RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/big_tech_takes_a_giant_step_towards_totalitarianism.html

Twitter has banned former President Trump for life, while Facebook has settled for a two-year suspension.  How proud these mammoth-valued censorious outfits must feel.  Well, the late Associate Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., is likely to be rather disappointed.  As for Framers of the Constitution, they must wonder why they bothered to enact the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee.

Justice Brennan, of course, in the 1964 case, New York Times v Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 took note of some precedents underscoring our tradition of free speech, and then summed up our “profound” free speech tradition.   The justice’s sources included this observation from Bridges v. California, 314 U.S. 252, quoted at 376 U.S.  269 of his Sullivan opinion:

“[I]t is a prized American privilege to speak one’s mind, although not always with perfect good taste, on all public institutions.”

Ah, but if you are a president, or former president, loathed by privately owned media outlets, with an enormous impact on the free flow of information, you will find a wall as iron as that which surrounded the former Soviet Union, a wall that blocks your ability to speak one’s mind freely, even “not always with perfect good taste.”

Justice Brennan, at 376 U.S. 270, then quoted at length from the incisive “classic” statement on free speech that Justice Brandeis included in his concurring opinion in Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357:   The Framers

https://reason.com/2021/06/04/lab-leak-misinformation-media-fauci-covid-19/

Facebook made a quiet but dramatic reversal last week: It no longer forbids users from touting the theory that COVID-19 came from a laboratory.

“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps,” the social media platform declared in a statement.

This change in policy comes in the midst of heated debate about how to respond to the perception that social media is amplifying the spread of false information. For the last several years, journalists and politicians have pushed to police so-called misinformation through various means. Major news organizations have hired mis- or disinformation reporters. Lawmakers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) have urged social media sites to prohibit speech deemed wrong or dangerous—and have sometimes suggested that this should be required by law. More recently, various groups have asked President Joe Biden to establish a federal initiative to combat online misinformation.

But Facebook’s concession that the lab leak story it once viewed as demonstrably false is actually possibly true should put to rest the idea that banning or regulating misinformation should be a chief public policy goal.

It’s one thing to discuss, debate, and correct wrong ideas, and both tech companies and media have roles to play in fostering healthy public dialogue. But Team Blue’s recent obsession with rendering unsayable anything that clashes with its preferred narrative is the height of hubris. The conversation should not be closed by the government and its yes-men in journalism, in tech, or even in public health.

From False Claim to Live Possibility

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-withdrawal-syndrome-11622839108?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Professional media folk couldn’t live with former President Donald Trump’s policies. Now they can’t seem to live without him as a foil. Just as the press and the public health establishment are begrudgingly admitting that Mr. Trump’s controversial theory that Covid-19 might have originated in a lab is plausible, a giant Silicon Valley publisher is formalizing a ban on contributions from the 45th president. The Journal’s Paul Ziobro and Jeff Horwitz report:

Facebook Inc. said it is suspending Donald Trump’s accounts for two years, formalizing a long-term penalty for the former U.S. president after its independent Oversight Board said the company was wrong to keep the ban open-ended.
Facebook said it would revisit the suspension two years from the date of its initial move to suspend him on Jan. 7, the day after the riot at the U.S. Capitol. Assuming he is then reinstated, Mr. Trump will face a “strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions” if he commits further violations, including permanent removal of his pages and accounts, the company said.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously expressed a desire to run an open platform enabling free speech. So much for that. This latest decision to attempt to edit U.S. political speech means many more editing decisions await. The Journal reporters note:

In responding to the board’s criticism, Facebook also opens the door for more, as the company will now be required to make more subjective decisions on whether posts from political figures violate its rules surrounding misinformation, hate speech and other issues that are hotly debated. Those judgment calls are likely to escalate partisan complaints around whether the company is being fair in how it applies the rules.

Will Facebook now ban Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists who dismissed the idea of a laboratory origin for Covid-19 in 2020?

As for the former President, Mr. Trump responds to the Facebook ban with an emailed statement:

Next time I’m in the White House there will be no more dinners, at his request, with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. It will be all business!

Meanwhile in the business of cable news, the absence of Mr. Trump has led to smaller audiences both before and after dinner. Ted Johnson at Deadline reports:

Fox News topped the ratings in key categories during the month of May, but cable news overall saw significant declines from the same period a year earlier…
In primetime, Fox News averaged 2.17 million viewers, down 37% from the same period a year earlier; MSNBC posted 1.49 million, down 22%; and CNN drew 913,000, down 45%. In the 25-54 demo, Fox News had 345,000, down 38%, followed by CNN with 218,000, down 53%, and MSNBC with 199,000, falling 32%…

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/congratulations-elitists-liberals

The hilarious headline in the Daily Beast yesterday read like a cross of Clickhole and Izvestia circa 1937: “Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media? FROM HIS MOUTH TO FOX’S EARS!”

The story, fed to poor Beast media writer Lloyd Grove by certain unnamed embittered personages at the Intercept, is that their former star writer Greenwald appears on, and helps provide content for — gasp! — right-wing media! It’s nearly the exclusive point of the article. Greenwald goes on TV with… those people! The Beast’s furious journalisming includes a “spot check” of the number of Fox items inspired by Greenwald articles (“dozens”!) and multiple passages comparing Greenwald to Donald Trump, the ultimate insult in #Resistance world. This one made me laugh out loud:

In a self-perpetuating feedback loop that runs from Twitter to Fox News and back again, Greenwald has managed, like Trump before him, to orchestrate his very own news cycles.

This, folks, is from the Daily Beast, a publication that has spent much of the last five years huffing horseshit into headlines, from Bountygate to Bernie’s Mittens to classics like SNL: Alec Baldwin’s Trump Admits ‘I Don’t Care About America’. The best example was its “investigation” revealing that three of Tulsi Gabbard’s 75,000 individual donors — the late Princeton professor Stephen Cohen, peace activist Sharon Tennison, and a person called “Goofy Grapes” who may or may not have worked for Russia Today host Lee Camp — were, in their estimation, Putin “apologists.” Speaking of creating your own news cycles, this asinine smear inspired serious stories by ABC News and CNN, and when Gabbard denounced it as “fake news,” Politico jumped in with the now-familiar retort:

“Fake news” is a favorite phrase of President Donald Trump…

For years now, this has been the go-to conversation-ender for prestige media pundits and Twitter trolls alike, directed at any progressive critic of the political mainstream: you’re a Republican! A MAGA-sympathizer! Or (lately), an “insurrectionist”!

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/06/03/cnns-take-on-the-fauci-emails-is-really-disturbing-n1451919

While most of us who have read the bombshell FOIA emails from Dr. Fauci believe they prove he wasn’t telling Americans the truth, the so-called journalists at CNN had a much different take on what the emails revealed.

“While many federal government staffers prefer the phone to email, this correspondence offers a rare glimpse into Fauci’s frantic schedule and polite, to-the-point demeanor during the time he emerged as a rare source of frank honesty within the Trump administration’s Covid-19 task force,” wrote Christina Maxouris and Paul LeBlanc of CNN.

“I honestly don’t know how CNN can crystallize those emails into this headline,” mused Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire. “We get it. You created a narrative of Trump as evil and Fauci as good, and now you have to stick with it. But your worship of a prevaricating career bureaucrat is unsettling.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/the_nyt_vs_israel.html

When I saw the title of an opinion piece by the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, “Were My Criticisms of Israel Fair?”  I did not hold my breath in expectation that his answer would be, “they were not, and I apologize.” He doubled down, yet again smearing Israel with the accusations of war crimes for forcefully responding to an attack from Gaza, in the best traditions of the New York Times.

Which is of course his right — as we well know, everyone is entitled to his opinion. The problem of course is that, as the second part of that same saying has it, no one (the New York Times, and Kristof including) is entitled to their own facts. 

And predictably, the facts Kristof adduces to support his argument that the fighting was Israel’s fault are not facts at all. His main source of facts and analysis is one Sari Bashi, “an Israeli human rights lawyer.” (the organization she leads, Gisha, “whose goal is to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents” is mostly funded (73.1%) by European governments and U.S. foundations like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Calling her an Israeli lawyer is a 73.1% lie; “foreign agent” would be far more accurate. She called Gaza a “penal colony.” and compared the Trump peace plan to apartheid South Africa. You get the idea of her reliability as a source — though her views are undoubtedly music to Kristof’s ears, reinforcing his own anti-Israel bias. Birds of the feather flock together, after all.)

So what is the Bashi/Kristof theory of the cause of the Israel-Gaza conflict? “Israeli security forces, led by a prime minister desperate to stay in power to avoid jail on corruption charges, created a provocation by using violence and the threat of violence against Palestinians in Jerusalem. They stormed a sensitive religious site, used excessive force against demonstrators and threatened to forcibly transfer Palestinian families from their homes as part of an official policy to ‘Judaize’ occupied East Jerusalem, which is a war crime.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/the_new_york_times_follows_its_h

Once again, the New York Times is acting to make it impossible for Jews to defend themselves against those who have announced their intention to exterminate the Jewish people.  The first time this happened was back in the ’30s and ’40s when the New York Times had knowledge of the impending plans for the Holocaust, as well as knowledge of the shipping of Jews to concentration camps in Europe.  For years it buried the story.  This is now well known.

Had the Times exposed the news that its correspondents had uncovered, many Jews could have been saved, and Jews and governments could have planned a defense against the perpetrators.  There would have been more Jewish resistance and partisans.  Instead, the New York Times buried these stories. 

Now the New York Times is once again doing what it can to demonize and prohibit the State of Israel from defending itself against those, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Abbas’s PLO, who daily announce their intention to destroy the State of Israel and the Jewish community.  In a front-page photo-job, conceived to mis-portray Israel as an aggressor hell-bent on killing children, the Times flashed a photo of Gazan children’s faces with a headline, “They Were Just Children.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-media-finally-discover-antifa/

The media abdicated their responsibility last summer by minimizing the violence.

L ast summer, New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof headed to Portland to try to locate the “radical-left anarchists” then–president Donald Trump kept mentioning in his campaign speeches. “Help Me Find Trump’s ‘Anarchists’ in Portland” Kristof implored his readers, as he roamed the city, running into well-meaning musicians, activists, technicians, and doctors, but, alas, no anarchists. The masked “protesters” who had thrown mortars, M-80s, and bricks at cops guarding the federal courthouse in Portland only a few weeks earlier were nowhere to be found. The “protesters” who in the week before Kristof’s column was published had been involved in dozens of acts of vandalism, destruction, and violence, including assaults on cops with “flaming projectiles” and bricks, had disappeared. Kristof’s piece is the equivalent of writing a column about the January 6 riot and focusing on the protesters who didn’t go into the Capitol.

Kristof’s piece was one of the most ham-fisted efforts, but he wasn’t alone. The day before left-wing CNN pundit Josh Campbell flew into Portland to mock concerns about violence — “I also ate my breakfast burrito outside today and so far haven’t been attacked by shadowy gangs of Antifa commandos” — a pro-Trump marcher had been shot to death, allegedly by an Antifa member. There was a concerted effort by many in the national media to play down the extent and damage of protests that summer, which turned out to be the most expensive domestic upheaval in insurance history, with costs exceeding $1 billion. Minority neighborhoods and city centers were often left to looters at night, as elected officials were often paralyzed by the fear of offending Black Lives Matter protesters. Some pundits would even argue the property destruction wasn’t “violence” at all — from the comfort of their homes, of course.

Turns out, as the Washington Post reports today, that the extremism Kristof and Campbell couldn’t locate anywhere within Portland’s city limits has done great damage to the city’s poorest communities. It turns out that de-policing efforts — the Portland city council cut $15 million as a “defund” effort and now has a cop shortage — have left some of the most vulnerable neighborhoods open to spikes in violent crime. Anarchists, writes the Post, have hijacked Portland’s “social justice movement,” exacerbating the problems BLM protesters were supposedly trying to fix.

Not that this is surprising to anyone who wasn’t in the liberal bubble. Local stories about black leaders attempting to distance themselves from Antifa were already being written in the summer. A month after Kristof’s column, Mark Hemingway detailed the corrupt 50-year influence of hard-left radicalism in the city in the Wall Street Journal. None of this was useful at the time. An election was coming.

A few weeks before Kristof’s piece, Portland mayor Ted Wheeler had even asked Governor Kate Brown for National Guard troops. One imagines it was not to stop peaceful schoolteachers from being heard on criminal-justice reform. Soon, the feds sent agents to protect the courthouse, which was under nightly attack. Hysteric Charles Pierce claimed that cops had “softly Pinochet’ed in broad daylight.” In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg did him one better, writing that “Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun.” (No hyperbole was left on the table during the Trump years.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/05/31/new-york-times-publishes-photo-of-girl-killed-by-israelis-who-was-also-killed-by-israelis-in-2017-n1451060

It was supposed to be heartbreaking: on Friday, the New York Times published a front-page series of photos with the headline “They Were Just Children,” little Palestinian Arab children who had supposedly been murdered by the evil Israeli war machine during the latest round of Hamas jihad attacks. The only problem was that one of the photos, prominently featured on the top row, was of a little girl whom Palestinian Arab propagandists, using the very same photo, had reported murdered by the Israelis in January 2017. It was just the latest example of the fact that Israel’s atrocities are so many and so brazen that Palestinians have to fabricate evidence of them – and the establishment media eagerly plays along.

The Times photo imbroglio came just over a week after Palestinian Arabs on Twitter claimed that a photo of another little girl depicted the victim of an Israeli airstrike; it was actually a photo of a Russian child model who has never been anywhere near Gaza and is still very much alive.

Shortly before that, a supporter of the Palestinian jihad against Israel tweeted: “Israel is now using white phosphorus on the city of Beit Hanoun in Palestine! It can burn human flesh until it reaches to the bones. White phosphorus is prohibited globally and it’s been considered as a war crime!” Included was a gruesome photo of a woman whose hair had been partially burned off and her face severely burned as well. There was just one minor detail that the tweet omitted to mention: the photo was not from Gaza in May 2021, but from Afghanistan in 2009.

This deception has been going on for years. It is perpetrated on an industrial scale by Palestinian propagandists in order to make Israel seem to be an oppressive occupying power. The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process details the breadth and sophistication of this deception.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/covid-censorship-consensus-daniel-greenfield/

“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made,” Facebook conceded, after the theory of a Chinese lab leak gained fresh currency.

It was not the first time that an idea suppressed by the Silicon Curtain had been revived despite the best efforts of the Big Tech monopoly to suppress it.

But Facebook warned that it will go on censoring to “keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge,”

Wherever these new facts and trends emerge from, it won’t be from its platforms.

The social media monopoly isn’t admitting that it was wrong. What it’s actually saying is that it’s up to high level authorities to decide what is true and what people can be allowed to say.

The Big Tech giant’s warning contains a series of admissions about how it sees the role of its platforms and the people who use them. Facebook, Instagram, and its younger cousins are not places where a new consensus can emerge by discussing serious issues. It’s where the proles are expected to listen to whatever they are told what to think and to do by their betters.

Facebook isn’t the place where influential people discuss ideas. Like network television or the New York Times, it’s meant as a top-down medium that tells a passive public what to think.

It’s hard to think of any greater expression of contempt by a company for its user base.

At the heart of Facebook’s COVID-19 censorship regime is the conviction that ideas are dangerous and during a pandemic people should not be allowed to make up their own minds.