I Didn't Say It ...

Sharyn Alfonsi, CBS journalist , taking on her MAGA editor, Bari Weiss, after Weiss canceled a 60 Minutes story that was damning for the Cankles regime:

“I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity. Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now—after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one. We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient. If the standard for airing a story becomes ‘the government must agree to be interviewed,’ then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state. These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless. CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that ‘low point.’ By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones. We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of ‘Gold Standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet. I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight.”

The Cankles Regime’s CECOT deportations are a crime against humanity on the level of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal or the Bush administration’s crimes in Guantanamo Bay; the public MUST be made aware of just what Cankles and Pee Wee German did to those poor men and be held accountable for their actions.

Search for the story; you can find it. In Canada, where Free Speech is still valued, the story aired but in America where a fascist rules, speech is denied.

Resist!

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George Takei, actor and activist, on people who say he should “stick to acting”:

“It’s a taunt I often have hurled at me. I am a gay man in America whose marriage is under threat. The last time [Cankles] was in office, hate crimes against AAPIs [Asian American and Pacific Islanders] skyrocketed. I care deeply about this country and the future of our democracy [so] I’ll stick to activism.”

If anyone in this country deserves to speak up, it’s Takei, openly gay, married to a man, subjected to hate speech and having lived in a Japanese Internment Concentration Camp during WW II.

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Jesse Thorn, content creator and father to a trans daughter, posted a  defense of trans kids during which he posed a question for all the cisgender haters:

“I have this memory of my wife handing me a printout of the book [she wrote, Feels Good to Be Yourself] and I read it, and I was just pouring tears. You’d think that would be because, like, this is a beautiful story of a trans kid, and it’s our kid. But actually, no. Actually, it was because it was about all of us. I’m cisgender. Everybody always assumed I was a man, and I actually am a man. And until my daughter came out, I never really had to think about my gender identity or even about anyone else’s. It was like transparent to me. I never consciously checked in with myself. People just assumed something, and it happened that they were right, so it just sort of ‘was'. And so when my kid came out, I had to really stretch my mind to imagine her experience. It was so different from my experience. I never chose my identity, and so my daughter must be choosing hers, and she must be rejecting my way of being in the world, is how it felt. [Those who hate trans people are] sort of caught on their back foot like, ‘Wait, I didn’t choose anything. These trans people must be choosing. I’m neutral. They’re different. They are rejecting me,’ and then people are taking that uncomfortable feeling and getting really nasty. In my wife’s book, there is no, ‘This way is normal. This way is different.’ There is the expectation that we each will engage with our own identities, think about who we are, and we might come up with different answers. Trans people had to look inward. Everybody was wrong about them. They had to figure themselves out. For cis people, we just never even tried. [My wife’s book] puts trans kids and cis kids on the same level. It’s because it asks cis people to think about themselves. It’s scary. What if we ask ourselves about ourselves, and we don’t like the answer?”

Thorn suggests that if you fear trans people “is it because they’re weird, or because you are being forced to deal with you?”

And that’s the answer. Pretty simple, eh?

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