Note #1: See the chart above? Gee, what a surprise. Researchers found that the “factchecking” business is overwhelmingly biased toward progressives, Democrats, and the whole Axis agenda. I suppose research was needed to prove the obvious; so many people denied this because they were a) gullible, b) stupid, or c) lying. Yes, the study is from Harvard, but I think you can trust the rotting university this time.
—Washington, D.C.-based journalist Lawrence Martin, a Canadian journalist, bemoaning how the “elites” no longer control the limits of free speech because of the internet, and the results are disastrous in a column titled, “Excessive free speech is a breeding ground for more Trumps.”
Even though this guy could be classified as a Canadian journalist, make no mistake: he is stating out loud how a large component, even a majority perhaps, feels about freedom of speech when it doesn’t stop with letting journalists and their favorite politicians and glitterati say, state and opine about what ever they want in the public square. This is exactly what “saying the quiet part out loud” means.
For that, I suppose we should be thankful to Martin. I would say we should also be thankful that he almost exclusively writes for Canadian publications—you know, the ones that cover the Great Stupid infected country to the north that is seriously considering a law, Bill C-63, that would establish life sentences for “speech crimes.” Oh, don’t worry: Martin feels that the bill goes “too far.” That’s nice. Based on his screed, I’m sure he favors lesser sentences. Continue reading
EA discussed George Stephanopoulos’s unethical, partisan, and thoroughly biased interrogation of Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC.) about her endorsement of Donald Trump during the March 10 interview on ABC’s Sunday talking heads show, “This Week.” It was one of the more blatant examples of how the mainstream media’s partisan biases and “Get Trump!” slant has rampaged through U.S. journalism like a cancer, but nobody should have been shocked r surprised. Stephanopoulos was a Democratic operative and a Clinton minion when he was hired. His performance against Mace was George being George; it was not the first time his biases and dishonesty were put on display. ABC should never have hired him, but then ABC, like NBC, CBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post et al. have virtually abandoned ethical journalism for partisan advocacy.
Yesterday Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit over Stephanopoulos saying that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” The jury specifically found Trump liable for sexual abuse under New York law, but not rape. Under classic defamation law, falsely stating that a woman has engaged in illicit sexual activity was per se defamation, but 1) Trump isn’t a woman 2) defamation by a news source against a public figure is measured by a tougher standard under the New York Times decision, requiring “actual malice,” and 3) George was carefully tip-toeing around the edges of acceptable (under the law) celebrity smearing. I highly doubt that Trump can prevail. Nonetheless, I’m glad he filed the lawsuit…hell, I’m not paying for his lawyers. If significant numbers of Americans who have been metaphorically sleep-walking for the past 30 years or so finally see Stephanopoulos for what he is, and can connect the dots to realize what this tells us about American journalism, it will be a good thing.
Great. We now have a U.S. Supreme Court Justice who doesn’t like the First Amendment. The Babylon Bee hardly had to be satirical to come up with that headline. During yesterday’s oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, the newest Justice and the only one appointed by President Biden, Kentanji Brown Jackson revealed a frightening hostility to the most important guaranteed principle of American freedom from oppressive government.
“My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods,” Jackson told Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga as he argued against allowing Big Brother to recruit Big Tech as a political ally by intimidating social media platforms into removing posts the government finds inconvenient. I read Jackson’s quotes yesterday with genuine horror. My sister, a federal litigator of liberal tendencies, had assured me that Jackson was a smart, solid, trustworthy jurist based on her experiences appearing before her. Justice Jackson may be smart, but trustworthy she isn’t. Intentionally or accidentally, President Biden’s openly DEI appointment to fill the Court slot vacated by Stephen Breyer installed the perfect tool to assist aspiring Democrat totalitarians to achieve their agendas.
Oh please, tell us again how Donald Trump is the existential threat to democracy.
A dissent from a well-respected contributor here spawned this post. The mainstream media is still pushing the Big Lie (discussed in this post)that Donald Trump promised to unleash a “bloodbath” if he lost the upcoming election (MSNBC mentioned it several times this morning). As I was pondering the argument (prompted by this post) that Elon Musk does not deserve the RBG Leadership Award for rescuing Twitter, now “X” from the Left-wing biased and censorious cabal that had captured it, I encountered the sequence below on the platform. Musk’s version of Twitter does not ban the progressives from spreading their “misinformation,” and he allows the crucial opportunity for countering the news media that is on display. This is undeniably a good thing. And I believe the the Notorious R.B.G. would agree.
—-The attorneys for Missouri and Louisiana in their U.S. Supreme Court opposition to staying the unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit order declaring that officials from the White House, the surgeon general’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the F.B.I. had violated the First Amendment by secretly pressuring social media platforms to take down posts as “misinformation.”
What a great line! I’m amazed it has never been used before: an instant classic and useful quote.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the oral arguments in a case to determine whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment in combating that endlessly useful word to progressive and Democratic censors, “misinformation,” on social media platforms. There are four case before SCOTUS on this topic, which, among other expressions of alarm, was the target of the so-called “Twitter Files” posts organized by Elon Musk in 2022.
The case being argued today, like the other ones, arose from revealed communications from administration officials urging/ persuading/ threatening social media platforms to take down Left-unfriendly posts on the Wuhan virus vaccines, the 2020 election and Hunter Biden’s laptop and other matters. Last year, the Fifth Circuit hit the Biden administration with an injunction that severely limited this tactic. The three judge panel wrote,
Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no
actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or
significantly encourage social-media companies to remove,
delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their
algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected
free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the
platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of
punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or
supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling
the social-media companies’ decision-making processes.
And the Biden administration opposed that language. Let me repeat that for emphasis: the Biden administration opposed that language. This is, you will recall, the administration and the party that has based its campaign against Republicans before the election this year on the premise that it is the Republicans and their presumptive Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who pose an existential threat to democracy. Yet these are the same aspiring totalitarians who used the power of the government—“Nice little business you have here…be a shame if anything were to happen to it!”—to secretly coerce, pressure, and infiltrate (read the whole order linked above) social media and Big Tech platforms to do their bidding regarding what opinions and assertions could be communicated by citizens.
This quiz could be fairly paraphrased, if in vulgar fashion, as “Who’s the asshole?“
Established in 2019, the RBG Leadership Award is supposed to honor “trailblazing” men and women of distinction, with “distinction” having a rather broad and vaguely defined meaning, as the pronouncements of officials connected with the awards made clear. “Justice Ginsburg became an icon by bravely pursuing her own path and prevailing against the odds,” said Brendan V. Sullivan, Jr., chair of the RBG Award. “The honorees reflect the integrity and achievement that defined Justice Ginsburg’s career and legend.” “Justice Ginsburg was a legal entrepreneur who innovated and took risks in ways that rewarded us all,” said Matthew Umhofer, president of the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation, which administers the awards. “In a world that sought to define and limit her, she found ways to challenge and change the system, armed with nothing more than a brilliant mind and a powerful pen. Her impact transcended the law, and society is better off for it.” “Such is the spirit that defines the honorees of the RBG Award,” adds the award’s website.
This year, it was decided that the awards, which were originally limited to women of distinction (because Ginsburg was an iconic feminist and women’s rights advocate), should be awarded to men as well. “Justice Ginsburg fought not only for women but for everyone,” said Julie Opperman, Chair of the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation. “Going forward, to embrace the fullness of Justice Ginsburg’s legacy, we honor both women and men who have changed the world by doing what they do best.”
[Can you see what’s coming? Diversity-obsessed progressives were set up to be hoisted on their own petard!]
When this years’ honorees were announced, it is fair to say that the late Justice Ginsburg’s family flipped out. The awards went to…
ELON MUSK – Entrepreneurship
SYLVESTER STALLONE – Cultural Icon
MARTHA STEWART – Industry Leadership
MICHAEL MILKEN – Philanthropy
RUPERT MURDOCH – Media Mogul
…and the family’s and assorted Ginsburg admirers’ collective heads exploded. Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia University, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront to the memory of our mother.” “The justice’s family wish to make clear that they do not support using their mother’s name to celebrate this year’s slate of awardees, and that the justice’s family has no affiliation with and does not endorse these awards,” she said.
Trevor W. Morrison, a former dean of New York University School of Law and one of the justice’s former law clerks, condemned the choices in a letter addressed to the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation. “Justice Ginsburg had an abiding commitment to careful, rigorous analysis and to fair-minded engagement with people of opposing views,” he said “It is difficult to see how the decision to bestow the R.B.G. Award on this year’s slate reflects any appreciation for — or even awareness of — these dimensions of the justice’s legacy.” Shana Knizhnik, an author of “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, ” spat out, “Honoring Elon Musk, who uses his platform to promote anti-feminist and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. sentiments, and Rupert Murdoch, who has used his immense power to undermine democracy, dishonors what Justice Ginsburg spent her career standing for.”
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Thanks, George!
George Stephanopoulos has been polluting broadcast journalism with the unconscionable conflicts of interest he brings to his prominent news show hosting roles for so long that a lot of viewers probably don’t realize just how outrageous it was for ABC to give such a huge megaphone to one of the most prominent Clinton henchmen. Yesterday on ABC’s “This Week,” George was interviewing Republican Representative for South Carolina’s 1st congressional district Nancy Mace. She’s a Trump supporter, so George felt a cheap shot was justified. Though she was on his show to talk about the election, Stephanopoulos blindsided her by referencing Mace’s past rape, and using it against her. To her credit, Mace called his tactic out immediately:
I gave the President a Julie Principle pass last week by not highlighting his hilarious open mic comment calling for Israel to have a “come to Jesus moment,” but I can’t let this one pass:
The statement is by turns incompetent, irresponsible, and dishonest; in non ethical terms, cowardly, offensive and idiotic.
But you know and I know an awful lot of people, including elected officials, educators and journalists, who wish this could happen here, will do what they can to see that it does happen here, and regard themselves as enlightened and virtuous for believing this.
[Aside: I first (and last) heard that Mothers of Invention riff when I was a freshman in college. I made me laugh then, and it just made me laugh now. Yes, I am looking for things that will make me laugh.]
Sam Melia is an activist who was recenly sentenced to two years in prison for making and distributing offensive stickers, including thos saying,
Other stickers are unquestionably racist or anti-Semitic. One asked: “Why are Jews censoring free speech?,” for example. He’s a member of neo-fascist Patriotic Alternative, and is clearly an asshole, distributing printable stickers and encouraged his followers to download them and sick them them up in public places. In January, at Leeds Crown Court, Melia was found guilty of distributing material “intended to stir up racial hatred” and “encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage,” though there was no such damage. Last week he received his sentence of two years in jail, and British progressives are just thrilled about it.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says that when Melia was arrested in April 2021, police “found in his wallet” stickers that expressed “views of a nationalist nature.” When police searched Melia’s home, they “discovered a book by Oswald Mosley” and other evidence “of Melia’s ideology.” Yes, in Great Britain, home of the Magna Carta, Locke and W.S. Gilbert, you can now be imprisoned for what you believe and what opinions you express.
Thanks to the First Amendment, the U.S. has been spared that step into totalitarianism so far, but the double standards applied to the January 6 morons and the George Floyd marauders show that the potential for erosion is strong.
British political writer Brendan O’Neill spends more time explaining what’s wrong with Melia’s persecution than he should have to, but he finishes his critique strongly:
“We need to trust ourselves more to confront hateful thinking and to ensure our communities are safe for everyone, rather than inviting officialdom to restrict and punish ideas we don’t like. Censorship both expands the state’s jurisdiction over the individual’s mind and weakens social solidarity by discouraging the public from directly confronting bigotry in preference for asking the government to cover our eyes and ears. The impact this has on the free society is devastating.
Even some liberal campaigners might feel uncomfortable defending the free-speech rights of a bigot like Melia. They need to get over themselves. As the American essayist HL Mencken said: ‘The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.’
And that is exactly why our aspiring censors—in the Congress, in the White House, in the news media, in universities, in DA offices—need to be stopped now. Immediately. This year.
Ethics Alarms 