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insider corruption Internet controversy media and media people social media

Child Corpses Pile Up

fake news, Hunter Biden, laptop, propaganda, legacy media

Two podcast conversations recently went viral, capturing the attention of millions. 

The first was on Triggonometry, where New Atheist luminary Sam Harris let his Trump Derangement Syndrome swing free, sans rational hinges. The second was on The Joe Rogan Experience, where Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg fielded a question regarding the same story — Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Mr. Harris called the Internet’s suppression of the Hunter laptop news “an eleventh-hour” way to rid America of a completely selfish, utterly unpredictable president — Donald Trump. “At that point,” Harris elaborated, talking about the run-up to the 2020 elections, “Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement: I would not have cared.”

The linkage between Hunter’s racket and Joe Biden himself did not seem to concern him, either.

The suppression of the laptop story by Twitter was also echoed on Facebook. The week after Harris’s unhinged rant, Joe Rogan queried Mark Zuckerberg, who calmly explained that the FBI warned Facebook against “Russian disinformation” and how his social media company then algorithmically suppressed the story without ever actually censoring the story as such.

While Zuckerberg absolved the FBI of specifying “Hunter Biden” as the keywords, and the FBI denies any ability to direct a company to suppress any “disinformation,” that’s hardly pertinent: apparently it’s easy for Leviathan Government to get Behemoth internet companies to play along.

This is an important issue upon which to stake future reputations. Comedian Bill Maher sided with principle and (yes) liberalism against leftoid-insiderish conspiracy on his show, while talking to Rob “Meathead” Reiner. The former All in the Family star professed ignorance of any of the pertinent facts.

Which is precisely what social media’s censorship and algorithmic suppression aimed to accomplish. But for more voters than just Meathead.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Garry Kasparov

The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

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Today

Locke & Shays

August 29 marks the 1632 birthday of British philosopher John Locke, author of Two Treatises of Government, and one of the strongest intellectual influences on America’s 18th century independence movement and subsequent constitutional thinking. Locke died on October 28, 1704.

On August 29, 1786, Shays’ Rebellion began. The rebellion was an armed uprising of Massachusetts farmers reacting very negatively against the high debt and tax burdens enacted to pay off the Revolutionary War. This rebellion scared American leaders into revising the Articles of Confederation, a process that led not to a mere few changes, but to the writing and adoption of a whole new Constitution.

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by Paul Jacob video

Watch: Sadder Yet

Paul Jacob looks at the reality of modern politics, and what people think of our major institutions. But it could be worse: people could accept that reality as the best possible, as even good itself. Increasingly, this is not the case. Which is the opposite of sad!

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Thought

Milton Friedman

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.

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Today

Slavery Abolished

On August 28, 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act received Royal Assent, formally abolishing slavery throughout most the British Empire.

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audio podcast

Listen: The Only Thing Sadder

What’s worse than the low opinion Americans have for their major institutions? Paul Jacob tells you in this weekend’s episode of This Week in Common Sense:

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Today

Baltic Independence

On August 27, 1991, the European Community recognized the independence of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Moldova after they had declared their independence from the USSR.

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Thought

Plato

θαρρεῖν, ὦ Θεαίτητε, χρὴ τὸν καὶ σμικρόν τι
δυνάμενον εἰς τὸ πρόσθεν ἀεὶ προϊέναι.

No one should be discouraged, Theaetetus, who can make constant progress, even though it be slow.

Plato, Sophist.
Categories
Fifth Amendment rights First Amendment rights general freedom nannyism national politics & policies

Just a Board Whose Intentions Were Good?

Homeland Security, censorship, spying, social networks, free speech, disinformation

They say it was all a terrible misunderstanding.

The Department of Homeland Security has caved and is now closing its new Disinformation Governance Board. Critics had been disinformatively saying that the board would probably be used for censorious purposes.

Au contraire, says DHS — even though the board was originally headed by an exponent of countering wrongthink about such matters as the “alleged” Hunter Biden laptop. No. Per DHS, this board really, truly, deep down, supposedly had only benign intentions.

When announcing the shutdown, DHS also announced that it has a bridge to sell you.

(Gotcha! DHS didn’t announce anything about a bridge. That’s just a bit of disinformation that I perpetrated with the help of my woefully abused First Amendment–protected freedom of speech!)

In May, DHS Secretary Mayorkas insisted that the board was no threat to free speech. The point was to address threats “without infringing on free speech.” Rather, the board would be doing things like disputing the strangely persuasive misinformation that the U.S. now has an open southern border.

Even early on, though, the board had been planning to coordinate its anti-disinformative efforts with Big Tech social media firms, which have been censoring on behalf of government. And various government officials will still be working to delegate the nuts and bolts of violating the First Amendment to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et al. No letup on that front in sight.

DHS may be ending its ill-named board. But beware: its spirit and agenda live on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

NOTE: This board was previously discussed in these pages on May 2, in “Homeland Censorship Board.”

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