Because I think nobody should be able to silence your thoughts, ideas or opinions but those things don’t encompass all speech.
I'm not saying this should a tool to enable internet censors. This should be used to go after the networks of people people producing this garbage. Unless you operate a website or blog where you are literally making stuff up and spreading it around as fact then this doesn't affect you in the slightest.
A lot of good examples of this surfaced when people were talking about what bathrooms trans people should use. It was an entirely manufactured controversy where no-name fly-by-night "news" sites would publish completely fictional stories about sexual assault cases to try and sway public opinion. I, and you, should be equally as mad at someone making up news stories trying to sway public opinion the other way.
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." — Harry S. Truman
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Probably around the same time as it became socially unacceptable not to vote for them? Note how you had to qualify yourself as a democrat voter as some kind of proof point of the validity of your claims?
If someone's doing something dumb and weird in a well off rural area nobody cares as long as they aren't actively negatively affecting people. Like maybe people will talk behind your back and think you're an idiot but that's about it.
If someone's doing something dumb and weird somewhere densely populated and wealthy people pour over the bylaws, call whoever they can to harass you and generally try to force you to stop by making your life miserable.
If someone's doing something dumb and weird somewhere poor, regardless of urban vs rural, nobody gives a crap because people have bigger problems.
My son's soccer team from the city decided they wanted to make a statement against racism and kneel for the national anthem before games. At one of the suburban/rural schools, they were vehemently booed and yelled at by the parents and supporters of the other team.
(And the decision to kneel was made after a game the previous season against a different rural high school where my son's team mates were racially abused during the game.)
And the school pushed as hard as it could to have the original incidents addressed (the same school has been reported for other similar incidents previously) and the league did not impose any consequences.
Those two things are not in conflict with each other: a sizable percentage of Trump voters may have been counting on the fact that they could secretly vote in order to protect themselves and even their jobs.
It seems that, today, some vocal people arguing for censorship immediately assume that anyone on the side of free speech and liberal thought is secretly a Trump apologist.
Black people have lost their jobs for years for being black (See, Kaepernick.) many mad about this post didn't care then. It's all fake, using free speech to coverup blatantly partisan items.
They can't actually be on the side of free speech and be a Trump apologist. He was extremely anti-media, one of the most anti-press presidents we have had.
You can be pro free-speech and anti-media for the same reason you can be capitalist and anti-corporation.
[1] And by "bias" I don't necessarily mean open bias. CNN wasn't partisan in the 1990s like it is today. But it still provided news filtered through a liberal ideology. For example, 71% of republicans say religion "does more good than harm in American society" versus 44% of democrats: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/republicans.... If you limit the analysis to white Democrats (the people who run newsrooms) the disparity is even starker: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/23/religiously... ("Religiously, nonwhite Democrats are more similar to Republicans than to white Democrats").
Do you think that someone who believes religion is an negative force in society, maybe jokes about religious people to friends after work will report on COVID-related church closings the same way as someone who believes religious practice is important to societal health? Even if they are acting utterly in good faith, their ideology can't help but influence their choice of stories, the gloss they put on developments, etc.
I'd like to pretend that we're all rational agents, but I know that there are certain "emotional backdoors" that people like Hitler have exploited in the past to get people to do horrible things against everybody's interest.
For those of us who live in a country controlled by the will of the majority, obviously the education of the average person is a priority.
If the shoe was on other foot, and I had a mainstream news channel that had 40% of the population angry and believing demonstrably false things (e.g. Aliens were running the country and I could point out the aliens for you), and I was hinting/insinuating a revolution was necessary, how hard would you defend my cable TV show?
[Edit - Lol, I know I've got a pretty solid argument when nobody can answer the question but only give a pouty downvote]
It's easily explainable, on the contrary, it was an intelligence psyop using half-truths that was setup to perform the two fold-function of honeypotting and distracting the "conspiracy theorists" who might look into the Trump admin and understand it's real dark underbelly, which is completely different from the one the MSM pushed for four years, and then to be used as most limited hangout psyops are; as a tool to discredit genuine conspiracies as crazy by association.
So now people like you who are probably fairly intelligent, but probably not keeping up with the underlying truths in the "half-truths" side of the phenomenon that was Q, can easily just discredit those who believe it as uneducated (usually the nicest term used), without understanding how they got there, and that you also lack education, at least in that department.
So thats the sort of high level overview, but I can give you a few examples about how psyops manipulate otherwise intelligent people to buy into that sort of thing.
1. Hope and belief: After the war, I ended up becoming an atheist and started to notice in my studies on that topic, more specifically in conversations with old christian friends, that much of their belief system stemmed not from the truth of the matter, but from the hope it gave them. Further, from the need for hope, and need for belief it provided. Q-Anon exposes to some limited degree that the elites are up to some very shady shit, and then said: "Don't worry, it's being taken care of! Trump is a good guy, antiestablishment revolutionary who is going to take them down from the inside, and drain the swamp!" And for a certain amount of intelligent people who know the elite are indeed up to nefarious things, that's so tempting to want to believe! Having been on the Q-board from more or less day one, I do want to make a point that the first few months were full of very original and deep "bread" (research postings), by the more intelligent from the conspiracy and chan community. After a few months when the game became increasingly obvious to those people, but as it gained more noteriety and more normies showed up, the demographics shifted noticeably, primarily towards the religious right... a group who have already demonstrated their ability to suspend critical thinking when it comes to belief. The vast majority if not all of the people (besides the q psyop group themselves) that did the best work left knowning what the intent was (this was max a few months into the forced switchover to 8chan)
2. Real truths: I'll just come out and say what most of it really is: the multi-national, multi-intelligence agency compromise operations are completely out of control, and target most if not all high level politicians and businessmen. There is a myriad of evidence, buth deductive and inductive, to support this claim. Epstein was just a disposable middle manager in a blackmail network, for example. When analyzing this issue it quickly gets to the darker stuff people don't want to think about or talk about. My usual summary of how it works is that the order of operations for compromise/control go like this; idealogical - at a lower level , say a freshman state congressperson, having idealogical alignment is enough to get them to do what is wanted, no real overt control need be exerted, but lets go to the next level; bribery. This is standard congressional fare. Lunches, parties, pac donations, kickbacks of various kinds to both the campaign and to causes the campaign wants pushed, cushy jobs and kickbacks for relatives and friends of the congressperson, etc. All mostly legal, with a few outliers like Jack Abramoff pushing the edges of that level. What happens when you get a congress person who doesn't play ball though? This is where you start to run into the higher levels, such as pure blackmail. Cameras are setup, and it starts with the after-after-party, usually just drugs at first. Then it's hookers. Then it's underage hookers... and it gets worse. Human trafficking, and worse. If for some reason the rare person with integrety survives all this, that is when the threats begin (and they are not empty!). This is all true stuff. But no one is actually doing anything about it, because most of the people in a position to do so are already compromised are at the very least afraid.
What Q did was exploit that these things really happen, by creating a false narrative that tended to only focus on the democrats participation in this system (both parties are completely compromised in this way, anybody remember Dennis Hastert?), and then pretended to offer a (false) hope by saying Trump was an anti-establishment savior, despite his many connections to this very system! For example, his mentor Roy Cohn was a CIA and Lansky-gang (who blackmailed Hoover) connected pedo-blackmailer very much in the vein of Epstein! Then creating other false narratives to distance the more obvious connections between him and that world (for example, pushing the narrative that he didn't like Epstein because of his pedo-tendencies, but in reality their spat was over a real-estate deal that went sour, and had nothing to do with Trump having a higher moral compass (laugh) than Epstein). Then taking all these things and promising there was always some action going to be taken around the corner, next week, next month, next year, stay tuned, etc... and none of it ever materialized.
So for a people who find so much value in the need for hope and belief, mixing real truths with half-lies and then pretending something would be done was a recipe made in heaven for the people behind Qanon. The media, who didn't want to address any of this just lied through their teeth about the Russian narrative, created a reinforcement mechanism that they weren't to be trusted, which pushed even more "normies" over into Q-territory.
Now, as you see the push for censorship and castigation of all things Q-anon, remember all nuggets of truth inside the half-truths are going to be thrown out baby and bathwater style... and I argue that this was the main intention all along (along with the cries of "domestic terrorism" being used to push all kinds of horrible things). Cass Sunsteins cognitive infiltration system is at play and is the modern evolution of COINTELPRO.
PS. For just one example in a myriad, look up the Dutroux Affair, aka Belgiums X-Files sometime, if you think that darker stuff isn't true/doesn't happen. (warning, not for the faint of heart)
That it was a typo is clear enough from the rest of your comment.
CNN isn't partisan though, they are just sensationalists.
Like I think you could treat Ron Johnson like a jackass and not be partisan, and they don't even do that, they act like he is a straight shooter and play out the kayfabe.
I'm more critical of my own party because I hold them to a higher standard. I'm getting very disillusioned with them at this point. All the behaviors I decried of the right so many years ago are now in full swing on the left side. The difference now is the consolidatation of control and power makes it an even greater threat. I fear a point of no return.
There was a study that came out a few years ago, and I can't find it, but the point was that any laws passed that the general citizenry want were purely incidental. All the laws passed over the last 20 years or so directly benefited corporate and special interest groups.
Another person described the spectrum of the various forms of democracy as a highway. The went on to describe the two US political parties as the two parallel lines dividing the highway.
/rant
When Trump got elected and it broke people's brains. At that point, everything became permissible in order to fight Trump. Now that Trump is gone, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Since Trump, the Democratic establishment has effectively captured Mainstream Media, Big Tech and Social Media (with Academia being already firmly in the Democratic tent). Mainstream media and Big Tech isn't even pretending to be objective anymore. There is now an incestuous pipeline between executive leadership in those institutions and the Democratic establishment. And I say 'establishment' because it isn't just the Conservatives, Republicans and Libertarians that are getting censored. I don't like the anti-war, anti-American, class-focused Left, but those groups also get targeted, as are Progressives that focus on class (as opposed to cultural) issues.
>Weren't the last people to make this move (more more ineffectively, thankfully) the Christian right?
Apt analogy. This is the 'Christian Evangelical Right' from the 90s, with similar level of puritanism ... and with the backing of media companies and big tech. So much much worse.
> Shedding its specifically Northern mainline Protestant cultural attributes, a version of Social Gospel Protestantism has mutated into the secular religion of wokeness, the orthodoxy of the universities and the increasingly important nonprofit sector. Its converts include many of the affluent white secular children and grandchildren of members of mainline Protestant denominations like the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists, which are hemorrhaging membership to the category of religious “nones.”
Gamergate pre-dates Trump, and was the exact same mentality, which you can probably trace back to the 1970's if not before.
Since, 2018-2020 has been almost a militant level of censorship being pushed.
There's a boatload of examples, but generally I recommend trying to join / visit different communities. While the right has been targeted to an extreme you can still see their points of view on gab.com or patriots.win pretty much uncensored.