That depressing exhortation above was released by the president of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson. It is signature significance for a man, and presumably the organization he has led and spoken for since 2017, who favors censorship, content-based control of communications media, and a manipulated political system. It also reveals a leader of an influential organization who sees no danger that his members and his organization’s supporters will react negatively to his open embrace of totalitarian principles.
“Hate speech” is free speech, and groups like the NAACP (and the Democratic Party, and too frequently the mainstream media) define as hate speech any speech that they hate, because it is critical of their positions, agendas or members. “Disinformation and misinformation” have always been welcome on Twitter as long as it advanced progressive goals. “Do not allow 45 to return to the platform”? What is that but a demand that a prominent political figure who was recently President be handicapped in his efforts to seek political office? How would the NAACP have responded to a call from white supremacy group to keep Barack Obama from a communication platform in 2008?
The organization is only about power. It has no integrity or principles.
Or self-awareness. Or comprehension of the words it uses and the concepts it claims to revere. Censoring speech and political opinions along with a recent President and current political leader protects democracy.
War is Peace
Ignorance is Strength
Slavery is Freedom
Silly me, I did not expect the NAACP to reveal itself as such a fan of Big Brother; I somehow thought that last motto would be a deal-breaker.
Well, now we know. It’s sad, and scary, but that’s what’s so great about letting people say what they think.
Among other benefits, we learn who can’t be trusted.
Ethics Alarms 
This is only tangential to the post, but I am just noticing that the inverse of Big Brother describes so much of what we’re seeing:
Peace is War
Strength is Ignorance
Freedom is Slavery
We cannot let ourselves get bogged down in foreign wars, we have too many (racist) problems to fix here.
We cannot let school’s get bogged down teaching “fundamentals”, that only serve to reinforce the patriachy; we have to challenge privelege at every level of education.
We cannot tolerate the freedom to express any idea; that so-called freedom only keeps the oppressors in power and makes us all unsafe.
We’ve seen during the last 2 Trump years that these are also true:
Speech is violence
Violence is speech
Don’t forget that Silence is Violence, too. It’s not enough to simply watch and be neutral or not speak when you disagree. You have to become hysterical over the current thing once you’re told which opinions are acceptable.
ps Why does the NAACP still exist? Colored is supposed to be pejorative today, isn’t it? Yet thar be no hate-speech in these waters.
And don’t forget that “Black Lives Matter” is the only iteration of that statement allowable, and nothing else will do. If you say “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter,” you’re really saying “black lives don’t matter.”
This jerk isn’t interested in protecting free speech. He’s interested in consolidating power But he’s still afraid to say the quiet part out loud.
Good observation.
Morre precisely, for the American left, “YOUR speech is violence; OUR violence is speech”, is their motto.
Well obviously! If you don’t agree with us, then by definition you are wrong and evil. In fact, hate speech is just speech we hate.
It’s been an unbelievable meltdown to behold. I may start posting some of the exasperated exclamations of the most panicked progressives as they brazenly scream about the possibility that Musk (a seemingly 1st Amendment absolutist) might do to them what they enjoyed Twitter doing to conservatives for a decade.
It won’t happen though.
Just as the pro-maskers are “defiantly” telling anti-maskers that they won’t put up with the kind of treatment they themselves pushed on anti-maskers for 2 years – these dip stick progressives are 100% sure they’ll be treated exactly as they treated others.
Time to remind the few remaining progressive readers here- your *entire* worldview’s modus operandi is a menace to society. If you can pursue your worldview without the methods your side consistently employs then it is your *duty* to confront your own everywhere you can. If your worldview *cannot* be divorced from it’s means of attainment, then it is your duty to change your worldview.
The weakness of one’s ideas can be gauged by the amount of effort they expend to ensure competing ideas cannot be heard.
When queried about the Musk’s purchase of Twitter she responded that the President is deeply concerned about the harm social media can cause.
Psaki:
“As a general matter — no matter who owns or runs Twitter — the president has long been concerned about the power of large social-media platforms, the power they have over our everyday lives,” Psaki said during a press briefing. The president “has long argued that tech platforms must be held accountable for the harms they cause.”
Psaki went on to say that Biden has been a “strong supporter of fundamental reforms to achieve that goal,” including reforms to Section 230, the law that protects social media companies from being legally liable for the content their users post. Biden has also advocated for antitrust reforms and for requiring more transparency from the companies, Psaki said, adding that the president is “encouraged that there’s bipartisan interest in Congress.”
“In terms of what hypothetical policies might happen, I’m just not going to speak to this at that point in time,” she concluded.
https://news.yahoo.com/psaki-says-biden-concerned-social-215924727.html?msclkid=833255b6c55511ecad1edbcf5bdd605a
This is a direct shot across the bow to Musk. The only concern the president has about who owns the social media giants is whether or not they have his back. This is a direct threat to democracy.
Musk should call her bluff and demand the repeal of Section 230. If he does not moderate the content of the users, he is still shielded from liability as a mere service provider, not a content provider.
That would be the result of being a platform,. and not a publisher. A platform merely allows content; a publisher promotes certain content.
jvb
This is not a good time as in quite possibly perilous to be Elon Musk’s food taster…
Looks like they’re going about this the right way:
https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/twitter-locks-down-product-changes-after-agreeing-to-musk-bid
What? Fear of left wing labor force behaving unprofessionally – even criminally?
I can’t imagine why they might do that, especially after the left has proven to be such a law-abiding sector of our society, especially in 2020.
Ari Melber said the following on MSNBC last night:
“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself. You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees. Or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff, turn up the reach of something else. The rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election.”
Why, yes, you could Ari. That is exactly what Twitter has been doing for years to candidates they don’t like. That is the sort of behavior Musk claims to want to put a stop to. Republicans have been pointing out this dangerous attack on free speech for years. Now that Democrats are worried about losing their monopoly over Twitter censorship, suddenly they have discovered the same concerns?
The reaction to the Twitter buyout has been very revealing, indeed.
It’s essential to *hear* and *see* him. Look how wide eyed that blithering ass gets. Screaming about everything that they think will happen to them THAT THEY’VE BEEN DOING FOR YEARS TO EVERYONE ELSE.
I call this the Harris realization, after Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, the commander of the RAF’s bomber forces in WW2, who said it was ridiculous for the Germans to think they could bomb everyone else and not get bombed themselves eventually.
And yet – Elon Musk isn’t about to do anything to them even if they richly deserve it.
The lack of awareness is amazing. Didn’t this fellow just describe what happened in the run up to the 2020 election?
jvb
Breathtaking, non? Talk about projection! I just don’t get how brazenly unselfconscious and un-self-critical standard-issue lefties can be. It makes me want to scream, “Listen to yourself!” or issue a snarky, snotty Keith Olbermann “Hello!?”
My apologies, Jack, but here’s a great compilation of Twitter memes:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/04/mid-week-in-pictures-muskageddon-edition.php
Confession: I check out Powerline’s meme collection every week.
I am not convinced of Musk’s true dedication to free speech. I do think, however, he is betting on the FINANCIAL benefits of free speech. I suspect that Musk is banking on the fact that there are enough people disillusioned and disenfranchised by censorship that he can make a lot of money owning a platform that gives them a voice. Buying the leading franchise and making it a free speech platform is much easier than starting a free speech platform. With a new platform, you have to start from the bottom, attract users, attract advertisers (without the benefit of Google’s 85+% stake in online advertising), gain access to spam/DDOS/DNS attack protection, etc. With Twitter, he will lose the most fanatical leftists, but the majority of people won’t leave (just like there are a lot of conservatives left on YouTube) and new, prominent conservatives will join to take the place of those who leave. As the only major source of information as opposed to one-sided propoganda, he can make Twitter much more influential than it is now. Without content censorship, he is immune to liability even without the legal carve-out, so he can push against censorship with no threat to Twitter. If he tries to censor, Twitter is just another censored platform. If he doesn’t censor, it can become THE platform.
I trust in a capitalist’s self-interest more than I trust their morality. I trusted that Trump wanted to improve the US economy because his wealth depended entirely on Americans having sufficient disposable income to spend on his companies. An America with a billionaire oligarch class and impoverished masses would destroy his life’s work. I suspect Musk will make Twitter a freer platform because that is probably the only way he will make money. I am not saying Musk doesn’t believe in free speech, I am just saying I don’t trust that he would be willing to lose $40+ billion for free speech.
Why do not these people just build their own platform and advertise it as a space where misinformation is banned?
Sad. but true and damning.
I wouldn’t advocate for it, but couldn’t the NAACP be labeled as a “hate” organization? The racialism and societal divisiveness is right there in it’s name.
It’s certainly a hate organization by the lights of such hate-mongers as the Southern Poverty Law Center, when they are evaluating any conservative organization.
I sure hope that Elon Muskateer has invested heavily in a super-duper top notch virtually unassailable security team if he intends to be around long enough to realize the fruition of his Twitter dreams, what ever they are.
Proglibocrats do not play well with those (even) suspected of being non-clones.
If the woke fascist Left can downsize the Orange Master they can certainly *minimize* Mr. Musk.
As one of the guys who invented Paypal and owner of a fleet of rockets and a bioengineering company, I hope Musk had a top notch security team before this…
It’s one of the things that gives me hope: this isn’t just virtue signaling or a ideological vanity project, Musk isn’t just some rich guy, he knows how to run a business and understands what technology can and can’t do.
The other thing I see clearly is that not only are folks like this clearly in favor of censorship, they are either completely unconcerned or abjectly terrified that it may apply to them.
Yup. The same mentality that led Harry Reid to exercise the nuclear option so that Obama’s judges could sail through, except it counted on them staying permanently in the majority.
Wait. I thought the Republican Party was dead and buried after 2008.
Are you telling me it is still around, no doubt as a tiny withered husk?
I am always the last to know.
And for a time a lot of us thought the Democratic Party was dead and buried after 2004, which was a disaster for them any way you slice it. But it always seems that just as one party or the other is about to put the final nail in the other’s coffin, that other party escapes to fight another day.