Sunday, August 28, 2022

The Politics of “Unprecedented” Projection Needs to End


If the Red side has the Deplorables, 
the Blue has the Unbearables
—and they’re in power now.


Our politics are a mess. Our political behavior and its trajectory are well past troubling. My fears are atavistic, and apocalyptic. Three-quarters of a million Americans died in the Civil War, at a time the population of our great country was just one-tenth as large as it is today. You do the math.

We appear to have lost the ability to “agree to disagree,” or even to let the ballot box decide the outcomes of elections. Three things are clear for anyone willing to see them.

First, Democrats and some establishment Republicans were deeply unhappy with the outcome of the 2016 election and proceeded to take extreme and unprecedented measures to undermine, unseat, and hobble a duly elected president.

Second, using the deadly coronavirus pandemic as a rationale, the rules governing the 2020 elections were changed—in a manner that violated several state constitutions, and over the vocal opposition of the Republican Party and President Donald Trump.

Third, the “unprecedented” search and seizure of material from the home of a former president under the platitude that “no one is above the law”—while Joe Biden boarded Air Force One to disappear on vacation with his son, Hunter, who appears very much above the law—sends a message that we have two justice systems, not one.

In light of these realities, can we turn the gaslighting down by half? Indeed, the mood lighting is not even set to “normalcy,” which is what Candidate Biden promised to restore, and which promise helped him to victory.

I fear, instead, we are headed toward another civil war. This one won’t make us better. And the toll could be gruesome: No country has proven better at killing Americans than America.

We all have friends and family on both sides. We need to keep the American family together.

I’m a fan of neither Blue nor Red Caesars. I’m committed to saving what we have and making it better, consistent with our principles and institutions. If the Red side has the Deplorables, the Blue has the Unbearables —and they’re in power now.

Unbearables: I’m sorry if this isn’t parsed to your liking. The Deplorables are not in charge—you are. And the party in charge is acting in a manner that goes against the principles, norms, and forms that it purports to care so much about, with its constant warnings that we are in “unprecedented” danger from the other side.

V =January 6, 2021 seems to have justified a lot—and far too much. It was certainly not the Deplorables’ best moment. Trump played with fire, lost control, got burnt, and returned to private life in disgrace, wounded politically but still alive.

One of the oldest methods of gaining clear thinking in clouded times is to ask, “Who benefits?” Did Trump and his cause benefit from the breach of Congress?

To ask that question is to answer it. No.

Did Trump bring trouble upon himself by having a rally outside of Congress? Yes.

Is his lack of judgment appalling? Yes.

Was it a failed insurrection, or coup? No.

The response of the Democratic Party and the deep-state industrial complex is to mercilessly try the former president—his family, his businesses, and anyone connected with him—in the media, in Congress, and in the criminal courts. They have “othered” half the electorate as domestic terrorists, white supremacists, authoritarians, and fascists.

Democrats appear breathlessly unaware of the daily, compounding effects of such actions. They continue to deepen our divisions, moving us closer and closer to dissolution.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Mar-a-Lago search warrant jumps the shark tank of credulity. The raid is all about criminalizing and conflicting the political opposition—and, in this case, about praying that Trump takes the bait and declares his candidacy before the November midterms.

Attorney General Garland, you’ve undermined your allies’ carefully orchestrated public relations campaign portraying you as a statesman and a moderate, whose impeccable judicial temperament would make the legal profession proud. Instead, you’re coming off as a partisan hatchet man, who somehow thinks it’s un-American to question the Justice Department or the FBI. Come again?

Former Attorney General William Barr: Thank you, sir. You are, first and foremost, a public servant. The contrast between your restraint and Garland’s rogue behavior couldn’t be sharper.

Unbearables: you grow scarier when deflecting attention from your policy failures by criminalizing politics.

You need to take a step back from your “unprecedented” abyss and accept the political consequences of your command-and-control comeuppance and start playing again by the rules once recognized by both sides—Deplorable and Unbearable alike.

Civil war may seem likely—but it is not inexorable. It can be avoided. Let’s avoid it. We the People—and those who represent us—need to settle our disputes in the voting booth in fair and trustworthy elections; not in the weaponization of the law unequally applied to political opponents.





Christian Patriot News, On the Fringe, and more- August 28

 



I dunno, but I think the first spoilers for NCIS LA's 1st episode could be released this week, either by CBS or by a news source. And that makes me nervous, because of the uncertainity. And knowing very very boring details of 3 upcoming episodes. Wish me luck.

Here's tonight's news:


Biden’s Debt Transference and Enforcement Arm

Work hard. Save your money. Pay your debts. Then get saddled with someone else’s debts because you didn’t have the foresight to be improvident at the opportune moment.


I have two subjects for you today: debt “forgiveness” and, once again, the raid on Mar-a-Lago by Biden’s secret police.

Let’s do the student debt wheeze first. “Forgiveness” without absolution: I think that just about sums up the Biden Administration’s latest publicity gambit, videlicet, the offer to “forgive” from $10,000 to $20,000 of the debt students have contracted. Note the scare quotes around “forgive.” 

It is pointless to go into the details of the program because nobody knows what the details are. Tens of millions of Americans (whoever they are in Biden’s America) are apparently eligible. You are supposed to make less than $125,000 a year to be eligible, but who’s checking? The government agency handling the program, studentaid.gov, has been inundated with inquiries, since the announcement of “free stuff!,” as usual, has acted like a handful of fresh meat tossed into a pool of piranhas. How much will it cost? Who knows? 

“The White House doesn’t know exactly how many eligible borrowers will actually end up applying for loan forgiveness,” one news source reported, “or how much it will cost.” According to a study from the Wharton School, however, the total tab might exceed $1 trillion. That is 1,000,000,000,000. It’s important to appreciate the number of zeros involved. 

I am not sure the Biden Administration has admitted yet whether the economy is in recession, but it is. And it is certainly suffering from inflation—or “Bidenflation” as some wags denominate it—the worst, we’re told, in 40 years. Gas prices have moderated a bit from their highs in May and early June, but they are still more than twice what they were when Biden took office, i.e., when Donald Trump was president, and everyone thinks prices will climb again this winter. 

So, prices are rising, your money is worth less, and, oh, by the way, you have less of it. On Friday, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average lost just over 1,000 points, wiping out billions in value. And if the “Prosperity Reduction Act” (the real name of the inflationary “Inflation Reduction Act”) weren’t enough of a blow—raising taxes and weaponizing the tax farmers of the IRS—Biden has delivered another sharp jab to the solar plexus of the American taxpayer with his hare-brained student loan “forgiveness” scheme. 

True, from time immemorial, the promise of debt forgiveness has been a powerful political gesture. But as has often been pointed out since the student loan subsidy was announced, Biden’s program is not really debt forgiveness. Rather, it is debt transference. That is, the debt doesn’t go away. It is just dropped in someone else’s lap. And that someone, Dear Reader, is you. 

Flying monkey Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) dramatized what is happening back in 2020 when, having touted the idea of forgiving students loans herself, she responded to someone who asked her if that meant he would be getting back the money he saved so that his daughter didn’t have any student loans. “Of course not,” was the squaw’s response. The moral of the story: “So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money and those of us who did the right thing get screwed.”

Crisply put, that. Work hard. Save your money. Pay your debts. Then get saddled with someone else’s debts because you didn’t have the foresight to be improvident at the opportune moment. 

Feel like a chump yet?

I suspect that there is a primitive impulse at work in this latest exhibition of magical thinking by our political masters. In many cultures, you find that at times of crisis people resort to scapegoating. The Book of Leviticus describes one version of the procedure. Get you a pair of kid goats. Perform a ceremony that invests one with all the debts, sins, and impurities of the community and release it into the wilderness to carry off said debts. Sacrifice the other. Feel better now?

The ancient Greeks promoted an unfortunate member of the community to the position of the goats. The so-called φαρμακός, usually from the lower class of society—those Hillary Clinton called “deplorables”—would be sacrificed in atonement for some perceived divine displeasure. Hard cheese on the victim, but sacrifices must be made for the greater good, or at least the good of the nomenklatura. 

Biden’s new exercise in scapegoating has not been very popular, and even Democrats, at least those whose election prospects are iffy, are quietly distancing themselves from this insane, immoral, and probably illegal effort at wealth redistribution. 

And speaking of things that are insane, immoral, and probably illegal, let’s turn briefly to our Stasi’s raid on Joe Biden’s chief political rival, Donald Trump. 

The raid on Mar-a-Lago has prompted an incontinent cataract of commentary. I’ve contributed a tiny stream or two myself (and here). The result has been a sea of verbiage across which it is difficult to paddle to the truth of the event. Perhaps the single best comment was offered by Mike Davis, an attorney and former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch. (Though this op-ed by David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey for the Wall Street Journal deserves honorable mention.)

Davis cuts like a laser beam to the essential core of the event. The raid, he notes, was “unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful.” 

All of the distracted talk about the Presidential Records Act and Trump having classified documents in his possession is neither here nor there. A president can declassify whatever he wants for any reason or no reason. 

Moreover, Davis said, he has the sole authority to determine what is a personal document, which is his for the keeping, and what is a presidential document, which goes to the national archive, before, generally, being returned for a place in the former president’s presidential library. 

The travesty of the raid was underscored by the heavily redacted warrant that the Justice Department was forced to produce on Friday. It’s a sea of blackpunctuated here and there by single words or phrases. Davis speculates that the proximate reason for the raid was that among the documents Trump had declassified and that he had in his possession were documents pertaining to the “Crossfire Hurricane” “Trump-is-a-Russian-Asset” gambit that the FBI unleashed in its long war against the former president at the instigation of Hillary Clinton and her cronies. Doubtless there are many embarrassing revelations in that narrative, about Clinton herself but also about various actors, former and present, in the FBI and various intelligence agencies. 

As the Federalist’s Sean Davis tweeted, the “DOJ and FBI are so corrupt that they’re redacting their reasons for redactions in their justification for raiding a U.S. president’s home.” And he adds, “However much contempt you have for these lawless agencies, it’s not nearly enough.” 

This is true. Together with last week’s revelation that the FBI leaned on Facebook to keep news about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop under wraps, the raid on Mar-a-Lago revealed the FBI to be totally beyond the pale. America, as Stephen Kruiser put it, was a better place when the FBI didn’t rig elections. The FBI long ago crossed its Rubicon. It should be disbanded and replaced.




As the Elites Pivot Away from COVID, Now, Right Now, is the Time to Confront the Other Stuff


An excellent and righteously deliberate weekly monologue from Mr. Neil Oliver this week.  Oliver walks through recent examples of British governing officials now attempting to rewrite their history in pushing the COVID madness and panic and then he shifts to the more important issue of their bigger agenda.

Oliver correctly notes that now is the time to expose it all; expose all of the madness behind the grand plan to weaponize the false framework of climate change in a quest to take control and reduce the lives of people to subservient proles.  Now is the time for all the conspiracy theorists, tin foil hat wearers, Putin apologist, vaccine deniers and those who have been proven correct, to stand boldly amid the crowd of sheeple and defy the next effort.

The Ukraine narrative is a western created false ruse, a justification without merit, simply to inflict more pain and hardship in Europe around the bigger multinational energy program known as Build Back Better.  Now is the time to use the truth of COVID as a reference point and weapon to call it out and ridicule political leaders.  Now is the time to see who stands with the people upon policies of commonsense.  WATCH:


[Transcript] – Don’t be fooled into thinking this disaster movie is coming to an end.

Rishi Sunak was quick off the mark last week with his pitiful, self-serving claims about having known the lockdowns were a bad thing but that despite him drumming his tiny fists on the table until they were a little bit sore no one would listen to him.

He said his heroic efforts to avert disaster were deleted from the official records of meetings he attended.

If that’s true – if minutes of meetings affecting government policy were doctored – then Sunak’s claims demand criminal investigation and jail time for those responsible – including big wigs with letters after their names, who presumably knew the truth of it as well and kept their mouths shut while people needlessly died miserable deaths, endured miserable lives and the country was driven off a cliff.

Sunak squeaks that he was on the right side of history but powerless. What absolute twaddle. He was arguably the second most powerful figure in government. By his own admission, he went along with all that was done to us. If it had ever been about principles, he would have resigned the first time his dissent was ignored and erased. He would have made his way hot foot to a television studio and there delivered an honest statement about how doing the right thing was more important than keeping his job. He did none of those things.

For all that, there’s excitement in the air. The mere fact the former chancellor and would-be prime minister has broken ranks – basically opting for the tried and trusted playground tactic of claiming a big boy did it and ran away means many are scenting blood in the water.

I’m hearing a lot of people, desperate and hopeful that the whole truth will finally come out, saying things like, “the narrative is finally falling apart.”

It might be and it might not. But the Covid and lockdown double-act is expendable. They’ve wrung all the juice they’re ever going to get out of that rotten fruit and now it’s ready to be cast aside. Or maybe it will just go on the back burner while other, fresher concoctions are brought forward. Either way, someone, somewhere seems to have decided it’s time to move on.

Just don’t be fooled into thinking that stuff about saving Granny and the NHS was ever the point, far less the main event. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again:

“It’s never about what they say it’s about.”

Thousands of grannies and grandpas died anyway and the NHS is a vast money pit that sucks in billions and now shuts its doors against people dying of cancer. I don’t believe the last two years was ever about public health.

The people who said lockdowns would kill many more than Covid, have been proved right. I’ve listened, ad nauseam, to all that stuff about:

“It was so scary in the beginning – those images from China – our leaders were just doing what they thought was right …”

Yada, yada, yada – I barely bought it then and now it seems obvious that from the beginning, whatever Covid was or wasn’t, wherever it came from, it was blatantly exploited in pursuit of long planned goals. From the beginning I say it was about fear and control.

The good ship Pandemic is holed below the waterline and all the rats are scuttling towards the life rafts. All the lies about Covid, all the lies about vaccines, more and more exposed every day.

On the other side of the Atlantic, micro megalomaniac Antony Fauci is making for dry land as fast as his little paws will propel him. There are so many rats on that sinking ship, however, that they know there won’t be enough rafts. They are aboard the Titanic and many won’t make it. Here’s hoping.

Now that some of the great and the good are changing their tune … now that more and more of the mainstream media are pirouetting like ballerinas and finally contemplating questions some of us have been asking, shouting indeed, on a desperate loop, for months and years, there’s a narrow window of opportunity for getting some other stuff out into the open. And so now seems like the right time to think more of the unthinkable and say more of the unsayable.

Things are unfolding now exactly as the so-called conspiracy theorists, us with the tin hats on, said they would. And while everyone else – those who poured scorn, and ridiculed and hated – surely have to face the fact that we, the outcasts who lost work and reputations and much else besides – were right all along about the unforgivable damage of locking down, about harms to children, about being determined to refuse the Covid injections – in this brief moment while those who had nothing to offer but spite, and vitriol and undisguised loathing for those of us who first suspected we were being sold a pup – and who felt something wrong in our guts and so bothered to do our own reading and learned we were absolutely right and so spoke out and kept speaking out – right now before those smug smarty pants regroup behind the next line trotted out by the establishment, we can state some more of the blindingly obvious.

Let me, on behalf of my fellow conspiracy theorists, put more of the truth out there. After all, in a few months’ time it’s what those same smarty pants will be saying they knew all along as well.

Here’s what I make of the bigger picture – and what some of us so-called Covidiots, anti-vaxxers, Putin-apologists, fascist, far-right extremist swivel-eyed loons want to talk about next.

Whatever is happening in Ukraine, to that country and to its people, both are undoubtedly being used by those who also need something and someone to make their own populations look the other way. The horror show in the Ukraine is being exploited.

Here at home last week, Boris implied that while only lesser mortals are fretting selfishly about heat and food, his attentions are focused on the lofty heights of saving the world. The little people of Britain must endure cold and hunger for … guess what … the greater good.

Anyone with even the faintest grasp on, at least an interest in, geopolitics knowns it is utterly bogus and he is a fraud – along with Biden, Trudeau, Macron, Von der Leyen and the rest of a list so long I don’t have time to read it out.

The imminent cold and hunger were made inevitable not by Putin in 2022, but years ago by the adoption of ruinous, ideologically driven nonsense presented as world-saving environmental policies that only denied us any hope of energy independence, the profitable exploitation of all the resources beneath our feet and seas and condemned much of Europe to dependence on Russia.

What we are paying is the cost of going Green, when those polices are not green at all but predicated upon some of the most destructive and toxic practices and technologies ever conceived.

Wind and solar will never provide the energy we need to keep thriving as societies, to grow and flourish. The situation is so insane I find it easiest to conclude we are simply meant to do without.

Stop thinking we’re all going to have cars, and international travel, and warm homes – just different than before. What seems obvious is that we are being groomed to live small lives, to make way for the grandiose expectations and entitlements of the elites that are working so effectively to hoover up the last of the wealth.

Smaller lives, colder lives may actually be the best we can hope for, given the plans evidently laid out for us by those with their hands on the levers of power. Our leaders used to tell us we needed them in order to be free. In future they will have us believe we need them to be safe. Caged animals are safe, but it’s not much of a life.

Energy prices will keep going up. This will obviously hurt the poorest countries and poorest people first and worst. What is obvious about the Green warriors making war on affordable, reliable energy is that they care not a jot about the poor – at least not the actual poor alive in the world today.

Those real flesh and blood people are to be sacrificed, by the millions, utterly denied the energy that might have lifted them out of poverty, so that imaginary people as yet unborn might thrive in a Utopia that exists only in the imaginations of pampered protesters. China will just burn more coal to compensate and seize more control but, shh, best not mention it.

That corrupted thinking comes from Communism – or perhaps Communism’s idiot cousin Socialism. Green warriors don’t care about the poor, in the same way socialists don’t care about the poor … they just hate the rich.

Which is ironic, given that with their infantile protests they are doing the work of the very richest for them.

Ukraine produces a fifth of the wheat crop, required by the poorest. Not this year though. Whatever has been grown will be hard to store and harder to export – so that hunger and full-blown famine becomes a looming threat for hundreds of millions of the world’s hungriest people.

In richer countries, life is being made deliberately impossible for farmers. Spiking costs of fertilisers and fuel are one thing but governments in the Netherlands, across Europe, in Canada and elsewhere around the world are persecuting those who grow our food. Farmers are being made to endure restrictions that destroy their businesses, being driven off their land altogether. They will have to watch as fields they have known and cared for over generations are hoovered up by transnational organisations with other ideas about what that land might be used for.

If you think mass migration and immigration are difficult problems now, wait until the unavoidable famines cause a hemorrhage of humanity out of the poorest countries of Africa and the Middle East. Perhaps hundreds of millions of people with nothing more to lose.

Where do you think they’ll go?

And here’s another inconvenient truth: money and weapons keep flowing into Ukraine, but despite months of war and sanctions, the Russian ruble remains strong and an end to hostilities seems as far away as ever. Maybe no one wants that war to end. Wars don’t determine who’s right anyway; wars determine who’s left.

Ultimately this is all about wealth and power. Not money, remember. Money is to wealth as a menu is to a steak. One’s a worthless bit of paper, the other something that will keep you alive. This is about actual wealth and its acquisition. It’s about the already super-rich getting hold of even more of the real things. Land, buildings, natural resources, gold. While we are supposed to be frightened out of our wits, squabbling among ourselves, and just hoping that one day it will all be over, a relative handful of others are hoovering up all the wealth, as planned.

Whichever way you slice it, an economic and societal shock on a scale that has not happened in lifetimes, if ever, is on its way. The world we live in is built in its entirety upon unimaginable, and now unsustainable, levels of debt. Trillions … quadrillions of dollars’ worth. There is always much more debt in the world than money – so that it is never possible to settle the debt. Now that debt, all that created money, is about to come crashing down.

Don’t be fooled by Sunak and the rest and their about face – their pretense that they were with us all along. Covid and lockdown carried them only so far – but they plan to go much further. Disease, War, Famine, Death – the same people always ride on the same four horses.

Now is not the time to take our eyes off the ball. Not by a long chalk. Keep watching the usual suspects.

As I say, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

[Transcript]

…”It’s time!”




Now That We Know the Federal Government Is Calling the Shots on Social Media Censorship, Conservatives Need to Wake Up


streiff reporting for RedState  

For some years now, many on the right have studiously avoided looking at what was going on with social media. As social media companies ratcheted down the ability of anyone to oppose the conventional, and invariably leftist, wisdom, all we heard was “muh private company.” The idea is that if a private monopoly prevents speech on any subject, that’s fine because they are a private company and conservative, you know, worship at the altar of private property and free enterprise. The solution has always been something along the lines of “if you don’t like how they operate, start your own social media platform.” You’d think that by now, given the difficulties faced by Parler, TruthSocial, and other would-be competitors, the folly of that flippant statement would be evident.

It was apparent at an early stage that social media was using its power to interfere in political campaigns. Federal election law requires broadcast outlets to offer candidates for federal office their best price for ads, and they are forbidden to censor candidate ads. So when a very attractive conservative candidate of Cambodian heritage ran a political ad showing a few frames of the horror of the Communist Khmer Rouge killing fields, Facebook banned her ad (Facebook Blocks Republican Candidate Ad for Daring to Show Horrors of CommunismRepublican Candidate’s Ad Again Banned From Social Media and We’re Supposed to Think It Is an Accident). By the same token, in 2018, Facebook approved an ad by the North Dakota Democrat Party on behalf of then-Senator Heidi Heitkamp that warned hunters that they would lose their deer license if they voted (Facebook Verifies Bogus Ad Designed to Suppress GOP Turnout in North Dakota). If you aren’t a liberal Democrat, this kind of hijinks is called a felony. In 2019, Twitter temporarily banned Senator Mitch McConnell because his campaign account showed left-wing protesters wishing death on him and his wife (Twitter Shuts Down Mitch McConnell’s Campaign Account Because They Didn’t Like Him Making the Left Look Bad).

During the COVID panic, all social media platforms fell in lockstep behind the constantly changing and usually bogus information disseminated by Anthony Fauci and his posse. Any disagreement or questioning of governmental actions brought down immediate retaliation.

Fine, you say, the social media companies were just following their natural progressive and anti-freedom impulses, and they are private companies and not the government, so we should support their suppression of free speech, which is at least as much a blessing of liberty as the drag queen story hour at your local daycare center.

During the infancy of commercial radio, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover observed:

It cannot be thought that any single person or group shall ever have the right to determine what communication may be made to the American people. … We cannot allow any single person or group to place themselves in a position where they can censor the material which shall be broadcasted to the public.

But, of course, we’re much wiser now, and what did he know anyway?

In the past couple of weeks, additional information has come to light that indicates the social media conglomerates are not acting as free agents but are acting as agents of the federal government. This is a significant development.

In the late-fifties, a Rhode Island state commission on obscenity would tell a major book distributor serving the state which books they had found to be “obscene, indecent or impure language, or manifestly tending to the corruption of the youth.” Based on that communication, the book distributor would block the books from being sold in Rhode Island. The US Supreme Court ruled that even though it was a private company, not the government, preventing the distribution of the books, the government was using the company as a government agent. The purpose of this was to allow the government to do by “advising” the company rather than a process open to court challenge and therefore violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

Last year one of my favorite authors, Alex Berenson, was banned from Twitter because he publicized opinions and scientific papers against the COVID hysteria. He had the resources to pursue a legal case against Twitter and was reinstated after most of the controversy over COVID had abated. As part of the legal process, Berenson received in discovery emails from Biden’s White House to Twitter directing that Berenson be banned because of the problems he was causing them, see Journalist Alex Berenson Busts Biden Team, Says WH Demanded that Twitter Ban Him. The fact that Berenson had operated before the email and was banned after the mail seems to indicate that Twitter acted at the behest of the Biden White House to silence an influential critic.

During the 2020 election, the epic story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, complete with Russian hookers, crack smoking, and underage girls, blew up. Twitter banned all references to the story. They went so far as to shut down the New York Post’s Twitter account for promoting its own frontpage story (Twitter Admits to Blocking NY Post Story Regarding Hunter Biden — Might the Supreme Court Have Interest?) and silence President Trump’s campaign Twitter account (Unreal: Now Twitter Has Shut Down the Main Trump Campaign Account Over the Hunter Biden Story) over its mention. That could, given a very dim light, look like an action by a private company. Then Facebook honcho Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview with Joe Rogan in which this fiasco was discussed (Smoking Gun: Mark Zuckerberg Makes Big Admission to Joe Rogan About FBI, Censorship, and Hunter Biden).


In the interview, Zuckerberg admits the FBI approached Facebook about censoring mentioning the Hunter Biden notebook because it was “disinformation.” Zuckerberg says, as though this was heroic restraint on his part, that Facebook elected to use an algorithm to make it difficult to share stories about the Hunter Biden notebook rather than banning it altogether. In the interview, he seems to confirm that an FBI visit also drove Twitter’s actions.

It is difficult to fathom a scenario in which the only two times federal agencies have intervened with social media companies to quash the flow of information in the United States were Berenson’s ban and the crackdown to suppress news of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In fact, the whole COVID crackdown now looks much more like a government information operation than a bunch of high-strung, magenta-haired, tongue-pierced, gender-questioning SJWs going rabid-Karen on us. If social media companies restrict information flow based on the federal government’s request, it has to stop. A request by the FBI or the White House is not trivial, as they can imprison you and shut down your business if you ignore their demands. We conservatives need to understand we are approaching a stage of proto-fascism where large private companies are working as an arm of the government to do things the government cannot. The only way it stops is with a Congress and a Justice Department that is ready to break these giant corporations up and with a president who is prepared to put in jail and financially ruin the people who interfered with the information available to the American people.