Fight the class war with solidarity, propaganda with reason
[UPDATED August 26 2025]
Bad people want you to fight shadows.
Free expression is THE cornerstone of a free society, just as Palestine is THE issue of our time, and the two are directly related. There are two major Supreme Court cases that epitomize some of the genuine Big Lies that Americans grow up with: Schenck v United States (1919) and Brandenburg v Ohio (1969).
Schenck is where we get "shouting fire in a crowded theater" and "clear and present danger" so we can use them totally out of context without knowing anything about the case. Charles Schenck and Dr. Elizabeth Baer were in the Socialist Party in Philly (still legal in all 50 states) and sent mailers to American men drafted to fight in WWI urging them to resist the draft on 13th Amendment grounds. They were sentenced to THIRTY YEARS in prison but got off doing six months after the SCOTUS appeal.
Brandenburg overturned Schenck half a century too late for Chuck and Liz, the court deciding that a literal KLAN leader — who was filmed horrifying the decent people of Cincinnati with a rally of ARMED dudes in the iconic hoods burning a cross to speeches about "revengeance" like they do — was just doing free speech, and the court's decision clarified the "clear and present" thing.
Ohio originally sentenced the racist to "one to ten" years and a $1000 fine ($8759.26 in 2025 dollars) and you'll have less success finding out if he served or paid any of that as you will trying to find out ANYTHING about Schenck and Dr. Baer.
The latter two were originally convicted on the Espionage Act of 1917 that the 44th POTUS invoked more than all his predecessors combined to persecute whistleblowers, paving the way for all his successors to keep protecting us from the truth.
Fact-based, non-corporate perspectives:
Show me just one example of any of them being wrong and not admitting it loud and clear. You simply won't find a lie.
Caitlin Johnstone | Useful Idiots | Michael Hudson | The Grayzone | Chris Hedges | Glenn Greenwald | Project Censored | Mint Press News
The Wall of Shame
Like corporate media, it's not that I believe everything these sources say is false but I have better things to do than weed through the endless lies, explicit and those of omission, when I can go to those listed above who manage to earn my increasingly hard-earned trust year after year by proving that they are dedicated to seeking truth and fighting for a free society. A few have sunk down here, The Shamed, and they are the axe the trees trusted because its handle looked like them.
The Intercept | The Young Turks | DuckDuckGo | The Squad | Jacobin | KPFK | Bernie | Matt Taibbi | R.E.M.
Tools of Liberation
If it looks too complicated, I will help you. I mean it.
- Owncast: Twitch/YouTube Live that YOU control - If I'm performing a live stream, you can watch it in action right now!
- JMP Chat: Free your phone number from your cellular provider
- Snikket: Simple, secure, and private messenging that is the jelly to the delicious peanut butter of JMP
- Fedora Atomic Linux: The most painless OS I ever made my wife use
- GrapheneOS: On a refurbished Pixel phone that was the cheapest I've ever bought since the days you'd get a free phone with a two-year subscription. Their features overview and FAQ are an incredible crash course in understanding the difference between privacy/security and PrivSec theater.
Easy Things You Can Do
- Use a different search engine like Brave* or Startpage. At the very least, stop referring to searching for info as "Googling". Language forms our perception of reality. *YES I KNOW you hate the CEO, you should hate all CEOs. Use their best products against them.
- Do you know more about browser security than the developers of GrapheneOS? I sure don't, so I believe Brave is the most secure browser for desktop PERIOD. Install it and just turn off the crypto stuff on desktop or mobile if you don't want them.
- Open a social account on a federated platform.
- VPNs are rarely the answer, but if you must use one maybe look at Mullvad and in any case KNOW WHO YOU ARE TRUSTING. Mullvad has no affiliate links, which would be an impressive starter for me.
- Block some tracking with the free public AdGuard DNS server (Option 2 > routers).