DeSantis Signs Laws Allowing Death Penalty for Pedos, Life Sentence for ‘Candy’ Fentanyl Traffickers

Abdul-Rahman Oladimeji Bello
-
0
DeSantis Signs Laws Allowing Death Penalty for Pedos, Life Sentence for ‘Candy’ Fentanyl Traffickers

(Abdul–Rahman Oladimeji Bello, Headline USA) Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis bolstered his conservative credentials this week, signing new crime bills designed to reduce crime and crack down on egregious offenders.

According to a Daily Wire report, the bills signed on Monday targeted bail reforms pushed by Democrat prosecutors, increased penalties for fentanyl traffickers and death penalties for certain crimes against children. 

“Florida is a law-and-order state with a 50-year record low crime rate and double-digit year-over-year decreases in murder, burglary, and overall crime,” DeSantis said in a statement. “For three consecutive legislative sessions, we have enacted tough-on-crime policies, and this year we are continuing to implement measures to protect our communities and keep Florida safe, with a particular emphasis on keeping criminals in jail and throwing the book at pedophiles.”

House Bill 1627 addresses bail reforms through several actions. One of these includes a requirement of the Florida Supreme Court to create a singular statewide bond schedule by the end of the year.

The bill forbids judges from setting an amount lower than the uniform state bond. Moreso, it prohibits the release of appellants before a first court appearance if arrested for violent crimes or any of the state’s “dangerous crimes.”

Bill 1359 increases penalties for rainbow fentanyl traffickers. Traffickers of this substance are now eligible for a life sentence. It also imposes a minimum of 25-year sentence with a penalty of $1 million. Hence, possession, distribution, or manufacturing of fentanyl or other controlled substances in the form of candy is now a first-degree felony.

The third bill signed by DeSantis, House Bill 1297, imposes the death penalty on criminals who  “commit sexual battery against children under the age of 12,” according to the governor’s office. 

DeSantis has stated that thinks the Supreme Court would be open to a challenge on a 2008 ruling where the court ruled against the execution of child rapists. 

DeSantis noted that he is ready to take the fight to the Supreme Court “to overrule judicial precedents which have unjustly shielded child rapists from the death penalty and denied victims and their loved ones the opportunity to pursue ultimate justice against these most heinous criminals.”

Coca-Cola Shareholders Overwhelmingly Vote against Woke Proposal to Punish Pro-Life States

Contributing Author
-
0
Coca-Cola Shareholders Overwhelmingly Vote against Woke Proposal to Punish Pro-Life States

(Headline USA) Coca-Cola shareholders voted down a leftist proposal this week that would have required the company to investigate how state laws restricting abortion impact business performance.

The proposal was introduced by a radical activist group called As You Sow, which promotes ESG — environmental, social corporate governance standards — in corporations. 

It stated: “Shareholders request that Coca-Cola’s Board of Directors issue a public report prior to December 31, 2023, omitting confidential information and at a reasonable expense, detailing any known and potential risks or costs to the company caused by enacted or proposed state policies severely restricting reproductive rights, and detailing any strategies beyond litigation and legal compliance that the company may deploy to minimize or mitigate these risks.”

As You Sow even went so far as to suggest in a statement that Coca-Cola’s board of directors should stop operation in states that choose to restrict abortion, The Spectator reported. 

“In its discretion, the board’s analysis may include effects on employee hiring, retention, and productivity, and decisions regarding closure or expansion of operations in states proposing or enacting restrictive laws and strategies, such as public policy advocacy by the company, related political contribution policies, and human resources or educational strategies,” the group said in a statement.

Eighty-seven percent of controlling shares voted against the proposal, according to reports. 

Coca-Cola’s Board of Directors also came out against the proposal in a proxy statement, saying it had “carefully considered this shareowner proposal and recommends that shareowners vote AGAINST it.”

The vote comes as other companies face significant backlash for pushing woke policies. Disney, for example, risks losing its self-government privileges after pushing a LGBT grooming agenda in children’s material.

And Bud Light’s sales have continued to drop significantly over the past couple weeks after the company partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a brand deal. One report estimates Bud Light’s sales dropped by 26% during the third week of April.

Hollywood Writer’s Strike Could Spell End of Woke Late-Night Shows

Jacob Bruns
-
0
Hollywood Writer’s Strike Could Spell End of Woke Late-Night Shows

(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The Writers’ Guild of America announced Monday that its 11,500 writers would go on strike to protest low pay.

In effect, this means the immediate cancellation of late night comedy shows hosted by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, the Daily Mail reported.

The Writers’ Guild enacted a similar strike in 2007 which lasted 100 days. That instance cost Hollywood, which was much healthier financially at the time, $2.1 billion.

Of the four aforementioned hosts, Meyers in particular expressed his joy for the strike.

“I love writing,” he said after news of the strike broke. “I love writing for TV. I love writing this show.”

He also suggested that, though he loves his job, he supports the union, being a member of it himself.

“I love that we get to come in with an idea for what we want to do every day and we get to work on it all afternoon and then I have the pleasure of coming out here. No one is entitled to a job in show business.”

Writers, according to the report, have suffered numerous pay cuts as the major networks struggle to turn a profit and as streaming services continue to undercut the old legacy media.

For this reason, Meyers believes that screenwriters “are entitled to fair compensation.”

“They are entitled to make a living,” he continued. “I think it’s a very reasonable demand that’s being set out by the guild. And I support those demands.”

Real Time with Bill Maher, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and Saturday Night Live will all be affected by the strike as well.

Some have suggested that, given the poor position of late night TV ratings and finances, the strike could be a death blow.

Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to the surprise of nobody, sided with the striking workers and labor unions, unable to stop himself from following the leftist tradition of inciting class warfare and never letting a crisis go to waste.

$8B in U.S. Funds May Have Gone to the Taliban

Wire Editor
-
0
$8B in U.S. Funds May Have Gone to the Taliban

(By Adam Andrzejewski, RealClear Wire) Since the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, the U.S. has continued sending money to the country in the form of humanitarian aid. Now, a watchdog claims that the U.S. can’t be confident that our $8 billion of aid to Afghanistan isn’t funding the Taliban.

John Sopko, the Special Inspector General to Afghanistan Reconstruction, recently testified before the House Oversight Committee, “Unfortunately, as I sit here today, I cannot assure this committee or the American taxpayer we are not currently funding the Taliban.”

He continued “Nor can I assure you that the Taliban are not diverting the money we are sending from the intended recipients, which are the poor Afghan people.”

The U.S. has sent Afghanistan $8 billion in humanitarian aid since our military withdrawal in 2021, according to CNN. Biden Administration officials have repeatedly stressed this aid is strictly going toward humanitarian efforts via non-governmental organizations and other humanitarian aid organizations.

Sopko, however, admitted there is effectively no monitoring of these funds to ensure they are not going to the Taliban. The U.S. does not currently recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government.

No effective oversight means U.S. funds could end up in the wrong hands, “subjected to waste, fraud, and abuse,” SIGAR wrote.

The U.S. needs to seriously reevaluate its funding and monitoring processes to ensure taxpayer dollars are actually helping the Afghan people, and not ending up of in the hands of the brutal and barbaric Taliban government.

Another BLM Hate Hoax Exposed at U.Va

Dmytro "Henry" Aleksandrov
-
0
Another BLM Hate Hoax Exposed at U.Va

(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) A Black Lives Matter activist accused a student at the University of Virginia of saying that she and other BLM activists would “make good f*ck*ng speed bumps,” which resulted in the expulsion of the student from the university in 2020.

However, an extensive investigation and court trial revealed that the allegations were not true and that the student never made these racist comments, according to the Post Millennial.

Morgan Alyse Bettinger was accused of making the racist remark about Zyahna Bryant and other BLM protesters during a Black Women Matters protest in Charlottesville, Va., in 2020.

These false allegations were quickly spread by news outlets like C-VILLE Weekly and the U.Va student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily. Bryant also called for Bettinger to be expelled.

U.Va released a statement, in which the university indicated that they started investigating the matter. However, that reportedly wasn’t enough for the leftist mob, so, after receiving pushback for “coddling little white girls,” U.Va. decided to cave by punishing Bettinger without having all of the evidence on their hands.

The Post Millennial also reported that on Sept. 28, 2020, the University Judiciary Committee jury sentenced Bettinger to “50 hours of community service with a social justice organization, three meetings with an assigned professor to teach her about ‘police-community relations,’ an apology letter to Bryant and and the expulsion in abeyance.”

However, a student-run investigation revealed that Bryant is a liar.

“Bettinger was driving home from work on East High Street, near downtown Charlottesville, when she saw a dump truck blocking the road ahead,” according to court documents on July 17, 2020.

“Bettinger says the truck didn’t appear to be completely blocking the intersection of East High and 4th Street, so she kept driving.”

She then parked her car to investigate why the truck was blocking the road. Bettinger had a brief conversation with a driver whose truck was blocking the road, telling him that it’s a “good thing that you are here because otherwise, these people would have been speed bumps.”

After talking to the driver, she took a photo of the crowd. Protesters started video recording her and later swarmed her vehicle after she got inside, pounding on the windows, shouting, threatening and hitting the car.

Police later arrived and helped her maneuver down East High Street so that she would be able to drive home.

“We had gone down a couple of blocks and they wanted to see how I was doing because I was quite shaken up,” Bettinger said. “I was physically shaking and very taken aback by the whole experience.”

‘Best Friends with Woke Media,’ Trump Agrees to CNN Interview

Wire Editor
-
0
‘Best Friends with Woke Media,’ Trump Agrees to CNN Interview

(By Philip Wegmann, RealClear Wire) He calls them “the enemy of the people,” and often delights when supporters chant “CNN sucks” at his rallies, but Donald Trump won’t let animosity get in the way of good television. The former president will sit down for a town hall hosted by CNN next week.

A senior Trump advisor explained away the apparent incongruity, telling RealClearPolitics the reason they accepted the invitation: Network executives “made a compelling pitch.”

That kind of programming note wouldn’t drive headlines for other candidates. Voters don’t care about the minutia of journalists jostling for access. Of course, Trump is different though. From his frequent attacks to his administration’s unsuccessful attempt to pull their White House press credentials, Trump vs. CNN was both a very real legal case and a feature of his administration.

Other camps in the Republican presidential primary are taking notice, arguing that the new CNN coziness is more evidence that Trump’s hatred of the media has either waned in recent years or was always a charade.

A spokesman for NeverBackDown, a super PAC encouraging Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to run, told RCP that Trump was rewarding old enemies. “Donald Trump has changed, and not for the better,” Erin Perrine said. “He’s now best friends with the woke media he used to call ‘fake news.’”

Trump World doesn’t make much of that allegation. The advisor countered that Trump was running to represent “all Americans,” hence the need to go on networks that aren’t traditionally friendly to Republicans. Then, they took what seemed like a veiled shot at DeSantis.

“Going outside the traditional Republican ‘comfort zone’ was a key to President Trump’s success in 2016,” the advisor said. “Some other candidates are too afraid to take this step in their quest to defeat Joe Biden and are afraid to do anything other than Fox News.”

If peace has indeed broken out between Trump and CNN, they will bury the hatchet at New Hampshire’s Saint Anselm College. The town hall will be moderated by CNN host Kaitlan Collins, an alum of the conservative Daily Caller, a website started by Tucker Carlson. The sit-down comes as Trump offers an implicit détente to the media. His campaign has invited numerous reporters from legacy media outlets to fly along on his plane to campaign events. DeSantis, meanwhile, continues to turn a cold shoulder to those outlets.

The Florida governor hardly ever sits down with the big networks or papers, preferring instead to drive his message on friendlier outlets like Fox News or Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire.

“The old way of looking at it is: ‘I have to do every media hit that I possibly can, from as broad a political spectrum as I can, to reach as many people as possible,’” Nick Iarossi, a longtime DeSantis supporter and a lobbyist in Tallahassee, told the New York Times earlier this year. “The new way of looking at it is: ‘I really don’t need to do that anymore. I can control how I want to message to voters through the mediums I choose.’”

More than just a strategic choice, DeSantis takes opposition to mainstream media outlets as an article of faith. “Don’t think that they’re coming to you in good faith,” he said in a broadside attack against the press while onstage with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds earlier this year. “They’re coming to you to be able to advance their agenda, and if you’re somebody that’s standing for our values, like Kim and me stand for, you are an impediment to their agenda.”

“So don’t play into it. Just speak the truth. Do your thing,” he continued, counseling that conservatives should “not give them the satisfaction that they are some type of neutral gatekeepers because they are not.”

It isn’t just Trump who has rejected that advice. Before he accepted an invitation to the network that he loved to hate, former Vice President Mike Pence sat down with CNN. So did Republican businessman and 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who got into a contentious debate with liberal commentator Don Lemon. The two men had a heated discussion about slavery and the second amendment as co-host Poppy Harlow was sidelined and looked down at her phone.

According to a person present that day, Lemon “went ballistic,” yelling at producers during the segment and then refusing to acknowledge the candidate when the show went to break. Lemon was later let go by CNN. Ramaswamy praised the move.

‘Godfather of AI’ Leaves Google, Warns of Tech’s Dangers

Wire Editor
-
0
‘Godfather of AI’ Leaves Google, Warns of Tech’s Dangers

(Headline USA) Sounding alarms about artificial intelligence has become a popular pastime in the ChatGPT era, taken up by high-profile figures as varied as industrialist Elon Musk, leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky and the 99-year-old retired statesman Henry Kissinger.

But it’s the concerns of insiders in the AI research community that are attracting particular attention. A pioneering researcher and the so-called “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton quit his role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

Over his decades-long career, Hinton’s pioneering work on deep learning and neural networks helped lay the foundation for much of the AI technology we see today.

There has been a spasm of AI introductions in recent months. San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, rolled out its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-4, in March. Other tech giants have invested in competing tools — including Google’s “Bard.”

Some of the dangers of AI chatbots are “quite scary,” Hinton told the BBC. “Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”

In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Hinton also pointed to “bad actors” that may use AI in ways that could have detrimental impacts on society — such as manipulating elections or instigating violence.

Hinton, 75, says he retired from Google so that he could speak openly about the potential risks as someone who no longer works for the tech giant.

“I want to talk about AI safety issues without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he told MIT Technology Review. “As long as I’m paid by Google, I can’t do that.”

Since announcing his departure, Hinton has maintained that Google has “acted very responsibly” regarding AI. He told MIT Technology Review that there’s also “a lot of good things about Google” that he would want to talk about — but those comments would be “much more credible if I’m not at Google anymore.”

Google confirmed that Hinton had retired from his role after 10 years overseeing the Google Research team in Toronto.

Hinton declined further comment Tuesday but said he would talk more about it at a conference Wednesday.

At the heart of the debate on the state of AI is whether the primary dangers are in the future or present. On one side are hypothetical scenarios of existential risk caused by computers that supersede human intelligence. On the other are concerns about automated technology that’s already getting widely deployed by businesses and governments and can cause real-world harms.

“For good or for not, what the chatbot moment has done is made AI a national conversation and an international conversation that doesn’t only include AI experts and developers,” said Alondra Nelson, who until February led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and its push to craft guidelines around the responsible use of AI tools.

“AI is no longer abstract, and we have this kind of opening, I think, to have a new conversation about what we want a democratic future and a non-exploitative future with technology to look like,” Nelson said in an interview last month.

Under pressure from a leftist agenda, a number of AI researchers have long expressed concerns about racial, gender and other forms of bias in AI systems, including text-based large language models that are trained on huge troves of human writing and can amplify discrimination that exists in society.

Hinton was one of three AI pioneers who in 2019 won the Turing Award, an honor that has become known as tech industry’s version of the Nobel Prize. The other two winners, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, have also expressed concerns about the future of AI.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

American, Southwest Pilots’ Unions Threaten to Strike

Wire Editor
-
0
American, Southwest Pilots’ Unions Threaten to Strike

(Cole Lauterbach, The Center Square) Pilots for two major airlines are threatening to walk off the job just as the summer travel season approaches, though an actual stoppage would have to occur with President Joe Biden and Congress opting to stay on the sidelines.

The Allied Pilots Association, a union representing 15,000 American Airlines pilots, announced Monday that its membership voted in favor of authorizing a strike.

“The summer travel season is almost here, and we’re all wondering whether this will be another summer of uncertainty for American Airlines,” said Capt. Ed Sicher, APA President. “Fortunately, there is an alternative. By embracing the win-win scheduling and work rule improvements APA has presented at the bargaining table, management can take steps to improve the airline’s operational reliability and efficiency.”

The union’s strike authorization vote lasted the month of April.

Meanwhile, pilots flying for Southwest Airlines announced Monday they had begun the process of tallying votes to authorize a strike of their own.

“We have been attempting to negotiate with Southwest in earnest for years, but they have shown no willingness to address some of the issues that impact not only our pilots but our customers as well, such as scheduling work rules and technology improvements,” said Southwest Airlines Pilots Association President Casey Murray. “The lack of discussion or commitment by our leadership team to rectify these issues for our passengers and our pilots are driving us to carry forward on this path afforded to us by the Railway Labor Act.”

The union notes that the strike threat comes months after the airline’s “December meltdown” caused by a winter storm and scheduling errors that left thousands of passengers stranded over the holiday season. The issue spurred a congressional hearing.

Both airlines have released statements stressing progress is happening in their respective negotiations, according to multiple media reports.

While the pilots can authorize a strike, they are limited to the decades-old law Murray mentioned. The Railway Labor Act of 1926 places several hurdles before something as disruptive as a rail operator or airline would suffer a work stoppage, disrupting interstate commerce. The RLA forces parties to bargain in a mediated setting in good faith when Congress is in session. If the two sides fail to come to an agreement, Biden can order a “cooling off period” that ensures operations continue. Congress can also intervene to force actions by the bargaining parties.

21 AGs Urge Colo. Supreme Court to Hear Masterpiece Cakeshop Case

Wire Editor
-
0
21 AGs Urge Colo. Supreme Court to Hear Masterpiece Cakeshop Case

(By Joe Mueller, The Center Square) Missouri Andrew Bailey joined 21 other Republican attorneys general in filing a legal brief urging the Colorado Supreme Court to hear an appeal by a Christian cake artist who lost a First Amendment case in a lower court.

Last month, Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips and the Alliance Defending Freedom filed a petition with Colorado’s highest court to overturn a state Court of Appeals decision. It found Phillips violated Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act when in 2012 he refused to make a blue and pink cake for attorney Autumn Scardina who stated in a phone conversation it was to celebrate transitioning from male to female.

The amicus brief filed by the attorneys general urges the Colorado Supreme Court to hear Phillips’ petition and rule he can’t be compelled to create a custom cake expressing a message contrary to his religious beliefs.

The conclusion of the 14-page document states Phillips engages in “expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment. The gender-transition cake Scardina requested was no exception; creating it would require Phillips to express a readily understood message about sex with which he disagrees. This Court should vindicate his right to not speak.”

The brief argues a gender-transition cake is symbolic speech and states the lower courts misapplied First Amendment doctrine. The brief concludes a ruling in favor of Phillips wouldn’t license discrimination.

“Scardina and the lower courts treat Phillips’ refusal to bake a gender-transition cake as a blow to LGBT equality,” the brief states. “But ruling for Phillips wouldn’t upend the long-settled rule that ‘business owners’ may not ‘deny protected persons equal access to goods and services.’ It would simply confirm that Colorado’s antidiscrimination law cannot be applied in the rare case where it would compel speech.”

The brief also states Phillips “happily serves LGBT customers: he’ll sell them premade cakes for any purpose and create custom cakes that do not express a message contrary to his religious beliefs. … Of course, for Scardina, that’s not good enough.”

Joining Bailey are attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.

“As Attorney General, I will always protect the Constitution, which includes the basic right to freedom of speech enshrined in the First Amendment,” Bailey said in a statement. “Americans enjoy the right not to speak as much as they enjoy the right to speak, and compelling a cake baker to speak in a way that violates his religious beliefs is a textbook violation of the First Amendment.”

‘Shawshank Redemption’ Star Unloads on Media for Hiding Government Censorship

Wire Editor
-
0
‘Shawshank Redemption’ Star Unloads on Media for Hiding Government Censorship

(By Jon Miltimore, FEE) Tim Robbins won an Academy Award in 2004 for portraying a victim of two terrible crimes in the neo-noir crime drama Mystic River. On Monday, Robbins made it clear he’s not content to be a silent victim.

In a tweet that reached nearly three million people in 24 hours, the longtime Democrat and Bernie Sanders supporter ripped Democrats who threatened reporter Matt Taibbi with prison following his congressional testimony on the Twitter Files.

“What an embarrassing, shameful time for the Democrats and the ‘free’ press,” wrote Robbins. “You are losing any shred of credibility you had, you f**king fools.”

Robbins’s comments stem from a letter published last week by investigative reporter Lee Fang, which showed Rep. Stacey Plaskett, D-V.I., threatening criminal prosecution against Taibbi, who she falsely claimed lied under oath during recent testimony at a congressional hearing titled “Weaponization of the Federal Government on the Twitter Files.”

Taibbi is one of several journalists who were given access to Twitter’s records, which showed a sweeping effort by the federal government to control and censor information on a massive scale (even when it was true).

Robbins praised that reporting, highlighting Taibbi as well as journalists Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger (who Robbins quoted tweeted).

“Recently, independent journalists … have been exposing a massive censorship operation by the US government to control content on social media and eliminate any dissenting voices,” Robbins wrote. “Could be the most important story related to our personal freedoms in the US and it’s being buried. Mainstream media have not only ignored the story but now attack the journalists…”

The Media Become Plumbers

Robbins’s comments come just days after the arrest of Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old National Guardsman from Massachusetts who stands accused of leaking secret government documents.

Teixeira, who remains in custody and is expected to appear in a Boston courtroom on Wednesday, was put behind bars with the help of The New York Times and Washington Post, which assisted the Pentagon in its search.

The actions are a stark contrast to the Pentagon Papers, which were released by the Times in 1971 and won the paper a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the government’s secrets and lies about the Vietnam War.

Many have noted the irony in the Times suddenly working with the government to plug leaks, much like Richard Nixon’s plumbers during the Watergate era.

“Literally every day, major media corporations…publish leaks of classified information from anonymous officials,” noted Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. “What’s the difference between them and Jack Teixeira? The media outlets are publishing what the Govt orders them [to] say.”

These revelations are deeply troubling. We’re taught in school that the Fourth Estate is one of the great protectors of freedom. Thomas Jefferson once noted that “our liberty depends on the freedom of the press.”

Unfortunately, while there are still some brave journalists working within corporate media who are dedicated to truth and government accountability, it appears media institutions have largely been co-opted by the state.

Students of CIA history will not be surprised by this. In his bestselling book The Devil’s Chessboard, David Talbot chronicled just how effective the agency was at planting stories in a docile media during the Dulles years.

It appears things have only gotten worse since. Most media appear to be little more than what economist Murray Rothbard described as Court Intellectuals, compliant servants of the government “whose task is to bamboozle the public into accepting and celebrating the rule of its particular State.” (And they are rewarded with access, scoops, and book deals for it.)

The failure of media to come to the defense of Taibbi after receiving overt threats of imprisonment for his work in exposing the government’s efforts to subvert the First Amendment, combined with the assistance of the Times and Post to the Pentagon in tracking down Teixeira, are hardly signs of a thriving independent media.

In Robbins’ words, rather than a check on government power, corporate media has become the “thuggish censorship arm of the government.”

Righting this ship to reclaim a free press and free speech will not be easy, but the Shawshank Redemption actor offers a clue on where we might begin.

“Oh, and by the way #FreeAssange,” writes Robbins.

1...2,0182,0192,020...3,892Page 2,019 of 3,892