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With the lines blurring between Big Tech and elected Democrats, the most urgent threat to democracy at the moment is their ability to silence ‘unauthorized dissent’.
Zuckerberg mentioned on Joe Rogan that the FBI told Facebook that Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Suppression of that story by Facebook, Twitter, and the media changed the outcome of the election. Full stop.
We saw the same things happen during Covid, where legitimate medical doctors were suppressed at the instruction of members of the Biden Administration. Some of them were discredited and had their social media voices shut down.
Conservative websites saw ad revenue slashed because sketchy fact-checkers with a political agenda objected to stories about the lab-leak theory, or the possible efficacy of some treatments, not to mention saying ANYTHING about mandates or the jab itself.
Republicans have seen how the game is played, and that it is rigged against them. Florida and Texas have both enacted State laws forbidding viewpoint discrimination.
In case there is any doubt as to what game is really being played here, we need look no further than the interaction between Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar when Ted’s amendment passed in committee.
In his remarks, Sen. Cruz made it clear that the purpose of his amendment was to prevent big media companies from negotiating the suppression of their competitors with tech giants like Facebook and Google.
“What this amendment would do, is it would say [that] when the cartel sits down to negotiation, it would say ‘we’re not going to discuss censorship, we’re going to discuss price,’” said Cruz.
Sen. Klobuchar’s response was to pull the bill from proceedings rather than pass it out of committee with the Cruz amendment. In doing so, she effectively revealed that enabling collusion between Big Media and Big Tech on censorship has always been a core Democrat aim behind the JCPA. –Breitbart
Both of those laws have gone to court. And this is where things get interesting.
The largely 2-1 ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, sets up the potential for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the law, which conservatives and right-wing commentators have said is necessary to prevent “Big Tech” from suppressing their views.
“Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” Judge Andrew Oldham, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote in the ruling.
The Texas law was passed by the state’s Republican-led legislature and signed by its Republican governor.
The tech groups that challenged the law and were on the losing end of Friday’s ruling include NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which count Meta Platforms’ Facebook (NASDAQ:META), Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Inc’s YouTube as members.
They have sought to preserve rights to regulate user content when they believe it may lead to violence, citing concerns that unregulated platforms will enable extremists such as Nazi supporters, terrorists and hostile foreign governments.
…The Texas law forbids social media companies with at least 50 million monthly active users from acting to “censor” users based on “viewpoint,” and allows either users or the Texas attorney general to sue to enforce the law. — Investing
The ‘regulating extremists’ is a weak excuse considering what we know about the government’s freewheeling definition of words like terrorists, and extreme reluctance to pin that term on even the militant left.
“The demand for White supremacy … vastly outstrips the supply of White supremacy,” one agent said. “We have more people assigned to investigate White supremacists than we can actually find.”
“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he continued. “If they have a [‘Dont tread on me’] flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.” –TheBlaze
What makes this ruling intersting is that it sets up a legal conflict. The 5th Circuit (narrowly) ruled against Big Tech, in favor of the red state legislation Texas enacted.
This puts this ruling in conflict with an 11th circuit decision in May that blocked Gov DeSantis’s law protecting the free speech of Floridians from similar Big Tech chicanery.
Now that we have two conflicting rulings, they will need to be resolved.
That’s where the Supreme Court comes in.
How delicious and ironic would it be if chronic Big Tech overreach ultimately sets up a situation where Trump-appointed judges put an end to the tyranny?
They made a political martyr out of him, only to find that demonstrated their total partisanship to the world… which sets up a ruling protecting the First Amendment rights from the hopelessly blurred lines between elected democrats and Silicon Valley?
Congrats guys. You played yourselves!
Dear Christian: Your Fear Is Full of Crap
by Doug Giles
Beginning in March 2020, many Christians went into lockdown-freak-out mode. Uncut, irrational, unbiblical, and not to mention, unconstitutional, fear gripped many churches and church leaders. Forced to choose between obeying the Word of God or the edict of man, most Western Churches buckled. We even saw it here in First Amendment-protected America.
The Apostle Peter buckled to fear on the night of Christ’s crucifixion. But he learned his lesson and lived the rest of his life bold as a lion. How can the church ‘go and do likewise’?
Read the book and find out!
Get your copy of Dear Christian: Your Fear Is Full of Crap now. Better yet, grab an extra copy for any petrified pastor who dutifully put obedience to the unconstitutional edicts of Mayor McCheese ahead of obedience to the explicit commandments of the LORD God Almighty.
