Tag: censorship

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First Amendment rights insider corruption

The Biden’s Four Ways

Joe Biden, censorship, mind control, obey, obedience, free speech

In response to controversies about pandemics, elections, and whatnot, Congress did not quite pass — nor President Biden quite sign — a new law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. (As far as I know.)

Biden’s government did act, regardless, with the force of law to shut people up. According to the Media Research Center’s new report on Biden censorship — ready to be shared with all who contend that his administration perfectly respected our freedom of speech — the cabal I call The Biden censored Americans using four approaches:

Direct action. For example, ordering a big tech firm or a judge to censor somebody. White house advisors, agency bureaucrats, and others exerted this kind of pressure.

Policy or rulemaking. Examples include the State Department’s agreement with foreign nations “to pressure Tech platforms to censor more” and Homeland Security’s attempt to create a Disinformation Governance Board to police speech.

Partnerships with state and private actors to censor speech. Biden’s National Security Council collaborated with the UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit to impose UK censorship on Americans.

Grants to organizations to attack and flag utterance of incorrect speech, which the government could then censor.

These were effectuated, by MRC’s count, with 57 initiatives.

As soon as he began his second term, President Trump issued executive orders to combat such muzzling of debate. Congress must do its part too.

No matter what defenses are put in place, though, we will see further attempts by government goons to gag us. We must be vigilant.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights

Charges Aborted

Can people now report on controversial subjects without being targeted by California officials? 

At least for the next four years?

David Daleiden has announced on X that the charges against him and Sandra Merritt for reporting on Planned Parenthood’s alleged sale of the body parts of aborted fetuses have now been dropped. Daleiden’s no-​contest plea, “which cannot be used adversely” against him, will be “entered into judgement as a misdemeanor … then converted into a ‘not guilty’ plea and dismissed.”

Why all the rigmarole instead of dismissing the charges fully and immediately?

Blame the sulking psyches of California poohbahs and jacks-​in-​office, who may have felt pressured to unload the case because of the regime change in Washington. It seems that President Trump nominated Harmeet Dhillon, who has represented Daleiden and Meritt, to help lead the Civil Rights Division of DOJ.

Charges of filming people without permission — in the kind of sting operation that still happens quite often without anybody getting arrested for it — had been brought against Daleiden and Merritt in 2017 by California’s attorney general at the time, Xavier Becerra. This prosecution was based on an investigation launched by one Kamala Harris.

The supposed crime was the recording, in 2015, of interviews with Planned Parenthood personnel by members of the anti-​abortion group Center for Medical Progress. Daleiden is CMP’s founder.

Now, with the charges gone, Daleiden and CMP can focus on their work, which he describes as reporting on “the injustices of taxpayer-​funded experiments on aborted babies.”

A work that their prosecutors obviously wished to forestall.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

A Free Speech Order

“Will President Trump be a free speech president?”

On January 21, David Keating, president of Institute for Free Speech, asked this question. And he refers the reader to his Wall Street Journal op-​ed published last month in which he offered suggestions about how to stop the federal government from censoring people via social media or in other ways.

The new president sure seemed to get off to a good start restoring the First Amendment. One of his thirty or so executive orders signed on the 20th, his first work day, is entitled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”

Section 2 says that it is U.S. policy to “secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech,” ensure that no federal employee or agent “engages in or facilitates” unconstitutional abridgement of speech, and “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.”

Section 3 says no federal employee or department may act in a manner inconsistent with Section 2.

Maybe this broad order needs to be supplemented with many more specific orders that say: Really. Don’t engage in censorship here or there or anywhere.

This is where specific suggestions like Mr. Keating’s come in handy, such as preventing the IRS from penalizing taxpayers for criticizing political candidates, repealing SEC limits on political donations, and instituting specific regulations to “force disclosure of most government contacts with social-​media organizations asking to take down third-​party posts,” thereby scuttling most future such contacts.

It’s a start. Let’s keep going.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media too much government

When Is Censorship Not Censorship?

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, censorship

Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is returning to its free speech roots.

Can we believe him?

While the restrictions on what you can talk about on Facebook are still pretty extensive, Zuckerberg’s outfit, Meta, is apparently ending the reign of “fact-​checkers” on Facebook and Instagram, as well as the platforms’ collusion with federal government “fact-​checkers.”

On Monday, I discussed the federal government’s screaming fits that led Facebook to ramp up “content moderation,” which I identified with a less euphemistic c‑word. But that word choice remains controversial. For example, a “global network of fact-​checking organizations,” the International Fact-​Checking Network, which includes Agence France Presse, objects to Zuckerberg’s assumption that Meta helped impose censorship.

“This is false, and we want to set the record straight, both for today’s context and for the historical record,” announced IFCN. The Network then “warned of the potentially devastating impact if the group were to end its worldwide programs.…”

If censoring in obedience to government demands is not censorship, what could be? The article doesn’t explain. AFP and IFCN are simply saying that they don’t want freedom of speech; it’s dangerous.

Of course, free speech can have costs. 

But censorship does too: suppression of truth and impeding the means of learning truth. 

The article doesn’t report on the costs of suppressing facts about, say, COVID-​19, vaccines, U.S. policy, UFOs, or Hunter Biden’s laptop.

AFP and IFCN simply assume that gatekeepers like themselves, with a vested interest in excluding divergent reports and viewpoints, must be allowed to keep excluding differing views and inconvenient facts from the “safe spaces” that apparently include all the very biggest spaces on the Internet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

The Defi(l)ers of the First Amendment

free speech, censorship, corporations

Early on, we carefully phrased our objections to the suppressions of dissident opinion on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. 

We knew (because we had been making the distinction for years) that when companies and private parties engaged in discrimination on the basis of opinion, including “de-​platforming” of opinion-​mongers, these weren’t, at least on the face of it, First Amendment violations. The First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech apply to the federal government and, by the stretch of the 14th Amendment, to state and local governments.

These were corporations.

Sure, corporations thriving under government liability rules, and with sometimes-​cushy contracts with government.

And social media companies’ actions were clearly partisan, obviously opposing Donald Trump. The dreaded Orange Man had used social media to get elected in 2016, running rings around the gatekeepers of Accepted Opinion; the ultra-​partisan censorship a reaction.

Only with the release of the Twitter Files, after Elon Musk bought Twitter, did we get the crucial facts in the case: Agents of the U.S. government (many of them eerily in the Deep State nexus) pushed the censorship.

Now, with Mark Zuckerberg’s very recent and very public pulling back from the excesses of DEI as well as government-​coerced content moderation, we’ve learned more of the manner of the duress in which his companies caved to censorship demands. Government agents called up Facebook managers and content moderators and screamed at them to suppress certain stories and “memes.”

The sharing of visual memes really, really bugged the Deep State, which was hell bent on delivering to everybody a jab in the muscle with gene therapeutics allegedly to “vaccinate” us against a disease that … well, their buddies in the Deep State helped China, it just so happened, create. 

Worldwide, millions died in a pandemic whose origin was actively covered up through violations of the First Amendment in America. 

Defend free speech to defend life itself. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people

Bill Nye, the Jail-​My-​Debating-​Opponent Guy

Bill Nye, science, climate, global warming, censorship, authoritarianism

The latest Joe Biden outrage is the handing out of Presidential Medals of Freedom to the blatantly undeserving.

Popularizers of science seem to have gone downhill these days. Or perhaps it’s just a few of the most visible ones who are so vile.

In their own day, Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov espoused some lamentable left-​wing views and advanced some dubious propositions as they explained the universe to nonscientists. But you could listen to, read, and enjoy them.

Neither ever suggested, not even once, that persons who disagreed with him on a scientific question might reasonably be incarcerated therefore — inasmuch as the disagreement impaired his quality of life “as a public citizen.” (An argument any totalitarian might use to rationalize violating innocent persons’ rights.)

But Bill Nye, “the science guy,” has expressed the greatest possible sympathy with the proposition that it might be okay to imprison scientists who disagree with him about climate, human impact on climate, or the advisability of trying to centrally plan climate.

In 2016, when asked about a proposal to imprison “climate skeptics,” Nye said that “extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my qualify of life as a public citizen. That there is a chilling effect on scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change, I think that is good.”

People don’t do their best thinking with a gun pointed at them, Nye guy. That is not good.

Note: it’s the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Not the Presidential Medal of Craven Censorship.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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