Silence the opposition

A Word on Free Speech

After I wrote my last post on government censorship, they went and tried to do it harder. Biden is screaming about Twitter. Hillary is demanding that the EU, who has no Constitution protecting free speech, pass laws to force Twitter into censorship.

I planned for this. My server is outside of US or EU control. I’m not saying that this website can’t be silenced if the US is determined, just that it won’t be easy.

I agree with Aesop on this one: I just don’t see these wholesale tyrants giving up power voluntarily. There will be bloodshed.

Some have suggested that I switch this blog to an email service if free voices on the Internet are finally silenced. I don’t think I will do that. Should that come to pass, I think we can agree that at that point, the time for talking is over.

There are other ways to be heard, and we won’t be silenced.

By Divemedic, ago

Propaganda Warfare

Back in June, I wrote about the Biden administration establishing a Ministry of Truth to police anyone online that would distribute facts that the government finds objectionable. This is one of the reasons why my server isn’t in the US. Anyway, the idea isn’t dead. A leaked document from DHS (pdf Alert) details how the Feds are going to police wrongthink and limit what people have to say. The Office of the Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security is endeavoring to stop “dangerous” ideas from spreading on the internet. They claim that they won’t be preventing free speech, but I don’t trust that any further than I do a promise from Obama that I can keep my doctor.

The Global War on Terror has effectively ended. Terror won, in case you didn’t know. The US got its ass kicked, and the Afghanistan airlift proved that to the world. Anyway, all of those Federal Employees have to find something else to do in order to mark time and fulfill budgets until they can retire, so the war on freedom inconvenient facts disinformation is just the ticket. The Intercept reports:

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.

That is why my server is in another country. In fact, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media meet on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives . The meetings between the private sector and government are for representatives of those government agencies to dictate how firms would handle what the government calls ‘misinformation’ being distributed over media- including social media.

Just months before the 2020 election, the FBI and other agencies met with large media companies to discuss how the election results would be reported. Why would you need to discuss them? Just report the results. The answer, of course, is that the results and their dissemination would have to be “handled” and “spun” so that the people would accept what they were being told.

During the March 2022 meeting, an FBI official warned that statements made on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government. According to senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase who were in attendance in that meeting, the FBI stressed that we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable. In other words, the FBI is attempting to turn our media, including social media, into official information outlets of the state.

The FBI even has a special portal that they use to “request” that Facebook censor or throttle certain statements or information. The DHS division that is in charge of managing this is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The CISA has an advisory committee that includes the former Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety- none other than Vijaya Gadde, who was fired this week by Elon Musk.

That committee drafted a report calling for the CISA to remake the “information ecosystem.” This would involve the CISA closely monitoring “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, ‘hyper partisan’ media, talk radio and other online resources.” The committee made the case that the government needed to take steps to halt the “spread of false and misleading information,” with a focus on information that undermines “key democratic institutions, such as the courts, the financial system, or public health measures.”

When business and government merge in order to forward the aims of the government to control the population is Mussolini Fascism.

“The Fascist conception of life,” Mussolini wrote, “stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual.” Sound familiar? To me, it sounds like the very platform of the Democrats today.

Gizmodo is getting onboard with this:

Gullible people eat up a gross diet of disinfo and loosely-factually-vetted, ideology-soaked infotainment, then run off to cause chaos in the real world. Who knows how bad things could get now with Elon on the loose

The odd thing about all of this is that the leftist media is screaming about how Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the ones spreading disinformation, but they aren’t the ones in charge of the government, now are they? The left is trying to insinuate that the appointees of Donald Trump are still in government and trying to sow disinformation, but I am not sure that anyone with half a brain thinks that DJT was ever in charge of the bureaucratic branches of the swamp.

The government is expanding its efforts to control the media. That same inspector general report details how the Customs and Border Protection determines whether information spread through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are accurate. The report also lists how agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement determine whether social media accounts are bots or humans, and how the mayhem caused by bots affects behavior. The Secret Service has reportedly also expanded their purview to include disinformation.

Keep in mind that President Biden has said that MAGA Republicans are the enemy of the state, and now you see how the war on those who would oppose the left is proceeding. Be ready.

By Divemedic, ago

Awww… Who’s a sad clown?

Robert Reich:

What ever happened to last year’s opinion?

LOL. You told people that if they didn’t like it, they should get their own Twitter, so they did. Schadenboner.

By Divemedic, ago

Correction

I want to make a correction to my earlier post about the Rubio staffer who was attacked. It turns out that the attacker was Christopher Monzon. The man who attacked him was Javier Jesus Lopez. I got the names reversed in my original post.

I also want to add that the press, especially the openly communist press in Miami, is running with the “white supremacist” claims. The press is now reporting that Monzon was at the Charlottesville protest. I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Let’s say that every claim is true- he WAS at the Charlottesville protest. How would his attacker have known that? Even if Monzon was there, and even if his attacker knew that, does that mean his attacker gets a free pass?

This is dangerous territory. A continuation of Antifa’s “punch a Nazi” campaign, it’s a call to political violence. They forget that this can work both ways. Did a person say something mean about you? Beat them within an inch of their lives…” I seem to recall a certain asshole calling me deplorable.

By Divemedic, ago

Targeting

Communists are still committing violence against the right. A staffer for Marco Rubio suffered serious injuries late Sunday night while knocking on doors as a campaign worker.

“Last night one of our canvassers wearing my T-shirt and a DeSantis hat was brutally attacked by 4 animals who told him Republicans weren’t allowed in their neighborhood in Hialeah, Florida”

By Divemedic, ago

First Amendment

If the government pays a burglar to break into your house to see what you have, then the police use that evidence to arrest you, they have just violated your right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

If the government pays a private contractor to burn down your church, or throw you in prison, or even prevent you from publishing books, your rights have been violated. It doesn’t matter if a business did it, especially if they did it at the behest of the government. If the government and businesses work together to deprive their citizens of rights, that is fascism. In fact, that is EXACTLY what Mussolini did.

With all that being said, the Biden administration has passed a regulation that bans the sale or distribution of books written by certain people, and they are getting the world’s largest book seller to enforce it.

This is a clear violation of the First Amendment, and was even used as an example during oral arguments in the Heller case. It was Chief Justice Roberts who asked “Would it be constitutionally acceptable for a municipality to ban books as long as newspapers—a viable substitute source of expression—were still legal?” The answer is no, of course.

How far we have come since then.

By Divemedic, ago

Real Goal of the Alex Jones Judgement

Alex Jones has to pay $1 billion. He says he will fight, delay, and appeal for years. In any case, he is likely done. Still, the reason for what was done to him is apparent to anyone paying attention. Just look at this article from the Guardian: Only proper online regulation can stop poisonous conspiracists like Alex Jones and by Alex Jones, they mean anyone on the right, including and especially Donald Trump. I quote:

Jones, like QAnon, Donald Trump and others, can navigate fake news sites and social media to reach millions…No one seriously believes free speech is an absolute right. The British government is now making desperate attempts to define such concepts as “causing offence” and “legal but harmful”. More ruthless efforts at control are emerging from authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The EU, too, is pondering regulation. But this realm of government is patently in its infancy.

The freedom of speech which to John Milton was “above all liberties” is not that simple today.

You get that? They consider censorship like Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the EU, and the UK are preferable to the freedom to say what you think. That is the lesson of Alex Jones: shut up, peasant. Silencing the opposition, it’s what every communist revolution needs to do.

By Divemedic, ago

Listen

Do you want to know what is coming here in the US? All you have to do is listen. On August 26, Biden told Democrats that, “The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security… They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans have made their choice — to go backwards full of anger, violence, hate, and division. But we’ve chosen a different path forward, the future, unity, hope and optimism.”

Then, just last week, the White House Press Secretary said that anyone who doesn’t agree with Democrats is an extremist.

The President himself then sent this message out on social media.

The NY Times is comparing the American right to ISIS and the Taliban. The Times goes on to call the grievances of the right “either wild exaggerations or outright fantasies — antifa supersoldiers, totalitarian globalists, satanic pedophiles.”

Now word comes out just today that Hillary Clinton said 9/11 is a reminder US must ‘deal with extremism of any kind.’ Then the reporter asked Clinton, “All of America’s elected officials really genuinely put party aside and came together after those attacks. Would that be possible today?”

“Well, I hope that it will be, and I give President Biden a lot of credit for trying to continue to reach out to people while still sounding the alarm about the threats to our democracy,” Clinton responded.

So the party that spent the four years of the Trump presidency screaming ‘resist’ and ‘not my President’ while simultaneously doing all that they could to oppose Trump’s policies is, now that their party is in the Oval Office, demanding that the entire country fall in line behind the President.

That isn’t how this works. Still, Clinton went on: “So we are in a funny position, Dana, because there’s a small, but very vocal, very powerful, very determined minority who wants to impose their views on all the rest of us, and it’s time for everybody, regardless of party to say, ‘No, that’s not who we are as America.’”

It’s working. In a Reuters poll, most Americans polled see Trump supporters as being a threat to the country. Fifty-eight percent of respondents in the poll – including one in four Republicans – said Trump’s supporters are threatening America’s democratic foundations.

This is the sort of talk that you would expect in a country where a political power or a dictator is getting ready to purge people, is getting ready to ethnically cleanse people. This is not normal talk.

Professor William A Jacobson, Founder of the Website Legal Insurrection

It’s clear- they intend to eliminate what they are referring to as a “threat to democracy.” That threat is anyone who opposes them.

That threat to be eliminated is you.

By Divemedic, ago

End Run

If a cop asks a criminal to break into your house to search it for evidence of a crime as an end run around the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for a search warrant, is that an infringement of your rights?

If the government asks a media company to censor free speech in order to influence an election, were people’s rights violated?

The FBI is the Sword and Shield of the Democrat party.

By Divemedic, ago

Censorship

The Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania says that the First Amendment does not protect people who claim the election was stolen. According to him, freedom of speech means the ability to “talk all day about what [your] favorite football team is,” but no one has the right to say “incendiary lies” about the election.

He uses the “fire in a theater” excuse, which is a load of bullshit. As I have written here before:

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the most well-known, misquoted, and misused phrase in Supreme Court history: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

Without fail, whenever any controversy about limiting people’s rights comes up, someone will misquote this phrase as proof of limits on the right to free speech, then use that as support for their claim that all rights have limits. Whatever that controversy may be, the law can then be interpreted to mean that we should limit the rights of the people. Holmes’ quote has become a crutch for every would be tyrant in America.

Go read the case where the phrase originated before using it as your argument. I will wait. The case is U.S. v. Schenck, and it was so bad that was overturned more than 50 years ago.

The case had nothing to do with fires or theaters or false statements. Instead, the Court was deciding whether Charles Schenck, the Secretary of the Socialist Party of America, could be convicted under the Espionage Act for writing and distributing a pamphlet that expressed his opposition to the draft during World War I. The case didn’t call for violence. It did not even call for civil disobedience. It simply urged people to vote out any politician who supported it.

The crowded theater remark that everyone likes to trot out was an analogy Holmes made before issuing the court’s holding. He was explaining that the First Amendment is not absolute. The actual ruling, that the pamphlet posed a “clear and present danger” to a nation at war, landed Schenk in prison. That case, along with two others, was used to toss people in prison for daring to oppose or speak out against President Wilson’s policies.

The case was effectively overturned in 1969, with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio. In that case, the Court held that inflammatory speech, even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan, is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech “is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Sound familiar? This is why they can’t do shit about what President Trump had to say on January 6, nor can they legally shut down the speech of the right. So instead, they are allowing large megacorporations to have monopolies on the digital town square, they coopting them into performing the censorship for them.

By Divemedic, ago