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Ruth King

Audacious Deplatforming: Some New Examples Francis Menton

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

My February 22 post noted that the “deplatforming” of seemingly mainstream conservative voices by the Big Tech oligarchs was reaching ever greater levels of audacity. That post covered some truly extreme instances of the phenomenon, including the total blocking by Twitter on January 8 of all accounts associated with then-sitting President Trump, and the removal on January 11 of Twitter’s biggest competitor Parler from its Amazon servers and then from the Google and Apple app stores. Those examples are rather hard to top.

But those apparent successes have only inspired the deplatformers on to new gambits. Clearly, this phenomenon is not going away any time soon. Even since that post less than two weeks ago, there has been a continuing series of strikes by the big tech censors, each time aimed at someone who has transgressed the current boundaries of political correctness.

On the other hand, from observing each new strike of the censors as it occurs, it’s hard to perceive exactly what the grand plan may be. Maybe there isn’t one. This is much more like the Cambodian genocide than its Nazi predecessor: rather than the enemies all getting rounded up and hauled off at once to the extermination camps, we instead have, every few days, another one or a few seemingly randomly-selected enemies suddenly disappearing without explanation, never to be seen again. One imagines at each Big Tech company a group a several twenty-somethings, just out of college, sitting around the conference room filled with open pizza boxes, rubbing their hands together and giggling and saying things like “Let’s see who we can get away with canceling next!” OK, today this is probably happening on Zoom meetings rather than in actual conference rooms, but it’s the same idea.

I have compiled below some of the more recent deplatformings, all of which are certainly well up there on the audacity scale. Here goes:

Nolte: Arizona Department of Education Teaches that White Babies and Toddlers Are Racist John Nolte

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/03/04/arizona-department-education-teaches-white-babies-toddlers-racist/

The Arizona Department of Education wants its teachers to promote racial “equity and diversity” through an “anti-racist” program that promotes the idea that white babies and toddlers are racist.

Provided for teachers is an “equity and diversity” toolkit. Included in this toolkit, is the wild-eyed insanity that your white baby is racist.

Look at this garbage…

And this naked racism is aimed directly at white parents.

For example, one recommended piece of reading linked in the toolkit is titled “How White Parents Can Talk to Their Kids About Race.” It says, “White parents should begin addressing issues of race and racism early, even before their children can speak. Studies have indicated that infants as young as 3 months old can recognize racial differences.”

Poll: Two-Thirds Of Americans Think Corporate Wokeness Has Gone Too Far By Evita Duffy

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/05/poll-two-thirds-of-americans-think-corp

Results from a national poll released Friday found 65 percent of Americans think corporate America is “taking political correctness too far.”

The study surveyed 1,098 adults about their thoughts on a range of high-profile actions corporations have taken recently to appease left-wing activists, including Hasbro dropping the “Mr.” from its Mr. Potato Head toy, Disney closing down popular rides at its theme parks that activists claimed were “racist,” and Lucasfilm’s firing of actress Gina Carano. On Thursday, eBay began banning the sales of Dr. Seuss books.

The study was conducted by Survey Monkey and Public Opinion Strategies and commissioned by The Daily Wire between Feb. 26 and March 3, following a storm of recent cancel mob moves, such as Disney placing warning labels on “The Muppets.”

Nearly 80 percent of respondents believe toymaker Hasbro’s changing “Mr. Potato Head” to “Potato Head” is “silly.”

When initially asked, 58 percent of respondents said they opposed Disney’s decision to fire Carano over social media posts. After being shown the actual post that resulted in her termination, however, 72 percent said they didn’t agree with the firing, including a majority of liberals and Democrats and 70 percent of Disney fans.

During an interview with The Federalist, Carano said she first became vocal about reportedly touchy or taboo subjects “because I feel like there is a large group of people that were being silenced this year and being forced to play this game of wokeism or whatever it is.” The cancel mob made sure to punish her for daring to speak freely and challenging the status quo.

Pushing back against toxic cancel culture, The Daily Wire announced last month after her firing that Carano will produce and star in a film for them.

Dear Sanctimonious, self-serving, self-righteous, pompous Liberals and Democrats

https://dianebederman.com/dear-sanctimonious-self-serving-self-righteous-pompous

Yes, this one is for you. You who say you care for the poor and sick, the widow and orphan; the lower middle class and the working class and the downright poor. You care so much you want to give everyone free health care and free drugs and education, wipe out student loans, increase the minimum wage, open your borders to all “refugees” and get rid of racism.

You care alright, until their needs interfere with yours. You are the righteous calling for lockdowns. So what if people are losing their businesses, their livelihoods, their future? I mean the government labeled them non-essential. So what if people are taking their lives and dying from opioid overdose or alcoholism?    I wrote about these concerns in April 2020.

So what you closed the Houses of Worship – you never went anyway. And it’s in those Houses of Worship that people find solace and aid, and AA meetings, and shelter and food.  But, hey, why should you care? I mean these are the people Obama referred to as those who hold on to their guns and Bibles.The people who believe in protecting and defending the Judeo/Christian ethic that underpins their freedoms. You know, those Conservatives, who actually do care about the poor.

As long as you pompous liberals can go to Walmart and Costco, can afford anything you want that is available on Amazon, or cub-side pickup, or to your door delivery and don’t need to worry about paying rent or getting food on the table, or educating your children-because you are at home, have IT knowledge and can always pay for a private school  or a tutor – that’s all that matters.

WELCOME to the New Age of STALINISM by Martin Armstrong

www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/bigtech/welcome-to-the-new-age-of-stalinism/ 

Welcome to the New Age of Stalinism. Children in East Germany were told that that state was their real parent, and if their biological parents spoke against the government, they should report them. The tyranny rising from BigTech in league with the far-left is really becoming frightening. Biden is going after all guns to compel people to register so he knows every person who has a gun so they can be targeted and relieved of their weapons regardless of the 2nd Amendment.

The First Amendment means nothing anymore, nor does Due Process of Law. Our courts have surrendered to tyranny, and they have canceled Justice Thomas because he is conservative, defending the Constitution. Suddenly, Justice Thomas being black is irrelevant. It is his thinking process that is dangerous to the LEFT and BigTech.

It is bad enough that BigTech has been out to cancel anyone they disagree with. Not only did they take down Donald Trump, but they have removed doctors coming out against the COVID fraud and even removed testimony of doctors before Congress which is a public record. If you testify before Congress and support their position, then that is OK for YouTube. If not, it is canceled. That is like a court that only allows the prosecutor to speak – defendants have no right to put on a defense and they call this freedom and America?

Anything anyone says against BigTech’s narrative is being canceled in an effort to impose their thinking upon the population. Those who resist, BigTech will assist in ensuring they will eventually be imprisoned or conveniently eliminated that is the next step in the way tyranny always unfolds. This, unfortunately, is the path they are taking which is a well-beaten path through history.

The Evolution of Elitism By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_evolution_of_elitism.html

In 1979, John H. Bunzel penned a piece in Newsweek titled “The Badge of  ‘Elitism.'”  Bunzel was president of a state university in California from 1970 to 1978.  Here’s what he had to say 

Thus I am an elitist if what is meant and understood is that I recognize there are differences in individual talent and capacity. Further, it is silly to pretend that anyone who acknowledges these differences is somehow an ‘anti-democrat.’ And it is just as foolish to claim that anyone who recognizes there are different physical and behavioral traits among various groups is a racist. 

He further asserted that “one can oppose racism without believing that people are equal in abilities.  Put another way, there is a world of difference between  ‘discriminatory practices’ and ‘discriminating standards.'”

Today Mr. Bunzel would be hounded for his perfectly logical idear

Now under the domination of Marxists,  progressives and Communists,  people must “assume that the existence of any differences constitutes prima facie evidence of inequality — and since in a democracy ‘all men are created equal’ these differences are presumed to be a self-evident indictment of democracy.” 

Colleges boast of programs dealing with diversity, inclusion and equity.  Here is a sampling.

Climate Policy Is a Money-Making Opportunity for the Elite By Rupert Darwall

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2021/03/04/climate_policy_is_a_money-making_opportunity_for_the_elite_766755.html

“The climate transition presents a historic investment opportunity,” says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. “What the financiers, the big banks, the asset managers, private investors, venture capital are all discovering is: There’s a lot of money to be made in the creation of these new [green] jobs,” chimes in presidential climate envoy John Kerry. Fink concedes that the economy remains “highly dependent” on fossil fuels. He also asserts that BlackRock is “carbon neutral today in our own operations.” It’s a claim open to challenge. “If a company or individual says to me they are net-zero, I know it is complete crap,” tweeted Glen Peters, research director of the Oslo-based Center for International Climate Research.

Peters was taking to task former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who had claimed that investments in renewable energy offset emissions from fossil-fuel investments. Carney quickly backed down, but the spat reveals the fissure in the climate movement that first became visible with Michael Moore’s 2020 movie Planet of the Humans, which pitted true believers on one side against those positioning themselves to reap profits from the climate money pouring into decarbonization.

Carney is a leading light of the climate-finance oligarchy, positioned at the nexus of politics and finance. He is a climate adviser to British prime minister Boris Johnson and serves as UN secretary-general António Guterres’s special envoy on finance and climate action. He is also vice-chair of Canadian alternative asset manager Brookfield, heading its ESG and impact-investing business. One privilege of being a climate savior: any concerns over conflicts of interest don’t apply when the interests of the planet are at stake.

Why is Joe Biden dodging the public and the press? By Joe Concha,

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/541580-why-is-joe-biden-dodging-the-public-and-the-press

President Biden is not unlike Candidate Biden in terms of being largely hidden from the public and press. Already, the decision by his team to limit his interactions with the media, while barely traveling outside the White House to address the concerns of the American people, is wearing thin, if new polls are any indication. 

It’s now been more than six weeks since Biden took office. He has yet to hold a press conference during a pandemic that has claimed more than 107,000 lives since his inauguration and more than 500,000 overall. His COVID-19 relief bill, with a price tag of nearly $2 trillion in what will be the largest spending bill in U.S. history, should be sold to the public by the president, just as his old boss, Barack Obama, sold the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in various speeches across the country in 2009. Biden and his equally invisible vice president are vaccinated, so the COVID-19 excuse for not venturing out much, which was used throughout the 2020 presidential campaign, is no longer applicable. 

This relief bill also is increasingly being paired down in Congress, infuriating Democrats on the left in the process. Gone is the federal minimum wage hike to $15 an hour that would have killed thousands of jobs, thanks to the Senate parliamentarian, who ruled that it couldn’t be included in the bill under Senate rules. So are proposals for a bridge between New York and Ontario, as well as a San Francisco transit extension, all of which have nothing to do with battling COVID-19. Republicans also argue, correctly, that money earmarked for reopening schools will not even begin until 2022, when the pandemic will probably be over or greatly reduced after the country is fully vaccinated by the beginning of the summer, according to Biden’s own timeline.

Will the real president of the United States please stand up? There’s no evidence that Joe Biden is actually serving as president Charles Hurt

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/mar/4/will-the-real-president-of-the-united-states-pleas/

Can anyone just tell us who the hell is running our federal government right now?

You literally get censored out of existence for suggesting that anyone other than Joe Biden won the election last November. Yet there is no evidence today — four months later — that Mr. Biden is actually serving as president.

A weird Tron video this week appeared to show Mr. Biden — looking every bit the part of Max Headroom — interfacing with House Democrats in Congress. Digitally, of course.

He droned on for a few minutes using scripted psycho-pablum, sitting alone at a table. The table was empty except for his instruction manual. As he spoke haltingly, he looked up at a giant screen from which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stared awkwardly, fake smiling.

One could imagine the Dem droids watching from somewhere in the cybersphere nodding along obediently.

The digital president then opened the floor for questions.

The New McCarthyism Comes to Harvard Law School by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17146/harvard-law-school-mccarthyism

This self-serving defense of censorship is intended to convey a crass economic threat: if you want to get a good job after law school, make sure that Harvard bans teachers and speakers who are trying to “rehabilitate their reputations and obscure the stain of their complicity in the Trump administration….”

One would also think that signatories would be aware that if these vague criteria — anti-democratic, racists, xenophobic and immoral — were applied across the board, they would result in bans on anyone who was associated with the current regimes in China, Cuba, Turkey, Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, the Palestinian Authority and other repressive governments.

It would also apply to supporters of American anti-democratic and anti-free speech groups, such as Antifa, and the very organization — People’s Parity Project — that is promoting this anti-free speech petition. Indeed, historically, repression and censorship have been directed primarily against the left.

The Harvard Law School petition is directed only at Trump supporters, not supporters of left wing anti-democratic repression, either here or abroad. It is based on the assumption that there is a special “Trump exception” to freedom of speech and due process. But exceptions to free speech and academic freedom for some risk becoming the rule for all.

Much of this effort to exclude Trump supporters from campuses comes from individuals and organizations that also demand more “diversity.” But their definition of diversity is limited to race, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity. It does not extend to the central mission of universities: to hear and learn from the widest array of views, perspectives, ideologies and political preferences.

A recent petition, signed by hundreds of Harvard Law School students and alumni, raises the specter of the new McCarthyism coming to the law school at which I taught for half a century. The petition states that “Harvard Law School faces a choice of whether to welcome the architects and backers of the Trump administration’s worse abuses back into polite society.” It demands that Harvard not “hire or affiliate with” any of these sinners, and threatens that “if it does so the school will be complicit if future attacks on our democracy are even more violent – and more successful.”