https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/get_ready_to_be_muzzled_the_coming_war_on_so_called_dangerous_or_hateful_speech
Get Ready to Be Muzzled: The Coming War on So-Called Hate Speech
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.”—Benjamin Franklin
Beware of those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech.
Especially be on your guard when the reasons given for limiting your freedoms end up expanding the government’s powers.
In the wake of a mass shooting in Buffalo, NY, carried out by an 18-year-old gunman in military gear allegedly motivated by fears that the white race is in danger of being replaced, there have been renewed calls for social media monitoring, censorship of flagged content that could be construed as dangerous or hateful, and limitations on free speech activities, particularly online.
As expected, those who want safety at all costs will clamor for more gun control measures (if not at an outright ban on weapons for non-military, non-police personnel), widespread mental health screening of the general population and greater scrutiny of military veterans, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do random bag searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more surveillance of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.
All of these measures play into the government’s hands.
As we have learned the hard way, the phantom promise of safety in exchange for restricted or regulated liberty is a false, misguided doctrine that serves only to give the government greater authority to crack down, lock down, and institute even more totalitarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.
Add the Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board” to that mix, empower it to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
After all, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.
Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
It’s been a long time since free speech was actually free.
On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak.
In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.
That’s not a whole lot of freedom, especially if you’re inclined to voice opinions that may be construed as conspiratorial or dangerous.
This steady, pervasive censorship creep clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness and inflicted on us by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) is technofascism, and it does not tolerate dissent.
These internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns. They’re laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
The internet, hailed as a super-information highway, is increasingly becoming the police state’s secret weapon. This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”
What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go and nothing left to say that cannot be misconstrued and used to muzzle us.
Yet what a lot of people fail to understand, however, is that it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted.
We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.
With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”
Little by little, Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their freedoms.
This is how oppression becomes systemic, what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.
It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.
Diamond’s concerns related to Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, but it’s a powerful analogy for the steady erosion of our freedoms and decline of our country right under our noses.
As Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”
His answer: “I suspect that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper.”
Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Yet almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.
The same could be said of the America today: it, too, is being reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they are failing to preserve freedom for future generations.
In Easter Island’s case, as Diamond speculates:
"The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”
Sound painfully familiar yet?
We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. It has vanished slowly, over the decades. Those who warned against the dangers posed by too many laws, invasive surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids and the like have been silenced and ignored. They stopped teaching about freedom in the schools. Few Americans know their history. And even fewer seem to care that their fellow Americans are being jailed, muzzled, shot, tasered, and treated as if they have no rights at all.
The erosion of our freedoms happened so incrementally, no one seemed to notice. Only the older generations, remembering what true freedom was like, recognized the difference. Gradually, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry became fewer, smaller and less important. By the time the last freedom falls, no one will know the difference.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls: with a thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother, but they add up.
Each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.
We are on that downward slope now.
The contagion of fear that has been spread with the help of government agencies, corporations and the power elite is poisoning the well, whitewashing our history, turning citizen against citizen, and stripping us of our rights.
America is approaching another reckoning right now, one that will pit our commitment to freedom principles against a level of fear-mongering that is being used to wreak havoc on everything in its path.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, while we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle, a tsunami approaches.
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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/82596/your-standard-of-living-is-being-systematically.html
Your Standard Of Living Is Being Systematically Destroyed
Flooding our economy with money was inevitably going to create an inflation crisis, and that is precisely what has happened.
Back in May 2020, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States was $1.96.
One year later, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States was $3.08.
That was more than a 50 percent increase in just 12 months.
But that wasn’t the end of the story.
On Sunday, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States hit an all-time record of $4.47.
Then on Monday it hit another all-time record of $4.48 per gallon.
That means that the price of gasoline has risen almost another 50 percent since May 2021.
Has your paycheck gone up by 50 percent during each of the last two years?
Needless to say, most of you cannot answer that question affirmatively.
Of course some areas of the country are being hit harder than others. In California, the average price of a gallon of gasoline has now reached $5.92.
But just wait until the war in the Middle East starts.
Once that occurs, it won’t be too long before many Americans are paying 10 dollars for a gallon of gasoline.
Meanwhile, food prices in the U.S. are rising at a pace that is unlike anything that I have ever seen before. Just check out these extremely alarming numbers that the government released last week…
Thursday’s report showed a broad-based rise in the cost of food at the wholesale level, with grains up 41.3 percent from a year ago as Russia’s war in Ukraine raises world prices. Both Russia and Ukraine are major grain producers.
The cost of eggs skyrocketed 161.3 percent, driven up by a bird flu outbreak that has killed 10 percent of chickens in the US. Processed young chickens were up 24.1 percent from a year ago.
Fresh vegetables were up 45.7 percent and fresh fruit rose 17.3 percent.
Eating fresh vegetables is a very good thing to do.
But now they will cost you 45 percent more than they did a year ago.
Has your paycheck gone up by 45 percent over the past year?
Sadly, food prices have been going crazy all over the globe, and this is going to hurt those on the bottom of the economic food chain the hardest.
In fact, the head of the Bank of England is using the word “apocalyptic” to describe the impact that these prices will have on the poor…
The Bank of England governor has blamed the war in Ukraine for the highest inflation in the UK for three decades and warned that “apocalyptic” food prices caused by Russia’s invasion could have a disastrous impact on the world’s poor.
And the head of the UN World Food Program is warning that extremely painful food prices could lead to widespread civil unrest in many areas of the planet…
A perfect storm of war, extreme weather and Covid-19 will drive global food prices to levels that will cause social unrest in some parts of the world, according to David Beasley, head of the United Nations World Food Programme.
“If people can’t feed their children and their families, then the politics unsettles,” Beasley told CNN during a conference on Thursday.
If you have been waiting for everything to “go back to normal”, you can stop.
Because it isn’t going to happen.
Homes are becoming a lot less affordable too.
As a result of a “combination of rising home prices and higher interest rates”, the average payment on a new mortgage is now 38 percent higher than it was 12 months ago in the United States…
The combination of rising home prices and higher interest rates — driven largely by the Federal Reserve’s more aggressive efforts to curb inflation — hiked monthly mortgage payments on the typical U.S. home by 19.5 percent in the first three months of the year, according to real estate listing service Zillow. Payments are 38 percent higher than a year ago.
Has your paycheck gone up by 38 percent over the past year?
I keep asking questions like that to point out the fact that your standard of living is being systematically destroyed.
It wasn’t just an intellectual exercise when I penned long article after long article about the evils of debasing our currency.
This is real.
I wasn’t joking when I warned that we were committing financial suicide. Now a day of reckoning has arrived, and everyone is expecting the same clowns that got us into this mess to get us out of it.
It ain’t gonna happen.
Once the next major crisis comes along, our leaders in Washington will respond by borrowing and spending even more money, and the “experts” at the Fed will respond by pumping even more fresh cash into the system.
And ultimately we will have the kind of horrific inflationary meltdown that I have been warning about for years.
Things didn’t have to turn out this way.
But the American people just kept sending big spenders to Washington, and any political candidates that dared to be critical of the Federal Reserve were considered to be “fringe”.
Now we get to reap what we have sown....
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