mikee dee 🍀

First They Scapegoat And Then They Censor California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping Between 2019 and 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom blamed climate change and Republicans for out-of-control forest fires. But the real cause of the high-intensity mountain fires was that the state had failed to invest adequately in forest management. Newsom had even cut the funding to reduce fuel load and prevent high-intensity crown fires in mountain forests, and failed to make the state’s electric utilities keep brush from growing near electrical lines. And yet, in a single message, Newsom managed to disavow responsibility for a problem he created, scapegoated Republicans and won accolades from apocalyptic environmentalists. Many other politicians have done the same. Now, this strategy of denial and deflection is at work in Europe. In Ireland, Varadkar is scapegoating social media for the failure of policing. And it’s easy to see why. Vardkar’s criticis are pummeling him on social media. "There is grave danger among us in Ireland that should never be here in the first place,” said world Ultimate Fighting Champion, Conor McGregor, an Irishman. Macgregorgenerated headlines internationally attacking the government on social media. “There has been zero action done to support the public in any way, shape or form.” The Dublin protests and riots speak to similar hopelessness and ambient nihilism expressed by similarly aged alienated young men during the Black Lives Matter Protests of 2020. And yet journalists in that instance expended large amounts of efforts to contextualize as justified or at least understandable. By contrast, in the case of the Ireland protest, media and Vardkar are labeling the protests and rioters as “far right” even though the same outlets rarely called BLM “far left” in 2020. And so Varadkar and the news media use the Ireland riots in the same way that Newsom used California’s fires: as both a shield and weapon. Similarly, French leaders have failed for decades to integrate and assimilate immigrant populations into European life through schools, apprenticeship programs, and employment opportunities. The riots last summer resulted from anger similar to that held by many of the Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, which was about police brutality. But it was also about frustration, resentment, and feelings of victimization, just like in the case of BLM. In other words, the liberal-Left politicians around the world, from Varadkar and Macron to Obama and Biden, are demanding censorship of, among other things, the very issues they have long lectured the public as ones for which they are offering to address “root causes.” Rather than maintaining the forest, dealing with mental illness, and providing a purpose and career path for angry young men, liberal Left governments have sought to use every new crisis as an opportunity to scapegoat their political opponents and, when that stops working, demand censorship, since the legitimacy and continued existence of the liberal Left hegemony in the West comes from control over information. While formal US government funding of journalists may or may not have continued after the Church Commitee exposed it in 1976, the corporate news media in the US has promoted the agenda of the so-called “deep state” ever since, including in boosting calls for wars with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, over the last 20 years. What explains the continuing, relentless drive for censorship by leaders around the world doesn’t reflect the will of the people so much as the will of elites. They are making clear that they view a free and open information environment as an existential threat to its ability to wage war, move labor as freely as capital, manage pandemics, and control energy supplies. Liberal and left governments around the world have made social programs, mass immigration, and alternatives to policing and incarceration their highest priorities. The result has been border chaos and violence in the U.S, and increased crime, stabbings and bombings in Europe, resulting in political backlashes from Italy and Sweden to the Netherlands and Spain, with right-wing parties in ascendence across the continent. Liberal and Left governments around the world made climate change and renewables two of their highest priorities, and the result was energy dependence by Europe on Russia, rising energy prices, a return to coal, and support for China’s suppression of Uyghur Muslims. And liberal and Left governments made pandemic response a central selling point in their agenda, and the result was catastrophic learning loss and student absenteeism that continues today. All of the specific demands for censorship expose what they really want: decisions transferred from parents to government; mass migration; political decision-making on energy, health, and the economy transferred to the international level; more expensive energy from renewables; and the ability to begin new wars outside of democratic votes (e.g. Ukraine). Liberal-Left demands for governmental censorship will continue until they cause more harm than benefit to this agenda. How Censorship Ends UFC Champion, and Irishman, Conor McGregor. (Getty Images) The record to date is a grim one. Heads of state and other elected leaders from liberal-Left parties believe that the existing political cost of demanding censorship is worth the benefit. And advocates of censorship operate from the same playbook: “Censors can inhibit this backfire effect in various ways, including covering up the censorship, devaluing the target, reinterpreting the action, using official channels, and using intimidation and bribery.” That is what they have done. In the US, pro-censorship forces attempted to hide their censorship inside of a “cybersecurity” agency and subcontract it out to government “partners” like Stanford Internet Observatory, while European nations take it out of their hands and put it in the hands of EU bureaucrats in Brussels. Censors around the world seek to devalue their targets as “far right” fascists, racists, and anti-semites. They reinterpret their actions as “fighting misinformation and hate” rather than as censorship. And they promote official channels from government-funded companies like NPR, PBS, CBC, and BBC, and by giving money to supposedly independent news media companies, or by having government beneficiaries, like Pfizer, finance pro-government media publicity. But if these governments are unable to control their borders, assimilate migrants, and prevent violent crime, it won’t matter how much they censor. Over the last two weeks, a plurality of voters cast their votes for a “far right” anti-immigrant political party in the Netherlands and a “far right” laissez-faire presidential candidate in Argentina, despite weeks of biased news media coverage against both. Having state-sponsored media label “far right” was apparently insufficient to destroy them electorally. . At a certain point, the tactics of the regime fail. The men charged with policing the Berlin wall decide they don’t believe in the Berlin wall any more, and they let the people tear it down. As such, the Irish Prime Minister’s renewed cause for his extreme hate censorship legislation isn’t just an obstacle for free speech advocates. It’s also an opportunity to push back on Varadkar’s totalitarian attack on the principle of innocent until proven guilty, and arbitrary ruel “The sponsors of the Hate Speech Bill refuse to define 'hate,’” noted the group, Free Speech Ireland, “leaving the assessment to Gardaí [police] and, as our former Justice Minister, @SenatorMcDowell, pointed out, the possibility of 'Hate Speech' citizens' arrests.” It’s one thing for the citizens of a nation to turn against one another politically and culturally. It’s quite another for them to criminalize each other’s political views. “Varadkar has moved from being a wide eyed classical liberal with conservative social values to a doe eyed social democrat with authoritarian social values and colourful socks,” wrote a former Irish politician. “He is dancing to the WEF/EU tune on secular blasphemy laws. He simply has to be removed from office. Change may be coming. The government’s failure to deal with rising violence, crime, and homelessness has led Conor McGregor to flirt with entering politics. “I am in the process of arranging,” he wrote on X. “Believe me I am way more tactical and I have backing. There will be change in Ireland, mark my words,” he wrote. The people will not be put down permanently. “The motivation behind the Dublin riot is as old as collective human existence,” concludes Angela Nagle. “If a male outsider hurts or kills women and children, a violent response follows. This principle is overridden by force in imperial systems, where the overarching power strategy of territorial expansion necessitates a universalist moral code. Rome had one, the Soviet Union had one, and the United States has one. For a small island nation with no imperial ambitions, this arrangement has to be awkwardly enforced by an administrative and comprador class in exchange for financial and status benefits. When those benefits are felt only by an elite, violent retaliation is the predictable result.”