Tag Archives: #FreedomOfSpeech

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Are there no mirrors in the Biden Administration?

The much nicer, and better-looking, Dana commented, on Patterico’s Pontifications:

Boom:

The United States strongly condemns the use of harsh tactics against protesters and journalists this weekend in cities throughout Russia. Prior to today’s events, the Russian government sought to suppress the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression by harassing protest organizers, threatening social media platforms, and pre-emptively arresting potential participants. This follows years of tightening restrictions on and repressive actions against civil society, independent media, and the political opposition.

Continued efforts to suppress Russians’ rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, the arrest of opposition figure Aleksey Navalny, and the crackdown on protests that followed are troubling indications of further restrictions on civil society and fundamental freedoms. Russians’ rights to peaceful assembly and to participate in free and fair elections are enshrined not only in the country’s constitution, but also in Russia’s OSCE commitments, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in its international obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

We call on Russian authorities to release all those detained for exercising their universal rights and for the immediate and unconditional release of Aleksey Navalny. We urge Russia to fully cooperate with the international community’s investigation into the poisoning of Aleksey Navalny and credibly explain the use of a chemical weapon on its soil.

Putin now: Damn Navalny for surviving that poison!

Of course, in the good and noble United States, we would never try “to suppress the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression by harassing protest organizers, threatening social media platforms, and pre-emptively arresting potential participants.”

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Tulsi Gabbard Williams is very much a leftist, but the left hate her anyway Why? It's because she believes in our constitutional rights!

JVW, one of the regular posters on Patterico’s Pontifications, and the one who was least infected with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, calls her his Little Aloha Sweetie, and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard Williams (D-HI 2nd) was the most sensible — not that that’s saying a whole lot — of the Cavalcade of Clowns running for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination. She is a true left liberal. From her Wikipedia biography:

Tulsi Gabbard (/ˈtʌlsi ˈɡæbərd/; born April 12, 1981) is an American politician and United States Army Reserve officer who served as the U.S. Representative for Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021. Elected in 2012, she was the first Hindu member of Congress and also the first Samoan-American voting member of Congress. In early February 2019 she announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election.[1][2]

In 2002, Gabbard was elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives at the age of 21.[3] Gabbard served in a field medical unit of the Hawaii Army National Guard in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was deployed to Kuwait from 2008 to 2009 as an Army Military Police platoon leader.[4][5][6] She was a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2013 to 2016, when she resigned to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

Gabbard supports a two-tier universal health care plan that she calls “Single Payer Plus”[7][8][9] and strengthening Roe v. Wade by codifying it into federal law. Her position has evolved on the issue and she now believes that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”, although it is not a choice she would personally make.[10][11] She co-sponsored the Family Act for paid family and medical leave and endorsed universal basic income.[12][13][14] She opposes military interventionism,[15][16] although she has called herself a “hawk” on terrorism.[17] Her decision to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and her skeptical approach to two claims that he had used chemical weapons[18][19] were controversial.[20]

On March 19, 2020, Gabbard dropped out of the 2020 presidential race and endorsed Joe Biden. She had already withdrawn from her U.S. House re-election race during her presidential campaign and was succeeded by Kai Kahele on January 3, 2021.[21]

Mrs Williams greatest claim to fame in that primary was how she eviscerated Senator Kamala Harris Emhoff (D-CA) in the debates. That helped to torpedo Mrs Emhoff’s campaign, but, sadly, the eventual nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, selected her to be his vice presidential running mate. Mrs Emhoff is now Vice President of the United States, while Mrs Williams is out of public office. 🙁

But if she’s a leftist, Mrs Williams is one other thing: she’s a libertarian (not Libertarian), in that she believes in really radical things like freedom of speech. and privacy rights. The 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, disliked Mrs Williams enough that she ‘hinted’ that JVW’s Little Aloha Sweetie was actually a Russian stalking horse, and that the evil Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would use her as a third party candidate to try to split the liberal vote and hand the election to President Donald Trump.

Of course, Mrs Clinton has always found someone else to blame for her loss:

Clinton also said she thought Jill Stein, the Green Party’s 2016 presidential nominee, was a Russian asset: “Yeah, she’s a Russian asset – I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”

Bitter much? https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif

From National Review:

Tulsi Gabbard: Domestic-Terrorism Bill Is ‘a Targeting of Almost Half of the Country’

By Brittany Bernstein | January 23, 2021 | 10:05 AM

Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative from Hawaii, on Friday expressed concern that a proposed measure to combat domestic terrorism could be used to undermine civil liberties.

Gabbard’s comments came during an appearance on Fox News Primetime when host Brian Kilmeade asked her if she was “surprised they’re pushing forward with this extra surveillance on would-be domestic terror.”

“It’s so dangerous as you guys have been talking about, this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends,” Gabbard said.

No, we don’t have to guess about how things like this end; the results have been seen around the world.

She continued: “When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he’s spoken with or heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements similar to the insurgencies they’ve seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians.”

She said her concern lies in how officials will define the characteristics they are searching for in potential threats.

“What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? Where do you take this?” Gabbard said.

As noted above, Mrs Williams supports abortion, but, how about that, she was concerned for the rights of those of us who are pro-life. We saw Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) try to impose her own religious test on then nominee to the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, and now Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, because Mrs Barrett is pro-life, yet Mrs Williams, who is pro-abortion, could support the rights of, shockingly, Catholics!

I’m old enough to remember how the left were the ones who insisted that Freedom of Speech was absolute, and how The New York Times fought for Freedom of the Press. Today, it seems, that the left are all for restricting freedom for those with whom they disagree, using the January 6th kerfuffle — and yes, that’s what it was, a kerfuffle, blown wholly out of proportion by liberals — as an excuse, but, as we’ve noted before, the attempts to restrict freedom of speech were already happening.

The Washington Post, which has the tagline “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on its masthead, has, on its website, several articles all bemoaning the Freedom of Speech and of the Press.

The hypocrisy is astounding! The Post certainly defended its freedom of the press, in its own piece of the Pentagon Papers case, but now the editors and the newspapers’ columnists seem to want darkness to fall on people and opinions they dislike. No wonder the left hate Tulsi Gabbard Williams.

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Speaking truth to power means telling the truth I will not tell lies just to not hurt someone's feelings

I found this on Twitter:

It would not surprise me that Richard Levine, a mentally ill male who thinks he’s a woman and calls himself “Rachel,” wanted to do that, but it appears that the Associated Press has retracted the article:

AP Retracts Article About Biden’s New Assistant Secretary Of Health Declaring “Hostile Misgendering” A Mental Illness

By Clover Chronicle | January 20, 2021

An article that was reportedly posted by mainstream news media outlet Associated Press (AP) revealed how Rachel Levine – President Joe Biden’s pick for Assistant Secretary of Health – is vowing to make “hostile misgendering” a mental illness under his administration’s new health guidelines.

Title: Biden’s pick for Assistant Secretary of Health vows to make “hostile misgendering” a mental illness under administration’s new health guidelines

Summary: Rachel Levine, herself a Transgender women [sic], has been appointed as assistant secretary of health and has vowed to save America’s Trans kids from misgendering

It has to be conceded that the whole thing could have been faked. Some enterprising hacker could have put the whole ting together and inserted it on the AP site. But, as we have previously noted, Joe Biden wants to ‘normalize’ transgenderism, and The New York Times, which so vigorously protected its own First Amendment rights in New York Times Co v United States, wants to limit the freedom of speech for other people and, more specifically, supports bans on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering.’[1]‘Misgendering,’ as used by the credentialed media, means referring to a ‘transgender’ person with pronouns or other forms of address which claim that person to be his … Continue reading

Let me be clear here: while some claim that going along with a ‘transgendered’ person’s preferred pronouns and name is simply a matter of being polite, to me it is an attempt to coerce people to lie. More, by pushing people to lie, the credentialed media are attempting to turn a lie into accepted truth.

I will not participate in such.

Dr Levine has been Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health under Governor Tom Wolf (D-PA), and, with the coronavirus outbreak, has been in the news rather a lot for the last ten months. While The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Commonwealth’s ‘newspaper of record,’ noted Dr Levine as being ‘transgender’ in the stories about his appointment by Mr Biden, due to the ‘historic nature’ of it, in stories not related to the appointment, Dr Levine is simply referred to by his assumed name, and referred to with the feminine pronouns.

While the AP story about Dr Levine wanting to define “hostile misgendering” as a “mental illness” might be a fake, he might well consider it to be:

Pa. health secretary denounces transphobic attacks: ‘Our children are watching’

by Sara Simon | July 28, 2020

HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania’s top health official on Tuesday denounced a recent series of transphobic attacks against her, saying she felt compelled to personally address the discrimination.

“While these individuals may think that they are only expressing their displeasure with me, they are in fact hurting the thousands of LGBTQ Pennsylvanians who suffer directly from these current demonstrations of harassment,” Health Secretary Rachel Levine said at a news briefing.

“I have no room in my heart for hatred,” she said. “And frankly, I do not have time for intolerance.” . . . .

In her remarks, Levine expressed the need for Pennsylvanians to “work towards a spirit of not just tolerance, but a spirit of acceptance and welcoming,” and told LGBTQ youth, “It is OK to be you.”

“Our children are watching,” she said. “They are watching what we do. And they are watching how we act.”

Yes, our children are watching, and Dr Levine knows that if parents go along with the cockamamie notion that a person can change his sex, just to be polite, it will subtly educate their children to believe that ‘transgenderism’ is normal, positive and real.

This is Orwellian Ministry of Truth stuff. If the credentialed media repeat the lie often enough, if the New York City Commission on Human Rights can force people to use the ‘transgendered’s’ preferred forms of address, it is normalizing the notion to try to turn a lie into the truth.

In the year 2525, if man is still alive following a nuclear holocaust, some enterprising anthropologist, trying to find clues as to what society was like back in the 21th century, is going to come across the grave of Dr Levine. Exhuming the remains, he will do detailed measurements of the skeleton, the soft tissue having long ago decayed away, and state, from the hip structure, “The subject was male.” Going further, this scientist will be able to extract some DNA from the remains, run an analysis, and state, having found the subject had XY chromosomes, “The subject is confirmed as having been male.”

In the year 3535
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today

It seems that Zager and Evans were overly optimistic that it would take so long; Twitter, The Philadelphia Inquirer, really all of the credentialed media, the government of New York City, all want to be the pill that governs everything you think, do, and say.

Well, Dr Levine and Bruce Jenner and Bradley Manning can call themselves whatever they want; that’s their right. But it is my right not to go along with their delusions, and I will not. I will do as I always have done; I will speak the truth.

References

References
↑1 ‘Misgendering,’ as used by the credentialed media, means referring to a ‘transgender’ person with pronouns or other forms of address which claim that person to be his biological sex rather than the sex he claims to be. At The First Street Journal, misgendering is referring to a ‘transgender’ person by the sex he claims to be rather than his actual, biological sex. ‘Deadnaming,’ according to the credentialed media, means referring to a person by his given name at birth rather than the name he claims to be following ‘transition.’ The First Street Journal’s Stylebook notes that we always refer to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth rather than the name he claims.
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Selling our birthrights for a mess of pottage

Don’t think that the American left don’t believe this! From Breitbart:

UK Police Chief: ‘Now Is Really Not the Time’ for Freedom of Speech, Right to Assembly

by Jack Montgomery | January 15, 2021

The chief constable of Dorset Police has urged lockdown protesters to accept that “now is really not the time” for freedom of speech and the right to assembly.

Chief Constable James Vaughan was speaking after the controversial arrest of two women for, seemingly, being recorded leaving home more than once and “sitting on a bench”, in an incident the police now allege was “stage-managed” by lockdown protesters, as one of the women is a Covid sceptic — although she denies any pre-planning.

“We appealed to them [the protesters] last weekend to say: ‘Look guys, we respect your right to freedom of speech and right to assembly but now is really not the time, it is too dangerous. Please don’t come, we have got other things we need to do,’” said the chief constable in comments to The Telegraph.

“Instead of giving us a break this weekend they decided to change their tactics and it just smacks of civil disobedience, really,” he complained, saying that he was “a bit angry and frustrated with these protesters on Saturday” and claiming that his officers “were acting with utter courtesy and restraint”.

Chief Constable Vaughan’s zero-tolerance attitude towards protesters differs markedly from that shown by British police leaders towards Black Lives Matter activists, who have been allowed to break lockdown rules largely unmolested throughout the pandemic — in part, London Police Commissioner Cressida Dick admitted in June, because officers are afraid to enforce the law against them.

There’s more at the original. The Breitbart article is not behind a paywall, but their internal references to the UK Telegraph are.

The sad thing is that I’m seeing the same arguments from good American citizens, some of whom at least used to be conservatives. Several state Governors, including Andy Beshear (D-KY), Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Tom Wolf (D-PA) suspended our First Amendment right to peaceable assembly — except when it came to the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations last spring, summer and fall, with Governor Wolf actually joining one such demonstration, despite it breaking his own gathering rules — and our right to the free exercise of religion.

When Chief Constable Vaughan said, “we respect your right to freedom of speech and right to assembly but now is really not the time, it is too dangerous,” he was telling people that he did not respect their “right to freedom of speech and right to assembly,” not as much as he respected his own police power.

Her Majesty’s subjects do not, of course, have as strongly guaranteed rights as we have in the United States, but many, many Americans seem to have forgotten that we are free of the British Crown specifically because our ancestors came to these shores because their own rights, their own freedom of religion, was being stifled by the British Crown and the official Church of England, because our ancestors risked their lives and fortunes and sacred honor to fight for our freedom.

Esau Sells His Birthright for Pottage of Lentils, a 1728 engraving by Gerard Hoet.

Genesis 25:29 When Jacob had cooked a stew one day, Esau came in from the field and he was exhausted; 30 and Esau said to Jacob, “Please let me have a mouthful of that red stuff there, for I am exhausted.” Therefore he was called Edom by name. 31 But Jacob said, “First sell me your birthright.” 32 Esau said, “Look, I am about to die; so of what use then is the birthright to me?” 33 And Jacob said, “First swear to me”; so he swore an oath to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. 34 Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew; and he ate and drank, and got up and went on his way. So Esau despised his birthright.

So many of our citizens are willing to sell their birthrights, as Americans, for their mess of pottage.

The Germans, free Germans, in free elections, sold their birthrights to Adolf Hitler, because times were tough. Free Venezuelans, even when times were not too tough, sold their freedoms to Hugo Chavez for the false promises of socialism, and now look where they are.

Freedom surrendered, rights given away, can be lost easily, but one must fight to get them back. It is better to bear the risks that come with retaining your rights than the death which can fall upon you in the struggle to regain them once lost.

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The out-of-touch Lexington Herald-Leader doesn’t like it when the riff-raff express their opinions

It is with some amusement that I noted that the Editorial Board of what my, sadly late, best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal, in their complaints that Republicans in the Bluegrass State need to grow up:

Impeach Beshear? Seriously? In Frankfort and DC, Republicans need to act like grownups.

By Herald-Leader Editorial Board | January 22, 2021 | January 11, 2021 | 11:01 AM EST | Updated 11:11 AM EST

In the same week the U.S. Capitol was overrun by the domestic terrorists who make up Donald Trump’s base, Kentucky’s state legislature got to work. The “superdupermajority” of Republicans put all their energy and brain-power into making sure Gov. Andy Beshear was hampered in efforts to save us all from coronavirus, and then to put a cherry on it, announced they will set up a committee to impeach him.

So on one side of Frankfort is an earnest, serious politician, one who hasn’t gotten everything right but has tried hard to battle a pandemic the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1918. On the other side, we have some distinctly unserious people who are working hard on curbing said serious politicians, and, say, on how to hamstring the last two abortion clinics in the state while thousands of people get sick of COVID-19 and die.

If you want to know just how not serious these people are, they had to quickly amend their bill curbing the governor’s powers to close schools and businesses after Beshear himself reminded them that sometimes his rules were less stringent than the CDC.

Then to top off this tragicomedy of errors, House officials announced a panel to take up articles of impeachment against Beshear as a bunch of armed thugs circled the state Capitol. This is the same kind of militia movement that earlier this year hung an effigy of Beshear outside the governor’s mansion.

This must stop.

Senators Dennis Parrett, D-Elizabethtown, from left, Jared Carpenter, R-Berea, and Brandon Smith, R-Hazard, right, walk past demonstrators a protest at the State Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., Saturday, Jan. 9, 2021. Alex Slitz ASLITZ@HERALD-LEADER.COM

Armed thugs, huh? According to the dictionary, a thug is defined as “a violent person, especially a criminal.” Yet the article the Editorial Board linked bears no mention of any shots being fired. An accompanying photograph shows three state senators, one of whom was a Democrat, walking past the “armed thugs” without an apparent care in the world.

“The same kind of militia movement that earlier this year hung an effigy of Beshear outside the governor’s mansion”? Hanging the hated in effigy has a long history in America, as noted in The Hill:

Americans have a long history of citizens committing violence against president effigies to voice political dissent.

James Madison, John Tyler, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter were all burned in effigy during their presidencies. And each time this happened, the offending party leaders repudiated the distasteful and disrespectful actions of their constituents.

President Obama was hanged in effigy, and Kathy Griffin posted a picture of her holding President Trump’s severed head.

The Editorial Board again:

But Republicans in Frankfort and Washington, D.C., who have played pattycake with these kinds of extremists for years, have got to stop this wing of the party from hijacking them literally, it seems, and on policy. They have got to become grown-ups and stop with these silly games that end in not so silly ways.

Did the hanging of Governor Beshear in effigy last spring end in violence? It seems that no one was harmed, other, perhaps, than the feelings of his supporters. Did the armed demonstration on January 9th result in injuries, damage or death? If it did, the Herald-Leader had nothing about that.

The Editorial Board appear to be like Twitter and The New York Times and others: they don’t like freedom of speech when it isn’t speech with which they agree.

In the article on the impeachment request, Herald-Leader reporter Daniel Desrochers noted that the petition was by four citizens, and that while there has been some talk about it in the legislature, “no sitting lawmaker has formally called for Beshear’s impeachment.” It would seem, then, that the Editorial Board is railing not against members of the General Assembly, but against a few citizens.

Of the four citizens who filed the petition, two aren’t even Republicans. Mr Desrochers noted that one of them, Jacob Clark, a 38-year-old machinist from Grayson County, is a Libertarian. Andrew Cooperrider of Lexington is also a Libertarian.

I would point out here the Editorial Board’s recent political endorsements:

  • 2020: Joe Biden for President, Amy McGrath for Senate, and Josh Hicks for 6th District Representative;
  • 2018: Amy McGrath for 6th District Representative
  • 2016: Hillary Clinton for President, Jim Gray for Senate, and Nancy Jo Kemper for 6th District Representative
  • 2014: Alison Lundergan Grimes for Senate, and Elisabeth Jensen for 6th District Representative

All Democrats, and all defeated in Kentucky and in the 6th District. It seems that the Herald-Leader Editorial Board isn’t exactly in tune with the voters of the Commonwealth.

Sadly, the editorial board did get their way in 2019, and Andy Beshear was elected. All he did was unconstitutionally suspend our First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion and peaceable assembly, claiming that COVID-19 somehow trumped the Constitution of the United States, the same Constitution they are so vociferously defending when it comes to the election of Joe Biden. It’s almost as though there was some hypocrisy there!

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No, no attack on #FreedomOfSpeech at all! It isn't just 'insurrection' speech the left are trying to stifle

As we noted a few days earlier, Twitter hates Freedom of Speech. Parler is a Twitter-like message sharing board, created specifically because Twitter and Facebook had been censoring messages, primarily from conservatives. Oh, both services claimed that they were just keeping threats and violence off their services, but, as one might expect when the ‘judges’ of such things are almost entirely from the political left, messages from conservatives, and the banning of certain users, was heavily tilted against patriotic Americans. They deleted President Trump’s accounts, but the Twitter account of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is still active:

From The New York Times:

How Parler, a Chosen App of Trump Fans, Became a Test of Free Speech

The app has renewed a debate about who holds power over online speech after the tech giants yanked their support for it and left it fighting for survival. Parler went dark early on Monday.

By Jack Nicas and Davey Alba | Published January 10, 2021 | Updated January 11, 2021 | 3:21 AM EST

John Matze, chief executive of the alternative social networking app Parler, has said the app welcomes free speech. Credit…Fox News, via YouTube

From the start, John Matze had positioned Parler as a “free speech” social network where people could mostly say whatever they wanted. It was a bet that had recently paid off big as millions of President Trump’s supporters, fed up with what they deemed censorship on Facebook and Twitter, flocked to Parler instead.

On the app, which had become a top download on Apple’s App Store, discussions over politics had ramped up. But so had conspiracy theories that falsely said the election had been stolen from Mr. Trump, with users urging aggressive demonstrations last week when Congress met to certify the election of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Those calls for violence soon came back to haunt Mr. Matze, 27, a software engineer from Las Vegas and Parler’s chief executive. By Saturday night, Apple and Google had removed Parler from their app stores and Amazon said it would no longer host the site on its computing services, saying it had not sufficiently policed posts that incited violence and crime.

Early on Monday morning, just after midnight on the West Coast, Parler appeared to have gone offline.

Translation: Freedom of Speech, the raison d’être for Parler’s existence, was not to be allowed. Mr Matze parlayed:

That’s a screenshot, because Mr Matze’s parlay is not visible on the site, because the site is down.

I’ve said in the past that Parler has some serious issues with its presentation, as you can see in the screenshot; it just isn’t as good as Twitter, and Mr Matze’s efforts to update it haven’t been particularly successful. But that does not mean it should be shut down.

From Wikipedia:

Many jurisdictions have laws under which denial-of-service attacks are illegal.

  • In the US, denial-of-service attacks may be considered a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act with penalties that include years of imprisonment.[109] The Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the US Department of Justice handles cases of DoS and DDoS. In one example, in July 2019, Austin Thompson, aka DerpTrolling, was sentenced to 27 months in prison and $95,000 restitution by a federal court for conducting multiple DDoS attacks on major video gaming companies, disrupting their systems from hours to days.[110][111]
  • In European countries, committing criminal denial-of-service attacks may, as a minimum, lead to arrest.[112] The United Kingdom is unusual in that it specifically outlawed denial-of-service attacks and set a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison with the Police and Justice Act 2006, which amended Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.[113]
  • In January 2019, Europol announced that “actions are currently underway worldwide to track down the users” of Webstresser.org, a former DDoS marketplace that was shut down in April 2018 as part of Operation Power Off.[114] Europol said UK police were conducting a number of “live operations” targeting over 250 users of Webstresser and other DDoS services.[115]

On January 7, 2013, Anonymous posted a petition on the whitehouse.gov site asking that DDoS be recognized as a legal form of protest similar to the Occupy protests, the claim being that the similarity in purpose of both are same.

What the big boys have done to Parler is different in method, by the same in kind.

The Times again:

Parler’s plight immediately drew condemnation from those on the right, who compared the big tech companies to authoritarian overlords. Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican, told Fox News on Sunday that “Republicans have no way to communicate” and asked his followers to text him to stay in touch. Lou Dobbs, the right-wing commentator, wrote on Parler that the app had a strong antitrust case against the tech companies amid such “perilous times.”

Parler has now become a test case in a renewed national debate over free speech on the internet and whether tech giants such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon have too much power. That debate has intensified since Mr. Trump was barred from posting on Twitter and Facebook last week after a violent mob, urged on by the president and his social media posts, stormed the Capitol.

The tech companies’ actions last week to limit such toxic content with Mr. Trump and Parler have been applauded by liberals and others. But the moves also focused attention on the power of these private enterprises to decide who stays online and who doesn’t. And the timing struck some as politically convenient, with Mr. Biden set to take office on Jan. 20 and Democrats gaining control of Congress.

The tech companies’ newly proactive approach also provides grist for Mr. Trump in the waning days of his administration. Even as he faces another potential impeachment, Mr. Trump is expected to try stoking anger at Twitter, Facebook and others this week, potentially as a launchpad for competing with Silicon Valley head on when he leaves the White House. After he was barred from Twitter, Mr. Trump said in a statement that he would “look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future.”

Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was understandable that no company wanted to be associated with the “repellent speech” that encouraged the breaching of the Capitol. But he said Parler’s situation was troubling.

Troubling, huh? How odd that an organization dedicated to defending Freedom of Speech, such as the march by neo-Nazis through the heavily Jewish village of Skokie, Illinois, only finds this “troubling,” and not outrageous.

Skokie authorities contended that the activities planned by the Nazi party were so offensive to its residents that they would become violent and disrupt the Nazi assembly, initially planned to take place on the steps of city hall on May 1, 1977. Therefore, they sought an injunction against any assembly at which military-style uniforms, swastikas or Nazi literature were present. Frank Collin appealed to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to represent the marchers’ right to free speech and assemblage. The President of the Chicago ACLU chapter said: “We have no choice but to take the case.” In its brief, ACLU attorneys claimed that so long as the demonstrators were peaceable, no injunction could be issued against their activities; furthermore, that such an injunction would constitute a prior restraint forbidden by the First Amendment. The ACLU relied upon First Amendment doctrines articulated consistently over the past fifty years by the Supreme Court, and recently by Chief Justice Warren Burger, who said: “The thread running through all of these cases is that prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.”

The Times article with which I began was a straight news piece, but this was on their OpEd pages last week:

Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech?

A debate has broken out over whether the once-sacrosanct constitutional protection of the First Amendment has become a threat to democracy.

By Thomas B. Edsall | January 6, 2021

In the closing days of his presidency, Donald Trump has demonstrated that he can make innumerable false claims and assertions that millions of Republican voters will believe and more than 150 Republican members of the House and Senate will embrace.

“The formation of public opinion is out of control because of the way the internet is forming groups and dispersing information freely,” Robert C. Post, a Yale law professor and former dean, said in an interview.

Before the advent of the internet, Post noted,

People were always crazy, but they couldn’t find each other, they couldn’t talk and disperse their craziness. Now we are confronting a new phenomenon and we have to think about how we regulate that in a way which is compatible with people’s freedom to form public opinion.

Trump has brought into sharp relief the vulnerability of democracy in the midst of a communication upheaval more pervasive in its impact, both destructive and beneficial, than the invention of radio and television in the 20th Century.

The left like to claim that the Capitol demonstration was some sort of coup d’etat attempt, but if it was planned at all, it was planned even worse than the Beer Hall Putsch. Yet, using that as an excise, they would stifle our Freedom of Speech.

There’s a lot more at the original, but it’s amusing. The New York Times was a staunch defender of the First Amendment, fighting against prior restraint in New York Times Co v United States, 403 US 713 (1971), the so-called Pentagon Papers case. But that was then, before the internet, when the Times was the biggest voice among the gatekeepers, the ones who got to decide what got published, and what did not. The credentialed media have long despised that they no longer have that control, that anybody can now publish, and anyone who wants to read what someone has to say can access it, normally for free.[1]The Times allows people without subscriptions ten ‘free’ articles per month before things go behind the paywall. I am not a Times subscriber, and I opened the Times’ articles cited … Continue reading Freedom of speech and of the press are things the Times supports, when it comes to the speech of which the editors approve. For others, not so much.

Mr Edsall quoted Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale:

The problem of propaganda that Tim Wu has identified is not new to the digital age, nor is the problem of speech that exacerbates polarization. In the United States, at least, both problems were created and fostered by predigital media.

The central problem we face today is not too much protection for free speech but the lack of new trustworthy and trusted intermediate institutions for knowledge production and dissemination. Without these institutions, the digital public sphere does not serve democracy very well.

Ahhh, yes, those “trustworthy and trusted intermediate institutions for knowledge production and dissemination,” meaning, for The New York Times, the Times itself and its long-lost gatekeeping functions.

A strong and vigorous political system, in Mr Balkin’s view,

has always required more than mere formal freedoms of speech. It has required institutions like journalism, educational institutions, scientific institutions, libraries, and archives. Law can help foster a healthy public sphere by giving the right incentives for these kinds of institutions to develop. Right now, journalism in the United States is dying a slow death, and many parts of the United States are news deserts — they lack reliable sources of local news. The First Amendment is not to blame for these developments, and cutting back on First Amendment protections will not save journalism. Nevertheless, when key institutions of knowledge production and dissemination are decimated, demagogues and propagandists thrive.

We do not need an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth,” the pundits tell us, but they are arguing for almost that, that the dissemination of thoughts and information be somehow regulated by the elites, private company elites to be sure, so that “demagogues and propagandists” do not thrive, that the ideas which are so very, very appalling to the political left die of loneliness.

Yet we are a nation created by “demagogues and propagandists,” by Thomas Paine and his Common Sense, by Patrick Henry and his great statement, “Give me liberty or give me death.” We had a great Civil War, egged on by “demagogues and propagandists” such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by John Brown’s rebellion, and slavery was ended due to this.

The left are appalled that Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, that he used media like Twitter to talk above the credentialed media, that WikiLeaks was able to publish Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails over the internet, and that, horrors! President Trump still has millions of supporters. But, despite Mr Trump’s supporters, he was still defeated, and handily, for re-election. The ugly demonstration at the Capitol on January 6th was just that, an ugly demonstration, one far less destructive and deadly than the Summer of fire and Hate led by the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations. The left like to claim that the Capitol demonstration was some sort of coup d’etat attempt, but if it was planned at all, it was planned even worse than the Beer Hall Putsch. Yet, using that as an excise, they would stifle our Freedom of Speech.

Of course, it isn’t just insurrection from which the Times believes we ought to be protected. On October 4, 2019, they published an OpEd by staffer Andrew J Marantz, entitled Free Speech Is Killing Us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?

Having spent the past few years embedding as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.

Then there was the Times publishing an OpEd by Parker Malloy, claiming that Twitter’s restrictions on ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’ transsexuals actually promoted freedom of Speech:

How Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech

Trans people are less likely to speak up if they know they’re going to be constantly told they don’t exist.

By Parker Molloy | November 29, 2018

In September, Twitter announced changes to its “hateful conduct” policy, violations of which can get users temporarily or permanently barred from the site. The updates, an entry on Twitter’s blog explained, would expand its existing rules “to include content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target.” A little more than a month later, the company quietly rolled out the update, expanding the conduct page from 374 to 1,226 words, which went largely unnoticed until this past week.

While much of the basic framework stayed the same, the latest version leaves much less up for interpretation. Its ban on “repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone” was expanded to read: “We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”

The final sentence, paired with the fact that the site appeared poised to actually enforce its rules, sent a rumble through certain vocal corners of the internet. To trans people, it represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur. But to many on the right, it reeked of censorship and “political correctness.”

Twitter is already putting the policy into effect. Last week, it booted Meghan Murphy, a Canadian feminist who runs the website Feminist Current. Ms. Murphy hasn’t exactly supported trans people — especially trans women. She regularly calls trans women “he” and “him,” as she did referring to the journalist and trans woman Shon Faye in a 2017 article. In the run-up to her suspension, Ms. Murphy tweeted that “men aren’t women.” While this is a seeming innocuous phrase when considered without context, the “men” she was referring to were trans women.

As a transgender woman, I find it degrading to be constantly reminded that I am trans and that large segments of the population will forever see me as a delusional freak. Things like deadnaming, or purposely referring to a trans person by their former name, and misgendering — calling someone by a pronoun they don’t use — are used to express disagreement with the legitimacy of trans lives and identities.

Defenders of these practices claim that they’re doing this not out of malice but out of honesty and, perhaps, even a twisted sort of love. They surely see themselves as truth-tellers fighting against political correctness run amok. But sometimes, voicing one’s personal “truth” does just one thing: It shuts down conversation.

It shuts down the conversation? And just what does compelling those who do not believe that someone can simply change his sex to acquiesce in the claims of a ‘transgendered’ person by agreeing with his changed name and the use of his preferred pronouns do? If I am compelled to refer to Mr Malloy as “Miss Malloy” or “Parker Malloy,” am I not conceding in the debate his claim that he is a woman?[2]The Times identifies the author as “Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) is a Chicago-based writer and editor at large at Media Matters for America.” Mr Malloy identified himself as “a … Continue reading

Let’s cut through the bovine feces here: the left are simply opposed to the Freedom of Speech and of the Press when what is said or printed is opposed to what they want people to be able to hear or read. It isn’t just they are trying to save the country from a rebellion, but they are concerned that someone might say that Bruce Jenner isn’t a woman.

If you can control the input, the conversation, then you control the output, the decision, and that’s what the heavily leftist controlled media and social media sites are trying to do. If saying things of which they disapproved is censored, then the beliefs of people will eventually be pushed into the things in which the left believe. Or, more bluntly, garbage in, garbage out.

References

References
↑1 The Times allows people without subscriptions ten ‘free’ articles per month before things go behind the paywall. I am not a Times subscriber, and I opened the Times’ articles cited in this post without paying a cent.
↑2 The Times identifies the author as “Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) is a Chicago-based writer and editor at large at Media Matters for America.” Mr Malloy identified himself as “a trandgender woman” in his article. I do not use “Ms” as an honorific; it is an abomination. Women are referred to as Miss, Mrs or, when appropriate, Dr. Parker Malloy is not his birth name; I found a reference which implied, but did not directly state, that his birth name was Chad Malloy.
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Twitter hates Freedom of Speech

To the surprise of exactly no one, Twitter has permanently banned President Trump.

And now Google blocks messaging app Parler from its store. Parler does not censor people, and was created precisely because Twitter and Facebook do censor people they don’t like . . . which primarily means conservatives.

Google has blocked the messaging and social network app Parler from its store.

The company cited the “urgent public safety threat” in restricting the app, touted as a free-speech alternative.

Google said in a statement that it reminded Parler in recent months of its policies requiring apps with user-generated content to remove “egregious content like posts that incite violence.”

A Google spokesperson told reports in a statement that the app is being suspended until it addresses issues.

Apple is threatening to do the same thing.

Sadly, as my good friend William Teach noted, Parler is kind of a joke:

The best thing about this is that either Parler will be forced to upgrade its software and site, or something else will replace it.

I’m old enough to remember the Free Speech Movement, a movement of the left. Now, the left hate the freedom of speech, or at least they hate it for people other than themselves.

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Conservative school administrators forced to resign over social media posts The only shocking thing is that The Philadelphia Inquirer printed the story

William F Buckley, Jr, famously said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” The Pico Corollary to that would be that where liberals get concentrated into greater numbers, they channel their offense into actions against those with other views. And there are no more concentrated pockets of liberalism than in our public education systems. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

School administrators say they were forced to resign over conservative Facebook posts

by Maddie Hanna | December 18, 2020 | 6:36 PM EST

Two former administrators at Montgomery County public schools are suing their school districts, alleging that they were illegally forced out of their jobs over Facebook posts criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and Democratic politicians.

Ashley Bennett — a former special education supervisor at the North Penn School District who appeared Thursday on Tucker Carlson Tonight — and Amy Sacks, a former elementary school principal in the Perkiomen Valley School District, said the districts violated their First Amendment rights, retaliating against them for comments made on their personal Facebook pages.

In Bennett’s case, she said she was forced to resign after a June 24 post that criticized Black Lives Matter, in the wake of national protests over the police killing of George Floyd. “I’m just trying to figure out WHICH black lives matter,” said the post, which someone else wrote but Bennett shared. “It can’t be the unborn black babies — they are destroyed without a second thought.” The post accused the movement of harming Black police officers, and media outlets of ignoring “black on black violence.”

I’m not a teacher or education professional, but I’ve certainly said the same things. The outrage over the killings of George Floyd, a convicted felon with a history of armed robbery and drug use, who was high on fentanyl and methamphetamines when caught passing counterfeit money generated a summer of Mostly Peaceful Protests™, and the left fêted Mr Floyd as though he was some kind of saint, when he was nothing but a criminal and a deadbeat dad. The Professionally Offended™ were outraged when two Philadelphia Police officers shot and killed Walter Wallace, even though body cam footage clearly showed the mentally unstable Mr Wallace approaching them with a raised knife. More Mostly Peaceful Protests™ occurred, and the story was in the Inquirer for days.[1]A site search for Walter Wallace returned 94 articles in the Inquirer.

Yet, just last week, the Inquirer ran an article telling us the names of the then 466 people murdered in the City of Brotherly Love,[2]In the seven days since that article was published, that number has increased by ten, to 476. because nobody other than their families and friends knew about them. Helen Ubiñas wrote:

The last time we published the names of those lost to gun violence, in early July, nearly 200 people had been fatally shot in the city.

Just weeks before the end of 2020, that number doubled. More than 400 people gunned down.

By the time you read this, there will only be more.

Even in a “normal” year, most of their stories would never be told.

At best they’d be reduced to a handful of lines in a media alert:

“A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head. He was transported to Temple University Hospital and was pronounced at 8:12 p.m. The scene is being held, no weapon recovered and no arrest.”

That’s it. An entire life ending in a paragraph that may never make the daily newspaper.

Realistically speaking, a lot of the victims didn’t even get that much of a blurb.

Back to the original story:

While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that public employees can express opinions on matters of public concern — in 1968 upholding Illinois public schoolteacher Marvin Pickering’s right to criticize his school board’s spending on athletics in a letter to the editor — North Penn argued that case might not apply to Bennett’s post.[3]Marvin Pickering v Board of Education of Township High School District 205, 391 U.S. 563 (1968).

“There is no clearly established body of case law as to whether the Pickering test shields from censure a teacher’s social media post dismissing Black Lives Matter as nothing more than an expression of hate for the United States President, denying the existence of systemic racism, and invoking ‘destroyed black babies’ and ‘black on black crime,’ ” the district said in the filing.

Note that the school district, in its legal filing, cites “the existence of systemic racism” as a given, as though it is not a subject up for debate. “(I)nvoking ‘destroyed black babies’ and ‘black on black crime’” is apparently an actionable offense, as though “black on black crime” isn’t a serious issue, and as though black women having abortions at nearly five times the rate white women do is not the truth.

I have said it before: We need to stop pretending that #BlackLivesMatter, because in the City of Brotherly Love, it’s very apparent that they don’t.

In Pickering, the appellant was fired for statements the school board claimed were detrimental to the functioning of the school system itself, namely a letter to the editor arguing against a tax increase for the schools. In the cases at hand, the statements made on social media had nothing to do with the operation of the schools, but were comments on the general political questions of the day, during a very political year. Were these private schools, then yes, those schools would have every right to fire the school administrators, because the First Amendment protects Americans against government action. The schools which went after Ashley Bennett and Amy Sacks were public schools, which are unquestionably part of the government.[4]In Pennsylvania, school districts have independent taxing authority, as fifteen years of my property tax bills unfortunately reflected.

While both cases were originally filed separately in state courts, in Montgomery County and Philadelphia, they have been consolidated and are now filed in federal court. This should probably be a good thing, but only time will tell that.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

References

References
↑1 A site search for Walter Wallace returned 94 articles in the Inquirer.
↑2 In the seven days since that article was published, that number has increased by ten, to 476.
↑3 Marvin Pickering v Board of Education of Township High School District 205, 391 U.S. 563 (1968).
↑4 In Pennsylvania, school districts have independent taxing authority, as fifteen years of my property tax bills unfortunately reflected.
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Using the Freedom of Speech and of the Press to condemn other people’s Freedom of Speech

My good friend William Tech’s website, The Pirate’s Cove, has as it’s blog tagline, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” That’s the important part of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” What part of “no law” is so difficult to understand?

Well, some very good people in Minnesota are very upset that the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech and religion of people they despise. From The Washington Post:

Facing a First Amendment fight, a small Minnesota town allows a White supremacist church

By Kim Bellware | December 14, 2020 | 6:00 AM EST

The nation’s ascendant White supremacy movement and small-town bureaucracy collided in rural Minnesota last week when a city council vote over a zoning permit made the 273-person city of Murdock the latest First Amendment battleground.

The Murdock City Council voted 3-1 during a virtual meeting Wednesday to allow the Asatru Folk Assembly to turn the run-down church it purchased in July into its first “hof,” or gathering place, in the Midwest. The looming presence of the obscure Nordic folk religion, widely classified as a White supremacist hate group by extremism and religious experts, promoted months of pushback from concerned residents.

The group purchased a building, and were planning to use it for a legal purpose. The Mayor and City Council didn’t like it, but them not liking it did not mean the city government had any right to block a legal assembly.

Some, naturally, argue that the First Amendment should not cover such a group:

Murdock’s issue underscores the deficiencies with the First Amendment and exposes a lack of neutrality in who it really protects, argued Laura Beth Nielsen, who chairs the Sociology Department at Northwestern University and wrote the 2004 book “License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy and Offensive Public Speech.”

“Right now, every local government is broke trying to deal with coronavirus. The idea that you would arguably subject yourself to a costly lawsuit — what town would want to do that?” Nielsen said. “But letting these organizations flourish and take root is scary, especially if you’re the Black or the Jewish family in town.”

She said Murdock’s individual battle is taking place in a broader legal and social environment where, “in the universe of the First Amendment, White people tend to win.”

White people tend to win? Surely there was little more offensive speech than that of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who called Judaism a “gutter religion.” He was condemned for that, but not fined or imprisoned, because his speech, no matter how vile, is protected by the First Amendment. The Reverend Al Sharpton has uttered plenty of anti-white and anti-Semitic bovine feces, but his statements, too, have, and deserve to have, the protection of the First Amendment. I do not have to like Messrs Farrakhan and Sharpton to believe that they have freedom of speech just as much as I do.

There’s a bit of irony in all of this, because Professor Neilsen is exercising her freedom of speech and freedom of the press to complain that other people’s freedom of speech and of peaceable assembly is “scary.”

The city council in Murdock, Minn., voted December 9 to grant a permit that allows the Asatru Folk Assembly, which has been identified as a white supremacist group, to gather at an abandoned church it bought. (Renee Jones Schneider/AP)

There’s much more at the Post original, with statements by other people, but I want to point out the final two paragraphs:

Nielsen, the Northwestern sociologist, noted that cities routinely restrict the First Amendment over issues it prioritizes, such as anti-pandhandling ordinances or obscenity laws.

“Even though the First Amendment is supposed to operate in this neutral way, when you dig in, hate speech against racial minorities is protected; harassment of women is protected,” Nielsen said. “In the big picture, the First Amendment is reinforcing who already has power.”

span style=”font-family: Georgia;”>To be fair, there is no quotation from the good professor that she believes the First Amendment should somehow be restricted; whether she says anything like that in any of her books, I do not know. But I do know that restrictions on speech, were they allowed, could condemn my website, given that our published Stylebook is not supportive of homosexuality and does not accept ‘transgenderism.’ With the incoming Administration of Joe Biden, RedState, where I frequently cross-post, could be shut down by the government for the many articles there which claim that the Democrats engaged in massive fraud and stole a presidential election they did not legitimately win.[1]I would note here that none of my articles make that claim.

When freedom of speech or the press is limited, the ox which gets gored depends on just who has the power to gore it.

The First Amendment has been used to protect many things I do not like: the American Nazi Party’s march in heavily Jewish Skokie, Illinois, the Westboro Baptist Church’s protests at the funerals of American soldiers, in Snyder v Phelps (2011), or the flag burning case, Texas v Johnson (1989), but it was right to protect those offensive actions. The First Amendment protects The Washington Post’s right to print Professor Neilsen’s objections. There are many things I’d rather not see voiced or printed, but it would be far, far worse for the government to have the power to ban them.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

References

References
↑1 I would note here that none of my articles make that claim.