Once I would have headlined this post with “Stop Making Me Defend Donald Trump!” But this is no longer about Donald Trump, and readers who can’t figure this out, frankly, are too dense and gullible to read here.
Earlier this week, former President Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump posted on Instagram: “BIG SHOW TONIGHT – I will be joined by President Donald Trump on The Right View!!”
Then, when she posted her “big show,” Facebook took down the video of her interview with the ex-President after sending her an email stating that content with the voice of former President Trump “is not currently allowed on our platforms (including new posts with President Trump speaking).” The Facebook spokesman said the video was not permitted on Facebook and Instagram because of the former president’s indefinite suspension. Facebook also warned that any future posts featuring Trump would also be removed “resulting in additional limitations on accounts that posted it.”
I wouldn’t walk down my stairs to watch Trump be interviewed by Eric Trump’s wife, or just about any interviewer, frankly. Nonetheless, he is a recent President, a former President, a political leader, and an important historical, cultural and political figure in the United States of America, which is allegedly a free country. Millions of members of the public are interested in his words, beliefs and activities, and access to information about those should not be impeded by powerful private companies.
The news media’s embargo on facts and events for its partisan objectives created this slippery slope, and this slide is accelerating. Tech companies and communications corporations are actively controlling what Americans can see, hear, think about, and think. An entire political party and its corrupted “base” are perfectly satisfied with this distortion of democracy. Others are just quietly being misled, and are now the apocryphal slowly boiling frogs, doomed to have teeth ripping at the flesh of their legs before they understand what has happened to them.
Meanwhile, anyone–like me—seeing something ominous in this is a “conspiracy theorist”—you know, liars and wackos. Why would anyone see a conspiracy at work when a major political figure approximately half the nation voted for to be President less than four months ago is erased from the public eye and ear by a joint campaign stretching across the airwaves and the internet? Crazy!
This mass Jumbo is being helped immensely by news media dishonesty and social media propaganda. When Trump was first banned by Facebook—while still a sitting President!—Facebook’s Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs, wrote that the decision was made in “extraordinary circumstances” in which a sitting President was “actively fomenting a violent insurrection designed to thwart the peaceful transition of power; five people killed; legislators fleeing the seat of democracy.”
That was a lie, however. There was no evidence that the riot at the Capitol was an “insurrection” nor that President Trump had actively fomented it. This was a calculated anti-Trump, pro-impeachment narrative that the subsequent evidence decisively disproved. Yet in its article about the new interview being pulled, USA Today quoted the lie again without elaboration.
As of now, President Trump is being silenced while Joe Biden spread disinformation—he said again last night, for example, that the Georgia voting law reduced the hours for voting. Meanwhile, all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Google’s YouTube, now censor Trump. YouTube says it will lift Trump’s ban when the “risk of incitement to violence” is gone. There is no risk of incitement to violence. The perception that Big Tech is aiding an abetting the shackling of democracy is a more dangerous incitement that anything Donald Trump is likely to say.
Yet here’s USA Today (risibly rated as “non partisan” by one bias “watchdog”), writing yesterday,
“The decision to block Trump’s access to the major social media platforms following the Capitol riots was praised by Trump critics and had the support of most Americans, but was condemned by Trump supporters and free speech advocates who warned it set a dangerous precedent.”
The paper’s own link does not support the statement that “most Americans” supported Trump’s banning across social media. The link refers to the Twitter ban, based on a poll in the midst of the post-Capitol riot disinformation and hysteria (“A Capitol police officer was killed by the rioters!”), and I presume inflated by Trump supporters who have wanted him to stop tweeting for four long years.
The effort to use the private sector to eliminate Donald Trump from the public square is an existentialist threat to our nation, its values, and civic peace. It we permit this to be done to him, it will be done to others, whole organizations, parties.
As Rosemary memorably said while being raped by Satan,”This is no dream! This is really happening!”
Indeed it is.
“Then, when she posted her “big show,” Facebook took down the video of her interview with the ex-President after sending her an email stating that content with the voice of former President Trump “is not currently allowed on our platforms (including new posts with President Trump speaking).” The Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said the video was not permitted on Facebook and Instagram because of the former president’s indefinite suspension. Facebook also warned that any future posts featuring Trump would also be removed “resulting in additional limitations on accounts that posted it.””
There is an approximate zero percent chance that Facebook is actually removing all videos with Donald Trump’s voice on it. Did they scrub the entire last six years of CNN, only leaving them with the reporting on Malaysia flight 370?
Good point. No, it’s only current statements by Trump, because they are the only ones that might interfere with the the AUC agenda. Or is that unfair?
I dunno, HT. Facebook is obliterating Looney Tunes watch parties. (Surely there are property rights issues associated with that move, but anyway…) Facebook it making it clear that it will censor anyone, anytime, for any reason, and even for no reason. They are an “at will” provider of social media experience. Do what they say, and no one will get hurt. Thus they are also an at will censor. Must be nice, to be that rich. It’s not inclusive, but it sure is fucking privileged.
I strongly recommend we discontinue the use of the term cancel culture and replace it with Progressives are the party of “Exculsion”.
Use their lingo against them. Have them prove the don’t exclude anyone with a different culture and perspective.
Exclusion not Exculsion
I like “Exculsion”! A cross between Exclusion and Expulsion!
It may be derived from the French word “cul”, not used in polite society, and so would signify “out of the ‘cul'”.
Oooh! Then I shall continue to envy neighbors who live “in a cul-de-sac.”
Cul ture is just too fun not to make fun of.
Like the Marshalls.
When Frenchmen visit the U.K. and first see that written on street signs, to indicate with a crude metaphor what they more delicately call an “impasse”, they are generally startled and even shocked.
I want to believe that the totalitarian social justice warriors haven’t already won the battle of the minds in the United States and that our society and culture isn’t doomed in the “near” future to tyrannical totalitarian rule and the individual rights guaranteed in the Constitution will only apply to the totalitarians but these stories are piling up, one upon another, verifying what is an obvious trend – at least it’s obvious to me.
In the minds of the political left, if the political left actively persecutes and censor those the oppose denying civil rights then it’s justified for then to do so.
Have the left gotten around to cancelling Pizza Hut yet for having Trump in an old commercial of theirs?
I guess at this point, I just wonder what’s to be done? Facebook and Twitter, along with their subsidiaries, control the vast majority of online speech done in the “live” social context. Yet we have one party of congress actively supporting their censorship, and in fact, demanding even more censorship, and actively enlisting private companies to do what the government (presently) dare not.
I read a piece today in which the Louden County, Virginia school board demanded the silencing of opposition to “equity training,” to wit (via Fox News, and I forgot my smelling salts, so buck up, buttercups):
“That simply cannot and should not be tolerated by anyone employed by LCPS!” [Kiera] Jennings (Minority Student Achievement Advisory Committee chair) reportedly wrote. She then appeared to call for teachers to be dismissed if they did not fully embrace diversity training.
Now, before someone points out correctly that these are apples and oranges because Jennings is a government actor and social media companies are not, I mention this to illustrate that the calls for censorship, currently confined mostly to mob pressure on private companies, is bleeding over more and more into official government pronouncements. At some point, just like we have seen with the AUC, the mask is going to drop and they will say out loud what they are currently saying in private.
When Biden gets a critical mass of censorship proponents into the federal judiciary, it won’t much matter what the Supreme Court says. That’s because federal district and circuit judges are already ignoring the Supreme Court, knowing that even if (and it is an if) they are reversed, it will take years, if ever, and meantime the damage will be done. That’s happening already — witness the recent Ninth Circuit ruling that simply rewrites the word “bear” out of the Second Amendment as evidence. Despite Heller’s holding that:
Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. (emphasis added). (Hat tip: Volokh Conspiracy)
The exception in bold above clearly indicates the kind of places where arms may be forbidden within the scope of the Second Amendment. That does not include all public places, and there is no doubt the Ninth knew this, but does not care. They expect their ruling to hold sway for years, perhaps long enough for the composition of the high court to change.
If this can happen to the Second Amendment, no rational argument can be had that the First Amendment will be off-limits. In fact, it is an even more attractive target because of the power that can be accumulated if they manage to rewrite it as favorable to censoring the “wrong things.”
Censorship by the government is coming, and that right soon. It isn’t even in serious doubt anymore. Private company enlistment to normalize censorship is just the first nail in the coffin of the First Amendment as we have known it for nearly 250 years.
I believe Benito Mussolini also enlisted the corporatists to effect changes the government wanted but were politically unpopular. Italy in 1939 was in the vanguard of the movement to have a ordered technocracy run by “experts”
What is it they say about history repeating itself?
“first as tragedy, then as farce”
Interesting take on “Facebook ethics” in today’s WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-staff-fret-over-chinas-ads-portraying-happy-muslims-in-xinjiang-11617366096?st=6ifjs1pbzxrwyx1&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
We who have the correct views are simply going to have to start terrorizing employees of “big tech” companies. Especially their management. We’re going to have to organize mobs to storm into the buildings where those oppressors do their dirty work, and destroy their workplaces. (We’ll have to “seize” and “quarantine” their IT assets, of course.) We’ll have to stalk the evil ones to their very homes and places of recreation; we know THEY have money to spend, and THEY don’t refuse themselves a little entertainment, a little luxury, after a hard day and week of suppressing white male non-leftist Trump-voting insurrectionists. No, really. That’s what this is all coming down to.