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The Real Threat to Free Speech Is Coming From the Right

BrainWorms @lemm.ee

The Real Threat to Free Speech Is Coming From the Right

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174 comments
  • What they want is freedom to control reality. What Republicans say, every day is not real, they don't live in reality. What they want is not free speech, they have that more than ever. What they want is to dictate reality to the rest of us.

    All conservative are bad, acab as it were.

    • I think what they want is as many big-money donors as they can get, for which they require as many reliable Republican votes as they can get, for which they require Trump, for which they are required to give prima facia credence to whatever misinformation Trump is pushing on any given day.

      It didn't always used to be like this, but that was a long time ago.

      Trump didn't create his voter base -- he stole it, from Rush Limbaugh, Bill Reilly, Glen Beck, Alex Jones, and all those other millionaires who spent decades feeding working-class conservatives daily servings hate for huge profit.

      And in all of history, who has been the conservative pundits' all-time number-one biggest and best favorite target for this hate? It has to be Barack Obama. (Our first Black president. Coincidence?)

      Trump didn't create his voter base, but he has owned it outright for going on a decade now, starting way back with his entirely bogus claims against President Obama's citizenship. It didn't matter that the claims were bogus -- all that mattered is that they were against Obama, in an outright demeaning (and overtly racist) way. Dittoheads and O'Reilly fans ate that shit up.

      Now here we are, eight or nine years later, and Trump still owns it. Only now, instead of feeding that voter base, and growing it with strongman posturing and punitive policy, he's using it exclusively to try to save his own skin. And at this point, the only way Trump saves himself is in an alternate reality, with alternate facts.

      Now Trump lies to save himself, and half of congress has to play along or risk losing their own reelections. Thanks Obama.

  • In the U.S., yes, at this moment the major threats to free speech are coming from the so-called "right". Forbidding teaching black history, LGBT issues, etc. A few years ago, lest we forget, it was Obama cracking down on the OWS protests and trying to prosecute Julian Assange and Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. Before that it was the GOP again pushing the PATRIOT Act and trying to ban Grand Theft Auto. They did it for a long time with the Red Scare. That of course, basically kicked off in response to Stalin, who was doing his own purges of opponents and censorship. Pre-war, it was Hitler, Mussolini and Franco worst of all, but was happening in the U.S. too. That all goes back even further to the Comstock laws, the Alien and Sedition Acts, you name it. There isn't some magical quality about the directions "left" and "right" by which bad people in power in government under that label don't want to silence their opponents. There is a tendency for what we call "the right" - this kind of more-or-less fascist, religious based, emotionally charged, etc. set of ideologies - to respond more eagerly to calls to silence or brutalize opponents, because they are by and large a good bit dumber at the end of the day.

  • always. every time. this is not surprising to anyone . people who act like this is untrue, or surprising, make me sick to my stomach.

  • It's nice to see that /c/politics and it's denizens are just an exact clone of /r/politics and is still full of circlejerking

174 comments