Liberty wrote:I want!!!!!
The Annoyed Man wrote:It’s not directly gun-related, but this:
It came in the mail unexpectedly, after I signed up as a paid member at DailyWire.com. I don’t really know if it was a special promotion, or they do this for everybody. I didn’t know I’d be getting it. By signing up for a paid subscription, I get to read their content without the intrusive advertising that otherwise shows on any news/opinion website these days. And I have a huge amount of respect for Ben Shapiro, so it was an easy decision.......
especially since the mainstream Democrat Steno Pool (AKA “the media”) are working so hard alongside social media to bury voices other than the left’s. I also pay for CRTV membership, and I donate regularly to PatriotPost.us during their fundraising campaigns.
If we are not willing to PAY to keep a free press, we will lose it entirely. I know that sounds like a non sequitor, but “free press” doesn’t mean “free to the consumer”; it means “free to publish apart from any shackles of tyranny”.
There is a point to what follows.......
My wife and I were watching “The Post” (2017, starring Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, et al) - the story about the Washington Post’s 1971 decision to publish the “Pentagon Papers” during Nixon’s administration. Regardless of one’s opinion on the Vietnam War then or now, once it became apparent that the war was no longer being prosecuted to win, but rather to avoid humiliation, the ongoing loss of American (and Vietnamese) lives became
extremely troubling and harder and harder to defend. That’s a nutshell description of the American public’s general perception of the war at the time at the time that the Pentagon Papers were published. There were the extreme hawks on one side, and the peaceniks on the other, but there was a vast middle ground of citizens who
wanted to believe that their gov’t was doing the right thing, and were having an increasingly hard time believing it was so. Walter Cronkite’s famous/infamous (depending on your perspective) 1968 broadcast in which he pronounced the war un-winnable certainly got the middle ground Americans to begin to question the war’s necessity, but WaPo’s 1971 decision to publish Pentagon Papers definitively turned that middle ground public opinion against the war. Up until that point, there were all kinds of good faith arguments on either side of the issue of whether or not the USA ought to be engaged in that war; but the Pentagon Papers made it plain,
in writing, that: (A) the gov’t’s policy was no longer to win it, but to avoid losing it; and (B) that this had
been the policy for a while. Plus it exposed things like our gov’t’s part in the assissination of Diem, etc., etc.
The Nixon Administration’s response to the existence of the Pentagon Papers was:
- Bury them, and never acknowledge their existence.
- Once their existence was established, threaten publishers with imprisonment if they published them.
It was an existential threat to a free press. Before granting Ben Bradlee permission to publish during the company’s internal debate about doing so, Katharine Graham - The Post’s owner - required Bradlee to truthfully assert whether or not publishing would expose any specific intelligence facts that could get American troops killed. Bradlee certified that there was no such content; that the papers consisted of a years-long report on the internal conversations in the gov’t for
why the war was being prosecuted.
Reasonable people of good will -
in a free society - are free to discuss the pros and cons of the Vietnam War. My own opinion at the time was admittedly colored by my leftist upbringing, courtesy of both of my parents’ being university professors of the humanities. But I also had friends at the time who had gone there, done their duty, and had come home alive, physically intact, if not entirely emotionally so. I tended to value their opinions as much or more than I did the opinions of what the gov’t was allowing the press to publish......and Nixon was all about having a tight leash on the press. I think that, in hindsight, American troops were being ordered to go fight a war that their gov’t had no intention of winning, and that the gov’t prolonged the slaughter long past its usefulness to any legitimate American foreign policy goals it might have once had. Most of them served valiantly and with great distinction, and were a tribute to the unique qualities of Americas citizen-soldiers; but their gov’t was not nearly so purely motivated.
I am
able to have that opinion today, because The Washington Post made the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers - without which we would have had a very incomplete understanding of that war; and the war would have been unnecessarily prolonged even longer than it already had been. The Pentagon Papers were not an indictment of the American fighting man; they were an indictment of his leaders.....those leaders, military or political, that demanded that that individual soldier/sailor/airman/marine should lay down his own life for the sake of something so crass as protecting his leadership from embarassment.
WHY is this 40+ year old story relevant to my post?
It is relevant because of something that Ben Bradlee was known to repeat frequently during the crisis that led to the Post’s publishing of the Pentagon Papers:
“The ONLY way to assert the right to publish, is to publish.” In our context of today, right here and right now in May of 2018, when armies of SJWs threaten publishers with boycott if they don’t drop certain advertisers, or fire certain reporters, or stay in lockstep with leftist doctrine; when mainstream media are virtually monolithically leftist and devote all their effort to propping up idiotic leftist administrations while savaging conservative administrations; when that same media come down solidly on one side of America’s culture war; when that same media coludes with social media to crush any voice that is not in lockstep with that leftist vision; it is absolutely
essential that citizens be willing to PAY to support the voices of dissent. Those channels of dissent are comparatively small-scale upstarts, with nowhere near the massive corporate funding to stay in business enjoyed by the MSM (AKA the DNC Marketing Dept.). They cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas if WE are not willing to support them.....NOT because their ideas are bankrupt, but because they are being actively suppressed by very powerful influences.
They cannot assert the right to publish by publishing, if they no longer exist to do the publishing. When the press monolithically aligns itself too closely for or against a gov’t, it is an existential threat to a free press. It’s not just about being pro or anti-Trump. It is much bigger than that. There is such a threat at play here and now, and if we are not willing to support the voice of conservative and libertarian opposition with our dollars, and not just our pretty words, a free press will die. We have to put our money where our mouths are. I would never have known or cared if I received a “Leftist Tears” thermos mug from DailyWire.com, as long as my dollars helped them to stay in the fight.
