Category: First Amendment rights

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Accountability ballot access First Amendment rights

Zuckerbuck Sucker Punch

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, elections, democracy

Who should fund our public elections? 

Partisan billionaires? 

Last election, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, “gave $419 million to two nonprofit organizations that disbursed grants in 2020 to more than 2,500 election departments,” reports The New York Times.

The idea was to help officials deal with holding an election during a pandemic. No laws were necessarily broken. Apparently, private individuals and groups can give money to government election offices — even “with strings attached.” 

“Some conservatives see this largesse of ‘Zuckerbucks,’” informs a Wall Street Journal editorial, “as a clever plot to help Democrats win.” In fact, a Capital Research Center (CRC) analysis found the liberal non-profit “consistently gave bigger grants and more money per capita to counties that voted for Biden.” 

“[A] deep dive into the available data shows that the funds were largely requested for get-out-the-vote efforts, influenced voter turnout in favor of Democrats, and may have impacted the results of the election in some states,” explains the Foundation for Government Accountability. “According to currently available information, less than one percent of the funds were actually spent on PPE nationwide.”

Can you imagine the outcry if a group with “conservative ties” funded by Charles Koch was giving grants to help Republican-rich jurisdictions rock the vote?

“[E]ven under the purest motives,” the Journal’s editorial offers, “private election funding is inappropriate and sows distrust.”

That’s why 16 states have since passed laws to restrict private funding of election programs.

Mr. Zuckerberg himself sees the danger in Zuckerbucks: “To be clear, I agree with those who say that government should have provided these funds, not private citizens.” Last week, he announced he would not be providing such funding in the 2022 elections.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets

Elon Musk Is Serious

Elon Musk, Twitter

Billionaire Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk is showing the world how capitalism reforms wayward companies — like Twitter. 

It is done from within the system.

By stock ownership.

Becoming Twitter’s top stockholder — right after Musk told the Babylon Bee he just might have to buy Twitter to reform it — surely demonstrates serious intent.

But Twitter honchos have stressed that the mere advent of Elon Musk portends no major changes, a hint of things not to come. 

Moreover, a restriction on how many shares board members may purchase meant that had Musk joined Twitter’s board, he’d have been unable to ramp up the pressure for reform by becoming an even bigger stockholder.

So Musk chucked his original plan to join the board and decided, what the heck: If I do need to buy Twitter to fix its anti-speech policies, I better outright buy it. He has reportedly offered $43 billion.

He says: “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe.” But he now realizes that the company in its current form will never be that platform. 

“Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”

A week ago we asked, “Will Elon Liberate Tweeting?”

We’re still asking. Maybe the current owners love banning disagreement with themselves too much to give it up. 

Someone should tell them that are worse things to sell out for than open discourse and freedom of speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Don’t Ask, We Won’t Sue

Solas, CRT, Critical Race Theory

Uh oh. Haul out the armament and load and aim — at least if you’re responsible for educating the young daughter of Nicole Solas.

Solas is among the many parents who missed the memo about how sinful it is to have some idea of and influence on what their kids learn in public schools.

She’d heard about how public schools have been indoctrinating kids with a noxious ideological brew about race and gender. So she asked the principal of her daughter’s school in the South Kingstown School District of Rhode Island whether collectivist critical race theory and gender theory were any part of the curriculum.

The principal give hints that this was indeed happening. But then the school stopped talking. Instead of elaborating, school officials told Solas to instead send formal public record requests to learn what was happening at the school.

Which she did. Then the school district began publicly harassing her for being a “threat to public education” (as we all should be, given such doings). The Rhode Island branch of the National Education Association even went so far as to sue this mom.

Nicole Solas could easily have been swamped by litigation costs. Fortunately, the Goldwater Institute stepped in to defend her against the lawsuit and help her pursue her inquiries about the school.

As for her little girl, she’s doing fine. In a private school that is open about what it teaches, which doesn’t include any corrosive political agenda.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

Will Elon Liberate Tweeting?

Elon Musk

Persons who skip social media or who spend their time on Twitter and Facebook discussing lunch or the weather may not realize how anti-speech such big-tech forums have become.

If you disagree about what’s better for breakfast, eggs or oatmeal, no problem.

But despite their putative pretense of providing open forums, the dominant social-media companies routinely ban discussion of touchy subjects like Hunter Biden laptops, pandemics, and and the politics of race and gender. As the satire site Babylon Bee discovered, even calling a man a man, apparently quite a controversial observation, can get you in hot water with Twitter censors.

We have ways of combatting the censorship. One is using alternative platforms that do regard open discussion as a value. Another is becoming a major stockholder and disrupting the anti-speech agenda from within.

Is this what Elon Musk is up to? Bee CEO Seth Dillon says that after Twitter suspended Babylon Bee for calling a man a man, Musk called him about the suspension and said that “he might need to buy Twitter.” 

Presumably in order to put a stop to such censorious shenanigans.

Now Elon Musk, who has 80.6 million followers on Twitter, has bought the company. Or rather, he has acquired a big stake in it, a 9.2 percent stake. This apparently makes him Twitter’s largest stockholder. Maybe we can dare to hope that he will eventually become the majority stockholder.

Good first step, Mr. Musk. 

Next? Get Twitter to remove the gags.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture

Our Uncivil War

speech, 1st Amendment, freedom, censorship

The New York Times admits it: “America Has a Free Speech Problem.” But the March 18 editorial, while trying carefully to distinguish one kind of speech issue from another, fails to acknowledge the full extent of the problem. 

The trouble, you guessed it, is partly a left versus right issue: “Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech,” which strikes me as a fairly accurate account. But the Times cannot help itself — the right must be made to seem worse. “Many on the right,” the editorial goes on, “for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.”

Sans persuasive examples — the Times provides none — I reject this claim as a grave misunderstanding of current trends. What has been happening is not the banning of books, but the mere removal of them from public school libraries and/or curricula. 

“Stifling teachers” is not a thing, really. Taxpayer-funded teachers have no more right to teach anything they want than taxpayer-funded police have the right to enforce whatever laws they want.

The multi-racial backlash against the left, most recently in Virginia, was a movement of parents upset over cultural Marxist indoctrination on racial issues . . . taking the place of quality education. 

Something else the Times missed: the extent to which cancel culture has worked hand-in-hand with social media companies under the influence of partisans in Congress and the Deep State.

That being said, the Times does get something right: “When speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out of public discourse, a society also loses its ability to resolve conflict, and it faces the risk of political violence.”

Yes, it’s a problem.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights social media

Chirp Meets Buzz

twitter, Babylon Bee, censorship

The Babylon Bee won’t cooperate with Twitter’s censorship of the Babylon Bee.

When instructed to remove tweets in order to recover account access, people tend to comply.

Not always, but often.

Hard to blame them. But it does mean that Twitter gets away with all kinds of egregious censorship that the social media “platform” shouldn’t get away with.

The Bee’s latest sin? Bestowing upon HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine — who had just been dubbed a Woman of the Year by USA Today because Levine “identifies as” a woman — the title Man of the Year.

Twitter has locked the Babylon Bee out of its Twitter account.The platform literally “can’t take a joke.” And Twitter demands the Bee must delete the tweet to regain access.

“We’re not deleting anything,” says Bee CEO Seth Dillon. “If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it.”

Dillon notes that account holders are not only expected to remove offending tweets but also to repentantly check a box to renounce the censored viewpoint. “You have to deny that you meant it. . . . They’re forcing you to grovel and adopt an ideological position that you don’t actually hold.”

The Babylon Bee is routinely assailed by Internet censors. Satire, parody, pastiche, lampoon, spoof, sarcasm, irony, etc. are all allegedly forms of “misinformation” and “hate speech,” thwarting of which is the rationalization du decade for stopping people from talking to each other.

In response, the Babylon Bee is thankfully taking a stand and, let’s hope and trust, won’t back down.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights

A Guide for the Surveilled 

cyber security, web, internet, crime

If you’re hounded — or merely have reason to suspect you are about to be hounded — by censors and spies, there are things you can do to protect yourself.

Self-defense often starts with your communication devices, the kind of things that Big Brother and Big Corporate Overlords tend to target. Reclaim the Net has put together a fairly comprehensive overview and explanation of ways to reduce your risk.

For example:

● Use a strong passkey.

● Turn off fingerprint unlock and face unlock.

● Be alert to phishing attempts.

● Delete unused apps and data.

● Delete photo metadata before sending or posting photos.

● Disable location services.

● Use airplane mode when preventing access to you is more important than having access yourself.

● Usea VPN to evade censorship and tracking.

● Be careful what kind of information about yourself you make public.

● Take steps to recover a confiscated or stolen device, or at least to make its data unrecoverable.

● Use anonymous accounts.

● Use encrypted text messengers.

● Switch to more privacy-conscious browsers, search engines, and ISPs.

Depending on your circumstances, some of these tips will be more relevant than others, of course. But it’s worth perusing the whole list.

Of course, to go to all this trouble, you’d have to believe that big governments and mega-corporations are trying to surveil you. As if we lived in one of those dystopian futures they talk about in scary science fiction stories.

And who could ever believe that?

Well . . .

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

What Is and Is Not Censorship

CRT, critical race theory, censorship

For days on end, outside of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, antifa protesters hounded book buyers and bookstore workers. These activists were on a mission: to get the store to expunge Andy Ngo’s book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, from its website offerings.

“We have to show up every day until they stop selling that f—king book,” one activist said, comparing her effort to “stopping the historical publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”

As the story in FEE makes clear, the store had already banished it from the block-sized building itself. But management has so far refused to de-list it from its website. 

Meanwhile, Democrats (or at least the leftists at Salon) have been dubbing attempts by legislators and school boards to get rid of Critical Race Theory and similar woke nonsense from their curricula as “censorship.”

Here’s the muddle: as mobs play censor to a privately owned book company, leftists pretend that public input into the revision of curricula in taxpayer-funded, government-run schools is worse.

There are Jewish, Christian and Muslim schools near where I live. I have absolutely no say about what they teach their students; if I demanded that they conform to my standards, my demand would (depending on threat level) constitute censorship. 

But if I’m taxed to support a school, and the school is constitutionally run as democratically controlled, my “voice” on the matter of curriculum is not in any way censorship — even if educators “professionally” disagree with my position.

Forcing someone else’s reading decisions is censorship; determining your own (or your children’s) is not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom international affairs

Virtual Private Communist

Eileen Gu, Olympics, China, censorship

“China censors Olympic gold medalist’s defense of China’s internet censorship . . .” informed Mashable.com’s ironic headline. 

The medalist in question? Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old phenom who just became the youngest ever Olympic freestyle skiing champion. Born in San Francisco to an American father and a Chinese mother, Gu is an American citizen, but chose to ski on the Chinese national team at the Beijing Olympics, which means she is also a Chinese citizen. (Which is completely against Chinese law. But ssshhh.*)

Miss Gu’s now-you-see-it/now-you-don’t Instagram post of February 7th garnered a reply from a Chinese netizen, who inquired, “Why can you use Instagram and millions of Chinese people from mainland cannot, why you got such special treatment as a Chinese citizen?” The commenter added, “That’s not fair,” noting that “millions of Chinese . . . don’t have internet freedom.”

Gu quickly replied, “Anyone can download a vpn its literally free on the App Store.”

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are indeed easily available outside of China, but “it is illegal to use them to get around China’s Great Firewall,” Mashable explained. 

“And, as the Weibo post featuring Gu’s Instagram comment started to gain traction on the social network, it was subsequently censored.”

“Let them have VPNs,” mocked a column in the Taiwan News, dubbing it Gu’s “‘Marie Antoinette’ moment.”

The reality of VPNs in China? Not so easy, and the laws against VPN usage are increasingly enforced.

Gu’s ignorance about the reality of living under Chinese rule may be caused by the wealth showering over her. “Eileen Gu’s China choice pays off for now,” says Yahoo News, noting she has made over $30 million since the beginning of 2021 and is poised to make far more.

This makes her a Communist Party asset, and thus a danger to herself and the rest us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “China does not allow for dual citizenship,” Mashable informs, “and there is no record that Gu has given up her American citizenship.” It appears we can add “looking the other way” and “duplicitousness” to the Chinazis’ long rap sheet of crimes against humanity.

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First Amendment rights general freedom local leaders nannyism

The Next-Worst Thing

New York City, big apple, mayor, censorship

New Yorkers can breathe easier now — they’re finally rid of the repellent Mayor Bill de Blasio.

But — uh oh — the new mayor, Eric Adams, may be another worm to keep that bitter taste dominant in the Big Apple.

Mayor Adams dislikes guns and violence, so he wants social media to censor rap videos that display and glorify guns. It’s unclear whether he also wants social media to censor links to westerns and Matrix movies and lots of other movies and media in which guns to fight bad guys or bad algorithms are approvingly deployed.

“You have a civic and corporate responsibility,” Adams intones, enjoining social media firms to expand their list of banned things.

“We [we?] pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music displaying of guns, violence. We allow this to stay on the sites.”

 “Stagecoach” and a rap video proposing that one “[expletive deleted] that [expletive deleted]” may have little in common in the categories of values and sensibilities. But if violence is “glorified” in both, well, that’s bad. Right?

Adams is a government official. A “public servant.” And a functionary in such a position cannot make solemn, well-publicized declarations about what companies should censor without thereby seeking to enlist them — deputize them, you might say — as agents of government censorship.

He is not sending police to the offices of Twitter and Facebook and ordering them to ban rap-video tweets or else. But he’s doing the next-worst thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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