Tag: satire

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Censors Slapped at Start

Kamala Harris, satire, free speech, censorship

Californians may now be allowed to see and laugh at “falsehoods” after all.

The Golden State legislature and Governor Newsom will probably fail in their attempt, made in open violation of the First Amendment, to ban certain parody and satire that communicates what they call “falsehoods.” (California hasn’t yet outlawed political novels.)

The battle isn’t over yet. But a court has issued a preliminary injunction against recently passed legislation, declaring that it “does not pass constitutional scrutiny.”

Cited in the ruling is this excellent insight: “‘Especially as to political speech, counter speech is the tried and true buffer and elixir,’ not speech restriction.”

Further, by “singling out and censoring political speech, California hasn’t saved democracy — it has undermined it. The First Amendment does not brook appeals to ‘enhancing the ability of … citizenry to make wise decisions by restricting the flow of information to them.’” Though the judge determined that California has “a valid interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,” the current legislation “lacks the narrow tailoring and least restrictive alternative that a content based law requires under strict scrutiny.”

What could such “narrow tailoring” have consisted of? The repudiated legislation has everything to do with speech that should be unhindered and nothing to do with protecting the electoral process. 

AB2839 and a related law, AB2655, were the rapid response of California’s kingpins to an effective parody video of a “Kamala Harris” “ad.” In it, “Harris” explains that she is a vacuous “deep-​state puppet.”

The First Amendment protects the right to utter truth, falsehoods, and the kinds of satirical fictions and parodic exaggerations that everybody but opponents of free speech understand to be fictions and exaggerations.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights judiciary

Court Halts Imprisonment for Speech

free speech, satire, mind control

Left-​wing enemies of right-​wing freedom of speech, specifically the freedom of speech of Douglass Mackey, recently got their way when U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly sentenced him to seven months in prison.

But now, a month after sentencing, another court has said wait a minute.

As I reported in October, Mackey was convicted for actions in 2016 that nobody could have known would later be treated as crimes. The FBI had arrested him shortly after Joe Biden became president in January 2021 — as if waiting for a favorable political climate for an obviously partisan action.

According to selectively prosecuting U.S. Attorney Breon Peace, Mackey threatened democracy and sought to “deprive people of their constitutional right to vote.”

What attempted deprivation of voting rights? Did Mackey lock people in their homes so that they could not go out to vote? Steal ballots? Glare and scream at people walking toward a voting site?

No, all that this obvious opponent of Hillary Clinton did was publish satirical posts telling Hillary voters to vote by text, much easier that way. Obnoxious, maybe; or silly. But the posts had no power to hypnotize or derange anyone or, for that matter, prevent anyone from double-​checking with an election office or Google. And prosecutors brought in no voters who claimed to have been fooled by the obvious jest — which arguably was satire, a jape upon Mackey’s political opponents.

There’s no there there. Nevertheless, Mackey’s liberty has been at risk at least since 2018, when his legal name behind his pseudonymous social media presence was revealed.

It’s still at risk. But the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked Mackey’s seven-​month imprisonment until his appeal can be decided and the free-​speech issues properly adjudicated.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights social media

Chirp Meets Buzz

twitter, Babylon Bee, censorship

The Babylon Bee won’t cooperate with Twitter’s censorship of the Babylon Bee.

When instructed to remove tweets in order to recover account access, people tend to comply.

Not always, but often.

Hard to blame them. But it does mean that Twitter gets away with all kinds of egregious censorship that the social media “platform” shouldn’t get away with.

The Bee’s latest sin? Bestowing upon HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine — who had just been dubbed a Woman of the Year by USA Today because Levine “identifies as” a woman — the title Man of the Year.

Twitter has locked the Babylon Bee out of its Twitter account.The platform literally “can’t take a joke.” And Twitter demands the Bee must delete the tweet to regain access.

“We’re not deleting anything,” says Bee CEO Seth Dillon. “If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter account, then so be it.”

Dillon notes that account holders are not only expected to remove offending tweets but also to repentantly check a box to renounce the censored viewpoint. “You have to deny that you meant it.… They’re forcing you to grovel and adopt an ideological position that you don’t actually hold.”

The Babylon Bee is routinely assailed by Internet censors. Satire, parody, pastiche, lampoon, spoof, sarcasm, irony, etc. are all allegedly forms of “misinformation” and “hate speech,” thwarting of which is the rationalization du decade for stopping people from talking to each other.

In response, the Babylon Bee is thankfully taking a stand and, let’s hope and trust, won’t back down.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Zucker’s Scold

Donald Trump, Kingsman meme

It was in bad taste.

The “meme” — an altered video — depicted extreme, murderous violence. But it was not “weaponized” as  incitement to real violence; it was, instead, “memeticized” contempt against the meme’s “victims,” the full panoply of media outlets along with a few iconic politicians.

The video was very popular over the weekend on social media. It took the church massacre scene from the first Kingsman movie, but with President Trump’s head placed over Colin Firth’s visage, crudely in “meme” fashion, and a few other heads put over other actors’, and the logos of major news outlets superimposed over most of the movie’s victims’ heads.

Cartoonish, yes, but done with élan.

Brooke Baldwin, however, is a paid agent of billionaire president of CNN, Jeff Zucker, and she has her marching orders, as revealed this week by a Project Veritas scoop. So she lit into the president in high moral dudgeon: “Mr. President, why is it taking you so long to condemn this video? You tweet all the time. I don’t want to hear from your press secretary … who says you strongly condemn the video … I want to hear from YOU.”

What Ms. Baldwin and her boss don’t get is that a growing swath of the American populace does not want to hear from a news reporter scolding demands that the president “condemn” things he had nothing to do with.

Trump didn’t make the meme, after all, nor had it made for him. 

Brooke Baldwin’s effrontery shows why someone might make a meme like the one in question. 

Not because you deserve to be killed, Ms. Baldwin, but because you deserve derision.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Donald Trump, Kingsman meme

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The Pumpkinification of Snopes

Babylon Bee, Snopes, fake news, satire

Satire exaggerates not just for a laugh, often employing the reductio ad absurdum for cutting effect — casting our attention on human follies and crimes. 

While the classic literary satires include Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii — “The Pumpkinification of (the Divine) Claudius” — and Jonathan Swift’s 1729 “Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick,” we nowadays often turn to humor websites, like The Onion.

Or, increasingly, The Babylon Bee.

Last week, as I set out for the Far East, the Bee story that topped the page was “New Genderfluid Dolls Emit Blast Of Pepper Spray, Alert Authorities When Children Use Wrong Pronoun.” On the same date I caught “Man Sure Is Glad He Switched From E‑Cigs To Regular, Healthier Cigarettes.”* And laughed until I coughed.

Worthy of The Onion, sure, but better than most recent Onion efforts. 

How did the Bee leap to the forefront of modern satire? Well, it’s a Christian site, actually, which seems to help. The Bee’s writers do not accept any dominant strain of contemporary culture as an admirable norm — like today’s “woke comics” must — so it is easier to find the absurdities in this current epoch’s conflicted and contradictory politics and culture.

The Bee so effectively lampoons dominant culture that snopes​.com, the progressives’ most popular (putative) fact checking site, warned that the Bee’s great Chick-​fil‑A satire confused some readers because it “altered some details of a controversial news story.”

Satire is funny. Not getting satire? Priceless.

The Babylon Bee’s biggest competition may not be The Onion.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Nick Gillespie of Reason mentions some titles that caught his attention: “‘Trump Is Being Influenced by The Russians, Screams Communist!’ and ‘Woke Polar Bear Apologizes for Being White.’ Classics include ‘Trump Proves He’s Not A Racist By Showing His Rejection Letter From The KKK’ and ‘Local Christian Would Do Anything For Jesus Except Believe Things That Are Unpopular.’”

Babylon Bee, Snopes, fake news, satire

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First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people Regulating Protest

James Woods, Parody, and a Pillow

James Woods, Twitter, censorship, free speech, ban, parody, satire

The beginning of the end of actor James Woods’s time on Twitter likely occurred on July 20, 2018.

Only recently discovering a tweet that he posted then, Twitter has locked Woods out of a forum where his right-​leaning messages have been followed by 1,730,000 people.

His delinquent tweet forwarded an image of giddily grinning guys promising to abstain from voting so that a woman’s vote would be “worth more.” Woods tweeted: “Pretty scary that there is a distinct possibility this could be real. Not likely, but in this day and age of absolute liberal insanity, it is at least possible.”

Twitter told the actor that if he agreed to the deletion of this fake-​news tweet — simple enough — it would let him tweet once again.

Woods refuses.

“Free speech is free speech — it’s not [Twitter CEO] Jack Dorsey’s version of free speech,” Woods says. “The irony is, Twitter accused me of affecting the political process, when in fact their banning of me is the truly egregious interference.… If you want to kill my free speech, man up and slit my throat with a knife, don’t smother me with a pillow.”

There’s lots more where that came from, but you get the idea. I don’t, um, strictly agree with everything Woods says here. But I can only applaud the spirit of his refusal to submit to Twitter’s arbitrary standards of acceptable speech.

Oh, and one other thing: somebody tell Twitter that parodies are inherently fake.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

The Sitcom Society

Roseanne Barr, sitcom, sit-com, comedy, Television, controversy, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, satire

If we are entering a new Golden Age of television, it is for the most part passing the legacy TV networks by. 

So, Roseanne Barr to the rescue! 

The reboot of ABC’s Roseanne — a hit situation comedy of the late 1980s and much of the 1990s — should put the network and the art form back in the spotlight.

But though it is very popular, the show is not without … its political controversy. You see, funny-​woman Roseanne plays Roseanne Conner, and she … (drum roll) … voted for Trump.* 

Horrors!

Predictably, our modal mainstream media cultural mavens are not on board. Roxanne Gay, in the New York Times, complains that Roseanne’s views are “muddled and incoherent.”

Roseanne to Roxanne, hello-​o‑o: the character is fictional. Who said characters in a comedy should have coherent views? One would think the point of comedy would require the opposite.

Jezebel provides another fine example of this. In “What’s Up, Deplorable; Roseanne Is Back,” Rich Juzwiak opines that “[n]ever discussed was the laundry list of hateful, stupid, and wrong things Trump said, nor their even more nefarious implications.” On Twitter, Professor Jared Yates Sexton calls the character’s perspective “a cleaned-​up lie,” and amounts to a turning a “blind eye to Trump’s many, many bigoted statements.” 

Neither Juzwiak nor Sexton mentions any problem with the main alternative to the president in the last election — something Roseanne does in the show itself. 

It’s almost as if what these (and many similar) critics want is a tidy propaganda piece for their opinions; it’s almost as if their objection is to the show’s realism.

Now that’s comedy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* In the season opener, Roseanne defends the president from her dippy Democrat sister, whom she had not been speaking with since the election. Her sister, Jackie (played hilariously by Laurie Metcalf), enters the tenth season wearing a red pro-​Hillary t‑shirt and one of those grab-​em-​by-​the-x pink hats. Their reconciliation is a hoot.

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folly government transparency media and media people national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

Peel Back the Onion

The Onion, satire, humor, CFPB, bureaucracy

Yesterday, an Onion title caught my attention: “Hooded Members of Congress Drown Another Love Child in the Potomac to Prevent Affair from Getting Out.” This is not funny because it is true, but because it is so close to the truth. Too close for comfort.

A similar story, the day before, sported a title so sublime that you do not really need to read further: “Al Franken Tearfully Announces Intention To Step Down From Role As Harasser Of Women.” The week before that, another satire gave us this extravaganza: “Paul Ryan Announces New Congress Sexual Harassment Training Will Create Safe Work Atmosphere, Plausible Deniability.”

But sex scandals are easy. If The Onion were seriously in the satire biz, the farcical-​on-​the-​surface nonsense of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau brouhaha that I wrote about on Tuesday would get incisive treatment as well.

My advice to Onion writers? Don’t go halfway into the problem, like David A. Graham does in The Atlantic: “The Fight Over the CFPB Reveals the Broken State of American Politics.” Sure, that’s true. But concluding that “neither party sees the political process as effective in resolving these basic issues is worrying” hardly goes far enough, and the next line — “the fact that they might both be right is worse still” — shies from the full extent of the predicament.

The Constitution was designed to avoid problems like the CFPB nonsense. Start there. Something like this comes close: “Politicians Shocked, Shocked to Discover That an Un-​Constitutional, Partisan Bureau Becomes Subject to Constitutional Dispute Along Partisan Lines.”

I have confidence that, if The Onion went there, it’d be funnier. 

Even without a sex angle.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture

Enslaved for Your Own Good

If government is “justified” in forcing you to buy health insurance for your own good — the fabled and perhaps fatal conceit of Obamacare — is it also justified in forcing us to keep up with “good” TV shows?

That’s the nutty notion floated at the satirical site The Onion, which drily reports: “FCC to Fine Americans Who Don’t Keep Up with TV Shows.” Seems too many office hours are spent explaining what happened on some iconic television show a co-​worker missed. So the FCC is fining anyone who falls behind.

Hyuk, hyuk, get it? The government would never actually mandate television watching! No, it just makes us pay for boring documentaries on PBS.

Nor would the government ever issue commandments about when you can smoke on private property or even in your own homes. Or … would it?

But the government would never declare what you can and can’t eat, or what foods you can and can’t dish out. Right? Unless, that is, you’re a kid in a government-​overseen cafeteria or a chef in a New York City restaurant prohibited from serving dishes containing the allegedly alarming ingredient of trans fat.

Well, the government would never require you to dutifully read even so salutary an e‑letter as Common Sense, eh? (I’m pretty sure about this one.)

Whether the policy-​makers’ notion of “the good” comports with your own doesn’t matter, of course. They’re the government, and they’re here to help.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.