Human Dialogue, Freedom, and Censorship

 

As facts start to come out and scandals start to close in, I am reminded of the following phase that stems from Soviet era Russia:  “There is no news in the Truth, and there is no truth in the News (В Правде нет известия, и в Известие нет правды).”

Actually, this stems from the two Russian newspapers – Pravda and Izvestiye.   Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, was considered to be filled with lies even though its name translates as “truth”, while the name Izvestiye, the other Soviet newspaper, translates as “news” and was the official newspaper of the Supreme Soviet.  The saying, at the time, was a joke because all good Russians knew that they could not get the truth or the news from state-controlled media.

Today Americans also have difficulty obtaining news or truth.  The government is too often involved in dissemination and editing of what should be accurate news and truth.  The state of the American media and Americans’ access to news, facts, and truth can be summarized as: 

Let me define truth, for the purposes of this discussion, as that which is in accordance with fact, evidence, and reality.  News I will define as new or noteworthy information in which an audience will likely be interested.

Editorial Discretion has become Political Censorship

The mainstream media today is less interested in providing facts to its readers, viewers, and listeners than it is in pleasing government and elite powers by providing their narratives to audiences rather than facts of a situation.  And audiences are often more interested in the entertainment rather than factual aspects of a story.    Hence, the truth (factual recitation) is not the news, and the news, because it is not factually accurate, is not the truth.

I am not talking about editorial discretion which has always been part of news dissemination.  What to print, where to place a story, how much time/space to give a story – these have always been decisions for editors and have always been colored somewhat by their biases, both conscious and unconscious. 

But today these decisions go far beyond and are far removed from simple editorial discretion.  We now have concrete evidence of state involvement and control of what is/is not “truth” and what information will be disseminated or hidden.   Such involvement has permeated both the actual “news” media as well as social media platforms. 

For example, House investigations now provide documentation that Facebook confirmed to the White House that it was working to accomplish “the administration’s directives” on suppressing content that clashed with its COVID vaccine agenda.  There are processes by which the government can flag certain content on social media and request it be suppressed.  There is also evidence that the White House wanted social media to change its on-line algorithms so that users would see more information from sources supportive of the White House agenda.

The News or Mainstream Media is now also beholden to powers outside of the news itself.  While news editors, as noted above, have always made editorial choices, those editors ensured that the stories presented in their news sections were factual; they left opinion for the opinion pages.  Not so anymore.

Today’s news sources clearly support one or the other political party and every aspect of their “news” reflects that.  Not just the selection of which stories to present, but the manner in which any story is presented. 

The conservative and right-leaning media will slant everything to support right wing positions and politicians while the left-leaning media will slant in the opposite direction.  Stories that cover the front pages of media with one political leaning will be close to non-existent in the media of the opposite political leaning.  Indeed, we now have proof of news sources such as the NY Times and Washington Post deliberately omitting or revising facts of key stories such as the now debunked Russian collusion or the now confirmed story of the Hunter Biden laptop.  Stories that are presented will often be filled with adjectives and other modifiers that, while perhaps appropriate in opinion pieces, are blatant attempts to turn what should be a factual news story into an opinion advocating a particular political position.

Consider the two big stories over the past few days:  the Trump indictments and the concrete evidence of President Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence peddling scheme that resulted in huge monetary payments to the Biden family.    To compare the coverage of these two stories between right and left leaning news media is to read accounts of two seemingly completely different worlds. 

It is next to impossible to find a full and objective account of the Trump charges along with the legal assertions that they are politically motivated and/or a form of election interference.  Similarly, one can barely find the Biden story in left-leaning media, and when one does it is downplayed as simply some sort of Republican witch hunt, while the right-leaning media perhaps over sensationalizes the clearly damning evidence of Biden’s quite likely illegal interactions with foreign countries and the possibility of its compromising of the President. 

The “news” from the left leaning media essentially has already found Trump guilty and Biden completely innocent while the right leaning media takes the opposite view.  This is not news.  This is not truth.  This is bias and propaganda.  And in many instances it is guided by the very people that we elect to protect us and our First Amendment rights. 

Information, Not Censorship, Heals and Sustains America

The First Amendment, a cornerstone of our American democracy, demands a free and objective news media in order that the people can voice and hear a variety of views and make their own decisions.  That others would decide what the people should and should not hear and, worse yet, make judgements about what information is made available in an attempt to do the people’s thinking for them is in complete antipathy to the First Amendment and all it stands for.

When those who should be leading our country become more concerned with their own power than their duty to the country and the people they serve, they find ways to justify their censorship and denial of free speech and the importance of narrative – their narrative – over truth or news.

Suppression of information is often done under the guise of protecting us from “misinformation” though as Robert Kennedy Jr. well-articulated in his July appearance before the House Committee regarding Censorship and Free Speech, the term is often rephrased as “mal-information” – not incorrect but just bad as in information that the government or its lackeys in the media have decided would be bad for the populace to hear, usually because it contradicts the narrative of those in power. 

Our country is split into two camps, and each wants to provide a narrative that benefits them.  To establish that narrative, censorship of truth and news becomes a temptation that is hard to resist.  That, however, is the worst possible reaction.

Words from Kennedy’s opening statement to the House Committee on Censorship are instructive.  He responded to Democrats’ concern about “the need to beat this toxic polarization that is destroying our country today and how do we deal with that?” Kennedy stated: “This kind of division is more dangerous for our country than any time since the American Civil War.  How do we [deal with] that?  Every Democrat on this committee, do you think you can do that by censoring people?  I am telling you, you cannot.  That only aggravates and amplifies the problem.”

Recently Sen. Joe Manchin spoke and wrote about the division in America, stating that the United States is “not designed for” the level of division currently seen within the country, leaving many “common-sense” Americans without a political home.   He wrote:

The extremes on the left and right now control the Democratic and Republican Parties, defining our politics and policy debates. These partisan extremes are in the business of feeding political division and dysfunction everyday – and their business is booming.

They want America divided – because they benefit greatly from it. They want us to see each other as enemies because they feed off of it. They attack our institutions, whether it is our Capitol, our elected leaders or our justice system, without caring about the lasting damage it does.

In America, leadership is not a birthright but instead it’s the choice of voters after respectful debates of ideas. And partisan leaders on both sides of the aisle are increasingly threatened by the growing desire for debate.

To be clear, while both parties are to some extent responsible for resorting to narrative and aggravating division, it is the current Administration and the hard Left that are aggressively pushing censorship and even elimination of First Amendment freedoms.

Dialogue Is Our Humanity

But why does debate and this current censorship matter?  Why not just pick a left or right bubble and live within it?  Or simply allow the government and its media to tell us what to think?  The answer is not only that this contradicts the very core of the 1st Amendment, a necessary cornerstone of our government and our way of life.  It is not only that it furthers a nefarious goal of making the American people enemies of one another.  These, of course, are serious problems, especially to those who believe in American democracy.  But perhaps an even larger problem is that it works to destroy the very core of our existence.

Life in the end is a dialogue.  We participate by speaking, asking questions, listening, writing, reading, responding, agreeing, disagreeing, learning.  A dialogue cannot be open and honest if information is restricted or denied.  With censorship we lose part of the dialogue, and we allow someone else to create a dialogue for us.  We stop learning.  We stop thinking.  We stop speaking.  And we lose part of our humanity.  We become nothing more than a tool for those creating the dialogue for us.

Currently the government and others in power through pressure on private platforms are trying to shape our dialogue.  The media gives us the stories they want discussed in a way that will create preordained narratives.  But our information is limited and therefore our dialogue is limited and we are ultimately limiting our individual humanity as we delegate our power to dialogue to the state.

To retain our humanity and our freedom we must remember that goals of personal comfort and protection from negative narratives are not in the end in our best interest.  Free thought and free dialogue are.  We must remember that good dialogue requires others and their possibly differing and uncomfortable viewpoints.  Those others are not enemies.  Silencing and censorship are the enemy as is a state-controlled media. 

As the mounting proof of censorship and silencing becomes both truth and news we must demand that our news media actually provide us with news that is truth and truth that is news.  All of it.  Only then can we dialogue as fully engaged free people.

Education requires a questioning interaction – with oneself and with others

 It is easy to give up on America these days.  In considering what we need to move forward I always seem to return to education and the fact that our current education systems do not teach the basic thinking skills that allow individuals to make informed decisions about the direction they would like their country to take.  Indeed, today our education system seems to be more aligned with the narrowness of propaganda than with the open-mindedness that true education requires.

Recently I heard someone on the radio arguing that college is a waste of money because you can learn as much by simply looking up the subjects you would study on Google and reading the information there.

Certainly, one can read up on a subject and in so doing gain information about that subject – that is, learn something about the subject.  But that is not all that education entails and it is not all that occurs in a healthy college environment.  Learning in the sense of acquiring information is but one part of education.  Education also includes reflection both on oneself and on the information being learned, it requires an open mind in coming to information and in listening to views of others about that information.   Most importantly, it requires constant questioning – of the information being presented, of the presenter, and of oneself

Simply acquiring knowledge is not true learning.  Learning and true education have at their core the question “why?”  The student must be taught to ask that question repeatedly, to move step by step into a deeper understanding of the subject being studied and of the understanding of others about that subject. 

In a true educational setting students will be pushed to use “why?” to push themselves to levels of understanding and achievement of which they did not even know they were capable.  They will be asked to address topics with open and curious minds, not minds that are preset or predisposed to merely accept views of others as their own without question. 

Reading or otherwise acquiring information in and of itself does not require thinking and is more likely to simply result in acceptance of the ideas of others.  In contrast, a true teacher will ask a student to question what is read, perhaps to hear other views of the readings presented during a class discussion with other students.  Reading alone does not require the students to articulate their own views about what was read or push the students to stretch their mind to the deeper thinking that discussion with others often does.  Rather, it allows the students to remain in their own world without examining and questioning the values and assumptions of that world.

Those who try to avoid questioning or who try to block the questioning and its resulting mental growth in others are actually quite insecure.  They need a certain and unchanging world in which everyone agrees with their assumptions and beliefs.  (I suspect such is the case of the radio voice I heard – afraid that college might force questioning of his own firmly established views.)

Such people exist on both sides of the political aisle and are always dangerous.  They are the false prophets, the purveyors of propaganda.  They are in many ways the evil opposite of true educators. 

These false prophets tell people what they want to hear; they feed existing fears and provide false solutions.  They demand their students accept what they are told without question, presenting their own view on topics as the one and only acceptable viewpoint.  Their “teaching” provides comfort; it is easy to accept in its certainty. 

True education is anything but comfortable.  It demands that students embrace the discovery and investigation of new ideas, even when that information is painful.  Its lessons can be disturbing as the students explore the depths and uncertainties of their own minds and their world.  It demands that students read beyond superficialities and plunge to depths of understanding that in the end allow a deeper sense of a common humanity that joins us all.

Reading, acquiring information, is only a beginning.  Questioning that reading and being questioned about one’s own ideas about the reading force one to learn and understand rather than simply acquire information.  And interaction with others and their thoughts and understandings about the same information pushes one even further to understand and articulate their own understanding and knowledge about the topic.  Ultimately, this interaction of ideas and ultimately of humanity itself is what a true education will entail.

With that education comes a confidence in who one truly is and about the world in which we all live.  That confidence overcomes the fear of real learning that the propogandists purvey and the cowards accept.

Today in America we have a lot of cowards.  On both sides.  They have dug into their positions and both sides can make arguments supportive of their views.  But what they cannot do is listen to, let alone understand the views of others.  (I note here that understanding does not necessarily require acceptance or a change in one’s own position, but it does result in tolerance.) Too many are afraid to question their own beliefs and who they are and where they are really going – they are imprisoned by their own fears and insecurity, afraid to evolve, denying the humanity that is common to us all. 

True education requires that one not fear human interaction, even with uncomfortable ideas of others.  True education is far more than merely acquiring information.  In true education the student takes the acquired information and is both externally pushed and internally motivated to transform that information into a deeper knowledge of the world, humanity, and one’s place in it; the true student, like all of humanity, is ever evolving and that evolution is reflected in the student’s interactions in the world and with others.

Yet, today, we have teachers who do not educate.  They do not teach their students to think critically – to ask “why?”.  Teachers should delight when a student questions, even and especially when a student questions their own teacher.  But too many of today’s “educators” simply provide information that reflects their own world view and expect students to accept and adopt what they are told without question.  Students are too often punished rather than praised for questioning what they are told.  Too many “educators” are teaching students to become receivers of propaganda, primed to accept the words of false prophets.

The discord and dystopia that we see around us is not going to go away unless and until we once again become real students of our world and our humanity, until we encourage, indeed demand, that education be led by questioning, not simply acquiring.  We must think, ask “why?”, interact with open minds until once again we are able to know ourselves and see our true and common humanity.  This we must teach our children, and this we must model for them as adults.

 

Don’t Let Them Fool You Again

"You cannot have a free and fair election when the media, the tech companies, and the intelligence community censor information about the foreign business connections of one of the two presidential candidates."

-Joel B. Pollak, Blue State Blues: The 2020 Election* Gets a Giant Asterisk over Hunter Biden Laptop, LINK 

Since 2020 I have been saying that while Joe Biden may have won the actual vote, that vote was not fair because the media suppressed information and distorted facts into a comprehensive narrative that pushed voters away from Donald Trump and toward Joe Biden.  Time magazine, as I have previously pointed out, so much as admitted this “conspiracy” to swing the election and “save the country.” That effort to “save the country” destroyed the very democracy – the freedom of the people to decide – that makes this country what it is.

The Big Lie

But to mention any of this to other than open-eyed conservatives has been to risk being called a crazy conspiracy theorist who has fallen for the Trump and right-wing lies.  But now, perhaps, those name callers will listen.

Now the truth is coming out:  the Russian hoax that consumed the media for the entirety of Trump’s presidency and underlay at least one of the Trump impeachment attempts has been proven to have been manufactured by the Democrats.  

And, now the mainstream media is admitting what they well knew before the election:  that the infamous Hunter Biden laptop which was deemed nothing more than Russian/Trumpian disinformation is in fact real and contains incriminating emails as well as information that implicates his father, then candidate and now President Joe Biden.

It’s interesting that the Left likes to blame Russia when the anti-democratic tactics used by Russia’s government are not that different from those used by the Left here.  Russia has sham elections; those in  power, not the people, decide their results.  We are hearing, and condemning, Putin’s crack down on Russian media as he allows only his story and justification of his invasion of Ukraine to be fed to his people.  But how is that really any different than what we have in this country: a people fed not facts but narrative by an undemocratic power structure that believes it has the right to decide for the people?

Democracy Requires Information

Democracy requires freedom of thought, and freedom of thought requires a free flow of and access to information, for without information upon which to base their own decisions, the people really have no freedom to think or to decide.

In 1780 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in its Declaration of Rights of the Inhabitants stated, “The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state.”  Similarly, in 1776, North Carolina’s Declaration of Rights stated, “That the freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and therefore ought never to be restrained.”

Our Founding Fathers and authors of our Constitution understood that freedom of the press – the right of the people to know the facts (as opposed to a selected narrative) – is an essential underpinning of democracy.  “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. 

John Adams, our country’s second President wrote that “The liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state.” He stated, “But none of the means of information are more sacred, or have been cherished with more tenderness and care by the settlers of America, than the press.” 

Today our Press, along with the rest of our power and information structure has decided that narrative is more important than facts and truth.  When the people lose access to that information, they lose their freedom and their democracy.

The power structure that includes mainstream media decided that they did not want President Trump to have a second term and so they withheld information from the public that would have allowed them to assess both 2020 candidates on an even playing field.  They fed the public false information that was anti-Trump and pro-Biden.  This did not “fix” the election in the traditional understanding of casting fraudulent ballots (although some of that occurred too), but it did “fix” the election in the sense that it left the voters without essential facts and with manufactured/false facts with which to choose for whom to vote. 

The author of the above quote is right:  President Biden should have an asterisk after his name for the rest of history to show that this was not a fair election in the sense of American democracy and the people’s rights to inform themselves of all facts and make their own decision about for whom to vote.  Rather, this election was manipulated by a vast power structure that was anti-Trump and either pro-Biden or more generally pro-Left.

The facts of the Hunter Biden laptop are now slowly being fed to us by the media which has decided they will now admit it exists and selectively feed us its contents.  This week Republican Rep. Gaetz asked that the contents of the Biden laptop (on a flash drive) be placed into the record of the House Judiciary Committee.  Its Democratic Chair, Rep. Nadler objected.  But, after some delay and a letter from Gaetz indicating support for its entry into the record by “majority authority,” the flash drive containing a copy of the contents is now public record.

Of course, that does not stop the attempts to deny and downplay its contents by those who benefited from it being hidden during the election as nothing more than a right wing conspiracy theory.  Indeed, President Biden continues to say it is all a lie.

Would Informed Minds Have Decided Differently?

Might it have made a difference to some voters if they had been given the information that the mainstream media had available but kept hidden that candidate Biden’s son was under investigation for tax evasion, that candidate Biden himself financially benefitted from his son’s questionable foreign dealings with Ukraine and China?

Would it have made a difference if voters had been informed that Vice President Biden was not only aware of, but also intimately involved in a corrupt, multimillion-dollar, international influence-peddling scheme run by Hunter, and Joe’s brother Jim Biden, in the countries for which Joe was point man in the Obama administration, such as Russia, Ukraine and China? 

Would it have mattered to voters that during the last two years of Joe Biden’s vice presidency Hunter in conjunction with “the big guy” Joe Biden, was using the Biden name to open doors and find acquisitions for Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC?   Or that $6 million CEFC wired into the business bank account of trusted Biden family friend Rob Walker, a former Clinton administration official whose wife, Betsy Massey Walker, had been Jill Biden’s assistant when she was Second Lady?

Would it have mattered to voters that SinoHawk Holdings, which was set up on May 15, 2017, for a joint venture between CEFC and Hunter and his business partners, was the deal for which Joe Biden was to get a 10% cut, as cited in an infamous 2017 email on the laptop, “10 [percent] held by H [Hunter] for the big guy [Joe Biden].”?

There is a lot on this laptop.  The laptop that the mainstream media and Leftist power structure asserted did not exist, even while knowing that it did.  Would it have changed some people’s votes if they had been given these hidden facts?  Perhaps.  We will never know. 

Moving Forward With Open Eyes

Along with Joe, many on the Left will continue to assert that there is “nothing to see here, move along.”  But the whole point in a democracy is that it is not for some power structure to make that decision.  It is for the people, who must be given access to ALL the facts which are available, to decide what to make of those facts.  Otherwise, how is this really any different from a state media like Russia where the people are given selective facts and through those selections are manipulated and told what to think and to believe.

Some people realized this sort of thing was going on throughout Donald Trump’s presidency in an effort to inhibit his ability to serve as President and in an effort to deny him reelection.  But, as directed by the mainstream propaganda narrative machine, most people accepted the conspiracy theory label that was attached to this and any other potentially negative publicity about the Left. 

Those who ignored mutterings from the Right can label themselves fooled.  Perhaps they were blinded by Trump’s often acerbic language which was up-played and often distorted by that same propaganda machine while it downplayed or simply failed to report his many successes for this country.  It’s hard to fight the vast power and propaganda machine that currently exists.  It’s hard to find the facts and thus the truth. 

What I wish is that, as the truth and actual facts begin to come out, that the millions who were fooled will not deny that they were indeed misled.  No one likes to make a mistake, to be made a fool of, but to ignore that it happened, to explain it away, only leaves those who fooled and took advantage of you the ability to do it again.

This country cannot survive without the freedom of information, without the assertion of the populace of their right to know and to decide for themselves.  The physical country might remain as a place on a map, but the democracy that it once was will die.

So, admit you were fooled by a propaganda machine that you once could trust but no more.  Admit that this Leftist machine has an agenda that it is determined to put into place without any real input from the people. 

Dumbing Down in the Name of Equity

Education.  It used to be a place where students would not only gain instruction in both general and specific topics.  It was also most importantly where students learned to question and to reason – to do the critical thinking that is necessary not only to expand one’s own mind and reach one’s own potential but is also necessary to understand others in society and to work together with those others to move society and mankind forward.

That is not education today.  Today we only allow students to learn that which meets the approval of a woke culture under its false promise of “equity”.  Questioning what is taught is frowned upon if not overtly disallowed.  No room for new or independent thoughts.  No tolerance for diverse views.

Consider the following examples (just a few of many available): 

·        A Virginia school district has cancelled Dr. Seuss for “racial undertones.”

·        Boston Public Schools are suspending Advanced classes because too many students in them are White or Asian (no evidence that the student makeup is based on any sort of discrimination).

·        English teachers across the country have cancelled Shakespeare as well as Greek classics because of “racism, homophobia, classism.”

·        Tom Sawyer has been cancelled due to racism.

·        Schools regularly condemn, punish, expel students for expressing un-approved views such as anti-abortion beliefs, Christian beliefs, conservative beliefs.  Students are sent home for wearing patriotic clothing displaying such things as the American flag.  A student who called conservative Black spokesperson Candace Owens a “Black trailblazer” was subjected to a schoolwide email condemning the student as racist.

·        The names “Abraham Lincoln” and “George Washington” have been removed from schools in California.

·        Schools are replacing traditional American history with the 1619 Project curriculum.  Written not by history scholars but by biased journalists, the 1619 curriculum “aims to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States' national narrative.”  It teaches that our entire country is based on a hatred of Whites toward Blacks.  It denounces the actual proven and factual history of our country as false and racist.  The premises of the 1619 Project have been shown to be erroneous.

·        More generally history instruction has taken a turn whereby America is seen to be an evil creation of White supremacists.  Students learn they should have no pride in their country.  White students are told they should be ashamed of their whiteness and feel guilt simply because they are White.

·        Critical Race Theory training, something that is notably both racist and inaccurate, is also a central part of public-school curriculums.  It focuses on instilling the belief that Whites are racist and that White supremacy is a continuing and systemic problem that cause a power imbalance and a subjugation of Blacks.  Basically, it teaches people of color to hate whites and teaches Whites to feel guilty and ashamed of who they are.

·        Teachers and professors who speak about differing perspectives or encourage students to discuss varying views on a topic are often censured or fired.

·        The hard sciences are not excused from the wokeness of the cancel culture.  Math has recently been accused of promoting White supremacy; demanding showing of work (thinking) or demanding correct answers is by some educators considered to be racist. 

·        Similarly, there are proper viewpoints that students are instructed to take about a variety of scientific theories.  Consider global warming:  while there are many theories about causes, effects, solutions, etc., many students are taught only the perspective of the Left-Green New Deal advocates while being told that questioning it or considering other perspectives is just plain wrong.  Science does not progress when it cannot be questioned just as the human mind does not grow when it cannot question.

·        Beyond the academics, the cancel culture reaches into extracurricular and other activities associated with education.  Students are taught that biological sex is subservient to gender identity.  Students are taught sexual concepts that are not scientifically accurate as young as kindergarten and are encouraged to choose and change their gender at will and without parental consent or even parental knowledge.

·        Women’s and girls sports currently are being eviscerated by the mandate that biological males are allowed to compete as women.  This essentially destroys the fair playing field and places women in a very real no-win situation – a situation that is both demeaning and destructive to their motivation.

These are just a few of the things that are going on in our educational institutions today.  This is happening at the behest of the Left and the woke and with the full blessing and assistance of the Biden Administration. 

This is a travesty, a tragedy, and simply unfair to the minds and souls of our young.  By not teaching students to think and reason, and by denying to those who can the opportunity to excel, we are dumbing down our educational system, our students, and in the end our entire country.

Education is supposed to be “the act or process of imparting or acquiring general or particular knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.”  This definition includes what I believe is the most important thing that any educational system or process can teach: the powers of reasoning and judgment, better known as critical thinking.  It is in that area that I believe the majority of educational systems in this country are utter failures. 

Today’s educational model does not teach critical thinking; moreover, it does not allow it.   Too often students are discouraged from questioning.  They are fed subject matter material, told to accept it, learn it, prove they heard what they were told by regurgitating in on tests.  Any aspect of critical thinking has been replaced by instilling a specific Leftist agenda and value system into the minds of our young. 

Students need to be exposed to more than one viewpoint, to alternate ideas, diverse authors, differing theories.  They need to be taught to solve problems, not just accept answers lectured to them.  They need to be taught how to analyze and assimilate facts and theories and viewpoints in order to discover and support their own conclusions. 

By not teaching or allowing students to question the information they are given, schools today deny the students the raw materials from which they could discover the joy of critical thinking and use it to realize their own full potential.  Not only does this not raise their thinking beyond a very basic level, it also creates the perfect environment for instilling minds with propaganda rather than knowledge.

The ability to question is necessary to preserve the freedoms of democracy.  Without questioning, when questions and diverse ideas are denied, democracy itself is being denied.

Short Notes on the First Amendment and Today’s News

     The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states in full:  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
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     Losing a security clearance when one no longer holds a job that requires it is not an infringement of one’s first amendment rights.  Those rights include speech, assembly, religion.  They do not include the right to be informed of national classified secrets and other information and use that to further one’s position as a partisan pundit.  Mr. Brennan is free to say his rights were infringed, but in reality they were not.
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     The hysteria around “fake news” is partly fueled by a lack of clarity or agreement as to what is “news.”  Traditionally, news has been a full, fair and objective reporting of facts and noteworthy information relevant to an issue or recent event.   That was not to be confused with opinion which is someone’s view or judgement about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.  Opinion can easily become propaganda when one uses information in a biased or misleading manner in order to publicize a particular political agenda or point of view.
     Today, news and opinion are less clearly defined, nor are they separated and are rarely distinguished.  In many cases both have taken on an entertainment rather than an informative role, as well as, in some cases, a propaganda role.  The term “fake news” seems to include instances where news media present incomplete information or use weighted language and in effect present opinion while calling it news. 
     The freedom of the press includes the gathering of facts and the right to present those facts as well as to present opinions about those facts.  The problem is that one should not be presented as if it were the other.  We, as a free people, depend upon the press to keep us informed, but that information must begin with a clarity of what is objective news and what is opinion.  The press is derelict in its duties when it (whether intentionally or negligently) confuses the two.
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     Freedom of peaceable assembly is not limited only to certain view points.  There is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment.   Democracy depends upon a free and full market place of ideas, even those that most of us find abhorrent.  Let all ideas be presented and have confidence that the people are capable of determining which should be accepted and which rejected.  That is freedom.
                                                                            ~
     When it comes to speech, let’s not be hypocrites; let’s have the same standards for what we will or will not find acceptable.  For example, why is it not OK for Trump to use the word “dog” when discussing Omarosa, but accepted if not celebrated when Ivanka is referred to as a c*nt, or Melania as a whore?  Why do allegedly racist comments by some result in job loss, while similar comments by others are excused?  Why are certain comments removed from social media while other, nearly identical comments are not?   Why are threats to the children of the President, his staff, and his supporters not condemned as they would be if directed at anyone else?   Why are only some people intimidated both verbally and sometimes physically when they “speak” in the form of a hat or a shirt or a bumper sticker asserting a particular political position?  The answer to questions such as these is simply that it depends upon whether the speaker and the comments are pro or anti Trump and his administration.  The chilling effect that this has on free speech is frightening!
                                                                           ~
     Let’s all just try to be more precise, articulate, and fair in our support of and discussions about speech and freedom and the first amendment.

Stop Letting Them Use Your Emotions to Control You!

The issue of the day is immigration.  We see photos of a crying little girl.  We are told babies are being torn from their mothers’ breasts.  We are told children are being placed in “concentration camps.” Of course, these are selective assertions, some of which are blatantly false.   All of this is used to motivate anti-Trump sentiment while making people so emotional that they can’t, don’t want to, or refuse to objectively look at all the facts and, more importantly, to THINK for themselves. 

Regarding emotional facts and their use as propaganda, Psychology Today states:

Propaganda traffics mostly in emotions, and not just negative ones. Propagandists appeal to our fears but also to our courage, our hatred and our love. The fact that propaganda is at heart an emotional manipulation also does not mean that our emotions and "emotionality" are bad. It means that our emotional system can be manipulated to destructive ends.

The antidote to the process of propaganda is the process of finding factual truth. The best way we have for doing that is through scientific inquiry, which referees competing claims systematically based on evidence. The propagandist process subordinates the facts to an agenda, even at the price of distorting or ignoring the facts altogether.

(The Con of Propaganda by Noam Shpancer Ph.D., https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/201702/the-con-propaganda )

The current propaganda attack about immigration plays to your compassion.  That human compassion that so many are feeling about the children at the border is a noble emotion.  But, sadly, it is being used to manipulate and exploit that emotion in a very un-noble and political agenda.

In the current emotional propaganda on immigration and children, you are not shown the actual housing for the children or the many services that are provided for them there.  You are not given the facts and statistics of the immigration laws, the numbers of those attempting to cross our borders illegally without any attempt to follow our very generous legal immigration laws and procedures, you are not told the numbers of criminals attempting to cross our borders, the child trafficking that occurs across the border, the number of “catch and release” families that have been allowed into the U. S. and then never followed through with appropriate paper work to become legal and indeed disappeared without returning for court hearings.  You are not told that there has been an enormous increase in the numbers of adults trying to cross with children that they fraudulently claim as family members.  And, you are certainly not reminded that those who are separated from their children are those who have broken our laws and committed an illegal act.   These are all facts that are relevant to this issue, as is the simple fact that we are a country of laws, not men (see earlier blog post On Law and Freedom, http://ps.pinkspolitics.com/2018/06/on-law-and-freedom.html ). 

I encourage everyone who is being swayed by the propaganda offensive  to listen to today’s briefing by the Secretary of Homeland Security which gives a much fuller picture of the problems at the southern border as well as actual facts about separations of children from parents:  https://www.c-span.org/video/?447252-1/homeland-security-secretary-nielsen-calls-congress-fix-immigration-policy&vod

We have laws and we cannot let emotion alone negate those laws.   We cannot let our sound and good emotions be manipulated for political gain.   If we become a country of emotion, not law, then we are certainly well on our way to anarchy.  Children on a playground let emotions rule their behavior.  Adults may be guided by their underlying emotions and values, but they create rules and then follow them while demanding that they be enforced.   At least, that is what adults in this country used to do.

Our government, as it should, is simply enforcing the law.  Congress makes the laws.  People who, upon examination of all relevant facts, would like to see the laws changed, should contact their Congress people.  I think that most everyone would agree that we need to resolve and update our immigration laws.  But we have a process for doing that, and it is not done by manipulating emotions and demanding that laws simply not be enforced.

Do not let emotional photos and misleading or incomplete facts keep you from using your mind.  Yes, consider the heart-wrenching facts and your emotional responses, but also consider other emotional facts that are more likely to cause feelings of fear or anger than compassion (such as the number of criminals illegally crossing and then lost in our country or the parents who separate themselves from their children and send them across the border alone or with criminals.) 

Objectively consider these things along with the existing law and what is the role of law in our society.  Those reciting the emotional anti-administration narrative also demand that the President and the executive branch “pause” enforcement of the law out of compassion.  Consider what a slippery slope this would create:  if whenever we have compassion that in some way conflicts with the enforcement of a law we just suspend the law, we eventually could have very few laws being enforced and those that are being enforced would be enforced subjectively and unevenly.  Moreover, by allowing this emotional control one sets the stage for even more manipulative propaganda.  And, propaganda is rarely used for the benefit of others, but rather for the benefit and power of the propagandist.

Perhaps you want to be a part of the fight for open borders or simply to unseat President Trump.  You have every right to make the decision to take that stand.  I only hope that it is indeed your decision to do so based upon all the relevant facts and not simply a result of emotional propaganda.

Ask yourself whether this is the direction you truly choose, or if your compassionate heart and legitimate emotion about children is instead being used by those whose agenda has little to do with children or immigration and more to do with amassing foot-soldiers in a far more calculated political agenda?  An agenda which is ultimately intended to create and maintain the power of those who are tampering with your kind heart.