By Tony Lyons
In a bold but clearly disingenuous statement from its famed Editorial Board, “a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate, and certain longstanding values,” the New York Times issued a cautionary statement:
“For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.”
The Editorial Board pounded the point home:
“People should be able to put forward viewpoints, ask questions and make mistakes, and take unpopular but good-faith positions on issues that society is still working through—all without fearing cancellation…Freedom of speech requires not just a commitment to openness and tolerance in the abstract. It demands conscientiousness…We believe it isn’t enough for Americans to just believe in the rights of others to speak freely; they should also find ways to actively support and protect those rights.”
Of course, the New York Times should be teaching by example. In fact, it has not supported free speech, protected the First Amendment, or allowed honest debate. It has not allowed competing perspectives about the most important issues of the day. It has been a mouthpiece for greedy corporations and corrupt government officials.
In support of their interests, and at the expense of those of American citizens, it censored The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in every conceivable way. It ranked the book #7 on its non-fiction bestseller list even though Kennedy’s book outsold any other book in America that week by thousands of copies. Then it refused to allow Skyhorse Publishing to place an advertisement for the book because it’s censorship division, ironically called “Standards Management,” decided that the book itself constituted misinformation, despite their stated policy that “Standards” only looks into whether an ad itself is “non-defamatory and accurate.”
The New York Times followed up with a scathing hit piece targeting Kennedy as “a leading voice in the campaign to discredit coronavirus vaccines and other measures being advanced by the Biden White House to battle a pandemic that was…killing close to 1,900 people a day.” It accused him of circulating “false information,” without indicating what that information is or explaining why it’s false, and of comparing the government pandemic response to the Holocaust, even though he clearly didn’t do that.
Finally, they refused to review The Real Anthony Fauci or so much as comment on its historic grassroots success, even though it’s become a cult classic, selling over 1,000,000 copies, and launching a worldwide movement against government corruption and corporate greed.“Despite all the lying, or maybe in reaction to it,” Tucker Carlson wrote, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is becoming a legitimate folk hero.”
He is a folk hero because he stood up, grabbed a bullhorn, and spoke truth to power. He’s risked everything and lost a lot. He’s realized that you either care about justice or you care about personal consequences. And for him there have been many.
After suppressing freedom of speech for two years, after defending a specific, myopic and harmful narrative, the Editorial Board of the New York Times decided it was the perfect time to take a strong stance against censorship and cancel culture.
The irony of the most powerful and impactful violator of First Amendment rights lamenting the lack of free speech and offering up ideas to protect the rights of Americans was palpable, inescapable, and despicable.
Like Captain Renault in the movie Casablanca, when he closes Rick’s Café Americain and proclaims: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here”, the New York Times gladly accepted it’s winnings. Their profitability has soared during the worst and most pervasive period of censorship in recent American history. They have done absolutely nothing to protect the free speech rights of hundreds, if not thousands, of doctors, nurses, scientists, and concerned citizens who have tried to discuss views, make arguments, and analyze scientific studies that challenge the prevailing Covid narrative. They have silenced debate, worked tirelessly to chastise, vilify, and discredit those whose positions they disagree with, and failed to investigate serious claims of government corruption.
Nevertheless, they claim to lament that “when public discourse in America is narrowed, it becomes harder to answer…the urgent questions we face as a society.”
What could be more important, more urgent, than the truth about corruption at the highest levels of government, about a pandemic response that led to more serious illness and death than was necessary, about the most powerful public health official in the country being more concerned with helping Big Pharma maximize return on investment and mitigate risk, than protecting people?
As the NYT wrote, the worst kind of censorship is cancel culture and the worst kind of cancel culture is the “piling on” kind. Why then, one might ask, did the NYT run a hit piece about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that covered essentially the same subject matter as a dozen other hit pieces against Kennedy? Why now? Why this target? His family thinks he’s wrong about vaccines, the Times noted. His friends think he’s wrong about vaccines. Dr. Fauci thinks he’s wrong about vaccines. Ever heard that before? Any analysis about vaccine safety? Any facts? Any citations? Any discussion of Dr. Fauci’s despicable corruption as described in The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy’s recent and epic takedown of Fauci. No, no, no, no, and no. What was the New York Times doing when the whole world was attacking Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?
Where was the New York Times when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Judy Mikovits, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Paul Marik, Dr. Ryan Cole … and so many other impressive voices were being stifled? Here’s an easy answer: they were “piling on.”
The NYT has stated that it won’t “publish ad hominem attacks,” but it does publish hit pieces that any rational person understands are meant to discredit a book that they don’t mention and obviously haven’t read. They protect corrupt government officials against the unsuspecting public by forwarding policy statements or official memos that they have not thoroughly vetted, investigated, or corroborated. They are the worst kind of co-conspirators: the kind that claim to be protecting their victims.
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The New York Times writes that:“At the individual level, human beings cannot flourish without the confidence to take risks, to pursue ideas and express thoughts that others might reject…When speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out of the public discourse, a society also loses its ability to resolve conflict, and it faces the risk of political violence.”
That’s where we are in America today. There is no debate, no public discourse, and we have lost the ability to resolve conflict. We have separated the country into two America’s, at least partially because of the policies and practices of the New York Times.
The New York Post has pointed out that the New York Times “published lies to serve a biased narrative.” They accused the Times of “malicious misreporting” and cite a book called “The Grey Lady Winked” by Ashley Rindsberg.
Rindsberg is quoted as calling the New York Times “a truth-producing machine.” He believes that the “fabrications and distortions” they’ve peddled since the 1920s were a system of twisting facts to manipulate public opinion about everything from “Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia to Vietnam and the Iraq War.” The “reporting” is designed to “support a narrative aligned with the corporate whims, economic needs and political preferences” of the New York Times. He believes that they have consistently created “false narratives.”
Projection. A wave of the gullible bought the idea that is was perfectly okay to censor, arrest, and completely deny rights to anyone labeled with such overused and utterly worthless titles as “nazi”, “white supremacist”, and “racist.”
Anyone with the brain knows the minute you act like a nazi to fight a nazi, you’re the nazi.
Now the backpedaling?
Once again, this is a planned narrative shift from the World Economic Forum.
Protecting the failing and corrupt Democrat party is more important. Promoting the leftist agenda, which actually brought us COVID, is more important. In fact, EVERYTHING is more important than freedom of speech, as far as a leftist propaganda organ is concerned.
Remember the hubbub over the editorial Tom Cotton wrote about using military forces to maintain law and order where Democrats were allowing crime to run rampant? Editors quit because the article wasn’t suppressed. Later, there were no articles denouncing idiot Biden deploying 35,000 troops to “maintain order” in DC. They exist and function to propagandize for the left.
Yeah, free speech is under attack. The NYT, along with many of their corrupt left wing allies, is one of the primary reasons and weapons of suppression.