RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/san-francisco-dying/

You may have heard the phrase, “Get woke, go broke.” It has become a common phrase in the past few years, mainly because it keeps proving itself true.

San Francisco is a prime example of the death spiral going broke puts cities, businesses, and people into.

The city has long been a bastion of liberalism. When it became fashionable after the death of George Floyd to defund the police, the city jumped at the chance. The people elected a prosecutor who was willing to allow criminals to go free.

This led to police resigning and crime in the city skyrocketing. Not only did violent crime rise, so did public drug use and homeless encampments because no one would enforce those laws.

The citizens and some government officials suddenly realized that police were needed. Politicians tried to refund the department as citizens called for police to enforce the laws.

The problem was the city has slipped into the death spiral. Even as politicians tried to pull it back, the crime problem led to citizens and companies leaving the cities in droves. San Francisco now has some of the lowest office occupancy rates in the country, “thanks to the tech companies that make the city’s lifeblood retreating to remote work, San Francisco has seen residents move to the suburbs – pushed also by rising crime,” the Daily Mail reported.

This has reduced the tax base, which means there is less money available to fund cities programs and services.

To compensate, programs and services will need to be cut or taxes raised. Both of which will drive more people from the city, leaving behind those most in needs of programs and less likely to be contributing much to the city’s coffers through taxes.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/27/twitter-americas-founders-and-free-expression/

Donald Trump’s declaration that he would run for president again in 2024 made me recall his previous tempestuous soap opera relationship with Twitter and “fake news.” And now we are living through the beginning of what could be an equally tempestuous soap opera triggered by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. After all, the left has decided that with Twitter no longer under its control, it now prefers a “hands around the neck of Twitter” approach rather than a “hands off Twitter” approach. It makes it worth revisiting the relationship between Twitter, and the constitutional freedoms of expression America’s founders guaranteed citizens for insight.

If we applied the same standards America’s founders applied to speech and the press to current media that did not then exist, there would virtually never be a time to acceptably deny Americans’ those freedoms. And that remains true even for Twitter or when “fake news” or “disinformation” is invoked as justification. However, as a recent Orange County Register editorial put it, “Maintaining a commitment to free speech and resisting the temptation to suppress  contrary points of view is especially hard without an appreciation for why freedom of speech is important.” Let us consider that issue more closely.

The Constitution included freedoms of speech and the press because our founders knew freedom of expression was necessary to maintain liberty. They repudiated restrictions on the press because they remembered that colonial printers had been licensed, but licenses could be revoked and printers imprisoned (e.g., Benjamin Franklin’s brother, James). At the time, newspapers were the primary means of public communication, so they were insulated from political extortion from those who didn’t like what they printed. However, what was emphasized was freedom of expression, not the particular medium of expression used. If radio, TV and the internet existed in the 1770s, the principle behind freedom of the press would have been expressed more broadly.

To see this, you need only consider some of our founding generation’s own words, and those of their predecessors who greatly influenced their beliefs.

https://www.newsweek.com/fbi-gaslights-america-over-twitter-files-opinion-1769352

The FBI is gaslighting the American people over the stunning—if unsurprising—evidence that it engaged in a conspiracy with Big Tech to silence wrongthinkers in violation of the First Amendment, as the Twitter Files have revealed.

Meanwhile, in attacking those who refuse to be gaslit, the bureau is also telegraphing that it would respond to Congress investigating its hyper-politicization and weaponization with relentless information warfare.

The gaslighting comes in the preeminent law enforcement agency’s “move along, nothing to see here” response to the Twitter Files. It stated that “correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements.” The FBI, it says, “provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”

Here is the kind of conduct the FBI wants you to believe is completely normal:

Grooming Twitter executives for months in advance of the release of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story to compel them to kill the story.
Referring myriad tweets concerning inherently political matters to Twitter’s censorship team for purging—so many tweets, in fact, that during one such bulk censorship request, a Twitter employee described the review of the “possible violative content” as a “monumental undertaking.”
Flagging specific Twitter accounts for the platform to take action against—up to and including suspension—apparently for engaging in thoughtcrime of promoting “civic misinformation” by making jokes related to the 2020 election.
Paying Twitter $3.4 million for its time and effort censoring Americans.