This happens because the left, at least at the level of the talking head or column byline, has ceased to think or reason at all. This has been pretty obvious for some time; consider the inherent contradictions in the left's pro-abortion choice and anti-vaccine choice policies as another example, or the inability to tell men from women. The key is that thinking is not required; unquestioning distribution of the approved opinion is.
How that opinion actually gets to the approved status is an entirely political calculus that happens in back rooms filled with smoke, billionaires, and German accents.
Once it gets approved, though, everyone must toe the lie and heaven help the hindmost. Instead of rational arguments -- of whcih they are now incapable -- the foot soldiers of the left deploy fact-checkers, disinformation nannies, and twitter cancellation mobs. And these agents are surprisingly successful, forcing even a sitting president off of his chosen social media soapbox during his reelection campaign.
FBI investigated concerned parents as domestic terrorists
In addition to the obvious political problems of investigating concerned parents as domestic terrorists, it also contradicts AG Garland's testimony to Congress about this topic.
Appeals court reinstates Texas law protecting social media users
The Texas law is clearly in the spirit of the First Amendment. The details are more complicated. My take on it is more practical: if a company gets so big as to have effective monopoly status, it's services are treated like common carrier services. The phone company doesn't get to deny service because they don't like you. Neither should Twitter or Facebook.
There is no doubt in my mind that this is another political persecution. Veritas gets targeted because they are one of the very few organizations doing effective investigative reporting.
It seems obvious that this agency will attempt to impose externally what, previous to Musk's purchase of Twitter, Big Tech was imposing internally.
It also seems obvious that this agency is a gross violation of the 1st Amendment and free speech, but it will likely take time for the courts to process this. If in fact they ever do. Our theoretical majority on the court is slimmer than it appears as Republican justices are apparently inherently untrustworthy, while leftist judges vote in lockstep.
Still, if the Supreme Court rules that a government censorship board is acceptable, we're not living in America anymore.
Investigation of Jan 6th police beating rules death "Objectively reasonable"
There is no way this was objectively reasonable. The woman was exercising her 1st Amendment right to protest peacefully before being knocked unconscious and struck dozens of times while unconconscious and unresisting until she died. Police claim she died of a "drug overdose". Sorry, but police are on video beating her while she is unconscious. That's not reasonable.
What would the left be saying if she was black and this happened at a BLM "protest"?
What's the relevant line here from ethics rules? Something about avoiding even the appearance of impropriety?
However, regardless of ethics and financial interest, using "fact checkers" to label, block, censor, limit, ban users, or in any way prevent people from having an honest conversation online is improper. It's not up to Big Tech to be that annoying stranger inserting himself into a conversation between friends and appointing himself the arbiter of facts, the telling everyone else to shut up.
And don't forget, much of this "fact checking" was done at the request of government officials, making it also a 1st Amendment issue.
Trump was, and probably remains, our best chance to fix this. He has been personally bitten by all this in a way that no one else in the political class ever has.
It's unAmerican, but Pelosi is an honest politician. Once bought, she stays bought, and the Chinese own her soul. And they know they are safe from criticism.
This sort of rhetoric is the culmination of decades of battleground prep in the media. When "freedom" and "conservative" are defined as "far-right" and "extreme" ideology, the link to terrorism and violence is a very short one.
Since when is freedom "extreme" or "far right"?
Freedom is the birthright of every human being. Governments rarely respect that, even when they claim -- as most do these days -- to receive their mandate from the people.
Canada's prime minister, Trudeau, famous for repeatedly and unapologetically wearing blackface, has declared martial law through Canada because he is tired of truckers honking their horns in peaceful protest over his vaccine mandates.
On Monday, Canada's parliament will either ratify his abuses and doom the nation to tyranny, or reject them and remain a free people.
If you ever wondered, in an idle moment, what you would have done were you a citizen in the Weimar Republic during Hitler's rise to power... you now have the opportunity to find out. Canada has not yet fallen. But the Reichstag is burning.
Trudeau invokes never-used Emergency Act against truckers
He's already called them Nazi racists, used police powers to spy on their social media accounts and send police to their homes, attempted to steal $10M of their funding, frozen their bank accounts, taken their food and fuel in below-freezing weather (thus putting their children in danger from the cold), threatened them with arrest, imprisonment, loss of commercial driver's licenses, and $100K in fines.
The truckers have so far responded with remarkably peaceful good grace.
The best response to this provocation might be to just go home, and stay home, for a couple weeks. All the truckers, all at once. No goods moving anywhere in Canada, not because anything is blocked, but because all the truckers are having a nice nap.
Trudeau has chosen, repeatedly and consistently, to threaten and escalate rather than listening to the concerns of the people he claims to represent. He has denied their right to free speech and peaceful protest.
It's not a surprise; ever since the 2012 election, at least, the Democrats have been all about abusing their power to influence elections. Obama started with the IRS, got caught (after he won re-election), and then shifted to a national security agency focus with the CIA, FBI, and DOJ, along with help from the Clinton campaign. He got caught there too, but so far neither Obama nor Clinton have faced any personal consequences. The heavy thumb on the scale in 2016 was not enough, but the effort continued even with Trump in office. In 2020, vote fraud carried the day and Congress got into the political surveillance game.
A warning label from "fact checkers" is where Facebook and Twitter started.
The problem isn't "misinformation" from people like Joe Rogan, who brings on real experts and lets them talk. The problem is that the "official sources" are not trusted because they are not worthy of trust. Their lies have been tested against reality and exposed as such. People are looking elsewhere for truth.
You can't convince people of something by telling them to shut up.
This seems way outside of the intended role of the postal service. Is there any federal agency that doesn't have some sort of spying and surveillance program?
Note the First Amendment tag on this one. The Biden Administration very recently demanded in very strong terms that online social media platforms crack down on "misinformation" about COVID.
The government, and their very deep pockets, are now a potential defendant in a First Amendment lawsuit. In addition to Youtube and their very deep pockets.
For everyone whining about bitching about how Twitter is a private company, the bit about "acting directly with federal officials" invalidates that defense and means the 1st Amendment absolutely does apply.
The intended effect is obvious: to co-opt journalists into dependent lapdogs. Frankly it's amazing that the existing media lapdogs aren't considered servile enough.
The claim that government wasn't involved in these cancel campaigns has been shattered. The Obama administration pioneered the efforts with Operation Chokepoint, which basically tried to get banks and the financial industry to "voluntarily" (under threat by their regulatory agencies) deny service to the gun industry. Now that's been expanded to deny access to social media and any speech or financial platform for, basically, everyone the left doesn't liked on whatever thinly veiled excuse they can come up with. If you're a CEO or a high level corporate officer, better not speak out or you will be hounded out of your job, or have your bank cancel your accounts, or whatever else they can come up with. And in many cases, there's a hidden hand of government applying pressure behind the scenes.
That should violate the 1st Amendment, but if it's kept secret, how would you ever know?
Texas passes law protecting free speech on social media
Somehow, that first paragraph was written without irony. "Free-Speech activists" oppose a law that prevents banning users based on their political opinions? The rest of the article is, if anything, worse -- conflating political opinions with obscenity and all the usual boogeymen.
I do not condone violence, but there's scant actual evidence of violence in this article. Instead, there is evidence that school board members are feeling the heat of an angry and engaged populace over COVID-19 rules and critical race theory.
Keep the pressure on, peacefully. This is what winning looks like.
Biden Admin directing Big Tech censorship efforts on COVID
It's one thing for Big Tech to decide, on their own, to "fact check" and suppress free speech on a topic. I believe that to be improper, but legally difficult to challenge. Most legal protections for free speech are based around government being the bad actor, with the infamous section 230 of the Communications Decency Act being an outlier. That section extends immunity from lawsuit to companies that decide to be "platforms" for user speech, as distinct from companies that are making editorial decisions about what to publish.
I believe that Big Tech has definitely stepped over the line into making editorial decisions, thus removing those legal protections. Cases are moving through the courts that will likely decide that.
But, it appears another front has just been opened. In separate situations, Big Tech appears to have colluded with Big Government (both the Biden Administration after the election and state government officials before the election) in censoring topics and specific posts that government officials requested be censored.
They are even asking for cross-platform censorship based on those government requests.
This will likely prove to be a dramatic mistake, as now the full force of the 1st Amendment protections against government censorship can be brought to bear.
In a nation that once considered freedom of speech a founding principle, the demands for censorship from the current regime are breathtaking.
Democrats want to fact-check your cell phone text messages
I think this is a significant escalation from fact-checking public posts on social media, and even from doing that in direct/private messages on social media platforms. Cell phone messaging predates most of the internet services messaging capabilities and is generally viewed as significantly more private. If this is implemented, suddenly the Democrats will be inserting themselves into the private conversations of many older and less technically sophisticated Americans who did not previously feel personally impacted by spying and censorship.
When companies like facebook and the media collude to suppress opposition to their favored narrative and policies, they destroy any trust in anything they say or allow to be said. Censorship is counterproductive when your message is true. It's only when your message is false that it becomes necessary.
The SPLC has already thoroughly discredited itself, and any groups associated with them should have no part in anything like this. Not that that matters, since this is a political purge of the US military. Obama purged the officer core and Biden is purging the rank and file. The next step, likely in 2024, will be using the military against the people.
MA government told Twitter to delete tweets of Senate candidate
We've seen recent revelations about California and Iowa officials making similar censorship demands of Big Tech companies. Funny how it's all about private companies exercising their own discretion until you find out the government is giving them instructions.
Police officer investigated for Molon Labe keychain
The phrase has been associated with the right to keep and bears arms -- not just the three-percenters, which are a more recent development -- since ancient Greece. This whole panic over anyone who believes in America as the Constitution defined it is political bullshit. And no, the right to keep and bear arms is not extremist.
FL legislation would impose fines for deplatforming
The same rules should apply to everyone. I understand that the legislature loves to create special rules for politicians, but all Americans have free speech rights.
That said, there was likely a tradeoff between imposing penalties large enough for Big Tech to notice and limiting the people covered by such a law. As far as compromises go, I'm fine with this one.
There are three boxes to which a free man can go when seeking to remain free.
He begins with the soap box -- advocating for retaining his liberty, using the 1st Amendment to protect his ability to speak. The media's bias (especially following the final capitulation of Fox News), combined with Big Tech's censorship of the internet, and pervasive cancel culture, have created a situation where speech is no longer free.
If speech alone is insufficient, he moves to the ballot box, voting for leaders who will correct the situation. While this may not resolve the problem immediately, so long as leaders are chosen by popular vote in free and fair elections there remains hope.
The presidential race in 2020 appears to have demonstrated that the ballot box is no longer free or fair.
That only leaves one box left. Pray we need not open it.
Facebook fact checkers were in Biden's camp all along
This will only surprise people who thought Facebook and other Big Tech companies actually wanted to check facts. They didn't. It was always about censorship.
Wikipedia now censoring support for traditional marriage
The problem here is that censoring something like this does not make it go away (as Wikipedia no doubt wishes), it just prevents that opinion from being expressed on a certain platform. It's a thumb on the scales of the overton window, as I saw it described somewhere earlier today; it's not a rational argument, not a discussion, not an explanation, merely a declaration that a certain position is verboten in polite society. Not only does the law not agree with that opinion (any longer, even though this change to millennia of law only happened recently), that opinion can no longer be spoken about at all, thus hampering anyone who disagrees from expressing their disagreement.
This is evil. It is evil in the unique manner of totalitarian technological societies; a minor evil that hurts millions of people just a little bit, and thus hopes to achieve great evil while sliding beneath the notice of those who might oppose it effectively.
This is an obvious attempt at influencing the election, and should result in Twitter being denied any protections against suits for those tweets it does not correct or remove, as Twitter has now claimed for itself an editorial role rather than being a content-neutral service provider. Trump has responded with an executive order emphasizing the importance of free speech and declaring that, by stepping back from political neutrality, Twitter has become a publisher making editorial decisions instead of a platform, thus stripping their protections from suit under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
... and they did it because of red flag laws. They are also refusing to share their bodycam footage, because of course they are. After all, that footage would expose them as liars who shot and killed a man while he slept peacefully in bed next to his pregnant girlfriend, who they also shot.
The police are keeping the survivors under surveillance and threatening them with arrest if they attend protests.
Everyone involved here needs to go on trial for murder and violation of civil rights. But they won't. Because they are police.
I'm not sure if I want to go that far. Any serious attempt at regulating the media would invite regulatory capture immediately, and backfire upon the small, indepedent bloggers and commentators. But to be honest... yes, I do think the media attention given to mass murders that happen at school contributes to them happening again and again and again.
Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) issued the following statement regarding the Internal Revenue Service informing the Committee that they have lost Lois Lerner emails from a period of January 2009 – April 2011. Due to a supposed computer crash, the agency only has Lerner emails to and from other IRS employees during this time frame. The IRS claims it cannot produce emails written only to or from Lerner and outside agencies or groups, such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.
Do the words obstruction of justice ring a bell?
There is no way this was anything other than a completely deliberate attempt to cover up incriminating evidence.
When it was Nixon, they said "It's not the crime, it's the coverup."
Major media is paid by government agencies for specific content
Those who have been paying attention have known this was true for some time in the realm of entertainment programming. If you ever wondered why so many children's shows have ham-handed anti-drug messaging, wonder no more: running an anti-drug storyline was good enough to tick a box and get money from the government, so of course everyone did. But a new revelation indicates that a similar situation exists for news programming:
Amber Lyon is an award-winning journalist who worked for CNN. She says while working at CNN she was ordered to report fake stories, delete unfriendly stories adverse to the Obama administration (like the Nick Robertson report), and construct stories in specific manners while working for the left-wing network. Why? According to Lyon CNN is paid by foreign and domestic Government agencies for specific content. [Emphasis added]
They are also paid by foreign governments to not air things, with an example at the link above. I can remember when CNN previously admitted to not reporting the truth from Baghdad while Saddam Hussein was in power.
