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First Amendment rights Internet controversy

Ron Paul vs. Fauci, YouTube vs. You

Ron Paul, Fauci, Covid, censorship, free speech, 1st Amendment

It’s new news but also, unfortunately, old news.

Tech-giant providers of forums for public discussion keep banning discussion of the issues of the day. The latest victim: Ron Paul, medical doctor, former congressman and presidential candidate, father of U.S. Senator Rand Paul.

Alphabet/Google/YouTube has pulled a video from Dr. Paul’s YouTube channel in which he criticized Fauci for, among other things, reversing his advice about wearing masks to combat COVID-19. YouTube warns of further suppression if this kind of thing (debate, I guess) continues. You can still watch the video, since there are competitors to YouTube (and we hope there will be many more). SoundCloud has it.

Paul linked to an image of the YouTube communiqué. “Your content was removed due to a violation of our Community Guidelines. . . . Medical misinformation.”

“If this happens again,” Paul’s channel will be hobbled for a week.

And if even then he still speaks freely, like any red-blooded American would? Still more sanctions, presumably.

Alas, there are many examples of these obnoxious policies.

We’ve recently complained about YouTube’s removal of a Mises Institute talk — once again, for failure to follow the pandemic panic party line. We’ve also complained about how WordPress buzz-sawed The Conservative Treehouse blog for nebulous violations of policy, violations suddenly discovered after years of hosting the blog.

We could go on. We probably will. Like the proverbial “broken record.” 

When’re we gonna stop?

Well, right after the tech giants stop their accelerating efforts to suppress debate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Ron Paul

It’s a mistake to think that poor people get the benefit from the welfare system. It’s a total fraud. Most welfare go to the rich of this country: the military-industrial complex, the bankers, the foreign dictators, it’s totally out of control. 

Dr. Ron Paul, television interview while running for the presidency as a Libertarian in 1987.

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Today

A law student

On December 30, 1919, Lincoln’s Inn in London, England, admitted its first female bar student.

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crime and punishment ideological culture

The Portland Chaos

Portland, autonomous zone, protest

“As a lifelong Portlander,” Alan Grinnell writes to the editor of The Oregonian, “I am shocked at what our city has become.”

Responding to a Steve Duin column about Portland, the “broken city,” Grinnell asks, rhetorically, “Who would have thought that our downtown would become a wasteland, that there would be homeless camps everywhere in the city, and that gangs of armed thugs on all sides of the political spectrum would run out our police?”

Duin defined the problem as one of “mob rule,” lamenting that “just about everyone I spoke to was terrified they might be the next random target of the mob.”

After months of riots and property destruction following the killing of George Floyd by police in distant Minneapolis, Minnesota, the focus of recent police and community attention turned to a house on Mississippi Street from which so-called “sovereign citizens” — the Kinney family (who are black and indigenous) — were evicted for not paying their mortgage (since 2017). Now the house is being occupied by “activists,” who have turned the area into a sort of autonomous zone — as was done for weeks this summer, dangerously, in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle.

“[I]f you live or tend shop on North Mississippi, and fear for your own safety around the local ‘security’ forces,” inquired the columnist, “what do you make of the cops’ retreat from the neighborhood?” 

While many appear sympathetic with the Kinneys’ plight, the takeover by the terrorists, er, activists, is another matter entirely. One black man on reddit calls it “one big scam,” suggesting folks “ignore these loons.”

But ignoring willful lawbreakers appears to be the problem, not the solution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

William Ewart Gladstone

The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the world.

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Today

Mongolia

On December 29, 1911, Mongolia gained independence from the Qing Dynasty.

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general freedom

The Season of Not Demanding

Every day, in tandem with these columns, ThisIsCommonSense.org provides a bit of history (“Today”) and a wise or significant saying (“Thought”). Christmas Eve’s Thought is worth thinking about again. 

“Liberty is the only thing you cannot have,” wrote William Allen White, “unless you are willing to give it to others.”

While one could argue that trust and love and a number of other important things also require reciprocity, it is true, and profoundly so, that liberty is reciprocal — or non-existent: if you won’t let others be free, they won’t let you be free, either. 

Further, the responsibility that is freedom’s flip-side is something we must do together. 

That is where the idea of shared burdens comes in. Freedom is not itself a non-economic, or free good, in that those who won’t leave us free must be fought, sometimes with a lot of time and effort and resources. And even danger.

The key to not turning the burden of defending freedom into a form of oppression itself is to respect individual liberty in doing so — not turning our wants into commands.

This year, 2020, the challenge has been bigger than usual. Governments’ demands have been breathtakingly extensive: to not work, not trade, to not engage in business or worship or even going to the beach.

That burden has been so oppressive — and so much worse for some (small business folks and their employees, especially, and those with mental health issues) than others (like retirees, people in government, those working from home) — that surely it is too much to demand of others.

That’s something to consider in this “gift-giving” season: Don’t play the spoiled child, with a gift-demanding attitude toward others.

Freedom is the gift we can all afford to exchange.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Mark Twain

The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it — when unpopular.

Mark Twain, “The United States of Lyncherdom” (1901), first printed in Albert Bigelow Paine, ed., Europe and Elsewhere (1914).

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Today

An Arrest, a Resignation

On December 28, 1797, Thomas Paine was arrested in France for treason, after being tried in absentia on December 26 and convicted. Before moving to France, Paine had been an instrumental figure in the American Revolution as the author of Common Sense. Paine then moved to Paris to become involved with the French Revolution, but the chaotic political climate turned against him. Paine had not earned friends in the Revolution with his vocal opposition to capital punishment.

“During the whole of my imprisonment,” Paine later wrote, “prior to the fall of Robespierre, there was no time when I could think my life worth twenty-four hours, and my mind was made up to meet its fate. The Americans in Paris went in a body to the convention to reclaim me, but without success.”

Paine’s imprisonment in France caused a general uproar in America. Future President James Monroe used all of his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794.

With the publication of Paine’s The Age of Reason — a great part of which he wrote in French prison — the American population turned against him, and he died penniless in New York in 1809.

On this date in 1832, John C. Calhoun resigned as Vice President of the United States, the first to do so.

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by Paul Jacob video

Watch: What Censors Do