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Some here may know of Keith Woods, who is a well-known figure on the Dissident Right. He had his Twitter account unbanned a month ago. Keith is Irish, and he made a tweet about an upcoming hate speech law being considered in Ireland:
Keith was retweeted by Elon Musk who replied "This is a massive attack against freedom of speech". He was subsequently retweeted by Trump Jr. and retweeted by Jordan Peterson.
So overall Keith's brief analysis of the hate speech law reached 11 million people, and sparked debate among opposition politicians and gave the law more public visilbity than it had before.
There's a very slim chance that any of those three know who Keith is or his politics. But it's still a good demonstration of why Twitter is important, and being banned from the public square really does shift the discourse. Of course that is the entire point.
New Florida hate speech law coming out of Jerusalem
After Trump Jr. retweeted Keith, Keith made a reply that was quite strategically intended to goad Trump Jr. into attacking Ron DeSantis for his recent trip to Israel:
You see, Ron DeSantis made a secret trip to Jerusalem (!) last week where he signed a new Florida hate-speech law which "aims to crack down on antisemitic and other heritage based threats." The press release, Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Legislation in Israel Further Combatting Antisemitism provides a summary, and one of the more significant parts of the legislation is:
In tandem with Florida, a couple of weeks ago it was reported that several people from the 2017 torch-light march in Charlottesville on the UVA campus are being charged with felonies on the basis of burning an object with an intent to intimidate. So there seems to be a broader strategy of expanding the definition of "intimidation" to mean "politically incorrect protest" and ban those displays from public universities.
Another significant fact of this Florida Law which was signed in Jerusalem is that it mandates that all manner of offenses, including minor litter (i.e. flyering) are to all be reclassified as hate crimes for statistical reporting. The ADL and various Jewish organizations were recently up in arms that hate crime data did not show enough of a rise an antisemitism, so there's a significant effort to expand the reporting of "hate crime" to include all manner of things.
I am unfortunately not surprised by this affair- an American hate speech law being signed in Jersualem. It goes to show that just because a conservative plays tough on some culture war issues does not at all mean they are an ally. The conservative establishment is not an ally, it's entirely compromised. Supporting conservatism is not an option for people who oppose this sort of influence. I would support Biden over Ron DeSantis at this point- I would be genuinely afraid of what Ron would do at the behest of Israel.
It's so secret that it is featured on his official website: https://flgov.com/2023/04/27/governor-ron-desantis-delivers-keynote-address-in-jerusalem-to-commemorate-the-75th-anniversary-of-the-founding-of-israel/
Doesn't get any more secret that that. And of course, a man gearing up for a presidential campaign going on foreign relations tour and going to Israel among several other key US allies is super-nefarious - I mean, Joos(!)!11oneonme11 are involved. He surely is part of the ZOG now, it is proven.
The Representative described it as secret, Florida State Representative Randy Fine. Obviously they publicized it after the fact, but the Representative himself described the trip to Jerusalem to deliver the bill to be signed as secret:
So the Representative himself described it in even stronger terms than I did- it was a secret trip to JERUSALEM (!!!) to deliver the strongest antisemitism bill in the United States (!!!!).
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Imagine if the white house was full of staffers from Saudi arabia and they were all staunch pro Saudi, had a clear pro Saudi agenda and continuously talked about Saudi Arabia. Many openly called themselves Saudi firsters. That would be considered weird. We are supposed to forget about the extreme overrepresentation of a small minority of jews whose interests and views differ from the rest of the population.
Except nothing like that is actually is happening - nobody calls themselves "Israel firsters", nobody "continuously talks about Israel" (in fact, the current administration is pretty hostile to Israel though thankfully most of the time ignores it by now), and White House is not "full of staffers from Israel" (unless you consider anybody with Jewish blood to be "from Israel", which makes as much sense as considering anybody with Arabic blood be "from Saudi Arabia"). There are, indeed, a number of Muslim staffers, and the number of ethnically Jewish ones (most of them are not even practicing Jews, in fact, I am not sure there's one practicing Jew among top current officials). It is not "weird" in any way.
Obnoxiously ad hominem, and you've been warned about low effort posting before.
Banned for two days.
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He almost certainly is - he blocked me after I made other anti-Israel lobby posts in the past. Such is life. We all bring our personal interests to the table, wherever we go.
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I think you've accidentally stumbled onto a generalization; any group that holds an important resource will get preference in how our policies are shaped to please others. Arabs have oil, Israelis have Jerusalem, Iowans have swing votes.
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Last time I voted, I ran into my incumbent county clerk campaigning outside the local courthouse. Very secret, very nefarious. She hadn’t even gotten it broadcast on Fox!
Or there was that time Ted Cruz flew away to Mexico during the big freeze. He broadcast it on Twitter, and the Texas media really picked it up. Not a great look. I wonder what percentage of Americans heard or cared?
This is fun; hit me with some more examples!
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By that logic, literally everything about our government and state is secret, because I'd estimate the percentage of people having at least basic working knowledge about anything happening in the government that is not plastered in MEGA FONT in the headlines is much less than 1%. And the amount of people who read even one of those many-thousands-pages bills can probably be counted on your fingers and you wouldn't need to remove you shoes for that. I guess that must be the proof the government is captured by the Illuminati.
In fairness, I can see where CoolAdam is coming from. I certainly wouldn't have known of a number of digital-speech-related bills throughout the years if it weren't for Fight For The Future and other orgs. I can only imagine what kind of possibly-massive legislation just cruises on by without much public scrutiny.
It's not because they are "secret". It's because most of the population is apathetic and the press has completely abandoned its mission to inform and investigate. There are still some real journalists, either independent or not yet pushed out of MSM for some reason (give it time), but otherwise yes, we are is a bit of a sad situation here. Low-information (or zero-information) voting is rampant. But it's not because it's not possible to see those bills. It's because as a society, we failed to demand a functional debate about them.
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Which topic is that? Israel is routinely discussed, and open anti-Semites sit in Congress right now. Yeah, it's about as "forbidden" as something published on the official site of the Florida governor is "secret". If you intend to contend in the Victim Olympics, you have a lot of training before you until you have a chance.
Talking negative about "Jews" is the definition of being anti-Semite - it is assigning negative qualities to people by their genetic makeup alone, and inferring various negative traits solely from that genetic makeup. That's textbook racism, and of course racist prejudice agains Jews specifically is called "anti-Semitism". Revulsion to racists is not specific to anti-Jewish ones - if you go around telling people in public that anybody who has French blood is stupid rude lazy bastard, or anybody with Persian blood is an arrogant greedy asshole, or anybody whose ancestors came from Portugal can not be trusted with anything, or that all Italians are mafiosi and should be jailed, or that Indians are dumb, only worth of working as grocery store clerks, and they speak funny - you won't be very popular. Except that there's actually not a lot of people now that do that - prejudices against Japanese and Germans mostly died after the end of WW2, prejudices against Italians and Irish mostly came out of favor too. Well, maybe about Indians some still around, and of course we have other new-ish ethnic groups to make fun of instead of the old and integrated ones. The fashion for Jew bashing is eternal though.
It's not weird - it's what Hollywood was made for. The whole reason why Hollywood came about was because Jews were excluded from the "respectable" movie industry - as well as many other "respectable" industries, so they went to the far west coast and made their own. And it worked for them. That's what Jews do, read the history - if you exclude them from something, they'd build the new thing, with blackjack and everything else, much better than the original one. Now historical ignoramuses see that and whine "why there's so many Jews in Hollywood?". The same reason why there's so many Protestants in the US - because that's where they went after being kicked out from the places they were initially. It's not some far-reaching arcana knowledge - Hollywood history is covered everywhere, random example: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-09-25-bk-4083-story.html (took me about 5 secs of research to find this secret knowledge). It's about as "weird" as CEO of Toyota being Japanese. Really, a lot of "weird" stuff becomes much less weird if you bother to research a little bit and educate yourself.
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Could be a hold over from the days when only the federal government got the .gov suffix or perhaps its because that site is being run by DeSantis himself (or rather his campaign staff) instead of the state government proper.
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Florida be open for business, yo.
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Having some experience with non-US governmental internet management, it might be much easier to buy a .com domain than to fill in all necessary forms for setting up a .gov one and wait until the wheels finish turning. So somebody might just lose patience, buy a .com and when the .gov finally comes through just put a redirect on it. At least I've seen such things happening.
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