We have a Catbird in our yard this year. It’s a pretty thing. It is a dynamic flier and a fast hopper. It almost looks like it is running across the ground (roadrunner style), but its most distinctive quality is that it never shuts the hell up.
Listen to the Catbird (0:22)
It is a very chatty bird, and while its ‘song’ is complex (diverse?) and even beautiful, it never seems to stop.
I don’t think my wife is a fan of this bird, and while she’d never suggest we get a cat-cat to get the catbird, if the bird found somewhere else to be, it would not displease her.
The endless repetition bugs her the same way she is put out by droning 90s grunge rock (Would? by Alice in Chains, for example, which I love, but she is not a fan).
Droning and depressing, she says. That’s the point, I say.
Birds of a Feather
I shared the bird soundbite to make a political point. Progressive-leaning politicians have a habit of telling you who they are or what they are doing by repeatedly claiming it is what their opposition is going to do. Joe Biden is a great example.
We were told that Joe was going to bring Adulting back to DC. We’d have unity, peace, a great economy, blah, blah, blah. Underscoring that was the same catbird who had been “singing” endlessly about how Trump (after his election in 2016) was going to start World War III, crash the economy, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
Dictator Trump would crush you under his Fascist thumb.
No such thing happened under Trump, quite the opposite. But politics is marketing (and a few other things), and Democrats and then Team Biden convinced some people of something until he stumbled his way into the Oval Office. After which, the economy, jobs, inflation, and Middle East Peace all went to sh**!
The border is such a mess that even Democrats are pissed and put out, and we’ve been watching the proxy war in Ukraine escalate us as close to WWIII as we’ve come since (perhaps) the Cuban Missile Crisis. Peace was an option, and they scuttled it and then sent obscene amounts of US wealth (plus debt) to fund more war. Iran? Isreal?
And it is safe to say “divisiveness” is at a record high.
Everything they accused their opponents of they are doing or plan to do (true to form).
Same Old Song
If you missed it, they are recycling that same fear as we approach November 2024 (and getting high on their own narrative supply) despite four years of none of that under Trump and three years of a lot of it under Biden.
Part of that manifold of ills includes a war on Free Speech that ramped up during COVID then went on Steroids when Joe B’s Obamabot support staff took the reins. The Blob (State/CIA/NSA/Media) weaponized and mechanized under Barry Obama metastasized digitally under Biden. The terms misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information became integrated into the collective consciousness thanks to the politicos and their media water carriers who, like the catbird, wouldn’t shut the hell up.
From the same cabal that parroted “Safe and Effective” (it was neither), a pandemic of the unvaccinated (to hide how the vaccine didn’t stop infection or spread), masks (that didn’t do what they said), lockdowns and distancing (no science supports it), and their fear campaign against cheap, safe drugs that could have helped millions —they got almost nothing right.
The go-to source for medical misinformation and disinformation was the people saying they needed to suppress our speech to protect us from what turned out to be the truth.
The Government Lies a Lot
These are not the only examples, but they provide a look behind a much larger curtain.
The limited discovery produced so far (in Missouri v Biden) provides a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal “Censorship Enterprise,” which includes dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies and components identified so far, who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation, disinformation, and the suppression of private speech on social media—all with the intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavor.
The goal is no different than the standard acts of Lawfare used against J6ers.
No one in DC cares about some protesters getting into the Capitol unless it is to disrupt the one chance Trump had to challenge the election results. This is actually the best reason to believe it was incited by government agents. The blob didn’t want the House and Senate looking closer at what was one of the weirdest elections in twenty years, and to send that message home (don’t do that), regular Americans discovered what their democracy might do to them should they dare to gather and seek redress under the First Amendment.
Indefinite detention and a show trial for what was one of the most “more peaceful protests” since June – Sept of 2020.
Guilt or innocence, even eventual pardon, does not matter. The point has always been the pain of the journey as a lesson to others.
The answer lies in forced preference falsification. When those who speak up in principled opposition to a dictator’s policies are punished and forced into silence, those with similar opinions are forced into silence as well, or even forced to pretend they support policies in which they do not actually believe. Emboldened by this facade of unanimity, supporters of the regime’s policies, or even those who did not previously have strong opinions, become convinced that the regime’s policies are just and good—regardless of what those policies actually are—and that those critical of them are even more deserving of punishment.
The Internet makes this play more difficult, so the Blob adapted into what I have called nothing short of a fascist cabal. Big Tech does what the Government asks, and as a favor, the Government will not crush it like a bug under a rising tide of regulations, investigations, and lawfare.
They Can’t be Trusted
From Elections to COVID, to Basement Joe, and Hunter Biden (and his laptop), the Big Tech Deep State cabal used technology and intimidation to control what Americans saw, read, and heard in the run-up to the 2020 election and long after.
(When The Left’s™ opponents appear to do the same thing, it is a Russian disinformation campaign.)
During all of it, the droning mantra of the catbirds in government was that they needed you to help them, censor speech they didn’t like. As I’ve noted in the past, if they are allowed to get it wrong, why aren’t we?
If the government has a right to be wrong, so do you—not just then or now but always, loudly, and often. When the right to be wrong proves detrimental to the rights of others, inquiries must be made with rules that are narrow and limited in the interest of protecting free speech – because our rights and our liberty as individuals cannot exist without that.
We must be free to challenge, engage, refute, or support the expression of others, even if we or they get it wrong.
If we let the government intervene on our behalf, it will only ever intercede to advance its own interests—predetermine truth on its terms, which the pandemic proved to be a terrible, tyrannical idea.
It feels like an extension of “local police and Federal agents can lie, but lying to them is a crime.” Elevated and amplified, the result is what continues to be an effort by actors in your government to use technology to de-amplify, silence, or censor things that might be true but that make them look bad (Mal-information).
They want to control it and you and what you can see, hear, read, and say, and only you can stop it. So, if you are concerned about disinformation, stopping the government from having a monopoly on it is a good place to start. Only in a free and open internet, or any space where people can publicly exchange ideas, can they be tested and affirmed or dismissed, just like science (by the way).
Anything else is just another shade of tyranny, and you don’t want to be part of that, do you?
