Tag: free speech

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social media

Fired for Being on Parler

censorship

Is the desire to speak freely a bad thing?

In tweets now “protected” from public view, Jennifer De Chiara, president of Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, professed distress upon learning “that one of our agents has been using the social media platforms Gab and Parler. We do not condone this activity.”

Her agency, she added, works “to ensure a voice of unity, equality, and one that is on the side of social justice.” So “Colleen Oefelein is no longer an agent at The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency.”

This announcement came some weeks after Oefelein reported (on Twitter) that she’s “now also posting on Parler. It’s a great platform with no censorship!”

Tech giants like Twitter and Facebook have become increasingly brazen about banning users for uttering wrongthink. Hence the appeal of pro-free-speech alternatives like Parler and Gab.

De Chiara and Oefelein certainly disagree on the exact reason for the firing. Oefelein says it was for being “a Christian and a conservative.”

Of course, their two explanations are not mutually contradictory.

Anyway, it is significant that De Chiara explains the firing by specifically citing Oefelein’s use as such of a pro-free-speech platform. Also significant is that her explanation includes nothing to the effect that Oefelein expressed anything even so much as politically incorrect . . . or, let’s note, that she was bad at her job.

One apt response to deplatforming is shunning, the boycott of (in this case) the Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency. If you are an author or agent working with the agency and you disapprove of such retaliation against the desire to speak freely, find another agency.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people

Gun Group Deplatformed

Mailchimp, email, marketing, 1st Amendment, speech, censorship

Mailchimp is an “all-in-one integrated marketing platform” that helps businesses send newsletters and other email to customers, prospects, and supporters. In January it blocked the Virginia Citizens Defense League from sending email to members about an annual rally in defense of gun rights and told the organization to get lost.

Some help.

According to the president of the Defense League, Philip Van Cleave, “There was no justification. They provided nothing. Basically, they just said we need to get our stuff and be prepared to move on.”

Well, Mailchimp’s boilerplate letter did also state that its “automated abuse-prevention system, Omnivore, detected serious risks associated with [your] account. . . . This risk is too great for us to continue to support the account.”

What risk? Oh, why bother to specify. The point is, the automated system detected it. I’m guessing that certain scary words were flagged, like “gun,” “Second Amendment,” “Constitution,” “rights.”

It seems that any kind of assembling on behalf of certain constitutionally protected rights or to petition for redress of grievances is to be regarded as a rationale for summarily ejecting politically right-leaning customers — at least by firms going along with this accelerating strategy to abet repression.

Mailchimp has violated the terms of service upheld by those who respect freedom of speech and do not respect arbitrary assaults on costumers. If you’re using it, look for an alternative.

The Defense League’s “Lobby Day” rally was peaceful again this year — as the group’s website informs, “just a lot of patriots sending a strong message to the General Assembly to keep their hands off our gun rights.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights

America Is Speech

censorship, free speech

In this frightening time marked by actual violence — five dead in the attack on the U.S. capitol and many more killed during last summer’s unrest* — last week’s very scariest news was this admission by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY):

Several members of Congress, in some of my discussions, have brought up media literacy because that is a part of what happened here [the capitol attack] and we’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation.

Two things immediately came to mind. 

First, AOC has herself “shown a tendency to exaggerate or misstate basic facts,” as a year-old Washington Post report noted.

“I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct,” the progressive pol explained, “than about being morally right.”

Second, I recall taking President Trump to task in 2017 after he asked in a tweet: “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License?”

“The answer to his question is,” I wrote, “never.”

But when Twitter blocked Trump for life, many pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan replaced their profile pictures with a photo of their ally, Trump.

“People in China use VPN [a Virtual Private Network] because they crave uncensored information,” explained Taiwanese media commentator Sang Pu, “but now when they climb over the Great Firewall what they’ll find is more partisan, more censored, more narrow speech rather than an open arena for debate.”

Sad. Tragic. For America is free speech. It is our gift to the world.

Or was?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Be skeptical of these numbers. Of the five deaths at the capitol, one was due to stroke and another a heart attack, both occurring outside the capitol and away from the violence. Three deaths are, of course, three too many. Likewise, the deaths linked to the summer riots include violence by both police and civilians with the details and motivations not always known. 

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First Amendment rights social media

Our Info War

Michael Rectenwald

“Do not close your Facebook or Twitter accounts,” wrote Michael Rectenwald a few days ago.

But I already closed my Twitter!

“Do not give up the geography you have and the connections you’ve made within those spaces. Instead, subvert from within.”

Still, I never liked Twitter. It seems a poisonous atmosphere of too much snark, virtue signaling, mobbing, and worse.

“As of now, there are no alternatives. Parler will be shut down by Amazon within hours. It will also be shut out of Apple and Android vis-a-vis Apple Store and Google Play.”

I hopped on Parler, when it got attacked. With the outages, etc., it is impossible to use. 

“Gab is a digital silo or ghetto that contains and isolates deviationism.”

And former leftist professor Rectenwald — author of the books Springtime for Snowflakes, The Google Archipelago, and Beyond Woke, as well as a novel, Thought Criminal — means “deviationism” in an entirely good way.

“MeWe has already succumbed to the oligarchical censors,” he informs.

“Instead, keep the beach heads that we have and spread out. Don’t give up the connections. We must retain the network of thought deviationism . . . . Read this article and you’ll understand why it’s not as simple as you think,” linking to a Daniel Greenfield essay on Frontpage, “Parler and the Problem of Escaping Internet Censorship” (January 8, 2021).

The problem is oligopoly, argues Greenfield, since five big corporations “control the mobile ecosystem and can shut down an app like Parler anytime they please. . . . an increasingly small interconnected network of companies . . . can act in concert to suppress anyone or anything they don’t like.”

And what role does the federal government play? It applies pressure by threats at the top end (Nancy Pelosi, et al.) and who-knows-what at the Deep End (the CIA and other intel agencies, which have working arrangements with all major tech companies, including Apple).

All the more reason for you to (ahem) SUBSCRIBE for email service on ThisIsCommonSense.org, if you haven’t already. Email is harder to control. 

And we have a lot of work to do, to fight back.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture responsibility social media

Realtor Group Gag

censorship, oppression, flag

The U.S. President, along with his most influential followers, has been banned from Twitter and from other social media while also facing yet another impeachment effort.

So who cares whether some silly realtor group imposes an anti-“hate speech” code on members?

Us. 

We had better care.

Why?

Bureaucrats and politicians don’t act alone. 

They are empowered by individuals who consent to, cheer for, do whatever they can to promote and enable repression. And by all the private organizations and institutions who do the same kind of enabling of repression.

The “hate speech” ban just imposed by the National Association of Realtors on its members to govern their conduct 24/7 (a “blacklisting,” says Reason’s Eugene Volokh) could impose fines up to $15,000 for violations. (I assume NAR would be unable to collect from members who don’t stick around to pay.) 

The goal is to make at least the most submissive members struggle never to say anything that could offend some anti-speech client.

If you are a realtor with NAR: quit. Don’t cooperate. Don’t fund and don’t sanction these aspiring tyrants. You can find client leads another way. Join a competing organization that doesn’t ban speech. Or work with other realtors to form one.

Governments do not tyrannize in a social and cultural vacuum. 

Do we want a world in which everyone who values freedom is silent — even “voluntarily” — for fear of “hatefully” offending the infinitely tender sensibilities of those who hate freedom of speech and any fundamental disagreement?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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political challengers social media

Ron Paul & the Fascisti

Ron Paul

Yes, you can make this stuff up. 

But long before you could add your implausible idea to your farfetched script about the weird dystopian future or recent tyrannical past, some big-tech social-media company will have galumphingly implemented that notion.

Former Congressman Ron Paul said the following on Facebook, reprinting a column on his site:

“Last week’s massive social media purges — starting with President Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter and other outlets — were shocking and chilling, particularly to those of us who value free expression and the free exchange of ideas.

“The justifications given for the silencing of wide swaths of public opinion made no sense, and the process was anything but transparent. Nowhere in President Trump’s two ‘offending’ Tweets, for example, was a call for violence expressed explicitly or implicitly. It was a classic example of sentence first, verdict later.”

Then Facebook blocked Dr. Paul.

“With no explanation other than ‘repeatedly going against our community standards,’ Facebook has blocked me from managing my page,” he reported on Twitter, itself no sturdy redoubt. “Never have we received notice of violating community standards in the past and nowhere is the offending post identified.”

Can humongous corporations really jerk people around so dishonestly? Is it legal? 

Paul further argued that “this assault on social media” is not merely “a liberal or Democrat attack on conservatives and Republicans.” 

“As progressives like Glenn Greenwald have pointed out,” explains the doctor, “this is a wider assault on any opinion that veers from the acceptable parameters of the mainstream elite, which is made up of both Democrats and Republicans.”

The narrowing of opinion down to what elites find acceptable is one definition of fascism: a no-opposition-allowed corporatist state.

I’m not making this up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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partisanship social media

Consigned to Outer Darkness

mass media, establishment media, censorship, free speech

Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon are on a de-platforming binge.

The official rationale? Anyone “associated” with rioting must be expelled from virtual society. 

Yet these social media outfits have hardly ousted endorsers of violence against innocents with anything like consistency. Iranian Boss-man Ali Khamenei still has a Twitter account. Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Cortez, who has opined that some people “have no choice but to riot,” is still merrily blathering on Twitter.

The latest victim of Big Tech’s assault on speech is not an individual but a competing platform, Parler, whose support for free speech is its main selling point.

Apple has kicked Parler off its app store, and Parler got booted from the Google Play store, too.

Now Amazon, which provided storage for Parler, is kicking Parler off its servers with essentially zero notice because Amazon employees “were lobbying the company to disconnect Parler from AWS for hate speech,” which is like arguing that USPS or the Constitution must be shut down because it enables hate mail.

Apparently, once enemies of speech employed by a big-tech service provider scream “Deplatform so-and-so,” any erstwhile reservations of top management — Jeff Bezos, in this case — pop like a soap bubble under a hot iron.

Parler was one possible landing place for the President of the United States, booted from Twitter for allegedly inciting the capitol riot.* It now seems that Trump may find refuge at Gab.com, where his tweets expunged from Twitter have been republished. 

But note: Gab has long been out in the wilderness, denied service on Google’s and Apple’s systems.

Folks who demand inclusion sure do practice exclusion well.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Rush Limbaugh deactivated his Twitter account in protest of Twitter’s action. And I deactivated mine as well — something I meant to do when Twitter blocked the New York Post’s truthful reporting on Hunter Biden during the election.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Bully for Your Thoughts

Professor William Jacobson, a Cornell Law School professor who also publishes the popular Legal Insurrection blog, got into trouble last summer by criticizing the violent Marxist organization Black Lives Matters.

BLM’s standard weapons include rioting, burning, looting, and screaming.

Jacobson had argued that the “Hands up, don’t shoot” version of the Michael Brown case is a lie and, in another post, that all the “bloodletting and wilding” around the country was primarily about tearing down the country, not about George Floyd.

These opinions upset the bullies.

Being a conservative professor on a liberal campus had all along made Jacobson feel like a “mouse waiting for the cat to pounce.” After 12 years at Cornell, though, the summer of 2020 was the first time that fellow Cornellians actively sought his ouster.

Six months later, we sure hope Professor Jacobson has managed to land on his feet. And he has. Back then, he was a professor at Cornell Law School. Today, he is a professor at Cornell Law school.

Why didn’t he seek friendlier pastures?

“I don’t see why I should be forced to change my life because they are so intolerant and they are so malicious,” he recently told The Daily Signal podcast. “Why don’t they leave? I’m not going to leave voluntarily. And if they do try to interfere in the renewal of my contract in a year and a half, I will take them to court over it.”

Bully for you, Professor. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Totalitarians Gloat

The Odyssey, Ulysses

For generations, even millennia, boys read The Iliad with admiration for Achilles, and men referenced the clever Odysseus from that other Homeric epic, The Odyssey. 

By my day, neither were required reading. If I’ve read The Odyssey, it was the same version the Coen Brothers referenced when concocting their terrific film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) — the Classic Comics version.

Nowadays, teachers gloat, online, about expunging the poem from the canon.

Rod Dreher, in “Cancel Cult Comes For Homer,” explains the context for this latter development: the politically correct “intersectionalism” of public school teachers in the “#DisruptTexts” movement. “‘Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),’ tweeted Shea Martin in June. ‘Hahaha,’ replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. ‘Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!’”

Why? All that ancient racism and sexism.

Expelling the classics from schooling is absurd, of course, exposure to a diversity of ideas and historical achievements being what we used to call a “liberal education.” But today’s canon controllers are not liberal activists. They are, Dreher insists, totalitarian ones.

And they are quite emboldened — their ground-up, crowdsourced movement gets the usual pat approval by tax-funded educational institutions. It’s not a conspiracy if they boast about it on Twitter.

Here is a fun fact about The Odyssey: Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon (1872) and The Way of All Flesh (1903), conjectured that the real author of the poem was a woman. Yes, an “authoress.”

Nevertheless, that would not likely convince woke cultists to put The Odyssey back on your kids’ reading lists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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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