Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

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Killadelphia Is The Philadelphia Inquirer trying to keep the truth hushed up to protect Democrats?

I noted, just five days ago, that I saw a mathematical possibility, at the margin of error, that the City of Brotherly Love could finish very slightly below 500 homicides in 2022. That was based upon the decrease in the rate of killings since Hallowe’en.

Alas! while the rate of killings still isn’t in the 2021 range, it has picked up once again, and the math makes it seem impossible now. With 488 killings as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 11, 2022, Philly is now seeing 1.4145 murders per day; that works out to 516.29 murders for the year. And with at least six homicides over the last three days, the city has seen 43 murders in the 41 days since Hallowe’en. At that rate, 1.0488 per day, times thee 20 days left in the year, yields 20.98 homicides in these last three weeks. If there are 21 homicides in the last 20 days, that would end the year with 509 murders.

But that is working with the official homicide numbers, and Broad + Liberty, along with other outlets, broke the story of the uncounted deaths in the city, showing at least 101 “suspicious” deaths, in a photo taken just before Thanksgiving. That the credentialed media didn’t want to report that is evidenced by the fact that, since the story broke, The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, and the supposed newspaper of record for the area, and one which believes it is so important that the federal government should subsidize it, has nothing on that story, even though it was published four days ago, on a subject that would seem pretty serious and significant. Checking the Inquirer’s website main page, specific crime page, and doing a site search for suspicious deaths, as of 9:45 AM EST today showed no stories on the subject at all. Did the Inky investigate at all? Did Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw tell them that it was nothing, don’t worry about it? Did the top officers clam up?

You’d think that a leak like this, from someone inside the Philadelphia Police Department, would have piqued the interest of real journalists, especially the police-hating #woke of the Inquirer, but if you actually thought that, you’d be wrong, wrong, wrong!

Who knows, perhaps the unauthorized leak from someone in the Police Department was a fake, a political attack. If so, wouldn’t the journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading want to expose that? After all, it’s a serious accusation, one which attacks the political leadership of the Police Department and the city as a whole . . . and Philadelphia hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Harry Truman was President.

Oh, wait, that’s it: the editors of the Inky don’t want anything which could hurt the Democrats made public.

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↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Journolism!

The New York Times’ famous logo tells us something other than what the public might think; it tells us that the editors will decide what you should know.

Sam Brinton, from his Department of Energy biography, and is a public record.

Remember Sam Brinton? Well, he’s actually someone you’d really not want to remember, because he’s loony tunes, off his rocker, certifiably nuts, cookoo for Cocoa Puffs. Mr Brinton ‘identifies’ as ‘non-binary’ and chooses to use “they/them” pronouns, something along with which the credentialed media go, but The First Street Journal, in accordance with our Stylebook, does not.

Mr Brinton is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Masters in nuclear engineering, technology and policy, which, I suppose, qualified him to be appointed by President Biden to become Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition, despite the fact he is completely nuts, because the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading in the Biden Administration are promoting all sorts of sexual weirdness acceptance.

Now, you would think that The New York Times, one of our newspapers of record, would have a story on it if the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition, someone with a high-level security clearance, was arrested for felony theft, but if you thought that, you’d be wrong. Site searches for both Sam Brinton and the more specific “Sam Brinton” did not return any results related to his arrest. Going through the Grey Lady’s website front page, at 9:28 AM EST, I saw nothing on Mr Brinton’s arrest.

The New York Post had the story, as did Fox News, as did The Telegraph in London, as did the Daily Mail, but not The Washington Post, at least not according to a site search conducted at 9:35 AM EST. Scrolling down through the Post’s website main page also showed no such story.

You remember The Washington Post, one of our other newspapers of record, one which specializes in federal government reporting, and its addition of “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to its logo, during the Trump Administration? It would appear that the editors of the Post want this story to die in darkness!

Of course, the Post’s Editorial Board did have a posted editorial against Elon Musk’s opening Twitter to freedom of speech, so perhaps “Democracy Dies in Darkness” really means that the editors only like light on news and opinions they approve.

Also see: Nine Bookout, The Victory Girls, Gender Fluid DOE Official Charged With Felony, and Robert Stacy McCain, The Other McCain, Crazy People Are Dangerous (and They’re Working for the Biden Administration)

This is not journalism, but journolism. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity, and I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias. It seems that two of our newspapers of record, the most important papers in the United States, don’t want their readers to know that President Biden appointed someone who is just plain nuts to an important security position, and that he’s turned out to be both stupid and (allegedly) a thief. Knowing that Mr Brinton (allegedly) stole a suitcase off thebaggage claim carousel at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport might, just might, lead some people to have poorer opinions about ‘gender-fluid’, ‘non-binary’ people in general, and they just can’t have that!
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Update: 8:15 AM EST, Wednesday, November 30, 2022: Site searches of our nation’s four ‘newspapers of record, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times, still show no returns for “Sam Brinton” on this subject.

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↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Those who want to regulate speech aren’t really afraid of lies or misinformation; what they are afraid of is the truth.

The American left are aghast that Elon Musk’s somewhat delayed purchase of Twitter has meant that conservatives would be able to actually speak freely. As we have previously noted, Twitter added rules banning “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” “Misgendering” means referring to ‘transgendered’ individuals by their biological sex, either directly or through the use of the appropriate pronouns, while “deadnaming” means referring to such people by their birth names rather than the ones they have adopted which are more consistent with their imagined ‘gender.'[1]The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is exactly the opposite: while we do not change the direct quotes of others, in original material we always refer to people by their normal, biological sex … Continue reading The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy[2]Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker.” to claim that such restrictions actually promoted freedom of speech.

To trans people, it represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur.

That their ‘identity’ might not be “an accepted fact” is not something Mr Malloy wanted to concede, but Twitter’s policy also meant that those who did not accept such claims still had to be careful with their language, or be suspended or permanently banned.

And yes, I have had to be careful in tweets, especially when it came to my reporting about Will Thomas, a male swimmer who claimed to be a woman named “Lia,” including calling him ‘Lia’ Thomas in a couple of article titles to get past Twitter’s rules.

Now comes Robert Stacy McCain, who had his own @rsmccain Twitter account, with “tens of thousands” of followers, permanently suspended noting that Twitter, under the previous regime also suspended credentialed media sites which did something really radical like tell the truth:

‘Blood On Your Hands’? Is Anyone Really Endangered by Twitter ‘Amnesty’?

by Robert Stacy McCain | Sunday, November 27, 2022

Hopewell Chin’ono is an award-winning journalist who has relentlessly exposed the evils of the lawless and corrupt regime in Zimbabwe:

In 2020, Hopewell reported on alleged Covid-19 procurement fraud within the health ministry, which led to the arrest and sacking of Health Minister Obadiah Moyo. It was President Emmerson Mnangagwa who fired Obadiah in July for “inappropriate conduct” over the $60 million medicines supply scandal. On July 20, 2020, Hopewell was arrested and charged with inciting public violence. The US embassy called Hopewell’s arrest “deeply concerning”, while his lawyer called it “an abduction” and Amnesty accused Zimbabwean authorities of “misusing the criminal justice system to persecute journalists and activists”. He was freed in September on bail, then he was arrested again in November 2020 and was charged with obstructing justice and contempt of court for a tweet about the court outcome of a gold smuggling scandal.

Hopewell Chin’ono was released on bail on January 27, 2021 after spending three weeks in prison. Chin’ono expressed concern about the COVID-19 pandemic in the overcrowded Chikurubi Prison and accuses the government of harassment for arresting him three times in five months.

Given such credentials, Chin’ono must be taken seriously when he warns of the risks of a general “amnesty” for banned accounts on Twitter. And certainly we should hope that Elon Musk will have his staff exercise caution when it comes to such cases as these, where repressive regimes are using “ghost accounts” to harass their critics. But the problem in the United States is almost the diametrical opposite situation, i.e., critics of the regime have been banned, because Twitter staff were working with the Democratic Party to effectively prohibit dissent.

The New York Post, America’s oldest continuously published newspaper,[3]There’s some dispute, but I believe that the Hartford Courant, founded in 1764, is the oldest, followed by the Post, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, as second, and The Philadelphia … Continue reading had its Twitter account suspended at the behest of intelligence officials who falsely declared the Hunter Biden laptop story to be “Russian disinformation.” (For the record, I do not think the Biden family is less corrupt than the rulers of Zimbabwe.) Comparing the problems in America to the problems in Zimbabwe is apples and oranges, of course, but that’s the point: If we don’t want to descend into a Third World nightmare, the voices of opponents of the Democratic Party must be heard. Maybe you think Zimbabwe can’t happen here, but you’re wrong. I mean, look what Democrats have done to Chicago and Philadelphia . . .

Of course, as it turned out, the Hunter Biden laptop story turned out to be true, but it was far, far, far more important to the #woke[4]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading nerds who ran Twitter previously that the story be stifled on October 14, 2020, three weeks before the presidential election, because Joe Biden just had to be protected so that he could win the election.

Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey was able to say that yeah, it had been a ‘total mistake’ to block the Post’s story . . . on March 25, 2021, after the election.

I’m old enough to remember when the left were free speech absolutists .  .  . when they weren’t really in control of much, when they were trying to get their messages out to the public in general. Now that they have power, not only in government but largely in the professional media, they really aren’t so enamored of freedom of speech, not for those with whom they disagree. To them, Twitter was great, when Twitter was suspending Mr McCain, when the platform was censoring the Post, when views contrary to theirs were stifled.

In one episode of Blue Bloods, fictitious New York City Police Commissioner Frank Reagan said that freedom of the press applies only to those who own a press, but that time has elapsed: with internet service (sort of) inexpensive, and the cost to have your own website cheap — heck, even I can afford it, and some platforms are free — almost anyone can own a ‘press.’

Well, social media like Facebook and Twitter and less popular sites like Parler are, in effect, publishers, and publishers do get to choose what they will and will not publish. But once Elon Musk bought Twitter leftists like The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch, whose newspaper rarely publishes any opinions which aren’t #woke, decided that Twitter “should exist more as a semi-public utility than as an entity that a man with a spare $44 billion can just light on fire,”[5]As we have previously noted, Mr Bunch’s newspaper has been begging for donations to help keep it afloat. while Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wants Twitter to be ‘socialized’:

Of course, there is one way Twitter could be saved: By actually making it the “digital town square” Musk says he wants it to be. Which is to say the government should buy and run Twitter, just as government owns and operates actual town squares. Yes, I’m talking about a “socialist” takeover of Twitter, just like we have “socialist” libraries, schools and museums.

I don’t think that they understand what they’ve advocated, because a public utility cannot deny service to anyone who will pay the bill! It doesn’t matter how odious someone might think my opinions to be: Jackson Energy Cooperative cannot deny me the electricity service I use to power my too-old computer as long as I pay my sparktricity bill. Verizon cannot deny me the cell phone service for which I’ve contracted as long as the bill is paid, even if they’re worried that I might say something unsavory over the phone. Mr Bunch and Miss Marcotte somehow seem to think that if Twitter were a public utility, the utility’s directors could ban people they don’t like. Perhaps they just don’t understand what a public utility actually is?

Well, I actually (kind of) agree: Twitter should be considered a public utility, not only because of the size of its reach, but because governments at all levels use Twitter and Facebook — but not Parler or Truth Social — to communicate with the public. Virtually every government in the United States, federal, state, and local, have a Twitter account that they use. Being a public utility does not mean that it cannot be privately owned, as most of our electric, water, telephone , and natural gas companies are.

As a private publisher, Twitter was able to censor information it didn’t want disseminated, information which turned out to be the truth, and the left liked that. Now that Twitter is owned by someone who actually favors freedom of speech, the left don’t like it, don’t like it at all. It wasn’t just the Hunter Biden laptop story; Twitter routinely throttled down messages that exposed the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines did not actually keep a person from contracting the SARS-CoV-2, something we now also know to be true, because the left just can’t handle the truth.

References

References
↑1 The First Street Journal’s Stylebook is exactly the opposite: while we do not change the direct quotes of others, in original material we always refer to people by their normal, biological sex and their original names.
↑2 Chad Malloy is a man male who claims to be a woman, and goes by the faux name “Parker.”
↑3 There’s some dispute, but I believe that the Hartford Courant, founded in 1764, is the oldest, followed by the Post, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, as second, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, founded in 1829, third.
↑4 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑5 As we have previously noted, Mr Bunch’s newspaper has been begging for donations to help keep it afloat.
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They thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.

Ever since Powerline and Little Green Footballs spotted the use of forged documents by CBS News 60 Minutes, in their attempt to swing the 2004 election away from President Bush and toward Senator John Kerry (D-MA), the credentialed media were, or at least should have been, put on alert that there were eyes on them, looking for the kind of bovine feces they had long been peddling. And so you’d think that the editors of The Washington Post would have learned that lesson by now, 18 years later.

So, when James Woods tweeted a screen capture from the Post, it was going to live forever, regardless of how the editors tried to soften the headline. It didn’t work.

Covid is no longer mainly a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Here’s why.

Analysis by McKenzie Beard | Wednesday, November 23, 2022 | 7:46 AM EST

For the first time, a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine.

Fifty-eight percent of coronavirus deaths in August were people who were vaccinated or boosted, according to an analysis conducted for The Health 202 by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

It’s a continuation of a troubling trend that has emerged over the past year. As vaccination rates have increased and new variants appeared, the share of deaths of people who were vaccinated has been steadily rising. In September 2021, vaccinated people made up just 23 percent of coronavirus fatalities. In January and February this year, it was up to 42 percent, per our colleagues Fenit Nirappil and Dan Keating.

If you hover your cursor on the Post’s article title, you’ll see the hyperlink for it, and see that it was originally https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinated-people-now-make-up-majority-covid-deaths/, “Vaccinated people now make up majority (of) covid deaths”. I am reminded of Tony Stark’s line in the first Avengers movie, “That man is playing Galaga. He thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did.”

You can read the rest at the link, and if the Post’s paywall stymies you, another site has copied it.

Also see: William Teach: Vaccinated Account For Majority Of Wuhan Flu Deaths

Let’s be clear about this: the original headline would grab far more attention than the revised one, and part of a headline writer’s job — articles in newspapers traditionally have an editor rather than the author compose it — is to write a headline which is accurate but will still grab the reader’s attention and make it more probable that he will read the article.

But the original title very much undercuts what William Teach noted yesterday, “World Leaders Sign Declaration to Introduce COVID Vaccine Passports“:

At this year’s G20 Summit in Indonesia, the twenty participating world leaders signed a declaration to introduce vaccine passports for their respective jurisdictions, with the stated intention of creating a global verification system to facilitate safe international travel. (snip)

In a statement, the leaders affirmed their respective countries’ support of the World Health Organization mRNA Vaccine Technology Transfer hub, which aims to build capacity in low- and middle-income countries to produce mRNA vaccines.

The leaders said they welcome joint production and research of vaccines and acknowledge the importance of shared technical standards and verification methods.

They also agreed to a globalised ‘vaccination passport’.

While the details are scant at this stage, the statement says this will be done under the framework of the International Health Regulations to “facilitate seamless international travel, interoperability, and recognizing digital solutions and non-digital solutions, including proof of vaccinations.”

Indonesia’s Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said that a Digital Health Certificate using World Health Organization standards would be introduced during the next World Health Assembly in Geneva, in May next year.

“If you have been vaccinated or tested properly, you can move around. So for the next pandemic, instead of stopping the movement of people 100%, you can still provide some movement of the people,” Mr Sadikin said.

So, it’s somewhat alarming that governments – and of those belonging to the G20, the majority represent democracies – would consider introducing a passport that, since it was first mooted by individual countries, been widely condemned as medical discrimination as well as a violation of privacy with serious ethical implications.

Of more concern are reports that the vaccine won’t just apply to Covid vaccinations, but also to any vaccination that WHO recommends is required for international travel.

But if the SARS-CoV-2 virus is simply bypassing the vaccinations, something we have known for a year now, there is really no purpose in requiring vaccine passports, at least no real medical purpose. There is, as always, a Control Of People purpose. The editors of the Post have no real objections to more government control over the public, at least not if that control is exercised in the direction they like.

Between my wife and I, we’ve been in the Netherlands, Scotland, Canada, Israel and Switzerland — three of them just airport layovers, but there was nothing stopping us from leaving the airport in those countries — in the past two months, and neither of us has ever been asked for our vaccination records. We did carry them with us, in case they were required, but I, for one, was very happy that the busybodies and Karens didn’t ask. We were not asked for such when we returned to the United States.

While we have the stupid COVID-19 vaccination records, being relatively recent, how many people have their childhood vaccination records? Sure, I had all of the childhood vaccinations when I was a child, but that stuff was sixty years ago. The physicians who administered them are all probably dead, their offices gone. The school I attended from third grade through high school closed after the 1976 school year; where would those vaccination records be?

The vaccines are available for free, and anybody who wants to take them can do so. What the government does not like is the fact that those who do not want to take them have the right not to take them, so our government, and other governments, want to add more coercive pressure on those who decline.

I am not opposed to the vaccines, and am vaccinated myself. But I am very much opposed to the government trying to coerce people, trying to use force to get people to comply. A nation which has individual liberty as its standard should never, ever do that, and should always be resisted.

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Brynn Tannehill and the American left love them some freedom of speech and of the press . . . for themselves. For conservatives? Not so much!

I will admit it: I had not heard of Brynn Tannehill before seeing this tweet from my good Twitter friend Robert Stacy McCain. Now I don’t know what Mr McCain tweeted to her that she found blockworthy — though blockworthy seems to have a pretty low threshold among many on the left — but, as I frequently do when I see something like that, I checked out the blocking author.

It didn’t take too much scrolling down to find this tweet in Miss Tannehill’s file. She is exercising her freedom of speech and of the press to tell us why other people ought not to have the same rights. That is, sadly, far too typical of the American left!

Why Elon Musk’s Idea of “Free Speech” Will Help Ruin America

Twitter without content moderation—and with Donald Trump and others reinvited—means that lies and disinformation will overwhelm the truth and the fascists will take over.

by Brynn Tannehill | Wednesday, October 26, 2022

After months of legal wrangling, Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter appears to be finally going through. Musk and the right see this as a great thing because it will restore “free speech” to Twitter. Any suggestion that the sort of “free speech” they envision can have highly undesirable consequences is met with howls of “Libs hate free speech” or other accusations of fascism. Similarly, warnings that unfettered free speech results in dangerous misinformation spreading are derided with “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” and the libertarian belief that in the marketplace of ideas, the best will always win out.

These theories will be tested quickly. It is being reported that after the sale is finalized, Musk plans on laying off nearly three-quarters of Twitter’s staff and that one of the first things to go will be any corporate attempt at content moderation and user security. Musk also plans on restoring the accounts of high-profile sources of disinformation and violent messaging who were previously banned, most notably former President Trump.

Well, of course it’s all about Donald Trump, who has been living rent-free in the heads of the left since before he was elected, and still now, after he’s been out of office for 21 months. We have often noted how some of the major organs of the credentialed media, including those who have so vigorously defended their own freedom of speech and of the press, have advocated censoring other people’s freedom of speech and of the press, all as the left scram that evil reich-wing Republicans are the fascists! That Miss Tannehill has previously accused Republicans of wanting to ban books only makes it more hypocritical, and more humorous.

OK, at this point, 9:41 PM EDT on Friday, October 28th, I need to make a serious correction. When I originally wrote this article, I made a huge, huge error: I failed to check the author’s biography, and did something silly like use the feminine honorifics and pronouns. Commenter 370H55V I/ME/MINE notified me of the error, and now I need to correct it. It turns out that Bryan Tannehill was a 1997 graduate of the United States Naval Academy, and began to ‘transition’ in 2010. I left the above part of my article in place, as written, but shall now correct the rest of it.

The pro-Musk arguments are complete nonsense, and there are innumerable historical and modern examples of why social media platforms with nearly unlimited freedom of speech produce horrors. The Supreme Court decided free speech isn’t absolute long ago, when Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes noted that you can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, for obvious reasons.

As happens so often among the anti-free speech crowd, Miss Mr Tannehill wholly missed the point. From Schneck v United States, 249 US 47 (1919), internal citations omitted:

But it is said, suppose that that was the tendency of this circular, it is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Two of the strongest expressions are said to be quoted respectively from well-known public men. It well may be that the prohibition of laws abridging the freedom of speech is not confined to previous restraints, although to prevent them may have been the main purpose, as intimated in Patterson v. Colorado. We admit that in many places and in ordinary times the defendants in saying all that was said in the circular would have been within their constitutional rights. But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. Aikens v. Wisconsin. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force. Gompers v. Buck’s Stove & Range Co. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

The entire opinion is short, and can be easily read in just a couple of minutes, but what Miss Mr Tannehill and others have so often forgotten is that while Associate Justice Holmes — he was never Chief Justice of the United States, as Miss Mr Tannehill claimed, though he was once Chief Justice of the Massachusetts state Supreme Court — said that the First Amendment does not protect a man from the consequences of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater and causing a panic and, presumably, a stampede for the exits, he never stated that the worry that someone might do such, without solid information about a specific, real, and credible threat justifies the law disallowing him from entering a theater in the first place. Miss Mr Tannehill and the like-minded left are basing their desire to shut down access to the most important organs of free speech these days to those they fear might shout “Fire!” in that crowded theater.

First, freedom of speech has caused untold death and suffering when used to disseminate hate or spread disinformation. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a fabricated antisemitic text that purported to expose a global baby-murdering Jewish plot bent on world domination. Mein Kampf was Hitler’s autobiography, which blamed Germany’s post–World War I woes on a global Jewish conspiracy. Both were readily available in the Weimar Republic, which had no First Amendment per se but guaranteed freedom of speech. They were key contributors to the fall of German democracy, the rise of the Third Reich, and the Holocaust itself.

Godwin’s law, also known as Godwin’s rule of Hitler analogies, “is a statement maintaining that if any online discussion continues long enough, someone will almost certainly compare someone else to Hitler. Typically, the comment likens someone to Hitler or calls that person a Nazi, and the individual described in that way is often a participant in the discussion. The law is thought to apply to conversations about any conceivable topic.” Miss Mr Tannehill leapt to that in just four paragraphs!

In modern times, lack of moderation on social media sites has repeatedly contributed to mass murder. The Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter killed 51 Muslims at two mosques after being radicalized on YouTube, 4Chan, and 8Chan. The shooter who killed 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh had been radicalized on the social media site Gab, which advertised itself as the “free speech” alternative to Twitter. Dylann Roof killed nine people at the historically Black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, after he self-radicalized online. Investigations revealed that Google searches steered him further and further into extremist propaganda and hate.

Conservatives might just as well have stated that the free dissemination of the unfortunate death of George Floyd during a legitimate arrest helped lead to 2020’s summer of hate riots under Antifa and #BlackLivesMatter, though I suspect that Miss Mr Tannehill might disagree with that. If the freedom of speech and of the press are to be restricted because they might lead to harm, it has to be remembered: the speech that will be limited depends upon who is doing the limiting. Had President Trump been the horrible fascist that the left told us he was, he might have just suppressed the freedom of speech and of the press of the left. Oddly enough, the proposal for having Nina Jankowicz to lead a Ministry of Truth “Disinformation Governance Board” under the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security never occurred under President Trump; that was a (quickly trashed) idea of the Biden Administration. Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz was aghast that it had been torpedoed:

But within hours of news of her appointment, Jankowicz was thrust into the spotlight by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating. The board itself and DHS received criticism for both its somewhat ominous name and scant details of specific mission (Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said it “could have done a better job of communicating what it is and what it isn’t”), but Jankowicz was on the receiving end of the harshest attacks, with her role mischaracterized as she became a primary target on the right-wing Internet. She has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral.

Of course, Miss Lorenz being appalled that the “Disinformation Governance Board” was a flopped idea, was somewhat hypocritical, given that Miss Lorenz had been most recently famous for her investigation and doxing of Chaya Raichik, a Brooklyn-based real estate saleswoman and creator of the Twitter site that the left hate, Libs of TikTok. Freedom of speech is for the left, not the right.

There’s a lot more at Miss Mr Tannehill’s original, trying to tell us all about the horrors that freedom of speech has caused, and telling us that the “libertarian fairy tale” of the “free market of ideas”, that “truth will inevitably conquer demonstrably false narratives” but then she he concludes with a strange paragraph:

As far as the free market goes, people forget that the usual result of completely unregulated markets is monopolies. Ideas within social media are no different. “Free speech” competitors to Twitter such as Gab, Parler, Truth Social, and GETTR (which exert little to no moderation) are uniformly conservative monocultures full of the worst kinds of misinformation and hate outside of 4Chan and Kiwifarms. Parler’s former CEO has begged liberals to join the site and even offered people $20,000 to do so, without any success. Musk himself has made it clear that he plans to follow down the path of Parler and Truth Social, posting a meme of himself, Donald Trump (owner of Truth Social), and Ye (formerly Kanye West and now owner of Parler) as the Three Musketeers.

It’s also true that Gab and Parler and the rest are simply not very large; begun to compete with Twitter, they can’t hold a candle to Twitter’s success. However good or bad they are, they are not winners in the competition for customers. Liberal Twitter has been winning, in part because conservatives like Mr McCain, and me, have been using Twitter because it allows a far more widespread dissemination of what we want to say.

The problem with the oh-so-noble left is that they just can’t handle the truth! Allowing, gasp! conservatives to speak freely on Twitter might just challenge the left’s thinking, and that simply cannot be allowed.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer, which declines to print the photos of criminals who are black, sure is willing if the perp is white. That the perp is a former police officer is just icing on the cake for the Inky!

As we have previously noted, The Philadelphia Inquirer chose not to publish the photos of Quadir Jones, charged in the rape of a 13-year-old girl leaving a SEPTA train station on her way to school, or Yaaseen Bivins, already convicted and awaiting sentencing for an incident killing an unborn child, and now accused in the Roxborough High School shootings, but they made certain that we knew a former Warminster police officer who pleaded no contest to sexually assaulting five underaged boys was a white guy:

‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing’: For years, a Warminster police officer sexually assaulted troubled teens, DA says

James Carey assaulted four teenage boys he met through the D.A.R.E. program, prosecutors say.

Screen Capture from Philadelphia Inquirer, October 27, 2022. Click to enlarge.

by Vinny Vella | Thursday, October 27, 2022 | 12:26 PM EDT

A Warminster police officer acted as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and sexually assaulted four teenage boys he knew were dealing with difficulties at home, Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub said Wednesday.

More than 30 years after the initial alleged attacks, James Carey was arrested Wednesday and charged with felony sexual abuse.

“A police officer’s creed is to protect and serve his community,” Weintraub said. “In a perverse and cruel dereliction of duty, James Carey took advantage of the rank and credentials he had as a police officer on the job to prey on our community’s most vulnerable.”

Carey, 52, met his victims between 1988 and 2000, when he worked as an officer in the D.A.R.E antidrug program at schools in the Centennial School District in Warminster, Weintraub said. But he had access to victims beyond the schools, including on overnight camping trips to the Poconos and to Camp Ockanickon, a Boy Scout facility in Pipersville, the district attorney said.

With his conviction, Mr Carey faces a maximum of 94½ to 189 years in prison. 🙂 Whatever his sentence, I suspect that a convicted child rapist who is a former police officer will not much enjoy his time in prison.

Let me be clear about this: I have no objection to the Inquirer publishing photos of criminals. Indeed, I think that they should be published, and it is The First Street Journal’s policy to do just that. But that the Inky, which publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes proclaimed to be an “anti-racist news organization,” one which would:

  • establish “a Community News Desk to address long-standing shortcomings in how our journalism portrays Philadelphia communities, which have often been stigmatized by coverage that over-emphasizes crime,”
  • create “an internal forum for journalists to seek guidance on potentially sensitive content and to ensure that antiracism is central to the journalism,” and
  • examine their “crime and criminal justice coverage with Free Press, a nonprofit focused on racial justice in media”

seems to have decided that the way to do that is to indicate for readers when crimes, especially crimes committed by police officers, are committed by white people.

Perhaps that’s what Miss Hughes thought would be the right thing to do after declaring that the Inquirer was a ‘white newspaper’ in a ‘black city.’

The Inquirer did not just publish the offender’s photograph after he was convicted, but did so on April 20, 2021, shortly after he was arrested, 1½ years before conviction, as I have documented in this screen capture, taken at 4:39 PM EDT on Thursday, October 27, 2022. Why the screen capture? It ought to be obvious: I do not trust the editors of the Inquirer not to scrub the earlier article once this is pointed out to them!

Want more proof? Published just this afternoon:

Samir Ahmad, taken during FBI sting operation, photo via Steve Keeley, Fox 29 News, on Twitter. Click to enlarge.

Guns used in Roxborough shooting later ended up in the hands of a Philadelphia sheriff’s deputy

Samir Ahmad, a four-year veteran of the department, was arrested while at work last week as part of an FBI gun trafficking investigation, court records say.

by Ellie Rushing and Jeremy Roebuck | Thursday, October 27, 2022 | 4:35 PM EDT

Two of the guns used in the shooting outside of Roxborough High School last month, which left a 14-year-old dead and four teens injured, later ended up in the hands of a Philadelphia sheriff’s deputy who then illegally resold the weapons to a federal informant, according to a court filing unsealed Thursday.

Samir Ahmad, 29, a four-year veteran of the department, was arrested at work last week as part of an FBI gun-trafficking investigation, the records say.

The photos of now-fired Deputy Sheriff Samir Ahmad were freely available, and on Twitter an hour before Miss Rushing’s and Mr Roebuck’s story was published. The Roxborough High School football field shooting has been a major story in the City of Brotherly Love, so this wasn’t just a minor gun trafficking story. But the Inquirer reporters and editors did not, for some reason, publish the photos alleging to show the now-former Deputy Sheriff in the act of selling guns, somehow lifted from evidence lockers, to what he thought was a criminal and an illegal immigrant, but turned out to be an FBI agent.

The credentialed media sure didn’t like being called #FakeNews, something which challenged their veracity and credibility, but they sure have been caught in the act doing it, kind of a lot. The credentialed media rarely tell outright lies, but they often omit important pieces of information when the whole truth would undermine their political positions.

Now, here the Inky goes again, trying to conceal the races of black law-breakers, not that readers wouldn’t have guessed just from the names of the accused that they were black, but making sure that readers would know when an accused man (at first) and now convicted sex offender and rapist is white.

The part I really don’t get? The editors, reporters, and publisher of the newspaper know that people like me are watching, yet they keep doing the same stuff, over and over and over again.

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I guess the Inky needs help before Christmas!

This is not the first, nor even the second begging letter — just 3½ months ago — I have received from the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the non-profit owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, but it is as amusing as all of the others.

I have frequently referred to our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, in our nation’s sixth largest city and seventh largest metropolitan area as The Philadelphia Enquirer ever since RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake. I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I have found it very apt. The Inky, despite Philly’s size, is only our nation’s 17th largest newspaper, by circulation. Why? I have suggested that part of it is because the Inquirer censors the news!

Just two days ago, I pointed out that four people had been murdered in the City of Brotherly Love, and the Inky didn’t even mention any of them.

In attempting to meet publisher Elizabeth Hughes stated goal of making the Inquirer an “anti-racist news organization,” the newspaper published its “Black City. White Paper” series, which, in effect, told white readers and potential readers that the Inky was really not for them.

Nor is it even true. Philadelphia isn’t a “black city.” The 2020 census found that just 38.3% of the city’s population were non-Hispanic black, and Hispanics, who can be either black or white, made up 14.9%. Between non-Hispanic whites, 34.3%, Asians, 8.3%, and “other groups,” 4.3%, the city is 46.9% non-black, and it doesn’t take a terribly large percentage of the Hispanic population being white to get the city to majority non-black. The non-Hispanic white population of the city have certainly declined, but they are hardly gone.

More, the Philadelphia metropolitan area is very much majority white. Perhaps, just perhaps, the Inquirer practically marketing itself as a newspaper for a “Black City” isn’t really something that’s going to help it to sell well in West Chester or Bucks County.

The Inquirer used to proclaim itself, on the newspaper’s masthead, that it was a “Public Ledger” and “An Independent Newspaper for All the People”. That “Independent Newspaper” blurb was even proudly emblazoned on its old building, but the newspaper under Miss Hughes has been telling us that no, it is no longer a “Public Ledger,” and that it is no longer a “Newspaper for All the People.”

Why did Annie McCain Madonia, the Chief Advancement Officer for the leftist Lenfest Institute, call me “a supporter of The Philadelphia Inquirer“? It’s simple: it’s because I am a subscriber for the digital newspaper.[1]As much as I really do love actual printed newspapers, I now live well outside the newspaper’s physical delivery area. Before I retired, I used to pick up a dead trees copy of the Inquirer to … Continue reading And I am paying $21.96 every four weeks for my digital subscription, more than I pay for The Washington Post, $99 a year, and more than I pay for The New York Times, $17.00 every four weeks. Given that I used to live in the Keystone State, and Philadelphia is the city about which I am most concerned, and about which I most frequently write, I’ll continue to pay that subscription. But I think that I have contributed quite enough to the Inky, thank you very much.

But the Inquirer needs to get better; it needs to report all the news, not just what Miss Hughes and Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar consider to be politically correct.

With the advent of digital publication, even though the dead trees edition has gotten physically smaller, newspapers in digital format are no longer constrained by word counts or assigned column inches. Newspapers have always had the ability to go more in depth than television news and their quick-fire show-and-tell stories, and now, with space constraints gone, really get into the heart of stories. The Inky can be better than it ever was.

I did, however, note, with a photo, that our forebears across the pond have been able to keep newspapers full-sized.

Instead, it has gotten worse. Instead, the newspaper has gotten so thoroughly eaten up with ‘progressive’ ideology that the editors refuse to cover the news which might be politically incorrect, refuse to publish the news which might be outside Miss Hughes ideology. With Lenfest’s ownership, the Inquirer actually can call itself “An Independent Newspaper,” but they are failing in the “for All the People” part. I have frequently noted the differences between journalism and journolism,[2]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading and too much of the Inky is the latter.

I’ve said it before: if I had Jeff Bezos’ money, I’d do what he did with The Washington Post: I’d buy the Inquirer and rescue it from its financial problems. But I would also clean house, I would make sure that the newspaper really did cover all the news, and publish all of the news, letting the chips fall where they may, regardless of whose feelings might get hurt. That’s what real journalists are supposed to do.

References

References
↑1 As much as I really do love actual printed newspapers, I now live well outside the newspaper’s physical delivery area. Before I retired, I used to pick up a dead trees copy of the Inquirer to take to the plant.
↑2 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Journolism: ignoring the “Five Ws + H” in reporting due to political correctness

Despite having spent two years on the staff of the Kentucky Kernel, the University of Kentucky’s student newspaper, I was never a journalism major. That does not mean that I have been completely uneducated on reporting and newswriting, though I must say that newswriting under 2022 standards is nothing like it was in the 1970s.

One of the most basic journalism standards is the “Five Ws,” frequently referred to as the “Five Ws + H.” It’s pretty simple: “who, what, when, where, and why,” with the addition of “how”. Who is involved, what happened, when and where did it happen, why did it happen, and how did it happen. These are the things for which every responsible editor looks, and will come back to the reporter or newswriter — not always the same person — if one of them is missing.

Sometimes, especially with a breaking news story, one or more of those “Ws” is simply unknown, and deadlines being what they were, and are, a story will get rushed to publication while missing one of the six important points. In most such cases, there will be a note at the end to the effect of “This is a breaking story and will be updated.” With the advent of digital publication, where newspapers have online versions, this can be fairly frequent, as newspaper editors, in competition with television and internet media, don’t want to sit on a story.

Which brings me back to something I covered Thursday evening, the decision of the Cherokee County School Board to not play the Highlands School girls’ volleyball team. Several credentialed media sources covered the story, and they gave us the “who”, the Cherokee County School Board, the “what”, the decision to forfeit all scheduled games with Highlands, the “when”, Thursday, September 21st, the “where,” the Cherokee County School Board meeting, and the “why,” because a “Hiwassee Dam High School volleyball player got neck and head injuries when a Highlands athlete spiked a ball”.

Except, as it happens, the credentialed media sources all censored part of the “why.”

Volleyball players spike the ball! They all try to spike the ball, to deliver a shot against the opponent with such speed and force that the defense cannot react quickly enough to prevent the ball from hitting the ground inbounds. That a player in a (supposedly) non-contact sport was injured by a spiked ball is infrequent, but certainly not unheard of.

If you read only the credentialed media stories, you might be scratching your head, wondering why the School Board would take such a decision, against one player on one team. Spiking the ball is, after all, part of the game, and if the Board were concerned that a spiked ball injured a player, and that somehow made the game unsafe, then a reader might wonder why the Board didn’t simply cancel all girls’ volleyball games, with all opponents.

And that’s the part of the “why” the credentialed media censored: the Highlands School girls’ volleyball player that so forcefully spiked the ball isn’t a girl! The unnamed-in-the-media player is a boy who “identifies” as a girl, and that’s why the Cherokee County Board of Education took the decision the way they did. The report from the Cherokee County Board of Education is here.

The Board’s report noted:

Mr. Jason Murphy stated to the Board that he hoped they voted on this issue based on their morals, ethics and Christian upbringing.

In other words, there was a political and religious aspect to the Board’s decision, as raised in the meeting, and it is at least possible, though the Board denied it, that political and religious considerations influenced the decision. Surely that would be a newsworthy part of the “why” of the decision.

Ms. Jordan Lovingood asked the Board to consider how their decision will affect the Highlands’ player this decision is being made about. She stressed how we are teaching inclusion and acceptance in our schools, yet making a decision to not play a team based on sex.

(Board member) Mr. (Joe) Wood commented that no one is basing their decision on sex; it’s based on safety.

This would normally be a very contentious point, yet the credentialed media completely ignored all of it, because to have included it in their stories would have been to inform readers that the player in question is not, to use a phrase in the Board’s report, “100% girl”.

I frequently use the word “journolism”, the spelling of which comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. Perhaps some would find that unfair, but what better reflects when (purported) journalists ignore the basic principles of reporting and newswriting in order to protect the political position that ‘transgender’ girls are real girls?

The credentialed media got really, really upset when they were accused of #FakeNews, but what else would you call it when the media censor the news in the way they did in this story? If the media aren’t trusted, this is just part of the reason why.

I found out about this story not through the credentialed media, but due to definitely biased bloggers, and I put some effort into searching out confirmation of this through the credentialed media; it took the link to the Board of Education’s report of the meeting, in the Washington Examiner, certainly a conservatively biased source, to gain unbiased confirmation. But when biased bloggers report the whole story, while the professional media will not, there’s something wrong with our professional media.

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Journolism: media bias at its finest The credentialed media didn't publish anything untrue, but they deliberately chose to omit the most important fact

No, there isn’t a typographical error in the article headline. The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.

Sometimes that bias is deeply buried, and at first, I wondered if this was a hoax, because I wasn’t finding any credentialed media verification of the story. But finally, I found it from an ABC News station:

After player injury, Cherokee Co. schools forfeit all volleyball games against 1 school

by Jordan Karnbach | Tuesday, October 4, 2022

CHEROKEEE COUNTY, N.C. — All girls’ volleyball teams in the Cherokee County school district will forfeit upcoming regular season games against one competitor due to a recent player injury, according to Cherokee County School Board member Arnold Mathews.

Mathews told us in an email on Tuesday that the board determined the varsity and junior varsity teams in the district won’t play the Highlands School volleyball team “due to safety concerns,” Mathews said.

That decision came after a Hiwassee Dam High School volleyball player got neck and head injuries when a Highlands athlete spiked a ball, which “forcefully struck” the athlete in the head, says Mathews.

Mathews says this decision does not affect any other sports or teams in the district.

You know what isn’t in any of the credentialed media reports? What isn’t there is that the ball which was forcefully spiked was spiked by a ‘transgender girl’, meaning: a male who identifies as a girl and is playing on the girls’ volleyball team.

Several non-credentialed sites picked up that part, and it took some digging through them to find the confirmation. There was considerable debate among the Cherokee County Board of Education meeting, but if you read through the meeting minutes, you’ll see what the credentialed media tried to hide: yes, the player in question is a “biological male”.

Dr. Lisa Fletcher, Principal Murphy High, informed the Board that at the athletic association meeting she had just attended the issue of student’s playing based on their birth certificate gender is going to be addressed in the future. She advised the Board to communicate with the Athletic Association regarding this issue.

Mr. Steve Colemen addressed the safety concern for the female players facing a biological male player. He added that the Board should make a stand because if it isn’t addressed now, it’s possible in the future that a Cherokee County team could face a team with all biological males playing; and if this isn’t addressed there is a risk for biological male students taking over women’s sports.

The Board of Education clearly took its decision based on the fact that the Highlands girls’ volleyball team had a male team member; that ought to be news, ought to be an important part of the story, and is the “why” for the entire decision, but the credentialed media have censored that part. The credentialed media didn’t publish anything untrue, but they skewed the entire story by deliberately omitting the most important, most relevant fact. How is that not lying?