marking a significant development in the investigation.
I genuinely- no sarcasm- appreciate you responding to my post using specifics.
Lock up everyone who did that. In my experience, one of the most-consistently-true moral rules I've ever observed is that, people who destroy art are the bad guys. Any side; any conflict.
That said, didn't Patriot Front turn out to be the FBI? The guys covering their faces in sunglasses and white masks, wearing identical clothing; all of them with that 'cop build' body type? The guys who announced they were disbanding the instant that Kash Patel became FBI director? If they were defacing memorials with the intent of inflaming race division, then lock them up for thrice as long.
> That said, didn't Patriot Front turn out to be the FBI?
No. If it had, Kash Patel would have been able to tell us. You can't keep a conspiracy like this secret when the boss changes and wants to hear about it and will reward people to bring him evidence.
It's fine to be suspicious of them because they act so squirrelly. They could just be non-fat conservatives, though.
> The guys who announced they were disbanding the instant that Kash Patel became FBI director?
What have you done to check this story?
For example, what's your primary source for it?
Meanwhile Mr. Free Speech champion Matt Taibbi, who you wrote about recently, feels Trump is the lesser of two evils (despite Trump using government to suppress speech to a far greater degree than the Democrats did) on this issue and feels the Democrats are getting their just deserts.
Democrats have a storied tradition of upholding speech rights and now the chance to reclaim that mantle. I would so love to see it. The problem is looking at their current leadership I don't see anyone with credibility. Who will step up?
Sorry, but I don't believe that Kimmel meant a joke.
The whole thing was a set up to mocking Trump for showing zero human emotion about the murder of his friend.
Doesn't matter
Joke about whatever you want, just make it funny. At least the up-their-own-ass left did not set up websites designed to get random people fired from their jobs over mediocre jokes. I thought someone said comedy was now legal...
I feel like a sucker for defending the right-wingers from the cancel culture left. This pearl-clutching routine the right is now engaging in is embarrassing.
Just DO something, Dems!!!!
Ever think maybe Trump wants these guys fired because he’s a major shareholder of these companies hoping to goose a little more value out them?
These talkshow guys are ballast and if it takes a threat of a threat to get the big guys upstairs to pull the plug and juice the price of deal? —Well, that’s what we call a win-win.
If you're going to be a headache, you better be making money.
Damn straight! “We’ll defend you to the death…or the fourth bad quarter, whichever comes first.”
Or at least be funny
Not even a year ago they were claiming that free speech is not absolute. How quickly things change when an election doesn’t go their way.