RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=8cab9ac5f9

For years, conservatives have complained of apparent censorship of their voices on the principal social media platforms, like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Posts or tweets get taken down, or de-boosted, or de-monetized, or degraded in search results, or “shadow-banned,” or slapped with content warnings, or otherwise suppressed. But the response from Big Tech has always been, hey, we’re private companies, and we’re not subject to the First Amendment. We can do as we please.

Then Elon Musk took over Twitter, and followed by giving several journalists access to Twitter’s electronic archives to investigate any untoward government manipulation. The result has been the Twitter Files, an ongoing series of Twitter threads laying bare the coordination between pre-Musk Twitter and dozens of government actors to suppress disfavored speech. The most recent nineteenth segment of the Twitter Files series was published on March 20 by Matt Taibbi.

Now that it is clear that the systematic censorship of conservative voices is very real and has been largely directed and coordinated by the government itself behind the scenes, is there anything that can be done about that through litigation? There actually are some significant efforts under way in that regard. Probably the most important is the case titled Missouri v. Biden, pending in the Western District of Louisiana. The case seeks declaratory and injunctive relief against the government under the First Amendment to stop it from continuing to pressure social media platforms to suppress speech that the current government does not like. On March 20, the court issued a major opinion denying the government’s motion to dismiss. That opinion is available here. With the motion to dismiss denied, the case will proceed through full discovery and, presumably, trial.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The Left has the annoying habit of blaming the right for transgressions of which they are guilty, from weaponizing government to tabling stories that put them in a bad light, like Hunter Biden’s laptop. Cloaked in bogus virtue, with mainstream media in their corner, they leave no doubt as to the righteousness of their positions. They profess concern for the aged yet are unwilling to address the impending financial collapse of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – virtually a certainty in the next ten to fifteen years, unless action is taken. They claim to represent the poor yet propose and implement inflationary policies whose victims are the lowest income families.

The Left complains about censorship from the right, while they intimidate conservative college speakers, like commentator Charlie Kirk at the University of California Davis, Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School and causing Mary Eberstadt, author of Primal Screams, to cancel this week’s talk at Furman University. In 2016, public figures as diverse as Barack Obama, Clarence Thomas, and Michael Bloomberg warned about political correctness gone awry. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) agreed: “One worrisome trend undermining open discourse in the academy is the increased push by some students and faculty to ‘disinvite’ speakers with whom they disagree from campus appearances.” Seven years later, the situation has worsened. People have the right to protest, but school and college administrators should promote diversity in speakers and in books, not cling to a partisan political ideology.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation

PROLOGUE: THE INFORMATION WAR

In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that he had proof of a communist spy ring operating inside the government. Overnight, the explosive accusations blew up in the national press, but the details kept changing. Initially, McCarthy said he had a list with the names of 205 communists in the State Department; the next day he revised it to 57. Since he kept the list a secret, the inconsistencies were beside the point. The point was the power of the accusation, which made McCarthy’s name synonymous with the politics of the era.

For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.

Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States.

None of it was true. After reviewing Hamilton 68’s secret list, Twitter’s safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing “real people” to be “unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.”

The Hamilton 68 episode played out as a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the McCarthy affair, with one important difference: McCarthy faced some resistance from leading journalists as well as from the U.S. intelligence agencies and his fellow members of Congress. In our time, those same groups lined up to support the new secret lists and attack anyone who questioned them.

When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.