Good Content Requires Honesty, Something Progressives Cannot Tolerate – Opinion

Sometimes, I’ll come across a topic that will cause a split in my opinion and the opinions of our readers. In the interest of good business, I’ll find myself tempted to censor my own opinion, or avoid the topic altogether. But there’s one mantra I’ve lived by in my career that just won’t let me do that.

An opinion journalist is someone who can be open about their opinions.

We sign up for brutal honesty when we sign up for this job, and brutal honesty isn’t always fashionable. There is no way to make a reaction without first taking an action. This industry is all about discussion. To start, information must first be discussed. Then opinions need to be recorded and finally reactions. No matter whether those reactions cause raucous applause, or incensed outrage, it doesn’t really matter. Our job is to provoke engagement, and censoring our thoughts — oftentimes thoughts that we are working through as we talk aloud — is a disservice to the public who give us their time and dollars to watch us facilitate discussion.

The “controversy” over Joe Rogan’s content isn’t just about blatant censorship. The chilling or censorship of speech is what is causing the disruption of the discussion. Recently, Rogan lamented that he couldn’t possibly continue to do his job the way he needs to do it if he’s going to be forced to weigh every single word on every single topic.

“I will quit. If it gets to a point that I can’t do it anymore, where I have to do it in some sort of weird way where I walk on eggshells and mind my p’s and q’s, f–k that!” Rogan said.

I’ve recently been rewatching the fabulous sci-fi, thriller drama “Fringe” and last night’s episode was about a man who developed superpowers of probability. He could calculate the probabilities of every single action within his field of sight and cause a chain reaction tailored to his mood based on his brain’s calculation. His mind could run through millions of possibilities and predict the future. He used it to murder people, so this skill might have been fun. This character wasn’t a very fun one. He became more like a machine because he had to do all the calculations all day. He couldn’t maintain a personal conversation with the person who loved him most in the world. He couldn’t relate to the plight of others. He couldn’t even comprehend the idea of relating to the world he was making calculations about. He was a robot.

People like Rogan — and me — cannot afford the mental bandwidth needed to logic out every possible response to every word we utter and then plan our speech according to those possibilities. If we can’t speak from the heart, and our own curiosity, we can’t encourage anyone to respond from the heart. Even the pouncing progressives would agree that being “emotionally honest” about something is a huge part of any meaningful discussion. They’ve been putting feelings over facts for years now. By their own measure, audiences cannot engage their feelings on an issue if they’re not being met with the honest feelings of the personality opining on the issue. All speech is affected by the speaker’s speech.

This is, in fact, the ultimate goal. It is to squash all discussion and substitute preformed ideas given by intellectual elites and lesser-intellectual cultural minions. You can’t respond to a bad idea you’re not allowed to hear in the first place. They don’t want our responses to their bad ideas.

That’s what makes places like RedState special…and guys like Rogan special. We do wantWe would love to hear your thoughts. We welcome emotion, anger, laughter and applause. The hate clicks are just as welcome as the love clicks. They all pay the same, but even better, they serve a function that we’re all on board with on the non-progressive political spectrum. They encourage discussion. Honesty is key to quality content in this industry.

Did you wonder why production values of movies and television seem to have fallen lately? It’s because the number of calculations executives and their creative partners are required to make these days about possible responses, boycotts, hurt feelings, and social media backlash forces them to think more like machines and less like thinking, feeling human beings. Ever read an AI-generated letter? It’s always ridiculous, but in an uncanny valley kind of way. It’s almost like real, but a little off… a little weird. Like Canada.

In this particular country, the internet’s censorious speech is actually lowering entertainment quality. Worse than that, it’s making machines out of humans, at a time when we need much more humanity in this world.