Posted on 07/08/2018 4:06:13 PM PDT by Eleutheria5
Writers say the darndest things. The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, for example, said the following when she addressed fellow literary worthies at a PEN America awards gala.
Quoting her word for word, she said: "When democracy is in retreat, the first thing authoritarians do is silence those who are telling stories they dislike."
So true. Applause! Applause!
Atwood continued: "While the United States isn't putting reporters in prison yet, the tactics of the current administration are dangerous."
Who could that be?
Naturally she meant Trump as being authoritarian, and dangerous enough to put reporters in prison, though not yet. It’s chilling, she warned, and it’s coming.
Guess what? It came. But not under Trump. It came under Obama. Where was that speech from Miss Atwood?
Disobedient reporters were not tolerated and found themselves shipped to re-conditioning camp – under Obama.
Where was that uprising from PEN or from the Committee to Protect Journalists?
Dinesh D’Souza was jailed for speaking out against Obama in his films and during his appearances on TV. They found some other pretext. But that fooled nobody.
He offended Obama and was made to pay the price, and if that’s not chilling, maybe this? “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
Obama said that at the UN, 2012 – though newsrooms throughout the nation (and the world) got the message.
So did Fox News reporter James Rosen who was put under surveillance by Holder’s Justice Department for digging too deeply into a story that might harm the Obama Administration.
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(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
If Trump were the “authoritarian” these people claim he is we’d never hear from them because they’d be in a Konzentrationslager and not able to get the word out.
Margaret Atwood has hardly been silenced. Her book is the basis for the Netflix show “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which is running without any harassment whatsoever, and whose billboards have been all over Los Angeles for 2 years now.
Tommy Robinson’s been silenced by the leftard fascists over in merry old England, and British press is shockingly one-sided about the controversy. What would Milton say?
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6718446/free-tommy-robinson-march-leeds-england-v-sweden-world-cup/
Ayn Rand said “the press will always kiss the hand that slaps them.” Not a follower of hers, but occasionally she said something worth repeating.
He expresses his own views in (GASP! ORGAN MUSIC!) tweets and at rallies.
I like Ayn Rand. So much of what is going on today, she predicted down to the letter in the 1960s, including the whole environmentalist movement, and the nonsense going on in today's colleges.
I stopped reading her in the middle of Fountainhead, after getting through We The Living, Anthem and Atlas Shrugged. I’ve never picked up an Ayn Rand book since.
I liked The Fountainhead, but except for certain parts, it’s not necessary to read it over and over. She gets her point across with a sledgehammer. LOL! her non-fiction essays are a lot better.
POS Kenyan Obunghole put Dinesh D’Souza in prison. The Mueller which hunt is absolute criminal and scary. America almost had a coup. Never believe the left and their talking points and projection. They are pure scum.
The lack of verisimilitude in the scene where the leading lady explains why she married the other guy to Roarke turned me off. I just couldn’t go further. It was too unnatural.
Yeah, she was pants at writing love stories. I was there for the philosophical part.
That got stale for me after Atlas Shrugged. Long, undisciplined speeches that were totally unrelated to the characters’ actions in passages didn’t strike me as particularly insightful. As for the philosophy itself, it’s incredible that she viewed the Deity as a bureaucrat you want to ask a favor of. I can take militant atheists, but not if their atheism is based on such utter ignorance.
Bttt.
5.56mm
I never did get through the entire John Galt speech. About halfway through I was like “Okay, I get it.” I like Francisco d’Anconia’s Money Speech much better.
That was more focused. He didn’t get into religion, or love, or why movies have gone downhill and municipal bonds are the best investment. Frisco’s speech was long, but to the point. I read every word of Galt’s speech, and agree with Officer Bar Brady on South Park. It was enough to turn me off to reading forever.
She really needed a good editor.
She needed an open-mike venue that wasn’t infested with leftards, someplace where she could learn that her every word wasn’t the second coming of Shakespeare through constructive criticism. I don’t think she would have listened to an editor without going through that first. The only fully developed novel she wrote that I really liked was We, The Living, which was all based on her personal experiences, except she didn’t bleed to death at the frontier. She had promise as a writer, without passing on her philosophy. I couldn’t see love as a prize you get for having a high IQ, which is what she was implying in her later books. Dagne loves Frisco, then switches to John Galt because he’s even smarter. No thank you. But in We, The Living, she hadn’t yet made that fatal perceptual error. Her heroine was really in love.
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