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OPINION

Left's Efforts to Censor 'Fake News' Real Threat to Free Speech

Left's Efforts to Censor 'Fake News' Real Threat to Free Speech
(AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

Michael Hurd By Monday, 20 March 2017 03:42 PM EDT Current | Bio | Archive

When the media portrayed his meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel as unfriendly, President Trump called it more "fake news."

Another recent example of fake news?

The media’s claim that Donald Trump’s budget proposal eliminates Meals on Wheels. The story misleads people into thinking that Meals on Wheels, which provides food for elderly and house-bound persons, is a government program.

In truth, only 3 percent of funding for Meals on Wheels comes from the government.

You’d never know it from hysterical news stories claiming that the Trump administration seeks to starve old people.

Fake news is not new. In the Soviet and Nazi eras, we called it propaganda.

Propaganda is information of a biased or misleading nature used to promote a political cause or point of view.

Today’s so-called mainstream media – The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and all the rest — serve as reliable propaganda sources for socialists and leftists.

They’re worse than liars. Liars simply fabricate. It’s easier to disprove fabrications than half-truths. The leftist mainstream media tells half-truths, i.e., falsehoods with a grain of truth smuggled in as a decoy.

Think of a courtroom oath, where you’re bound to tell, "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

Mainstream media sources violate this principle with sinister and sneering arrogance.

Kudos to Donald Trump for using the bully pulpit of his presidency to call them on their blatant dishonesty as nobody in political office has ever done.

If his presidency accomplishes nothing more than exposing the media as the dishonest, immoral and largely unaccountable bunch of sycophants for the leftist-socialist cause that they are, Donald Trump will have done America a heroic service.

If you think the left’s reliance on propaganda is only a metaphor, think again. In a bill aimed at securing a chillingly Orwellian "right to be forgotten," introduced by New York State Assemblyman David I. Weprin and by state Sen. Tony Avella (Senate Bill 4561) leftist New York politicians would require people to remove "inaccurate, irrelevant, inadequate or excessive" statements about others from the Internet.

Within 30 days of a "request from an individual," according to the proposed law, "all search engines and online speakers shall remove . . . content about such individual, and links or indexes to any of the same, that is 'inaccurate,'  'irrelevant,' 'inadequate' or 'excessive.'"

The Washington Post itself reports details of the proposed bill on its website on March 15,  2017. Welcome to the Soviet Union, circa 1960.

So now it’s official.

Members of one of America’s two major political parties now aim at dictatorship.

A dictatorship consists of government control of speech, including the press and the Internet. For the first time ever, Democrats are considering legislation to actively and openly ban free speech when government deems it "excessive," "inadequate" or offensive to the wrong people. Just imagine Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch (or Eric Holder) back in office, determining whose speech is or is not "adequate."

Under the law, what exactly is that supposed to mean? It’s too hideous to contemplate.

Some people claim Donald Trump is dangerous because he seeks to impose a dictatorship on the United States.I’ve yet to see any evidence of this, but the propaganda machine continues to report half-truths (or outright falsehoods) supporting that narrative.

They are so desperate that they’ve even created a conspiracy theory involving Russia’s Putin forcing Trump into the White House.

Such lies are all they’ve got! No facts are ever cited.

America does not yet have a dictatorship. If we ever get one, I don’t think it will be due to Donald Trump. The far more likely scenario is that Democrats regain control of Congress and/or the White House, and resolve never to let anything like Donald Trump ever happen again.

They’ll have their excuses and rationalizations, and they’ll strong-arm something through Congress and the courts a lot like the trial balloon now being floated in the New York State legislature.

Dictatorship can come to America. If it does, look for it to arise from the left. In New York State, it’s already starting.

Like Communism, the entire leftist ideology of economic and environmentalist controls is based on coercion.

Leftism and liberty are polar opposites.

There’s simply no reconciling them. Many on the left already understand this.

Their propaganda machine-in-waiting, our mainstream "fake news" media, has understood it for years. It will ultimately be up to the American people to forcibly reassert the Bill of Rights and Constitution to keep America as strong and free as it was up to this point.

Michael J. Hurd, Ph.D., LCSW is a psychotherapist and author with a private practice in coastal Delaware. He is the author of “Bad Therapy, Good Therapy (and How to Tell the Difference).” For more of his reports, Go Here Now.

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MichaelHurd
Leftist New York politicians would require people to remove statements about others from the Internet. Democrats are considering legislation to actively and openly ban free speech when government deems it excessive, inadequate, or offensive. Welcome to the Soviet Union, circa 1960.
orwellian, putin
801
2017-42-20
Monday, 20 March 2017 03:42 PM
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