Bonnie Faulkner's long-running radio show Guns & Butter has been abruptly cancelled by its home radio station KPFA in Berkeley.
The weekly show has been one of the central features of KPFA (and affiliated stations) for the past seventeen years.
See this article about the cancellation of Guns & Butter, published today by Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa and the Centre for Research of Globalization, at Global Research.
Professor Chossudovsky has been a frequent guest on Guns & Butter, along with a constellation of other important critical voices including Professor Michael Hudson, Professor David Ray Griffin, Professor James Tracy, and accomplished civil rights lawyer William F. Pepper, Esquire -- among many other insightful researchers and authors examining issues of absolutely critical importance.
While I certainly do not agree with every assertion by every single guest who appears on Guns & Butter, the abrupt cancellation of Bonnie Faulkner's show because of assertions made by one recent guest (who was one part of a three-guest show) sends a chilling message about the freedom of the press in the united states at this time. To be even more specific: I personally do not agree with the opinion voiced by the guest in question, cited by KPFA as the reason the show was shut down, and yet I believe the termination of the show is a very serious matter and an ominous indicator of the current state of freedom of speech and the press.
Are men and women to be treated like children, as if they are unable to discern for themselves whether or not an argument has merit, and thus must be shielded from any objectionable views? Even if I disagree with a guest on a show or find that guest's views to be objectionable, I am adamantly opposed to silencing a radio program in the united states because an opinion with which I disagree was voiced by someone appearing on that show.
This removal of Guns & Butter from production at KPFA terminates one of the last remaining shows on the broadcast airwaves which dared to question the government narrative on events such as the murderous attacks of September 11th, 2001 or the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and many others.
I would strongly urge Bonnie Faulkner to continue her weekly show as a podcast, if at all possible, and to solicit support from listeners in order to enable that to happen. I would also urge podcast hosts who are interested in the truth on the kinds of subjects that Guns & Butter has examined over the past seventeen years to invite Bonnie to be a guest on their shows, and to reach out to her with offers to help her launch such a podcast that can be independent of KPFA.
However, there are numerous reasons why the removal of Guns & Butter from the airwaves is a huge blow to independent examination of critically important political and economic subjects at this juncture in history -- not least of which being the fact that consumption of digital media can be monitored and tracked much more closely and much more easily than can the similar consumption of a radio show by listening to that show on one's radio, at home or in the car. Additionally, it is much easier to suppress or obscure the existence of a website, or slow the traffic going to that website to a trickle, using a variety of techniques such as those described here, here and here.
For these reasons, men and women who believe in freedom of speech and freedom of the press should flood KPFA with indications of disapproval of their high-handed cancellation of Bonnie Faulkner's weekly show, using the addresses provided in the Global Research article linked above.
In addition, I would strongly recommend visiting the archives of Guns & Butter and downloading as many shows as possible, in case those shows are removed at a future date. Those archives go back fifteen years, to 2003.
The possibility that access to those archived shows could be removed appears to me to be fairly likely, especially given the fact that the video showing Bonnie Faulkner voicing her displeasure at the termination of her show in a room full of supporters carrying signs condemning censorship, which was embedded in the article posted earlier today on Global Research, has already been removed in the short time that it has taken to write this blog post.
I myself met Bonnie Faulkner in my hometown of San Mateo in 2014. There is no indication that she has ever harassed anybody or called for the harassment of anybody. However, as the article posted today in Global Research points out, while the banning of Alex Jones has received enormous media attention, the termination of Guns & Butter has been completely ignored by the monopoly media (the so-called "mainstream media") which shapes the opinions of the large segments of the population who do not avail themselves of other sources of information.
The termination of Guns & Butter, about a month following the Alex Jones incident, removes yet another avenue of information outside of the controlled media monopoly. My personal suspicion, based upon evidence and not just intuition, is that Alex Jones is likely a provocateur whose role is to behave in a deliberately objectionable and offensive manner in order to discredit more authentic independent voices while at the same time sucking up all the media attention given to the many voices critical of the official media line on important and suspicious events, and whose antics make the censorship of such voices easier for the general public to accept.
In other words, I strongly suspect he is deliberately playing the role of a raving "conspiracy theorist" in order to discredit more deliberate and less objectionable voices who question the mainstream narrative on certain subjects. I strongly suspect that some of the more vocal and visible proponents of the "flat earth" movement could be playing a similar role in order to jump in front of and distract from more serious lines of investigation, while attempting to discredit anyone else who questions certain narratives through a form of "guilt by association."
The fact that Bonnie Faulkner's show has suddenly been terminated without any media attention approximately one month after the much-publicized Alex Jones dust-up would appear to lend some credence to that possibility.
I believe that the termination of Guns & Butter is an extremely troubling and serious sign about the current status of the freedom of the press and freedom to express opinions in an era of increasingly rigid control over the media, the airwaves, the general discourse among the citizenry, and the ability of men and women to gain access to research, evidence and analysis which reveals some of the glaring inconsistencies in the official narrative of critical events.
I would recommend immediately downloading many (or all) of the available Guns & Butterarchive, and placing them on an external hard-drive, mobile device, or series of CDs, and then listening to them while driving to work, riding on the bus, doing the dishes, or working in the garden. I would recommend going right back to the beginning of the archive in 2003, and working forward -- and after several shows, asking yourself if you really believe Bonnie Faulkner is someone whose views are objectionable or outrageous.
And, after you have asked yourself that question and answered it, you might also ask yourself why the framers of the Constitution put the protection of the unabridged freedom of speech and the unabridged freedom of the press at the very beginning of the Bill of Rights -- rights which they correctly described as being inherent in all men and women, and not granted by anyone else, and rights which they accurately perceived as being essential to democratic government by the people, just as they clearly saw the silencing of free speech and a free and independent press to be an essential aspect of tyranny.