In 2016, when Donald John Trump won the presidency in a squeaker election, major news media and the Deep State worked together to censor online and free speech in a big way, culminating in the election of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., in 2020. Now, in November 2024, with many millions fewer voting than for Biden, Trump wins handily, taking the swing states and achieving what looks like a popular vote majority.
So what are major news media mavens doing?
Complaining about a lack of censorship!
Well, some are. Specifically, as said on The View, “It would help if we could regulate social media, because one of the biggest offenders is D.C. and Congress have not been able to do one thing in regard to the rogue corporations of social media,” meaning, mainly but not exclusively, ex-Twitter/X.
There are many such laments out there. Just remember the Constitution of the United States, though:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
First Amendment, approved by Congress along with other amendments and submitted to the states for their ratification on September 25, 1789; ratified December 15, 1791.
Paul Jacob has covered online censorship extensively. Here are just a very few examples:
“Say No to Reich-Harris Reich,” September 6, 2024
“Censors Cancelled,” July 6, 2023
“Invitation to a Beheading,” March 13, 2023
“Buzz-Sawing the Conservatives Treehouse,” November 17, 2020
Our constitution protects aliens, drunks, and U. S. Senators. There ought to be one day (just one) when there is open season on senators.
Will Rogers, Daily Telegram number 2678 (March 6, 1935).
On November 9, 1960, Robert McNamara was named president of the Ford Motor Company, becoming the first non-Ford family member to serve in that post — only to resign a month later to join the newly elected John F. Kennedy administration.
In my experience, whenever many politicians push for a ballot measure in order to supposedly “fix” an already-established right of citizen initiative, the goal is usually to make it harder for people to get a question onto the ballot.
Three questions on state ballots this November exemplify the pattern. Fortunately, voters have rejected the sly politicians’ gambit in each case.
In Arizona, Proposition 136 would have let opponents of a ballot question force a doubt about its constitutionality to be adjudicated before the measure can be placed on the ballot. (Nothing prevents a measure from being challenged in court after passage.) Of course, sometimes litigation, whether sincere or not, can’t be entirely resolved before proposed urgent deadlines, like the deadline for submitting signatures to place a question on the ballot.
Arizona voters clobbered Prop 136 with about 64 percent of the vote.
In North Dakota, voters had to again defeat a lawmaker-referred measure to weaken citizen initiative rights. Among other arbitrary burdens, Measure 2 would have increased the number of signatures required to send a question to ballot.
Voters killed it by about 56 to 44 percent.
Lastly, Colorado’s Amendment K sought to impose an earlier deadline for submitting initiative signatures. This, too, voters declined by about a ten point margin.
Good results. Voters tend to see the elite’s designs and react appropriately.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Herbert Spencer, Principles of Ethics, Vol. 2, Part V: “Negative Beneficence” (1893), Chapter 1: “The Kinds of Altruism.”
The mental action by which from moment to moment we thus, in ways commonly too rapid to observe, class the objects and acts around, and regulate our conduct accordingly, has been otherwise named by some, and especially by Professor Bain, ‘discrimination.’ Intelligence is, in its every act, carried on by discrimination; and has advanced from its lowest stages to its highest by increasing powers of discrimination. It has done this for the sufficient reason that during the evolution of life under all its forms, increase of it has been furthered by practice or habit as well as by survival of the fittest; since good discrimination has been a means of saving life, and lack of it a cause of losing life.