if you haven't seen the video this post describes i highly recommend you find and watch it as its quite revealing on several levels;

It was a strange experience watching the House hearing in which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was testifying.

The topic was censorship and how and to what extent federal government agencies under two administrations muscled social media companies to take down posts, ban users and throttle content. The majority made its case.

What was strange was the minority reaction throughout.

They tried to shut down RFK. They moved to go to executive session so that the public could not hear the proceedings. The effort failed. Then they shouted over his words when they were questioning him.

They wildly smeared him and defamed him. They even began with an attempt to block him from speaking at all, and eight Democrats voted to support that.

This was a hearing on censorship and they were trying to censor him. Just think about that for a second.

It only made the point.

It’s in the First Amendment for a Reason

It became so awful that RFK was compelled to give a short tutorial on the importance of free speech as an essential right, without which all other rights and freedoms are in jeopardy. Even those words he could barely speak given the rancor in the room.

It’s fair to say that free speech, even as a core principle, is in grave trouble. We cannot even get a consensus on the basics.

It seemed to viewers that RFK was the adult in the room. Put other ways, he was the preacher of fidelity in the brothel, the keeper of memory in a room full of amnesiacs, the practitioner of sanity in the sanatorium, or, as H.L. Mencken might have said, the hurler of a dead cat into the temple.

It was oddly strange to hear the voice of wise statesmen in that hothouse culture of infantile corruption: It reminded the public just how far things have fallen. Notably, it was he and not the people who wanted him gagged who was citing scientific papers.

The protests against his statements were shrill and shocking. They moved quickly from “Censorship didn’t happen” to “It was necessary and wonderful” to “We need more of it.”

Reporting on the spectacle, The New York Times said these are “thorny questions”: “Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?”

These are not thorny questions. The real issue concerns who is to be the arbiter of truth?........more......