Originally published via Armageddon Prose:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”
-George Orwell, 1984

Reigning MSNBC patriarch Richard Maddow — who maintains her brutal rule from the studio with an iron dildo forged in the fire of Hades — and her guest, a law professor whom Maddow snatched up into her harem, had some choice words for the peasants complaining of the elimination of civil liberties for their own good.

Their message, paraphrasing, went like this: we’re not censoring you, but also we are, and we’d like to censor you harder, but you should shut your mouths about it, bigots, because… [unintelligible gibberish, monkey-in-heat noises]… Democracy™.

Via Jonathan Turley:

“In the interview, [University of Michigan Law Professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara] McQuade explains how the First Amendment is the “Achilles Heel” of the United States and why the public needs to embrace greater limitations on free speech.

Professor McQuade has published a book entitled Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.”

McQuade:

“Rachel, I think we’re more susceptible to [disinformation] than other countries, and that’s because some of our greatest strengths can also be our Achilles Heel. So, for example, our deep commitment to free speech in our First Amendment. It is a cherished right. It’s an important right in democracy, and nobody wants to get rid of it, but* it makes us vulnerable to claims [that] anything we want to do related to speech is censorship…

I think any time someone tries to do anything that might limit free speech, people claim censorship.”

*This is obviously not an original observation on my part, though nonetheless worth making: whenever one of these goblins inserts a “but” conditional clause at the end of a profession of a deep and abiding commitment to freedom of speech, you can know immediately they are promoting the suppression of speech.

Frankly, it’s remarkable that said goblins still profess such a fidelity to freedom of speech; I suspect that it’s because they are still sufficiently afraid to come out and say what they really want, which is totalitarian information control. Yet as soon as it becomes viable to do so, you can be assured it will happen.

Credit to Portfolio Armor on ZeroHedge for introducing me to this Frank Zappa quote, apropos to our current discussion as it is:

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
-Frank Zappa

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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