Michael Ejercito
2025-02-18 03:34:34 UTC
Reply
PermalinkVP Vance’s Speech and the Complete Unmasking of the Totalitarian
American Left: Part I
February 17, 2025 / Jack Marshall
Prelude.
Well, here I am again, starting off the Ethics Alarms day with a post
related to politics and government. This is not a political blog, and I
strive mightily to prevent it from being one. However, I cannot operate
an ethics information and analysis site that fulfills (or, to be
realistic, attempts to fulfill) the mission I have set for it and ignore
massive, serious, indeed historic events and issues that have ethics
principles not only at their core, but at risk because of them.
Those who have followed Ethics Alarms for the past decade know that I
had made up my mind to vote for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election
because I had concluded that Donald Trump lacked literally every
character trait, instinct and qualification that my study of leadership
and the American Presidency had taught me that a U.S. President must
have. I knew that Hillary Clinton and, of course, her husband were
corrupt, dishonest and untrustworthy, but I also knew that she had the
intellectual ability and at least some of the experience necessary to
handle the job. I wrote dozens of posts about how unfit Donald Trump
was, and that doesn’t take into account the Trump critiques I had
written years before he had announced his candidacy in 2015.
Then, mere weeks from the election, I realized that the Democratic Party
had rigged the nomination process to ensure Clinton’s victory, and that
Clinton and the Democratic Party were ready, willing and eager to cheat
in order to obtain power. How far that party (and the rotted news media
that conspired with it) would go, as we now know, was fully revealed
over the next eight years.
I decided, a couple of days before I had to vote, that it was a choice
between an unfit candidate—Trump—and a dangerous, anti-democratic party
ironically called the Democratic Party. I voted for neither as a matter
of principle. I found myself surprised when my emotional reaction to
Trump’s stunning upset was relief. The American system had, once again,
gotten lucky. The public had recognized what I had, though almost too
late, recognized myself.
An arrogant, elite, ruthless political party had the culture, society
and government by the throat, and by a miraculous confluence of unlikely
and indeed accidental events, had been at least temporarily foiled. It
was a result that I analogized to the “futile and stupid” rebellion of
the Deltas in the finale of “Animal House,” when the expelled Faber
College students demonstrated their contempt for the system that had
mistreated them by disrupting a parade and humiliating those in power.
And, memorably, the most chaotic of the rebels ended up a U.S. Senator.
The next four years proved my analysis of the Democratic Party correct,
in fact too generous. It marshaled its allies in the news media,
education, the law, the judiciary, academia, Big Tech, the federal
bureaucracy and, of course the news media to launch what I have tagged
as “the 2026 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck,” denying an elected U.S.
President the mantle of legitimacy as well as the basic deference,
respect, honor and cooperation a POTUS must have to carry out his agenda
and policies. This divided the country to a dangerous extent. It set
terrible precedents that I concluded, correctly, would damage the office
and the future functioning of democratic institutions.
Worst of all, perhaps—it is a close competition—I saw an entire
political party representing a large proportion of the public actively
seeking to weaken and distort the First Amendment, the metaphorical
beating heart of the unique structure our Founders created. This was
(and is) a party that not only supports but relies upon a journalistic
establishment that does not keep the public informed, but rather seeks
to manipulate it by withholding information and employing partisan bias
and advocacy in what are supposed to be objective news reports. This
mutated Democratic Party also endorses censorship, using the usefully
vague terms “hate speech” and “misinformation” to justify quashing
dissenting views, opinions and analysis that the party deems a threat to
its primacy.
The degree to which the disastrous Biden Presidency extended and
metastasized these anti-democratic attitudes and tactics would have once
been unimaginable, but, fortunately and inevitably, the wheels fell off,
allowing Trump to return to office and allow him to use the bitter
experiences of his first term to begin an administration the way every
elected President before him had been permitted to begin it—with support
of the public and without overwhelming unethical obstruction, though
there is still plenty of that.
In the process, perhaps out of fatigue, confusion, panic or
incompetence, the party that I had concluded was rapidly tipping toward
totalitarian methods and aspirations has outed itself spectacularly
along with most of its submissive media minions. The Democratic Party is
protesting the DOGE assault on wasted and irresponsibly spent taxpayer
funds. It is opposing efforts to reduce the bloated bureaucracy. It is
allying itself with racial and gender discrimination. Its elected
officials have reacted with unrestrained fury to President Trump’s
efforts to bring outsiders and iconoclasts into management positions to
mute the Deep State, and beclowned themselves by resorting to
fearmongering, insults and ad hominem attacks during confirmation
hearing. They have been behaving and sounding like Sixties Vietnam War
protesters, shouting obscenities and calling for violence in the streets.
Make no mistake: we are in an ethics drama. Politicians and journalists
in this culture who have functioning ethics alarms could not behave like
this. There have been only five or six transformative ethics battles in
American history—I do not want to be distracted now by naming them—but
we are witnessing one of them. The United States has been lucky in the
outcome of the others (“There is a Providence that protects idiots,
drunkards, children and the United States of America.” – Otto Von
Bismarck), but luck always runs out eventually. It had better not be
this time.
On February 14, Vice-President J.D. Vance delivered a valentine to free
speech by confronting European leaders at the Munich Security Conference
with their nations’ ominous opposition to freedom of speech. Prof.
Turley, a free speech warrior in academia, wrote, “For the free speech
community, it was truly Churchillian — no less than the famous Iron
Curtain speech in which Churchill dared the West to confront the
existential dangers of communism.” The conservative bloggers, pundits
and commentators hailed the speech, and, stunningly, the Axis news media
attacked it—not just attacked it, but resorted to fake history,
rationalizations and false equivalencies to side with the European
censors while condemning Vance.
I do not believe, and nor should you, that the Axis propagandists are
doing this without support and incentives from the Democrats. Moreover,
the endorsement of censorship by our own “free press” shows just how
dire our nation’s democracy crisis is. Some of the negative reaction to
Vance’s speech is cognitive dissonance reflex by the Trump Deranged:
Vance=Trump, anything Trump is associated with must be bad, ergo a
speech extolling freedom of speech and democratic values must be bad.
[Tangent: On Facebook, I realized that one can identify the Stage 5
Trump Derangement victims by noting who is obsessed with the re-naming
of the Gulf of Mexico.. These same once-functional citizens didn’t
object to stripping a U.S. President’s name from an Alaskan mountain, or
assaults on memorials to Jefferson, Washington and Teddy Roosevelt among
others. The gulf was named by Spanish conquerors when there was no
United States for it to border; there is nothing sacred about the name,
and, frankly, if I were a body of water and had the choice to be
identified with either the greatest country in the modern history or the
corrupt, chaotic, apparently incorrigible mess that is Mexico, it would
be the easiest of choices.]
Much of it, however signals that there is a large and powerful segment
of our society that literally, and I literally mean literally, does not
support American values. They are vocal, relentless, influential and
attention should be paid.
I will explore what the last few days have revealed in Part 2. It
is…well, it must not be taken lightly.
Vance’s speech is here.
Over to you, Geena…
https://ethicsalarms.com/2025/02/17/vp-vances-speech-and-the-complete-unmasking-of-the-totalitarian-american-left-part-ii/comment-page-1/#respond
VP Vance’s Speech and the Complete Unmasking of the Totalitarian
American Left: Part II
February 17, 2025 / Jack Marshall
That’s the chest of CNN’s Jake Tapper above. He was making a little
frowny-face yesterday for the idiots viewing CNN who are too dim to
realize that the accusatory headline is a non-sequitur, like “I like ice
cream, can you swim?” The White House suspending the AP’s White House
privileges—that’s privileges, which are distinct from rights, Jake—has
nothing to do with freedom of speech or even the First Amendment, so the
implied hypocrisy is more fake news.
The remarkably negative (and ignorant, and biased) Axis media reaction
to J.D. Vance’s speech in Germany proves one again that as often as
President Trump exaggerates, calling the news media the “enemy of the
people” was neither excessive, unfair nor untrue. That’s exactly what it
is. It is now the enemy of democracy as well, and nothing illustrates
that better than the rush to condemn the Vice-President for telling
European leaders to stop censoring speech based on political content.
It takes special chutzpah for any media organization to accuse Trump of
stifling press coverage when he has made himself more accessible to the
news media in less than a month than Joe Biden was in four years. I
would also venture that the Associated Press could get more useful
information surfing the web that it ever got from Biden’s idiotic,
stumbling, incompetent, lazy paid liar Karine Jean-Pierre. The AP has
proved itself conflicted, partisan and anti-Trump as well as unreliable.
Why should it be entitled to attend press briefings instead of, say,
Ethics Alarms?
Also on CNN, Nick Paton Walsh attacked Vance’s speech while defending
censorship to prevent “authoritarian regimes.” This was the excuse used
to justify banishing Trump from social media. I suppose it was also the
excuse for blocking coverage of and commentary on Hunter Biden’s laptop
on news platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Those who would punish and
censor speech always have “reasons,” but the real reason is maintaining
their own power and crippling the functioning of democracy. Just listen
to this hack…
“Vance’s complaints struck at the heart of a key difference in the role
of free speech in Europe and the United States, a much fresher
democracy. In Europe, free speech is paramount and enshrined in law, but
so is responsibility for the safety of citizens. Some European legal
systems suggest this means you cannot falsely shout there is a “fire” in
a crowded theater and escape punishment if the resulting stampede causes
injury simply because you had the right to shout “fire.” In the United
States, the First Amendment means you can shout whatever you want. In
the smartphone and post-9/11 era, Europe has prohibited some extremist
activity online. It is still illegal to advocate for the Nazis in
Germany, and it should not be controversial or mysterious why. The
wildly rebellious press across Europe are a vibrant sign of its free
speech. And the fringe parties Vance objected to being absent in Munich
are growing in their popularity. Nobody is really being shut down.”
Hilarious! Enshrined in law “but”! If speakers, writers and artists can
be censored and punished for words and opinions that some authority
rules “unsafe,” then there is no free speech. It’s amazing that
advocates for censorship still use Oliver Wendell Holmes’ thoroughly
discredited “shouting fire in a crowded theater” analogy. Ken White of
Popehat, perhaps the sharpest and most eloquent blogger in captivity
until he was infected with the Trump Derangement virus, decisively
explained in “Three generations of a hackneyed apologia for censorship
are enough” how Holmes’s famous opinion has been misused to defend
government censorship of speech that mentions or threatens violence
without actually inciting it on the spot. This includes “hate speech,”
which is what many of the European countries outlaw and what the
totalitarian Left here would love to outlaw in the U.S. “Hate speech”
would mean “speech that progressives hate.” (Knucklehead Tim Walz said
on national TV that “hate speech” isn’t protected by the First
Amendment.) Walsh, like Walz, literally doesn’t know what he’s talking
about; he is quoting an opinion he hasn’t read, and he definitely hasn’t
bothered to read White’s explanation of why that defense of censorship
is based on legal and constitutional ignorance.
CNN’s censorship rationalizing pales before CBS’s efforts, however.
Incredibly, “Face the Nation’s” Margaret Brennan really and truly
asserted to Marco Rubio that Hitler’s Germany used “freedom of speech”
to spark the Holocaust. Kudos to the Secretary of State for not
channeling Dan Ackroyd from the old Saturday Night Live
“Point/Counterpoint” skit and responding, “Margaret you ignorant slut!”
She deserved it.
Rubio was defending Vance’s speech, and this exchange ensued,
MARCO RUBIO: I assure you, the United States has come under withering
criticism on many occasions from many leaders in Europe, and we don’t go
around throwing temper tantrums about it.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, he was standing in a country where free speech
was weaponized to conduct a genocide. And he met with the head of a
political party that has far right views and some historic ties to
extreme groups. The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you
know that, that the censorship was specifically about the right.
RUBIO: Well, I have to disagree with you. No, I have – I have to
disagree with you. Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The
genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to
also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities and
they hated those that they – they had a list of people they hated, but
primarily the Jews. There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was
none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were a sole and
only party that governed that country. So that’s not an accurate
reflection of history. I also think it’s wrong – again, I go back to the
point of his speech. The point of his speech was basically that there is
an erosion in free speech and intolerance for opposing points of view
within Europe, and that’s of concern, because that is eroding. That’s
not an erosion of your military capabilities. That’s not an erosion of
your economic standing. That’s an erosion of the actual values that bind
us together in this transatlantic union that everybody talks about. And
I think allies and friends and partners that have worked together now
for 80 years should be able to speak frankly to one another in open
forums without being offended, insulted, or upset. And I spoke to
Foreign Ministers from multiple countries throughout Europe. Many of
them probably didn’t like the speech or didn’t agree with it, but they
were continuing to engage with us on all sorts of issues that unite us.
So, again, at the end of the day, I think that, you know, people give
all – – that is a forum in which you’re supposed to be inviting people
to give speeches, not basically a chorus where everyone is saying the
exact same thing. That’s not always going to be the case when it’s a
collection of democracies where leaders have the right and the privilege
to speak their minds in forums such as these.
There was no “free speech” in Nazi Germany! Who doesn’t know that? I
mean, other than CBS news hosts? After Rubio’s slam dunk, Brennan had no
response and moved on to another topic.
Fire her.
But CBS wasn’t finished. On “60 Minutes,” which should be hosted now
with bags over the various correspondents’ heads after the Kamala Harris
interview fiasco, the show appeared to cheer on German authorities
arresting “online trolls.” There was not a hint of criticism in her
coverage, but rather envy. Later she interviewed German prosecutors as
if they were the enlightened ones. Here was her introduction to the segment:
SHARYN ALFONSI: “If you’ve ever dared to read the comments on a social
media post, you might start to wonder if civilized discourse is just a
myth. Aggressive threats, lies, and harassment have unfortunately become
the norm online, where anonymity has emboldened some users to push the
limits of civility. In the United States, most of what anyone says,
sends, or streams online — even if it’s hate-filled or toxic — is
protected by the First Amendment as free speech. But Germany is trying
to bring some civility to the world wide web by policing it in a way
most Americans could never imagine. In an effort, it says, to protect
discourse, German authorities have started prosecuting online trolls.
And as we saw, it often begins with a pre-dawn wake-up call from the
police.”
‘It’s 6:01 on a Tuesday morning, and we were with state police as they
raided this apartment in northwest Germany. Inside, six armed officers
searched a suspect’s home, then seized his laptop and cellphone.
Prosecutors say those electronics may have been used to commit a crime.
The crime? Posting a racist cartoon online. At the exact same time,
across Germany, more than 50 similar raids played out. Part of what
prosecutors say is a coordinated effort to curb online hate speech in
Germany.”
Later, she said,
“As prosecutors explain it, the German constitution protects free
speech, but not hate speech. And here’s where it gets tricky: German law
prohibits speech that could incite hatred or is deemed insulting.
Perpetrators are sometimes surprised to learn that what they post online
is illegal, according to Dr. Matthäus Fink, one of the state prosecutors
tasked with policing Germany’s robust hate speech laws. ‘They don’t
think it was illegal. And they say, ‘No, that’s my free speech,’ Fink
said. ‘And we say, ‘No, you have free speech as well, but it is also has
its limits.’ In the U.S., most of what gets posted online, even if it’s
hate-filled, is protected by the First Amendment as free speech. But in
Germany, authorities are prosecuting online trolls in an effort to
protect discourse and democracy. It can be a crime to publicly insult
someone in Germany, and the punishment can be even worse if the insult
is shared online because that content sticks around forever, Fink said.
Fink, and prosecutors Svenja Meininghaus and Frank-Michael Laue,
explained that German law prohibits the spread of malicious gossip,
violent threats and fake quotes. Reposting lies online can also be a crime.”
Wow, isn’t that great?
Naturally, the New York Times is also on board with criticizing Vance
for advocating “too much” free speech. Berlin bureau chief Jim
Tankersley authored “Vance, Like Musk, Attacks German Norms on Nazis and
Extremism.” The German “norm” the Times is defending is censorship:
“The American vice president visited a concentration camp on Thursday
afternoon. He laid a wreath at the foot of a statue, made the sign of
the cross and paused before a memorial wall where in multiple tongues,
including German and English, the words “Never Again” were written. JD
Vance told reporters he had read about the Holocaust in books, but that
its “unspeakable evil” was driven home by his trip to Dachau, where more
than 30,000 people died at the hands of the Nazis. “It’s something that
I’ll never forget, and I’m grateful to have been able to see it up close
in person,” Mr. Vance said. But after Mr. Vance spoke in Munich the next
day, Germany’s leaders effectively questioned if he had understood what
he had just seen. Eighty years after American soldiers liberated Dachau,
top German officials this weekend all-but accused Mr. Vance — and by
extension, President Trump — of boosting a political party that many
Germans consider to be dangerously descended from Nazism. That party,
called the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is sitting second in the
polls for next Sunday’s parliamentary elections, with about 20 percent
of the public saying they support it….”
Vance is accused of supporting a party by asserting that it shouldn’t be
outlawed or censored. Of course, if a government can outlaw one party
that it decides is dangerous, it can outlaw any party, which is what the
previous President and his party was moving rapidly toward with this…
We have powerful forces in the Axis media that will support
content-based censorship if it sees any chance of the Democrats
inflicting it on society. Their reaction to J.D. Vance giving a ringing
endorsement of free speech to European leaders proves that.
Enemies of the people, enemies of the Republic.