Mark Steyn on free speech: another casualty

 

image credit: contrarypedant.blogspot.com

Mark Steyn’s column today reports on another grim milestone: the death of Lars Vilks, one of the vocal few who made up the front line in the “free speech wars”:

Here's the score card from that 2010 event [in the free-speech wars, gathered to mark the fifth anniversary of the Danish Mohammed cartoons in Copenhagen in 2010]: Lars Hedegaard, of the Danish Free Press Society, had invited five of us that day - a Dane, a Swede, a Norwegian, a Dutchman and yours truly:

~The Norwegian comedienne Shabana Rehman had already had her family's restaurant firebombed; she now lives under 24/7 police protection, which is not the easiest way to practice observational standup;

~The Dutch cartoonist Nekschot was obliged, for security reasons, to appear on stage with his face obscured and unidentifiable. So he chose to wear a burqa. Funny, but not quite secure enough. Nekschot had already been arrested for "hate speech" with the authorities openly taunting him about the impending loss of his anonymity. He now lives in hiding, and is no longer a cartoonist;

~Our host Lars Hedegaard was subsequently shot at point-blank range, but fortunately by an incompetent, so he survived. Mr Hedegaard also lives in hiding; the would-be assassin lives free in Turkey, where Sultan Erdogan refuses to extradite;

~and now Lars Vilks is dead.

Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, he was being driven in a bulletproof car by two of his protection officers when there occurred what Swedish police regard as a freak collision with a truck. An almighty fire ensued and neither Lars nor the policemen survived; the driver of the other vehicle is seriously wounded and in hospital. This all happened near Markaryd, about an hour north-east of Helsingborg, where Lars was born. Helsingborg, like many Swedish cities, is utterly transformed, which is why Lars Vilks ended his life in an unmarked car being driven home under police protection from a guarded lunch with an old friend.

The BBC reported his demise thus:

Muhammad cartoonist killed in traffic collision

He was not, in fact, a cartoonist. He was an artist, primarily a sculptor - of limited technical skills (as he conceded) but of whimsical imagination. Yet, as the gates clank shut on free speech across Europe, it's easier for lazy Beeb hacks to lump every dissenter under the category of "Muhammad cartoonist".

. . .

It was an unusual traffic accident. On a divided carriageway with a sturdily fenced median, the police vehicle somehow managed to cross into the oncoming lane to find itself just in front of a large truck. As Robert Spencer puts it:

The names of his police guards need to be released. As does the name of the truck driver. Note that 'the rescue service and the police said it would take a lot for a vehicle to be able to pass into the other lane, given that it is separated by a wire fence.'

The Swedish police continue to investigate. Whatever the circumstances of the fatal crash, Douglas Murray is correct as to the broader cause of death:

Lars Vilks was a man, and an artist, of enormous courage. He should never have been in this situation, and if other artists and others across Europe had not been such cowards then he never would have been.

I ponder the grim arithmetic of that 2010 event. Six of us on stage that day: One firebombed, one forced into hiding and out of his job, one shot, and now one dead. It's like Agatha Christie for jihadists: And Then There Were None. Maybe someone would like to produce a film or a play on the theme. Ah, but no: As Douglas says quite correctly, Lars Vilks was only in that van because of the miserable cowardice of our so-called artists, a "community" that spends the whole year giving each other awards back and forth for their "courage" and "heroism".

Mark’s full column is here.

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Weaponized Medicine

 

JD Rucker has been publishing Dr Joseph Mercola’s updates on the mandates and “guidelines” on COVID-19, and Dr. Mercola's updates are perpetually at risk of being censored (see here and here).  Here’s the beginning of today’s offering:

Editor’s [JD Rucker’s] Commentary: When this story first crossed my desk, I almost didn’t publish it. Dr. Mercola will often revisit topics that we’ve already discussed, and while his insights are invariably better than mine, I initially thought this particular topic was well saturated.

I was wrong for two reasons, which is why you’re reading this right now. First, there is no such thing as an important topic regarding Covid-19 being “oversaturated” because mainstream media is flooding the zone with propaganda. How could a story like this be overdone compared to all the massive lies that are being told to the masses every minute of every day? I realized the error of my thinking and I blame a temporary lapse in judgment.

The second reason, as I learned when I read it, is that the Project Veritas video may be a bit long in the tooth for the mercurial news cycle, but Dr. Mercola’s perspectives tie it all together with current events. Again, silly of me to think otherwise and almost pass on this fabulous article!

In short, I almost messed up and deprived our audience of this important piece. But just in the nick of time, I grabbed it in the 48-window Dr. Mercola allows for his articles to be published. Here it is…

Medical Mafia is Sinking the Healthcare System

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

• Jodi O’Malley, a registered nurse who works for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Indian Health Services branch in Phoenix, Arizona, is blowing the whistle on COVID jab injuries
• A DHHS emergency room physician admits no one is reporting COVID jab injuries, even though it’s required for emergency use medications
• According to media reports, unvaccinated COVID patients are causing health care systems to be overwhelmed. Health care systems in Idaho, Alaska and Montana have started rationing health care based on probability of survival
• What many media outlets are not addressing is that medical resources are under strain due to the enormous numbers of trained medical staff either resigning or getting fired for refusing the COVID jab
• Public health data are being massively manipulated and then wielded as a weapon to justify egregious power grabs and governmental overreaches. In the process, the medical profession has been pushed to the edge of a moral void where patients are viewed as disposable based on their medical choices

Read Dr. Mercola’s article here. 

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A Glimmer of Hope

 

Patriot Post meme via PowerLine

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse is always a step ahead of everyone else. Here’s a chunk from his weekend column:

Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics was downstream from pop culture.  Andrew’s ability to engage any audience that generally didn’t care about politics, while displaying the Machiavellian manipulators in a way that was brutally effective, made him an enemy to those who avoid sunlight.

What we are seeing amid college football games, and recently any venue where a large audience is assembling, is really quite remarkable.  The cultural shift within the modern political sphere was triggered by Donald Trump; his election was the biggest middle finger to the elites, and ultimately the scale of his support amid a global population that was disenfranchised is why they needed to eliminate him.

The leftist Marxist’s have power.  However, their unquenchable lust for power, specifically showcased in their COVID-19 reaction, has put them in a place where they are in power but losing the cultural argument.

Free people can only tolerate and internalize so much frustration before it starts to come out. Specifically, because frustration is now palpable anger, the sense that screams freedom has become snarky, raw, unapologetic and now often vulgar.

Yeah, it’s a weird thing to find alignment with vulgarity, but when your life and liberty is on the line… well, you fight like the third monkey on the ramp to Noah’s ark – and you appreciate anyone that stands beside you.

If  “F**k Joe Biden” bothers you, don’t watch this [video] . . .

I didn’t watch the video, but I am certainly following the phenomenon.  Full article with video is here.

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Louie Gohmert: ivermectin is safe and effective

 

Congressman Louie Gohmert(R-TX) explained why the deliberate campaign to smear ivermectin as an effective treatment of COVID-19 is a “crime against humanity.” Below is most of his op-ed at American Greatness:

Just as we saw with hydroxychloroquine last summer, government alphabet agencies, the medical industrial complex, and their willing accomplices in the media have recently made it clear that there is yet another safe, effective treatment for COVID-19 they wish to torpedo. It’s the latest naughty word which will get you censored on social media and mocked and belittled by late-night “comedians”: ivermectin.

While ivermectin has been used by certain brave doctors around the world to treat COVID-19 for over a year now, it only recently became the target of a multi-pronged attack, with the U.S. government, the media, and Big Pharma all playing important roles in the deadly dystopian disinformation campaign against the drug. As more Americans became aware of ivermectin’s efficacy against COVID-19, like clockwork the government and its propaganda arm in the press jumped in to discredit it, referring to the drug snidely as a “horse dewormer.” 

We watched the FDA embarrass itself with its ridiculing tweet telling people “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” while linking to an agency article on why people should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent the China Virus. We saw Rolling Stone magazine forced to admit that its recent story about Oklahoma hospitals being overwhelmed by patients who overdosed on ivermectin was completely false. 

Pharmaceutical company Merck, which produces ivermectin, discredited its use for COVID by irresponsibly stating, “We do not believe that the data available support the safety and efficacy of ivermectin beyond the doses and populations indicated in the regulatory agency-approved prescribing information.” It is worth noting that Merck and Pfizer are developing their own oral antivirals that would directly compete with the cheap and effective ivermectin. These antivirals, unlike ivermectin, would be patented, creating the potential for pharmaceutical companies to rake in billions of dollars from their use.

What the globalist elites and the medical establishment won’t tell you is that those who discovered ivermectin and its use to treat parasitic diseases won a Nobel Prize in 2015—it was the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine’s only award for treatments of infectious diseases in six decades. 

Almost 4 billion doses of ivermectin have been prescribed for humans, not horses, over the past 40 years. In fact, the CDC recommends all refugees coming to the U.S. from the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean receive this so-called dangerous horse medicine as a preemptive therapy. Ivermectin is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be an “essential medicine.” The Department of Homeland Security’s “quick reference” tool on COVID-19 mentioned how this life-saving drug reduced viral shedding duration in a clinical trial. 

. . .   

Critics argue that ivermectin hasn’t been approved for use in the fight against COVID-19 and therefore should not be prescribed to patients. Doctors, however, often prescribe drugs to help patients that aren’t necessarily approved for their particular ailments—it’s called “off-label” prescription and according to the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, 10-20 percent of all prescriptions are prescribed in this fashion.

Make no mistake, the evil, deadly, coordinated globalist attacks we are currently witnessing on ivermectin will go down in history as a vicious crime against humanity; a grievous public health policy error that can only be explained by following the money. Many top doctors agree that hundreds of thousands of American lives could have been saved had early treatment protocols such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine not been so maliciously vilified by authority figures, some pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare providers who just so happen to have financial incentives to suppress the truth about these cheap, effective drugs. 

Full column is here.

And for corroboration, click here for Justus R. Hope, MD’s detailed examination (at TheDesertReview) of the fake news media doing their best to hide the success of ivermectin in Uttar Pradesh, India. 

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Censorship on steroids at YouTube

 

This blog has linked many times to JD Rucker at NOQ and at Liberty Daily.  We’ve included commentary by Dr Joseph Mercola on controversial claims concerning vaccines.  Now Mr. Rucker reports that “YouTube Goes Full Vaxx-Nanny, Bans Huge Accounts that Posted the Truth About the Jabs,” and Dr Mercola is one of the censored accounts:

YouTube, the video site owned by Google parent company Alphabet, changed their terms of service this morning to go after “disinformation” regarding the Covid-19 injections. They removed countless videos and banned several prominent accounts.

Dr. Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr were among the account owners who learned this morning that they are no longer welcome on the “platform.” Their accounts are gone.

After an extract from the corrupt Washington Post deploring medical sources of “misinformation,"

Dr. Mercola responded to the move:

The world is becoming increasingly aware of the rampant corruption in the media, and are rising up against tyrannical government and the pharmaceutical industry that are coordinating this assault on our freedom and civil rights. Anyone who asks question or challenges the hard sell is immediately censored on social media. State government and employees, health care workers and emergency responders, face loss of their jobs for refusing the vaccine.

In other words, here we are in the Police States of America. Mr. Rucker has more to say here. 

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At Last, An American Sports Team To Be Proud Of

 

images from the linked article

The Blue State Conservative blogsite pops up occasionally on my searches.  Monday’s column by P.F. Whalen -- "At Last, An American Sports Team To Be Proud Of" -- caught my eye.  Here’s his feel-good conclusion:  

Even if you don’t enjoy golf, if you missed this weekend’s Ryder Cup competition you missed a marvelous spectacle, and you missed an opportunity to observe true American greatness. We had a great bunch of young men play their hearts out and win the coveted Ryder Cup for their country. We witnessed fans chanting “USA, USA,” and players urging on those chants. There was no kneeling or turning their backs on their flag, like we saw certain Olympians do. There was no one casting shame on our country or pointing out how bad we are for things that happened 156 years ago.  There was fist-raising, but it wasn’t in protest, it was in jubilation.

There is much about modern American athletics to be disgusted by. The NBA’s coddling of their gravy train known as China. The NFL’s promotion of having two separate national anthems based on your melanin levels. And MLB’s kowtowing to ridiculous leftist opposition to improving election integrity. And many of the athletes in those sports don’t just accept the nonsense, they propel it. But our 2021 Ryder Cup Team gave us an opportunity to forget about those absurdities and focus on America as it should be. Unified, happy, and unparalleled. God bless the 2021 U.S. Ryder Cup Team.

Full article is here.

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One Option: Do Not Comply

 

Hannah Cox at FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) has an encouraging story on how Americans can resist and choose not to comply with police-state directives:

4 Ways Americans Are Fighting Back Against Anti-Science COVID Restrictions

What’s more American than apple pie? Civil disobedience.

In the US, it would be easy to believe the vast majority of people are in lockstep with the government’s pandemic policies. Networks are aflush with headlines claiming their polls show a majority of Americans support policies like masks and vaccine mandates, and detractors are painted as fringe.

Every good politico knows that, with the right framing, you can get a poll to say anything you want it to. But aside from the unreliable nature of the polls and headlines dominating our airwaves, there is another problem with the media’s reporting: they never seem to elevate stories that tell a counter narrative.

One doesn’t have to look far to find examples of Americans who have simply had enough of the anti-scientific and unconstitutional COVID mandates. We know, and have known for over a year, that the majority of masks in use provide little benefit in warding off the coronavirus. Additionally, studies have shown that mask mandates failed to reduce COVID deaths, hospitalizations, or even cases. And on top of all of that, we consistently see the same leaders who push these unscientific mandates on the rest of us flout the rules whenever it suits their fancy—like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Met Gala or San Francisco Mayor London Breed partying at a local jazz club.

Vaccine mandates present similar problems. Besides being flagrantly unconstitutional and a violation of bodily autonomy, these mandates ignore the natural immunity that millions of people have built up.

The rules only get sillier and more nonsensical from there. . . .

Read the full article here.  

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