What happened to an America where you could freely speak your mind?

Yahoo News ^ | July 29, 2020 | John Kass,

[Hojczyk]

The angry left-handed broom of America’s cultural revolution uses fear to sweep through the our civic, corporate and personal life.

It brings with it attempted intimidation, shame and the usual demands for ceremonies of public groveling.

It is happening in newsrooms in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. And now it’s coming for me, in an attempt to shame me into silence.

Here’s what happened:

Last week, with violence spiking around the country, I wrote a column on the growing sense of lawlessness in America’s urban areas.

In response, the Tribune newspaper union, the Chicago Tribune Guild, which I have repeatedly and politely declined to join, wrote an open letter to management defaming me, by falsely accusing me of religious bigotry and fomenting conspiracy theories.

Newspaper management has decided not to engage publicly with the union. So I will.

For right now, let’s deal with facts. My July 22 column was titled “Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats: An overwhelming sense of lawlessness.”

It explored the connections between soft-on-crime prosecutors and increases in violence along with the political donations of left-wing billionaire George Soros, who in several states has funded liberal candidates for prosecutor, including Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.

Soros’ influence on these races is undeniable and has been widely reported. But in that column, I did not mention Soros’ ethnicity or religion.

You’d think that before wildly accusing someone of fomenting bigoted conspiracy theories, journalists on the union’s executive board would at least take the time to Google the words “Soros,” “funding” and “local prosecutors.”

As recently as February, the Sun Times pointed out roughly $2 million in Soros money flowing to Foxx in her primary election effort against more law-and-order candidates.

[KC_Lion]

IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE

[Rurudyne]

Cultural Marxism made cowards and nags and cowardly nags of huge numbers of people.

Being offended is the new political super power.

[Hojczyk]

Have no idea if he is a real conservative or not..

After 23 years as the Chicago Tribune’s white male conservative standard-bearer, John Kass is about to lose his coveted spot on Page 2 and his status as the newspaper’s “lead columnist.”

Colin McMahon, editor-in-chief of the Tribune, today announced plans to reorganize the paper’s columnists and separate their work from the news section.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Social media was specifically created as a sheep herding tool for the masses.

That’s my conspiracy theory and I’m sticking to it.

[sauropod]

bkmk

[ConservativeMind]

Direct link:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/john-kass/ct-cancel-culture-kass-20200626-zahoolv4jjaezed2p6qlopevrm-story.html

[marktwain]

Social media was specifically created as a sheep herding tool for the masses.

I do not think it was created for that purpose.

It was created to make money.

As the influence of the various social media became apparent, they were taken over by leftists, both in and out of the government.

I suspect the deep state was very influential in picking winners and losers in the social media contest.

[ConservativeMind]

He’s not. He’s politically agnostic, but leans liberal. However, in recent years, he seems more “conservative” than he ever intended.

I used to listen to him on the radio. Not a bad guy—just not Republican leaning.

[freedumb2003]

bfl

[LeonardFMason]

What Democrats/Liberals want if they win: The Killing Fields (Khmer: វាលពិឃាត, Khmer pronunciation: [ʋiəl pikʰiət]) are a number of sites in Cambodia where collectively more than a million people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime (the Communist Party of Kampuchea) during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War (1970–1975). The mass killings are widely regarded as part of a broad state-sponsored genocide (the Cambodian genocide). Analysis of 20,000 mass grave sites by the DC-Cam Mapping Program and Yale University indicates at least 1,386,734 victims of execution.[1][2] Estimates of the total deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including death from disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a 1975 population of roughly 8 million. In 1979, Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime; viewed as ending the genocide. The Cambodian journalist Dith Pran coined the term "killing fields" after his escape from the regime.[3] The Khmer Rouge regime arrested and eventually executed almost everyone suspected of connections with the former government or with foreign governments, as well as professionals and intellectuals. Ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Thai, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Cham, Cambodian Christians, and the Buddhist monkhood were the demographic targets of persecution. As a result, Pol Pot has been described as "a genocidal tyrant."[4] Martin Shaw described the Cambodian genocide as "the purest genocide of the Cold War era."[

[Gene Eric]

>> Cultural Marxism

And corporate Marxism

[proust]

By the time people ask this questions, it’s already too late.

[frank ballenger]

You have a good memory. Way back when we could speak our minds and express ourselves.

We will have to fight hard to regain those freedoms our forefathers sacrificed for in order to leave them behind for all of us when we were young.

Answer to “We can still express ourselves”——

If you lose your professional job, your chance at another one (Don’t hire him ,he’s the one who got in trouble for sexism, or for white racism, or for not signing the BLM company endorsement list...). Your radio and tv sponsors cut you off under pressure and this reduces your income and may take away stations (Michael Savage). Banned or shadowbanned on all social media including demonetized ones you used for income. And get doxed. Followed in public. Your house surrounded (Tucker Carlson....). Google searches in your favor deleted. Amazon won’t promote or sell your books. Surrounded and threatened in a restaurant (Ted Cruz, Sarah Huckabee Sanders) ,Social Security Number broadcast (Sarah Palin). Not allowed to speak again (Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter).

So if you pay that steep a price it is not “free.” Ask the Chinese dissidents and Christians.

[DivineMomentsOfTruth]

Human beings do not wish to see themselves as cowards. They want to see themselves as heroes. And, as they are shaped and taught to fear even the slightest accusation of thought crime, they will not view themselves as weak for falling in line. Instead they will view themselves as virtuous. And that is the sin of it.

Leftists care too much about what other Leftists think of them.. They fancy themselves "do-gooders".. The act of actually doing good is mot important to them.

[Erik Latranyi]

I was just terminated from my job with a publicly traded company.

My crime?

I commented on online Letter to the Editor in a local newspaper with the following:

“George Floyd was a drug-using scumbag who killed himself by resisting arrest.”

I did this as a citizen. But someone searched my name, found my employer and complained.

The company terminated my employment for this.

The cancel culture is very, very real, folks!!!!

[glennaro]

You can’t really “speak your mind”; you can only “mumble through your mandated face diaper” ... mandated by nothing more than politicians and unelected bureaucrats.

[Rurudyne]

Corporations reduce all to the movement of money even without it. They will inherently produce cowardice in the face of unreasonable demands if enough time passes.

[BobL]

“What happened to an America where you could freely speak your mind?”

We sat on our asses while the Left took over our schools, and even worse, we fed our own kids into them.

We deserve what happens now.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

I finally got around to reading the controversial column and can’t believe it caused this kind of trouble, or any kind of trouble at all. They must have been waiting for Kass to write something they could use against him.

All Kass did what write that our cities have become even more crime-ridden than usual and part of the problem is county prosecutors whose campaigns have been funded by Soros and are pushing his “criminal justice reform” agenda. That’s easy to verify for anyone who wants to take a few minutes to google it. Since it is true, and since the Left can’t have the truth be known, they have started playing the anti-Semite card anytime Soros is critcized.

Kass never said anything about Soros being a Jew. He didn’t even hint at it. I wouldn’t be surprised that someone somewhere has made an anti-Semitic rant against Soros, but I have never seen it. People don’t go after Soros because he is a Jew. People go after him because he is an evil scumbag with a lot of money who makes a lot of trouble.