Harvard is Hating, Cubans Are Fighting Communism, And TikTok Has Everyone Tripping | Black Sheep News
Harvard is Hating, Cubans Are Fighting Communism, And TikTok Has Everyone Tripping | Black Sheep News
A common collectivist thread poisoning it all.
Just because you’re a black sheep willing to go your own way doesn’t mean you don’t want to know what’s happening in the world. Uncover the patterns you care about and catch the rays of hope—that’s what Black Sheep News is for.
Harvard Chooses Conformity Over Competence
COVID drives a kind of collectivism that just won’t quit—but it will fire you. Martin Kulldorff is a biostatistician, infectious-disease epidemiologist, and until just last week, a professor of medicine at Harvard. Kulldorf has shown the kind of integrity, courage, and foresight that one would expect from a person in a highly respected position. But even amid articles sheepishly highlighting the severe education and socialization losses from extended school closures, Harvard has fired one of the few high-profile scientists who warned against these extreme lockdown measures all along.
Kulldorf published an essay detailing his long fight against COVID-inspired collectivism: he tried to point out evidence that Sweden’s avoidance of both lockdowns and mandatory all-ages vaccination was working; he tried to point out that natural immunity is real; he warned that lockdowns and school closures would have outcomes that outweighed the risk of infection. Instead of accepting his offer to debate these now-proven claims, his colleagues and employers attacked his reputation and exiled him.
Martin Kulldorff’s experience with both the government and academia perfectly follows the black sheep pattern. He had an informed, but dissenting perspective that—if considered—would be important and helpful. However, he challenged a collective maintained by gatekeepers like Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins who used mischaracterization and exile to suppress dissent.
When a collective exiles their black sheep, you can be certain that collective isn’t pursuing truth. The cost of destructive collectivism isn’t just the destruction of that collective, but of all those it can take down with it. People lost their jobs, businesses, were separated from loved ones, and kept from the bedside of their dying family members all because of lockdowns and vaccine mandates that Kulldorf showed well ahead of time were counterproductive.
Martin Kulldorff’s story is a tale as old as time, but the power we now have to amplify his story is new. Hopefully his story will help our culture recognize the importance of listening to the black sheep.
You can show your support for Martin by signing this petition for his reinstatement.
The US is Playing TikTok Trojan Horse
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector. — Plato
Trust me, I get it. I absolutely understand the motivation to ban TikTok—not just because of how untrustworthy and malicious China’s CCP is, or because of how sketchy the app was from the get-go, but simply because of how terrible the app's impact on its users is. I’ve heard every TikTok-brain horror story and seen things I’d pay to unsee.
But then the annoying, rational part of my brain that spoils all the fun of hating things and chasing quick solutions starts talking: “Would TikTok with new ownership realistically be any less mind-numbing? You really trust this government with the power to force changes in a company’s ownership? Why isn’t anyone talking about the fact that TikTok’s data management was already being migrated to a US location for management by an American company? Haven’t the instances of government repression towards alternative media companies like X proven the motive for company-controlling legislation isn’t “safety”? Isn’t the definition of fascism when the government can control corporations?”
The TikTok bill has passed in the House of Representatives with bipartisan support (352 in support, 65 opposed), which—considering how dysfunctional and destructive politicians on both sides of our broken two-party system are—offers yet another reason for suspicion. Let’s clarify the semantic arguments briefly: no, the legislation itself does not call for banning TikTok—the bill is being described as a defacto ban because that will be the outcome if TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, doesn’t sell the company. But the “handover your company or have it banned” bill would be a mouthful.
The bill’s author, Congressman Mike Gallagher, repeatedly emphasized that the bill will only apply to “companies subject to the control of foreign adversaries, as defined by Congress.” Besides the heavy lifting being done by “as defined by Congress,” there’s a fundamental question unanswered by this bill: why is the only solution being presented to this national security concern also the most extreme solution? Gallagher responded to the many dissenters calling their local politicians by saying, “[the dissent] provided [congressmen] a preview of how the platform could be weaponized to inject disinformation into our system.” Wait, when did this legislation become about fighting disinformation and not solely data security? If the TikTok bill is only addressing a data security concern, as has been repeated ad nauseam, whether TikTok can be “weaponized to inject disinformation” should be completely irrelevant, and it should especially not be the response a politician gives their dissenting citizens.
Like almost everything our government does, banning TikTok isn’t about helping the average American (many of whom will lose their businesses if TikTok goes away)—it’s about using the guise of safety and scary foreign enemies to seize power over speech, business, and ensure an unfair advantage for the companies eagerly supporting this legislation. The “national security concern” these politicians are focused on isn’t data, but dissenting speech.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. — James Madison
This is clear because what’s conspicuously missing from this debate is the less authoritarian option that was already underway: requiring American TikTok user data be stored in the US. In 2023, TikTok announced “Project Texas,” which gave control of user data to the American company Oracle and allowed its source code to be overseen by a committee approved by the U.S. government called “TikTok U.S. Data Security.” Despite this plan already being well underway, politicians are still fear-mongering over the security of TikTok’s data management.
Maybe the stated goal of this bill isn’t the true goal—maybe it’s the unprecedented expansion of government power.
While I get a personal kick out of watching a Chinese company be subjected to the same control the CCP has long subjected others to, I’m not so short-sighted as to cheer on my country behaving like the CCP in order to protect me from the CCP. The bill will soon be voted on by the Senate, where Marco Rubio is leading the charge against TikTok. While guilt-by-association is generally a bad heuristic, when Biden and Marco Rubio are on the same page, I don’t want to read that book.
And it turns out there are TONS of quotes from brilliant thinkers across time warning us against situations exactly like this one:
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. — C. S. Lewis
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants. — Albert Camus
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny. — Aesop
Cubans Protesting The Impact of Collectivism
Every now and again, the silent suffering of Cuba’s people erupts into vocal protest. The most recent of Cuba’s protests took place in and around one of its largest cities, Santiago, with the people calling out for food and electricity—a depressing reminder of how much we take for granted today.
The same pattern that followed previous protests will undoubtedly play out again, despite how large the recent protest was and the government’s acknowledgment of its existence. Cuba’s dictator, Miguel Diaz-Canel, has blamed both the US government and Cuban immigrants in South Florida (who he called terrorists) for stoking the unrest. But here’s some insider knowledge from someone with a family of Cuban immigrants: the Cuban government has used the US as a scapegoat and bogeyman since the day it came to power. Even before my mother fled, she was warned that the US was worse off than Cuba. Luckily she had the sense that many American leftists who accept the dictatorship’s propaganda don’t: if the US is so much worse, why don’t Cuban refugees ever seem to return?
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Claims that the US embargo against Cuba or that rhetoric from Cuban immigrants is causing the turmoil in Cuba is something only people already motivated to believe in communism can believe. I’ve been to Cuba; I’ve asked people there if the embargo is the main problem, and I’ve only ever heard this claimed by communists or those who’ve never lived under communism. The language used to defend the Cuban dictatorship isn’t new—it follows the classic tactic of creating an enemy “out there” to blame for every problem, and interpreting any criticism of the collective’s ideology as a betrayal.
While I’m against even a limited embargo on Cuba for the same reason I’m against communism itself (no government should use force to interfere with peaceful interactions), the magnitude of Cuba’s poverty and suffering could only be caused from within. If it was the US subjugating the Cuban people, there would have been no need for the Cuban regime to arrest and convict over 1,000 of its citizens since 2021 for the crime of “rising up against the government.”
For all these fools who still worship “El Commandante” Fidel Castro and Che Guevara here are some cold hard facts! Fidel Castro was the Saddam Hussein next door a brutal dictator whose death squads murdered thousands. Castro locked up a larger percentage of the population in his gulags than Hitler or Stalin. Communist Cuba has held ten times the number of political prisoners as Apartheid South Africa. Fidel Castro by the way was a racist and sexist. For example, the majority of people in Castro’s prisons were blacks and mulattos. His gulags also held some of the longest suffering female political prisoners in history. He drove 90% of the Cuban Jewish community out of the country upon his rise to power, which is a greater percentage of the population than Tsar Nicholas II drove out of Russia. Hundreds of thousands fled his tyranny on rafts to Miami. He took Cuba from a first world country with better living standards than much of Europe that Spanish emigrants were lined up around the block to get into to a third world s***hole with a terrible healthcare system and some of the highest abortion and suicide rates in the world that not even impoverished Haitian migrants wanted anything to do with. As for Che, he was by no means the romantic revolutionary he’s portrayed as. Che was a mass murdering psychopath who loved to kill people and thought hate was a GOOD emotion to feel. He hated blacks, Mexicans and gays, dreamed of launching nuclear weapons at New York City, lived like a dandy while claiming to be just a humble man of the people, a bad soldier, and a Stalinist bore who didn’t bathe or care at all for his own personal cleanliness. Che also destroyed the Cuban economy. When he was cornered by the Bolivian Army he said “Don’t shoot I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!” He was a coward who sent so many to their deaths but hadn’t the courage to face it himself. Don’t ever let anyone tell you they were heroes, or their legacies were “complicated.”
Next up, I want to discuss the TikTok Ban. I disagree with it very strongly. It will put thousands of Americans out of a job, blatantly violates the first amendment and is using a hatchet when you need a scalpel. Just have the data stored in America! Then China’s spying wouldn’t be a problem anymore. Lastly, I 1000% support the Cubans protesting against Communism! Cuban Dictator Miguel Diaz-Canel needs to be toppled and Communism in Cuba 🇨🇺 extinguished for all times! I’m so sick of the romanization of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Cuban Communism! No, the Cuban Embargo (which I’m all for until Cuba is democratized) isn’t the reason for Cuba’s economic woes! It’s the catastrophic failure that is Marxism!