Category: First Amendment rights

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First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights general freedom

Lockdowns Down Under

John Howard, Australia

“Australia is suffering a surge of authoritarianism, in part because of its lack of constitutional protections for liberty,” writes J.D. Tuccille at Reason.

Sydney, Australia, is going through another major round of lockdowns. When you see the popular reaction — the mass protests demonstrate how unpopular the lockdowns are — you might be inclined to think there’s hope.

But Mr. Tuccille finds the hope in Americans’ great historic fortune: we have a Bill of Rights.

Australian politicians, on the other hand, express thankfulness that Australia doesn’t have any deep constitutional limits to their powers.

While it is the current Aussie prime minister who plays tyrant today, Aussie tyranny was cogently expressed by a previous holder of the position, John Howard, whom Tuccille quotes — chillingly: 

  1. “The essence of my objection to a Bill of Rights is that, contrary to its very description, it reduces the rights of citizens to determine matters over which they should continue to exercise control.” 
  2. “I also reject a Bill of Rights framework because it elevates rights to the detriment of responsibilities.”

That first point is not made much less bizarre by the prime minister’s elaboration, expressed in a sentence Tuccille did not include, that a Bill of Rights must fail because it delivers “authority to unelected judges, accountable to no one except in the barest theoretical sense.” Yet, lacking a listing of rights, there are few things a beleaguered citizen can do but bend to the cop’s bludgeon and prime minister’s edict. (Hooray for judges?)

That second point is an old canard. Rights and responsibilities go hand in hand; every right has a flip-​side duty.

In the context of a pandemic: people with rights oblige others to negotiate masks and vaccines and the like.

Where? On private property: outside of government. On public property: in legislatures. 

Alas?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

You Kill Me!

Biden, Covid, Facebook, censorship

“Facebook isn’t killing people,” President Joe Biden informed us yesterday. 

At least, “That’s what I meant,” he clarified ever-so-confusingly. 

Meant last Friday, after a reporter mentioned “COVID misinformation” and asked Joe: “What’s your message to social media platforms like Facebook?”

“They’re killing people,” replied the president. “I mean, it really, look — the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”

CNBC noted that Facebook “reacted defensively” to Biden’s friendly murder accusations, failing to hit LIKE on the administration’s characterization of its pandemic performance. 

“The facts show that Facebook is helping save lives,” a company spokesperson countered. 

“My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally that somehow I’m saying Facebook is killing people,” Mr. Biden chided the social media giant, “that they would do something about the misinformation, the outrageous misinformation about the vaccine.” 

After all, the Biden Administration has certainly rolled up its sleeves, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki put it: “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

Yes, behind the scenes, this administration works with these behemoth social media corporations to help determine what hundreds millions of Americans will be permitted to say and share and discuss — on matters such as medicine, theories of disease origins, etc. 

Didn’t we just ride this pony? Remember the supposedly baseless, debunked, conspiracy-​nut-​fueled Wuhan lab-​leak theory? 

That idea was blocked from us by Facebook (and Google and YouTube) at the behest of Big Government Science … until just weeks ago.

It’s hard to keep up. 

Perhaps we are not supposed to.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs national politics & policies

Optimized for Attack

Whence came this pandemic? 

Now that we can investigate the lab leak theory without being smeared as conspiracy nuts or buried in an avalanche of disinformation from China, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. scientific community — all protected in their deceit by Big Tech and our mainstream media — we might make progress in our inquiries.

On June 29, in a little-​covered hearing before Republican-​only members of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Select Coronavirus Crisis, several renowned scientists testified, most notably Dr. Richard Muller, emeritus professor of physics at Cal-Berkeley.

“I would like to emphasize five points,” Muller stated, “each of which is capable of separating or distinguishing between a natural origin — a zoonotic origin — and the lab origin” of SARS-​CoV‑2: 

  1. “The absence of pre-​pandemic infections,” which he called “unprecedented”;
  2. “The absence of a host animal” (which was lied about early on); 
  3. “The unprecedented genetic purity.… Again, MIRS, SARS, previous viruses don’t have this, but it is exactly what you would expect if you’ve gone through gain-of-function”; 
  4. “The spike mutation … there is no known way for that spike mutation to get there except by gene mutation in a laboratory”; 
  5. “This virus was optimized to attack humans. Again, something that has never happened in natural releases — but it does happen if you run it through the gain-of-function.”

“All the scientific evidence argues in favor of the laboratory origin,” he concluded. “The evidence in favor of the natural, zoonotic origin? There isn’t any.”

But here comes the even bigger story, one that Dr. Muller called “horrifying” and “chilling.”

Muller had asked colleagues to assist in his lab-​leak investigation. But they declined to help because that would anger China, which would then blacklist those labs. 

“The idea that China has managed to interfere, to break United States’ freedom of expression, freedom of investigation, freedom of thought, through this collaboration effort,” the doctor explained, “is really scary.” 

If you think the Chinazis are merely a threat to “their own people” and neighboring Taiwan and countries bordering the South China Sea … think again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Here and here are links to additional testimony at that June 29th hearing. Coverage of Dr. Muller’s testimony first appeared in these pages as a “Thought.”

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First Amendment rights international affairs

The Biden-​Boris Censorship Alliance

The Group of Seven (G7) is an annual meeting at which leaders of seven major countries hobnob about international matters and how they might coordinate policies.

This year, the pandemic was high on the agenda. Also on the agenda, if lower and less conspicuous, was muzzling dissidents.

Dissidents being defined, in current style, as people who spread “disinformation.”

At the meeting, Joe Biden and Boris Johnson endorsed a revised version of the 1941 Atlantic Charter that includes a seemingly minor provision: “We oppose interference through disinformation or other malign influences, including in elections . . . .”

That’s it — just an ominous hint. 

But the Biden administration has been more open in other contexts. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki says that according to Biden, more should be done by “major platforms” to prevent “misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life-​threatening information” from going out to the public.

Throughout history, people have disagreed about facts and their interpretation. It’s nothing new. And pretending it is new provides no justification for preventing the exercise of freedoms that are the only means of reaching and communicating truths — and of correcting the honest or dishonest errors that government officials are as capable of committing as the rest of us.

The UK is considering an Online Safety Bill to block social media sites that fail to remove “legal but harmful content” — which opens up wide vistas of … illegal legal content? 

Even if our government doesn’t follow Her Majesty’s (yet), our current administration is pressuring social media firms to impose censorship on its behalf.

That’s violation-​by-​proxy of the First Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Colluders

censorship, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube

Big Tech social media companies that once boasted of providing open forums now routinely ban speech that they disagree with — speech about elections, pandemics, Wuhan labs, or what have you.

How much of this suppression is private and independently initiated? How much is imposed at the behest of government officials who are supposed to respect First Amendment rights?

Government officials not only say that people should not say such-​and-​such; they also, increasingly, either complain that social media companies don’t do enough to gag people or herald the extent to which they do so.

Earlier this year, Reuters reported that “the White House has been reaching out to social media companies including Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s Google about clamping down on COVID misinformation. . . .”

Now the American Freedom Law Center is suing Twitter and President Biden so that the question of whether the government is in effect “deputizing” private organizations to assault freedom of speech can be adjudicated.

The Center is filing on behalf of Colleen Huber, a doctor Twitter censored and suspended for saying the wrong thing about COVID-​19. Of course, there are many other victims of the same policy, and it the Center seeking class-​action status for the lawsuit.

The government has been enlisting social-​media moguls as foot soldiers in a propaganda war. Whether this is done openly or behind closed doors, this war on free speech violates the Constitution. 

As we must hope the outcome of this legal action affirms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights

Dissidents. Disagreement. Disinformation.

free speech, censorship

Politicians are ramping up assaults on political disagreement (with them) … only they call the disagreeable data “disinformation.”

The latest is a threatening letter by Democratic Representatives Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney to cable companies and digital providers such as Apple and Roku. Sample: “Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, OANN and Newsmax on your platform both now and beyond the renewal date? If so, why?”

Bottom line: Do more to deprive dissidents of a forum! (Here we loosely define “dissident” as “anyone who disagrees with Eshoo and McNerney.”)

With such epistolary conduct the threat is implied. When congresspeople write a complaint like this, the “gun under the table” is understood. They can make laws or use existing laws — antitrust laws or 10,000 other possibilities in the kit bag of the federal leviathan — to pummel speech-enablers.

On Monday, I noted next month’s scheduled congressional inquisition of Twitter, Facebook and Google CEOs, the third such “hearing” in the last five months. That alone imposes a punishment of sorts … and to what purpose?

As Glen Greenwald cogently points out: “Congress violates the First Amendment when it attempts to require private companies to impose viewpoint-​based speech restrictions which the government itself would be constitutionally barred from imposing.”

Congressmen who oppose what Eshoo and McNerney are doing should take this attack on our right to speak very, very seriously. Government must not silence voices, directly or indirectly. If there’s a battle to pick in defense of our freedom, this is it.

Freedom of speech is our first, last, and most important defense against tyranny. Tyrants have never been fans. We must be. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* It reminds me of President Trump complaining on Twitter about “Fake News out of NBC and the Networks” and asking

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