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crime and punishment First Amendment rights social media

Big-Gov-Google-Plex

social media, censorship

A major presidential candidate is suing YouTube for censorship.

The candidate’s a Democrat.

That’s right. Democrats can also be muzzled by social media companies . . . that is, by big corporations that obey the First Amendment-violating instructions of government officials.

Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for collaborating with the federal government to violate his free speech rights by removing various of his videos from YouTube.

Kennedy’s sins include openly disputing Official Government Doctrines about COVID-19 and the pandemic. Doctrines espoused by, among others, the incumbent he is running against.

The title of the complaint names only “Google LLC” and “YouTube LLC.” But the document makes clear the originating role of the federal government in censoring Kennedy. The complaint is avowedly about “freedom of speech and the extraordinary steps the United States government has taken under the leadership of Joe Biden to silence people it does not want Americans to hear.”

YouTube’s conduct “may be fairly treated as that of government itself,” the filing explains. “For example, although it cited its own COVID vaccine misinformation policies when censoring Mr. Kennedy, the policies rely entirely on government officials to decide what information gets censored.”

The relief that Kennedy seeks includes restoration of the deleted videos and an order declaring Google’s speech-banning misinformation policies to be “unconstitutional on their face.”

Kennedy wants to be able to state his views and distinguish them from the incumbent’s without being routinely censored by the Big-Gov-Google-plex.

Google and other social media companies must somehow be prevented from colluding with politicians and bureaucrats to interfere in the democracy they only pretend to support.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Adam Smith

In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest, that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; nor could it ever have been called in question, had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).

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Today

Purple Heart

On August 7, 1782, George Washington instituted the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle, an award later renamed “the Purple Heart.”

Illustration: “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” Emanuel Leutze, 1851, Oil on canvas (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), depicting an event in 1776, not 1782.

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by Paul Jacob video

Watch: Vote “Aye”!

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

What to do about the gerontocracy:

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Thought

Anthony Burgess

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive. Its dynamism has to find an outlet in smashing telephone kiosks, derailing trains, stealing cars and smashing them and, of course, in the much more satisfactory activity of destroying human beings. There comes a time, however, when violence is seen as juvenile and boring.  It is the repartee of the stupid and ignorant.

Anthony Burgess, Introduction (“A Clockwork Orange Resucked”) to a later, restored version of his 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. The American publishers of the novel elided the 21st and last chapter to his novel of futuristic “ultra-violence,” and in this introduction the author explained the publication history.
Categories
Today

Jamaican independence

On August 6, 1962, Jamaica became independent of Great Britain.

In 1991, on this date, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, and put up the first website, running on a NeXT computer at CERN, in France.

Tim Berners-Lee, pioneer of the World Wide Web, c 1990s.
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audio podcast

Listen: Vote “Aye” — and Gomorrah

Give yourself extra points if you can make heads or tails of the title:

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Thought

Jack Woodford

Americans pass a law against liquor and go right on drinking; they frown, publicly and openly upon the relationship of mistress and lover, and go right on having such relationships under cover. They draw up huge categories of business ethics, and American business is rotten to the core. It’s America’s fetich: this, ‘Save the Surface and You Save All,’ theory.

The character Nausicaa Bradford in Jack Woodford’s novel Unmoral, 1934.

Categories
Today

Flogged, Founded, Fired

On August 5, 1861, the U.S. Army abolished flogging.

The same day 23 years later, Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor received the foundation stone for the Statue of Liberty (which was featured in the rousing conclusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime picture, Saboteur). The island was renamed Liberty Island, in 1956.

President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers (who had ignored his order for them to return to work) on August 5, 1981.

Categories
First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Melting in the Force of Opposition

snow flake, news, Covid, censorship

Is it time to bring back the pejorative “snowflake”?

We got used to the term in the early days of woke political correctness, but maybe the most egregious snowflakes are the elites in government and Big Pharma.

They melt when anything is said challenging their narratives about disease and cures and public health measures.

An article on online censorship in The Epoch Times, by Naveen Athrappully, discussed recent revelations that Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) calls “the Facebook Files” — all about COVID-19, and the official Government Narrative surrounding it.

In July 2021, “President Biden accused Facebook of ‘killing people’ by not censoring COVID-19 content that the administration perceived to be ‘misinformation,” Mr. Athrapully explains. “The White House wanted Facebook to remove humorous or satirical content that it thought suggested the COVID-19 vaccine wasn’t safe. The Biden administration even wanted to remove honest information about the vaccines.” [Emphasis added.]

I mean, wouldn’t you add the emphasis? Forbidding even honest and true information that might give an inconvenient take surely goes too far. Facebook’s communications documents say that the Surgeon General wanted the social media giant “to remove true information about the side effects if the user does not provide complete information about whether the side effect is rare and treatable.” Astounding!

This level of touchiness, this obsession for control, shows a remarkably fragile bearing on the part of bureaucrats. The winds of doctrine and the gales of opinion? Mustn’t let that whirl around!

It’s the fainting couch set who most desire to control speech.

These government officials should be fired on principle. 

Every. Last. Snowflake.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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