Category: First Amendment rights

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First Amendment rights media and media people too much government

The Chirping Mockingbird

mockingbird, intelligence agency, mind control, media, press, speech, brainwashing

We are told that “there’s nothing to see” in the recent revelations about how USAID was subsidizing Politico. 

At Reason, Robby Soave pooh-​poohed the story: “some critics of USAID have seized on a misleading claim: Namely, that the organization was funneling millions of dollars to Politico. In reality, it appears that government agents were paying for subscriptions to Politico’s premium product. That may or may not be a worthwhile use of government funds (more on this in a moment), but at any rate, it does not represent some kind of direct subsidy to the news outlet.”

It could be, however, a subsidy with plausible deniability. 

The keyword may be: Mockingbird.

Remember the Church Committee investigations into the intel community, post-​Nixon? One of the revelations was of Operation Mockingbird, which was (“allegedly”) the CIA training and subsidizing of — and coordinating stories to — scores (perhaps hundreds) of individual journalists. 

One of the many things we don’t know about Mockingbird is if it ever ended. But one thing we do know is that programs begun by one agency not irregularly get taken up by others.

And speaking of multiple agencies — with more than a dozen dedicated to intelligence, why is government paying the private sector for information?

For all their massive appropriations, the basic job of intel agencies to inform (not lie to) representatives, government executives, and functionaries appears to be one they’ve skimped on.

Meanwhile, USAID’s massive subsidies to New Zealand news outfits has somehow received little interest. “Last week, Wikileaks reported that 25 NZ mainstream media outlets were given funding from USAID,” explains The Daily Blog. “We need an immediate explanation from our Mainstream Media Owners if they changed any editorial stance that aligned us with America while taking this money.”

Inquiring minds should be skeptical of underplaying of these revelations. Don’t we need a wall of separation between press and state?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights

Charges Aborted

Can people now report on controversial subjects without being targeted by California officials? 

At least for the next four years?

David Daleiden has announced on X that the charges against him and Sandra Merritt for reporting on Planned Parenthood’s alleged sale of the body parts of aborted fetuses have now been dropped. Daleiden’s no-​contest plea, “which cannot be used adversely” against him, will be “entered into judgement as a misdemeanor … then converted into a ‘not guilty’ plea and dismissed.”

Why all the rigmarole instead of dismissing the charges fully and immediately?

Blame the sulking psyches of California poohbahs and jacks-​in-​office, who may have felt pressured to unload the case because of the regime change in Washington. It seems that President Trump nominated Harmeet Dhillon, who has represented Daleiden and Meritt, to help lead the Civil Rights Division of DOJ.

Charges of filming people without permission — in the kind of sting operation that still happens quite often without anybody getting arrested for it — had been brought against Daleiden and Merritt in 2017 by California’s attorney general at the time, Xavier Becerra. This prosecution was based on an investigation launched by one Kamala Harris.

The supposed crime was the recording, in 2015, of interviews with Planned Parenthood personnel by members of the anti-​abortion group Center for Medical Progress. Daleiden is CMP’s founder.

Now, with the charges gone, Daleiden and CMP can focus on their work, which he describes as reporting on “the injustices of taxpayer-​funded experiments on aborted babies.”

A work that their prosecutors obviously wished to forestall.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights

The January Sixers

January 6, prisoner, jail cell, pardon, insurrection

Among the reasons one might be glad Donald Trump won the presidency is the reprieve he has given to many who attended the January 6, 2021, rally in Washington, DC.

While it is true that some who were punished did engage in violence and riot,* many were peaceful but were imprisoned anyway, under horrific conditions. And even some who avoided imprisonment were treated atrociously.

Among the latter is former police officer Michael Daughtry, who recently told his story. A few of the details:

Invited by President Trump to go to the West Lawn to peacefully protest, Daughtry did so. There, “police officers removed the barricades and waved us onto the West Lawn.” The FBI later confiscated Daughtry’s video of this.

On January 16, he was charged with trespassing on the West Lawn.

Though he had been a police officer and had no criminal record, Daughtry was jailed for hours before being brought before a judge … “in handcuffs, leg irons and belly chains.…”

Even after he was released, his home was raided repeatedly.

He was forced to turn over passwords to email, social media, bank accounts and much other private information to federal agents, who threatened him with prison if he did not comply.

Daughtry was under house arrest “for almost two years for a crime that carries a maximum punishment of less than a year. I have not been allowed to plea in this case.”

More here.

Trump pardoned Daughtry for his non-​crime. Would a President Harris have done so?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Those who assaulted police officers or plotted to do violence on that day should not have been pardoned — even if deserving of mercy, commuted sentences, without wiping their record, would have sufficed.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

A Free Speech Order

“Will President Trump be a free speech president?”

On January 21, David Keating, president of Institute for Free Speech, asked this question. And he refers the reader to his Wall Street Journal op-​ed published last month in which he offered suggestions about how to stop the federal government from censoring people via social media or in other ways.

The new president sure seemed to get off to a good start restoring the First Amendment. One of his thirty or so executive orders signed on the 20th, his first work day, is entitled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”

Section 2 says that it is U.S. policy to “secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech,” ensure that no federal employee or agent “engages in or facilitates” unconstitutional abridgement of speech, and “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.”

Section 3 says no federal employee or department may act in a manner inconsistent with Section 2.

Maybe this broad order needs to be supplemented with many more specific orders that say: Really. Don’t engage in censorship here or there or anywhere.

This is where specific suggestions like Mr. Keating’s come in handy, such as preventing the IRS from penalizing taxpayers for criticizing political candidates, repealing SEC limits on political donations, and instituting specific regulations to “force disclosure of most government contacts with social-​media organizations asking to take down third-​party posts,” thereby scuttling most future such contacts.

It’s a start. Let’s keep going.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media too much government

When Is Censorship Not Censorship?

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, censorship

Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is returning to its free speech roots.

Can we believe him?

While the restrictions on what you can talk about on Facebook are still pretty extensive, Zuckerberg’s outfit, Meta, is apparently ending the reign of “fact-​checkers” on Facebook and Instagram, as well as the platforms’ collusion with federal government “fact-​checkers.”

On Monday, I discussed the federal government’s screaming fits that led Facebook to ramp up “content moderation,” which I identified with a less euphemistic c‑word. But that word choice remains controversial. For example, a “global network of fact-​checking organizations,” the International Fact-​Checking Network, which includes Agence France Presse, objects to Zuckerberg’s assumption that Meta helped impose censorship.

“This is false, and we want to set the record straight, both for today’s context and for the historical record,” announced IFCN. The Network then “warned of the potentially devastating impact if the group were to end its worldwide programs.…”

If censoring in obedience to government demands is not censorship, what could be? The article doesn’t explain. AFP and IFCN are simply saying that they don’t want freedom of speech; it’s dangerous.

Of course, free speech can have costs. 

But censorship does too: suppression of truth and impeding the means of learning truth. 

The article doesn’t report on the costs of suppressing facts about, say, COVID-​19, vaccines, U.S. policy, UFOs, or Hunter Biden’s laptop.

AFP and IFCN simply assume that gatekeepers like themselves, with a vested interest in excluding divergent reports and viewpoints, must be allowed to keep excluding differing views and inconvenient facts from the “safe spaces” that apparently include all the very biggest spaces on the Internet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

The Defi(l)ers of the First Amendment

free speech, censorship, corporations

Early on, we carefully phrased our objections to the suppressions of dissident opinion on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. 

We knew (because we had been making the distinction for years) that when companies and private parties engaged in discrimination on the basis of opinion, including “de-​platforming” of opinion-​mongers, these weren’t, at least on the face of it, First Amendment violations. The First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech apply to the federal government and, by the stretch of the 14th Amendment, to state and local governments.

These were corporations.

Sure, corporations thriving under government liability rules, and with sometimes-​cushy contracts with government.

And social media companies’ actions were clearly partisan, obviously opposing Donald Trump. The dreaded Orange Man had used social media to get elected in 2016, running rings around the gatekeepers of Accepted Opinion; the ultra-​partisan censorship a reaction.

Only with the release of the Twitter Files, after Elon Musk bought Twitter, did we get the crucial facts in the case: Agents of the U.S. government (many of them eerily in the Deep State nexus) pushed the censorship.

Now, with Mark Zuckerberg’s very recent and very public pulling back from the excesses of DEI as well as government-​coerced content moderation, we’ve learned more of the manner of the duress in which his companies caved to censorship demands. Government agents called up Facebook managers and content moderators and screamed at them to suppress certain stories and “memes.”

The sharing of visual memes really, really bugged the Deep State, which was hell bent on delivering to everybody a jab in the muscle with gene therapeutics allegedly to “vaccinate” us against a disease that … well, their buddies in the Deep State helped China, it just so happened, create. 

Worldwide, millions died in a pandemic whose origin was actively covered up through violations of the First Amendment in America. 

Defend free speech to defend life itself. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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