With so many big things happening so quickly these days it’s hard to decide where to focus. In America, we have a chaotic and bizarre presidential election in full-swing. On July 13th there was an assassination attempt on former President Trump’s life at a rally in Butler, PA. A week later on July 21st, President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, after an intensive, powerful Dem-led pressure campaign to force him out. He dropped out via a letter posted on X, that wasn’t even on official letterhead. There’s some big cover-up with this shenanigans, I am sure.
After top Democrat powerbrokers haggled it out in backroom dealings, Kamala Harris was selected to top the Democrat presidential ticket. Last week Kamala announced Tim Walz, the radical progressive governor of Minnesota, would be her running mate. Walz was the most gung-ho governor at imposing COVID social mitigation policies in Minnesota and has embraced radical transgender policies and all the BLM “defund the police” agenda. There’s plenty to delve into about both presidential campaigns and Tim Walz, with his unusual ties to China and 30 trips to China, and his use of his military service for political gain, but this post is going to be about free speech in America.
We should be closely watching what’s going on in the UK with their crackdown on free speech. Reports of glaring double standards of justice and free speech “privileges” between white British subjects and Muslims has been reported, as their government cracks down on “hate speech” and “Islamophobia.” America is unique in having our Constitution and Bill of Rights, which guarantees our rights. The 1st Amendment protects our freedom of religion, free speech, freedom of the press, right to peaceably assembly and a right to petition the government for redress or express grievances.
I’m trying to assess the news using a big picture/little picture approach. While it’s important to keep abreast of news here and all the daily news, it’s probably best to keep the big picture in focus too. I’m trying not to get bogged down in this or that presidential campaign hot topic, that the political pundit crowd is all yammering about, but kind of look at all that stuff, but keep looking at the world events every day too.
Back in the 1980s, I loved reading Sydney Sheldon novels and then the early Tom Clancy novels, where all sorts of events around the world start happening and you have no idea how they all fit together until much later in the story. We are in a real-life version of that type of “plot,” except this is real life with wars breaking out and great powers competitions veering toward confrontation. All over the globe hot spots are popping up. The West is showing major signs of serious stress fractures forming, while China, Russia and Iran are on the move flexing all their levers of power. Then there’s these extreme efforts by powerful elites trying to transform western civilization quickly.
Levers of national power are usually framed in terms of DIME – diplomatic, information, military and economic. The US is failing to leverage any of America’s national power in a way that advances our national interests, but we’re not alone. Post-COVID craziness and post-letting western countries be overrun with refugees and illegal immigrants, who are hostile to western culture and values, has left western democracies extremely vulnerable to domestic and hostile foreign destabilization efforts. America and other western democracies all have both internal extremist entities and hostile foreign entities intent on fomenting chaos (destabilization efforts), but they also have large numbers of refugees/immigrants who are hostile to western civilization (a fifth column). Add in western civilization has been subjected to a steady effort by communist countries and leftist progressives to radically transform (dismantle) western civilization for many decades now.
That’s the big picture reality.
With the information war effort, well, I’ve been harping on the Democrat/liberal media spin information war since the late 1990s and that info war has intensified dramatically since the pandemic to push infringement of free speech, to silence opposing views, to punish people who refuse to use leftist dogma being crammed down their throats. Many people want to just forget about all those COVID government and powerful social media companies’ efforts to force compliance of their draconian social mitigation efforts, but we should all be paying attention to what’s going on both here in America and abroad – especially the UK right now.
Jonathan Turley wrote a good piece on free speech being under attack.
Turley states:
For over three years, the Biden-Harris administration has sustained an unrelenting attack on the freedom of speech, from supporting a massive censorship system (described by a federal court as an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth“) to funding blacklisting operations targeting groups and individuals with opposing views.
President Biden made censorship a central part of his legacy, even accusing social media companies of “killing people” for failing to increase levels of censorship. Democrats in Congress pushed that agenda by demanding censorship on subjects ranging from climate change to gender identity — even to banking policy — in the name of combatting “disinformation.”
The administration also created offices like the Disinformation Governance Board before it was shut down after public outcry. But it quickly shifted this censorship work to other offices and groups.
As vice president, Harris has long supported these anti-free speech policies. The addition of Walz completes a perfect nightmare for free speech advocates. Walz has shown not only a shocking disregard for free speech values but an equally shocking lack of understanding of the First Amendment.
Free speech is under attack – globally – in the West, not just in totalitarian countries.
Tonight former President Trump did a live conversation with Elon Musk on X. It was an interesting conversation about all sorts of topics, carried out civilly. There was nothing threatening about it.
Across liberal media there was a tizzy about Musk hosting this conversation with Trump being dangerous misinformation:
The Washington Post’s motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness” and today their WH reporter was asking the WH press secretary if they could do something to silence Trump due to “misinformation” being a threat. An American reporter was asking the WH to silence a presidential candidate…
Once that sinks in, the EU today sent a letter to Elon Musk threatening him with a potential ban if he held his conversation with Trump tonight.
The Musk/Trump conversation started late due to a massive attack on X’s servers>
Here’s the Harris/Walz statement on the Musk/Trump conversation:
Musk did say he extended an offer to Kamala Harris to have a conversation on X too, but her campaign declined.
This is where America, a country founded on people being allowed to publicly debate and freely express opposing viewpoints, is at.
The self-selected Misinformation Police pose a clear and present danger to our free speech rights.
libertybelle diaries 
IF what this article purports is accurate, I reckon things’re headed for a showdown.
https://nypost.com/2024/08/10/media/uk-police-commissioner-threatens-to-extradite-jail-us-citizens-over-online-posts-well-come-after-you/
I probably ought to hit the UK’s Police Commissioners’ webpage to check the veracity but I’m pressed for time.