{"id":162263,"date":"2021-01-25T04:12:06","date_gmt":"2021-01-25T01:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/liberal-authoritarians-are-the-real-threat-to-our-democracy\/"},"modified":"2021-01-25T04:12:06","modified_gmt":"2021-01-25T01:12:06","slug":"liberal-authoritarians-are-the-real-threat-to-our-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/liberal-authoritarians-are-the-real-threat-to-our-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"#Liberal authoritarians are the real threat to our democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Liberal authoritarians are the real threat to our democracy<\/strong>”
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Every time former CIA Director John Brennan app<\/a>ears on cable news<\/a> to warn about some new \u201cinsidious threat to democracy,\u201d I am reminded again that he deserves to be in federal prison.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this corrupt media<\/a> environment, however, the official who oversaw an illegal domestic-spying operation on the legislative branch of the US\u00a0government, who tried to cover it up and blame innocent Senate staffers when discovered and who then brazenly lied about it to legislators and the American people \u2014 this man is held up as a paragon of civic virtue.<\/p>\n

We still don\u2019t even know what role Brennan played in spying on his political opponents during the 2016 campaign. We do know he went on TV for years after, alleging to have insider knowledge of an unprecedented seditious criminal conspiracy against the United States. Never once was he challenged by his hosts. And when an independent multimillion-dollar investigation couldn\u2019t pull together a single indictment related to those claims, Brennan shrugged it off by saying that he may have \u201creceived bad information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brennan was back on MSNBC last week, contending American intel agencies \u201care moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about\u201d the pro-Trump \u201cinsurgency\u201d that harbors \u201creligious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even a former Communist such as Brennan surely understands\u00a0there is nothing prohibiting Americans from being religious extremists, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists or even libertarians. It\u2019s definitely none of his business, or that of intelligence agencies, to define what those terms mean. (And the idea that libertarians, who can\u2019t get a minyan to agree on anything libertarian, are marshaling forces for a national insurgency is nonsensical.)<\/p>\n

As Brennan is a congenital liar, this may well be another one of his convenient fictions. Yet, considering his history of abusing power\u00a0we shouldn\u2019t entirely dismiss the idea that his allies are ferreting out thought crimes.<\/p>\n

Finding those who illegally threaten others with violence is well within the bailiwick of the government. But the Capitol riot has given authoritarians such as Brennan the pretext to advocate the chilling of speech.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It has become normalized, even celebrated. Networks such as CNN employ full-time anti-speech advocates who pump out cynical content meant to shame tech carriers into taking their competition off the air.<\/p>\n

\u201cExtremists exploit a loophole in social moderation: Podcasts on Apple, Google,\u201d reports Tali Arbel for The Associated Press. Are Americans who express their political views on the Internet really abusing a \u201cloophole,\u201d or are Big Tech companies who censor them at the behest of the powerful abusing a \u201cloophole\u201d in the First Amendment?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Only in the kicker does Arbel quote Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who warns that the tide of censorship \u201cis against the speech of right-wing extremists .\u2009.\u2009. but tomorrow the tide might be against opposition activists.\u201d The problem is that censors never believe they\u2019ll lose power, and maybe this time they\u2019re right.<\/p>\n

Those who rationalize state censorship almost always expand their definition of \u201cextremist\u201d to include their opponents. The Washington Post\u2019s columnist Max Boot\u00a0welcomed regime change by imploring the Biden administration to regulate those who supposedly incite radicalism, including Fox News.<\/p>\n

Nicolle Wallace, Brennan\u2019s MSNBC colleague, called for forcing Republicans to offer \u201cthe truth\u201d before they\u2019re \u201callowed\u201d to say anything else. As we protect people from \u201ccounterfeit bills,\u201d\u00a0we can protect them against \u201cfake news.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

What made Wallace\u2019s comment especially surreal\u00a0was that her guest was Ben Rhodes, the former Obama administration official who once bragged that he\u2019d duped a bunch of dimwitted reporters into becoming his disinformation operation. Now Rhodes, too, seems interested in importing Iranian-style censorship with a \u201cfirm and brutal\u201d \u201cdetox\u201d of bad ideas, achieved through the \u201cnational security\u201d officials.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m old-fashioned. I\u2019d rather have a bunch of nuts ranting on podcasts all day than one John Brennan deciding what we can say. To my ears, Rhodes, Brennan, Wallace and Boot are the ones who sound like a threat to \u201cdemocracy.\u201d\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Liberal authoritarians are the real threat to our democracy” Every time former CIA Director John Brennan appears on cable news to warn about some new \u201cinsidious threat to democracy,\u201d I am reminded again that he deserves to be in federal prison.\u00a0 In this corrupt media environment, however, the official who oversaw an illegal domestic-spying operation…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":162264,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/01\/john-brennan.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[90607,73429,74856,90711],"class_list":["post-162263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-1-24-21","tag-authoritarian","tag-cia","tag-john-brennan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}