Tag: censorship

Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

California vs. Inconvenient Speech

Kamala Harris, parody, satire, free speech, censorship, deep fake

California Governor Newsom wants to outlaw all political speech annoying to himself. If legislation he’s just signed is allowed to stand, he’ll be well on the way to doing so.

One target of California’s two new laws, the Babylon Bee, is filing suit against them.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the Bee, says that the subjects of the lawsuit, California’s AB2839 and AB265, “censor speech through subjective standards like prohibiting pictures and videos ‘likely to harm’ a candidate’s ‘electoral prospects.’… AB 2655 applies to large online platforms and requires them to sometimes label, and other times remove, posts with ‘materially deceptive content.’”

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon observes that, contrary to the wishes of “self-​serving politicians [who] abuse their power to try and control public discourse and clamp down on comedy,” the right to tell jokes they dislike is secured by the First Amendment.

The vague nature of the laws would enable California officials to “police speech they disagree with,” according to ADF and Captain Obvious.

One of the laws requires a disclaimer to be attached to satirical content, a mandate that also violates the First Amendment.

The immediate incentive for fast-​tracking the censorship bills into law was a parody video of Kamala Harris that includes a simulation of her voice. The video does bill itself as parody but that is obvious regardless. This video “should be illegal,” Newsom asseverated.

No, it shouldn’t. 

Anyway, watch the hilarity on YouTube … while you can.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights insider corruption national politics & policies

Hillary Disinformation Hunt

Hillary Clinton, disinformation, censorship, mind control, thought control

Have you heard? It’s open season on disinformation.

Disinformation spewed by Hillary Clinton, that is.

Mrs. Clinton has escaped jail time for all her previous crimes, whether committed singly or in partnership with her husband. But now we are going to have a brand-​new crime to charge her with. And boy, is she a serial offender!!!!!!

The irony is, we would not even be able to charge anybody with this new category of crime — if indeed we’ll be able to; there’s still some controversy about it — but for the contempt of Hillary Clinton and politicians like her for the First Amendment rights that a large minority of Americans hold so dear.

Hillary Clinton, on MSNBC: “I think it’s important to indict the Russians … who were engaged in direct election interference.… But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda, and whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrent.”

Yes, Hillary Clinton “got away with” everything else. But can she get away with all her lies and, let’s face it, downright disinformation, certainly heavily disseminated by her around election times? 

Heck, even if the new category of criminal offense won’t be applicable retroactively, thus giving her a free pass for the last umpteen years, are we in any danger of running out of actionable Hillary disinformation going forward? Does a leopard change its spots?

Maybe she’s counting on selective enforcement.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights media and media people political challengers social media

The Ignorance of Censorship

Covid, censorship, surveillance, PSYOP, mind control

Why is Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, governor of Minnesota right now?

Perhaps because government censors — functioning through agents like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook — made it harder to hear his opponent, Dr. Scott Jensen, during Walz’s 2022 re-​election campaign.

A shift in a few percentage points would have tilted things in the challenger’s favor. But Jensen had made the government’s response to the pandemic — including the tyrannical policies of Walz’s state government — a central theme of his campaign.

And in those days (as in these), all-​out censorship of various deviations from the government line was de rigueur. Disagreement about COVID-​19, both the nature of the infection and the wisdom of the government’s response, was among the targets.

Jeffrey Tucker asks “Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess” to the fact that Facebook had done so little, in Zuckerberg’s words, to resist repeated pressure “from the Biden administration, including the White House … to censor certain COVID-​19 content”?

The answer to the uninteresting question “why now?” is standard CYApolitical calculus. In any case, the confession isn’t quite exhaustive; Zuckerberg doesn’t acknowledge the extent of the censorship. As Tucker notes, “every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels.”

The single COVID-​contrarian piece by Tucker himself that slipped through the social-​media censorship net “by mistake” got an atypical tsunami of response. So what if Dr. Jensen’s message and arguments had not been perpetually smothered by government-​pressured social-​media companies?

Jensen may still have lost (Walz got 52 percent) but the point of elections goes further than a horse race. Where there is free speech, voters can learn something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Say No to Reich-​Harris Reich

Kamala Harris, Robert Reich, censorship, X, Twitter, mind control, free speech

Freedom of speech is constantly embattled.

Just one example: government-​instigated stomping on social-​media speech in recent years, proof of which has been revealed thanks to litigation, freedom of information requests, and the purchase of Twitter by a friend of free speech.

But the embarrassing revelations have not caused our censors to retreat.

They’re not trying to censor people, they suggest, just trying to stop lies, hate, misinformation. And now Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, wants to arrest Elon Musk for resisting censorship as Twitter’s new owner.

Reich says: “Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”

Reich has also said that we must regulate speech to “direct people’s attention … to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.” As Jonathan Turley observes, “the ‘healthy public conversation’ with Robert Reich increasingly appears to be his talking and the rest of us listening.”

Would “regulators around the world” include U.S. regulators? Since the First Amendment has yet to be rescinded, perhaps Reich would prefer other countries to handle imprisoning Elon Musk for letting people speak “too” freely. But I’m guessing Reich would be fine with a U.S. arrest.

Reich would fit right in with a Harris administration, if we get one, led by a woman who calls the First Amendment a “privilege” and has lamented that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight and regulation.” Which, she declares, “has to stop.”

Something has to stop.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights international affairs social media

Banned in Brazil

Brazil, censorship, authoritarianism, mind control

Twitter is being banned in Brazil by a “Supreme Court justice” who seems to be the de facto ruler of the country. Who is also threatening Brazilians with massive fines, $8,900 USD daily, if they try to reach Twitter through a VPN.

A VPN or virtual private network hides your IP address and encrypts your web traffic. VPNs protect privacy and let you visit sites otherwise inaccessible. Sites that purvey “disinformation,” i.e., criticism of the government, and other verboten content. VPNs combat censorship and surveillance.

The justice, Alexandre de Moraes, issued an edict to ban Twitter after Twitter owner Elon Musk refused to obey censorship orders.

Twitter had told users that it expected to be shut down by Justice de Moraes “because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”

Now Musk declares that an “unelected pseudo-​judge in Brazil is destroying [free speech] for political purposes.”

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino adds that according to Brazil’s own constitution, “censorship of a political, ideological and artistic nature is forbidden.… Until there is change in Brazil, X [Twitter] will be shut down.”

Dictatorships often issue “illegal orders” in the sense that these contradict constitutional provisions whose force has faded … or that were never intended to do anything but fool people to begin with. Such political systems are not truly constitutional.

Nor would the situation be any better were the “constitution” more honest, simply announcing that whatever the dictator says goes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights too much government

Deep State in a Corner

deep state, censorship, mind control, PSYOP, CIA

Once upon a time, the CIA and allied agencies pushed free speech as a norm. 

Overseas.

The rationale? Without some free speech and press rights, it was too hard to organize a populace to overthrow their government. Our spooks exported freedom of speech abroad not because they were so gung-​ho American; it was all about seeding revolutions.

But not here! 

The CIA couldn’t let others take advantage of American free speech like its agents leveraged free speech abroad. A change in government might mean … loss of jobs. Mission. Money.

What to do? Disinform at home. By corrupting journalism.

The Operation Mockingbird efforts in the 1960s helped intel insiders control information and manage “the consent of the governed,” and these early efforts grew into the close ties between the Deep State and credentialed journalists today. 

The connections, I’m told are many: it’s not just Anderson Cooper’s internship at the CIA. 

During the Cold War, the disinformation element found a plausible justification. Then, the Soviets had us at a disadvantage: we had trouble extracting reliable information from within the Iron Curtain, but they could grab all sorts of useful information from our open, comparatively free speech realm.

Disinformation: a strategic necessity. But the consequences?

 “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete,” William Casey explained to President Ronald Reagan, “when everything the American public believes is false.”

In the early days of the Internet, the Deep State pushed online speech platforms, the better to allow for foreign coups. Is there a social media space that hasn’t received surreptitious government subsidy? It’s hard to be sure. We’re supposed to assume our government protects us rather than controls us. 

But, increasingly, Internet-​connected Americans see government officials chiefly as manipulators.

Which is why the Deep State’s most ardent partisans (neocons; Democrats; plutocrats) now routinely attack free speech here, and why allies overseas are so thoroughly cracking down on “de-​stabilizing” opinions. It’s why Rumble is no longer available in Brazil and why Musk is pulling out Twitter personnel … and why France has arrested the CEO of Telegram.

Us catching on to the psy-​op game places the Deep State in a corner. All the disinformation agents have left is censorship and repression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Midjourney and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts