A Massive Government-Censorship Industrial Complex

posted by Jamaica Plain at American Thinker 

SCOTUS will rule in June 2024 on a First Amendment free speech case the federal judge called “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history” and the circuit court judge described as “fairly unsubtle strong-arming” by government officials using “mafiosi style” threats to increase regulation.  Should government officials immediately cease contacting social media companies to censor content, with exceptions for illegal speech?  The U.S. government attorney, Brian Fletcher, eloquently argues for SCOTUS to discuss the following theoretical legal issues regarding free speech censorship on social media rather than specifics of the case.

Should the government have privacy in speech moderation policies?  The lawsuit discovery process exposed government pressure applied behind closed doors, with 24/7 badgering and profanity arising from the highest W.H., FBI, CDC, and CISA officials until Big Tech capitulation.  The Twitter Files released by Elon Musk and the House Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee investigation uncovered a massive government-funded censorship-industrial complex that links third-party “trust and safety teams” within universities and foundations to social media platforms.  These non-government organizations (NGOs), which include Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), had secret censorship strategy meetings against private corporations like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and YouTube where named plaintiffs were deplatformed, suspended, shadowbanned, or deleted.

When the Disinformation Governance Board was rolling out in early 2023, public outrage led the Stanford NGO to form the Election Integrity Project (EIP) to create stories on Russian disinformation.  While government purports to censor disinformation and enforce Big Tech data security, government became the #1 source of disinformation and engaged in massive personal data surveillance without a warrant.

Each federal agency demonstrated an escalation of demands until capitulation, direct access to data, and manipulation of content moderation policy.  The White House achieved decreasing virality of content that lacked actionable “misinformation” like anti-vaccine posts while amplifying W.H. narratives.  The FBI regularly monitored data, directly requested removal of speech from foreign and “state-sponsored actors,” and commandeered moderation policies.  The intimate details of extensive government entanglement within each platform specific to each agency was repressive and intimidating — likely Fletcher would prefer to dwell on not intrusive government action, but rather theoretical issues like government rights and scenarios demanding urgent government oversight.  Definitely, SCOTUS should not sanction the government right to monitor social media data and rewrite content moderation policy, nor enable secrecy in violating our freedom.

Can government officials contact social media platforms to remove unfavored by persuasion so long as coercive legal threats are not mentioned?  Fletcher asserts that the government didn’t engage in coercion, but rather “significant encouragement” to censor misinformation.

Some background is needed to explain the tenuous position of social media platforms.  Social media platforms are not classified as publishers, so they lack publisher First Amendment “freedom of the press” rights to free speech.  They also lack common carrier protections afforded the telephone company or railroads.  Instead, social media gain protection against lawsuits from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, without which Facebook (FB), Google, Twitter, YouTube, and all social media platforms could be sued for libelous user-generated content and effectively be unable to exist.  When the White House asked FB to censor the “disinformation dozen,” for instance, FB leadership knew that the W.H. could pursue action against FB for non-action, very different from a W.H. request of a New York Times (NYT) journalist not to publish a story.  The journalist could agree or publish without repercussions due to strong First Amendment protections.  The W.H. can threaten FB with government litigation or loss of Section 230 protections for noncompliance, making any request from the government “unsubtle strong-arming.”

The threat of government litigation and loss of Section 230 are not theoretical.  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DoJ) announced a broad antitrust review of “market-leading online platforms” different from individual targeting of Apple, Amazon, FB, and Google.  The 2018 FTC/DoJ probe focused on platform online content moderation policy and requested that state attorneys general bring lawsuits against “digital platforms [not acting] in ways responsive to consumer demands.”  The announcement coincided with FB’s Mark Zuckerberg paying a $5M fine for user privacy protection violations with the settlement requiring FB to establish an independent committee to oversee data and give a third-party organization access to FB’s data-collecting practices for 20 years.  Despite no recorded violations by the FTC, regular meetings between FB and the FTC were established under threat of criminal penalties for noncompliance.  Two weeks ago, the DoJ served Apple with an antitrust lawsuit, alleging anticompetitive behavior. The antitrust settlement that gave  government oversight via third parties and access to FB data with regularly scheduled meetings sounds like the cozy government–social media relationship uncovered during discovery, the House Weaponization Committee hearings, and the Twitter Files release.  By definition, communication by government agencies that have the power to litigate antitrust action or repeal Section 230 protections is coercive.

Should government censorship be permitted in certain circumstances, such as disinformation during public health threats or election season?  Fletcher contends that government censorship should be permitted during a public health emergency.  In reality, the declared emergency led to the evisceration of natural law–derived First Amendment constitutional rights, which enabled government to usurp power to force U.S. citizens into prolonged lockdowns, school closures, and business restrictions.  The first U.S. lockdown began in the California Bay Area on March 16, 2020 after February 2020 communication among Bay Area public health county officers describe an atmosphere of chaos and non-data-driven decision-making as members strove “to operationalize the [CDC] quarantine plan.”  The CDC outlined an untested quarantine plan, and jurisdictions throughout the U.S. followed it.

Lockdown began after seven California local public health officials (DPH) grasped their state-given “authority to control the spread of communicable disease” to mandate its counties’ 8.5 million citizens to shutter businesses, schools, and churches while healthy citizens were ordered to stay home.  This first U.S. jurisdiction ordered police-enforced mandatory lockdown with censorship of dissenting voices with the following edict: “this [lockdown] Order is issued based on scientific evidence and best practices regarding the most effective approaches to slow the transmission of communicable diseases generally and COVID-19 specifically.”  The published congratulatory self-reckoning explained their endeavor to ”control” the virus despite no knowledge of asymptomatic spread or efficacy of the mandated NPIs.  By their self-reckoning, “face masks, physical distancing, and increased ventilation as prevention countermeasures had not been established yet.”  They “recognized that SIP was a drastic measure with significant collateral social harm” yet implemented countermeasures “with no time for deliberation,” without known scientific benefit.  Thus, DPH spread disinformation to get its residents to comply with CDC orders, fully aware that its draconian orders were untested strategies.  To gain compliance, people were censored for criticizing harmful government mandates.

Because pandemic planning guides do not recommend lockdown, public health censored speech critical of the lockdown in the “hope” that their experiment on the U.S. population would work.  With lockdowns indefensible and rigorous scientific evidence unavailable, the CDC failed to conduct important scientific trials and censored scientific scholarship that contradicted their mandates.  During the discovery process of Missouri v. Biden, we learned that Big Tech, coerced by the highest levels of the Biden administration, censored speech — true speech — by the plaintiffs.  They censored true information on the infection fatality rate, the low infection risk of the young versus the elderly, and protection by natural immunity. 

When SCOTUS ruled in January 2022 to allow a CMS health care worker COVID-19 shot mandate, the justices claimed that “ensuring that providers take steps to avoid transmitting a dangerous virus to their patients is consistent with the fundamental principle of the medical profession: first, do no harm.”  In making this decision, SCOTUS became the unwitting victims of censored speech, and believed “the vaccine is 100% effective” and Biden, who said that “[the unvaccinated] are killing people.”  SCOTUS believed the CDC that sick patients would be safer from disease with vaccinated doctors and nurses as caretakers, making curtailing health care workers’ freedom worthwhile. 

The public health threat, per Fletcher, required the government to censor speech promoting vaccine hesitancy due to the “hope that the vaccine would end the pandemic” despite Pfizer’s trial follow-up never tested for viral transmission or efficacy past two months.  The government, who purportedly censored speech to combat misinformation, amplified CDC-sanctioned and W.H.-sanctioned health disinformation on social media, such as lock down at home to save Grandma, the mask is your best protection, the vaccine is 100% effective, and the Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation.  All these CDC public health missives turned out to be false — making the CDC and the W.H. #1 sources of misinformation — while censored speech by the five plaintiffs was true speech.

Ultimately, social media content should be designated either as a publisher, which can selectively censor certain viewpoints as a private entity or as a common carrier, which would be required to carry all viewpoints.  By straddling both entities, the government can exert its regulatory power to coerce or “strongly encourage” censorship.  Since the algorithms for posts to “go viral” lack transparency, the opportunity for the government to impose clandestine content regulation is significant.  Fortunately, the public has a window into the extent of government intervention in monitoring, guiding, flagging, and modifying social media posts and algorithms.

The court system needs to uphold the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.”  In times of public health threats, observed misinformation, or foreign election threats, public health and homeland security can use their websites, press conferences, and standard news agencies to warn the public without making government the arbiter of truth.  By allowing the federal government to censor true statements that are inconvenient to government edicts, we lose “a republic, if you can keep it.”

X22, On the Fringe, and more- April 18

 

When ‘Divide and Conquer’ Unites and Enrages

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

In two previous essays, I have discussed popular nullification in the context of the American people rejecting the State’s propaganda and withdrawing their respect for the rule of law.  As the U.S. and other Western governments continue to engage in a cognitive war against their own citizens, an increasing share of Western populations will conclude that their own institutions have been secretly targeting them as enemies.  Because the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and other globalist bodies have chosen to spread falsehoods (first they panicked about “global cooling” before pushing the more terrifying “global boiling,” after all) in a calculated campaign to sow public fear and drive public policy, authority figures have forfeited the public’s trust.  As Western governments and their international coalitions (e.g., the World Health Organization) respond to the public’s rejection of their authority by imposing new censorship and surveillance rules on society, the fracture separating the governing from the governed will widen into an unbridgeable crevasse.  

Western institutions have decided that a mixture of fear, lies, and coercive mandates (including vaccine passports, carbon allowances, central bank digital currencies, and social credit scores) will provide sufficient soft power to bring Western populations to heel.  It’s a bold gamble that overestimates the cunning of those globalist leaders who execute it, while underestimating the public fury that will eventually be unleashed.  What is more, globalists have already committed a fatal strategic error: they have set in motion events that will ultimately unite disparate blocs of society against their continued monopoly on power.

“Divide and conquer” has always been the most effective way to subdue a population.  Machiavellian leaders in the West use this tactic to great effect.  Brexiters who defend their national sovereignty against arbitrary edicts from unaccountable Eurocrats are demonized as xenophobic “bigots.”  European leaders from countries that were fortunate enough to exist beyond the reach of the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain rarely speak about the economic harms and murderous atrocities that arise under communism but are quick to mischaracterize any organized opposition to socialism or collectivism as “far right,” “extreme,” or “neo-Nazi.”  European propaganda is so invested in the Big Lie that human energy consumption will cause a global apocalypse that governments look the other way when brainwashed citizens destroy pipelines supplying lifesaving hydrocarbons for heat and electricity.  And new “hate speech” laws have not only fostered an unsavory predilection for censorship but also divided Westerners into classes and castes — some that are stringently protected from public criticism and others that are unjustly targeted for harassment.  When it is “legal” to be an illegal immigrant but “illegal” to complain that authorities have undermined social cohesion through their reckless mass migration policies, European governments have plainly chosen to foment public division.

American politicians are no different.  They divide blacks against whites, illegal immigrants against citizens, women against men, the young against the old, even Northern states against the South.  There is no attempt to use public policy as a means of generating unity and common cause; every political squabble is pushed toward extreme limits that force Americans into debilitating zero-sum games.  If it seems as if politicians want Americans at each other’s throats over abortion, illegal immigration, the minimum wage, COVID mandates, religious faith, sexual biology, cheap energy, and free speech, that’s because the overarching policy of the U.S. government is to keep the American people sufficiently divided to be easily controlled.

In the last fifteen years, this “divide and conquer” maneuver has begun to break down.  When Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, John McCain, and Bush-allied Republicans openly attacked Tea Party conservatives’ attempts to rein in government spending and socialized medicine, a substantial number of Republican voters saw the Uniparty clearly for the first time.  They realized that most Republican and Democrat representatives only pretend to fight.  The easiest way for the Deep State to maintain control over government institutions is to create the illusion that two political parties represent the people and battle each other when, in fact, they jointly represent the Deep State and wage war against the American people.  

When Donald Trump managed to defeat Hillary Clinton and survive both Deep State and Establishment Republican sabotage, the fake two-party system became apparent.  Both during and after his presidency, Donald Trump’s resiliency in the face of unrelenting legal attacks has opened the minds of Americans across the political spectrum.  He has more black, Hispanic, and blue-collar support than any Republican in generations.  He has accomplished this historic feat despite the efforts of Democrats and corporate news media to flood the public sphere with false charges that he is a dangerous racist and despite the efforts of Uniparty agents such as Paul Ryan to falsely portray Trump as incapable of appealing to minority voters.  The shift toward Trump from voters the Uniparty has kept segregated for many decades is a potent indicator that the efficacy of the U.S. government’s “divide and conquer” warfare is crumbling.

In the background of Donald Trump’s rise as a leader, a number of social “awakenings” have picked up steam.  Americans now see how colossal, multinational corporations exert undue influence on the U.S. government.  Americans understand how so-called “free trade” agreements have destroyed industrial and manufacturing towns, impoverished blue-collar workers, and shifted wealth to overseas hubs — often inside nations hostile to the United States.  As corporate boardrooms and government agencies institutionalize racism and “transgender” delusions through DEI initiatives, “woke” rule-making, and other culturally Marxist demagoguery, Americans realize that Big Government and Big Business conspire to undermine their families, faith, and heritage.  As inflation rages, personal savings dwindle, and families live paycheck-to-paycheck, Americans have a much better grasp of how the Federal Reserve (a private central bank disguised as a vital government office) has replaced reliable gold money with worthless paper currencies that have enabled profligate lawmakers to print and spend trillions on the path toward economic collapse.  And after Barack Obama and Eric Holder retooled George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s Patriot Act into a domestic surveillance system that targets political enemies, the American people are painfully aware that the Intelligence Community despotically tracks their movements and spies on their private communications in explicit violation of the Fourth Amendment’s safeguards against warrantless searches devoid of probable cause.  As these various “awakenings” have taken hold, more Americans have accepted that the greatest threats to their peace, prosperity, and freedom come from the collection of State actors, corporate oligarchs, and international clubs that seek their submission.  

In other words, a growing share of the American population sees clearly for the first time that the scourge of totalitarianism has metastasized virulently across the West and here at home.

This new public awareness that many of the political and economic institutions once accorded immense respect have instead betrayed the public’s confidence will have profound ramifications.  Perhaps for the first time since America’s founding, the public’s wrath is focused on government tyranny and economic warfare.  The days of the FBI being seen as the “good guys” are long over.  Financial titans such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street no longer dictate public policy from the shadows; a bright spotlight shines on their emissaries in the White House and Congress.  Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, George Soros, and other Dr. Evils intent on treating human beings as disposable game pieces and using food and energy markets as life-and-death leverage to extort the world are broadly recognized as the megalomaniacal menaces they are.  Even many combat veterans and law enforcement officers — some of the country’s most loyal and patriotic citizens — are openly condemning open border policies and misguided military engagements as self-destructive time bombs that compound misery and preclude peace.  

The tremors we feel today promise a devastating social earthquake still to come.

Clarence Thomas Has No Reason To Recuse From Any J6 Cases, And It’s Not Even Close BY: MARK PAOLETTA APRIL 18, 2024 8 MIN READ

 

These attacks have nothing to do with ethics concerns and everything to do with shrinking the court to let leftist justices decide these cases.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/18/clarence-thomas-has-no-reason-to-recuse-himself-from-any-j6-scotus-cases-and-its-not-even-close/

he left’s intolerance toward an independent Supreme Court and its gaslighting tactics are on full display in the latest calls for Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse from the presidential immunity case the court will hear next week. MoveOn.org is even raising money off this absurd claim to pressure Justice Thomas to recuse. These thuggish tactics won’t work.  

President Trump is presenting the argument that he is immune from prosecution for any official acts he took as president, including those related to the 2020 election integrity challenges and the events of Jan. 6,2021. The left demands that Justice Thomas recuse himself from this case and all Jan. 6-related cases because he has an alleged conflict of interest arising from his wife’s activities regarding the post-2020 election integrity challenges and the events of Jan. 6. But Ginni Thomas’ activities raise no conflicts of interest requiring Justice Thomas’ recusal from these cases, and it’s not even a close call.

Dishonest and Unfounded Attacks

Ginni Thomas is a longtime political activist. Like millions of Americans, she raised questions about fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election. The attacks on her, including in a recent piece by Professor Gary Simson, a longtime Justice Thomas hater, are dishonest and misleading. 

For example, Simson claims she “tirelessly lobbied Republican state legislators to displace lawful electors.” That’s a lie. Ginni Thomas sent two prewritten form emails to a group of state legislators who were selected by others. She did not write the emails, did not edit them, and did not pick the legislators. She merely pushed the send button. That’s not even “worked a little” and certainly not “tirelessly lobbied.” The rest of Simson’s screed is of the same level of dishonesty.

Yes, Mrs. Thomas had significant concerns about potential fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election, and her minimal activity was focused on ensuring that reports of fraud and irregularities were investigated. This is nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, we have seen many instances of Democrats challenging election results and Hollywood actors encouraging Trump electors to vote for someone other than Trump in the certification process for the 2016 election.

Beyond that, Mrs. Thomas played no role in any events following the 2020 election. She briefly attended the Jan. 6 rally but left before President Trump spoke and long before some of the crowd went to the Capitol. She also condemned the violence on Jan. 6, which was reflected in one of her texts to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows at the time. Ginni Thomas’ activities were minimal and mainstream. 

But don’t take my word for it. The congressional Select Committee to Investigate Jan. 6 requested to interview Ginni Thomas, and despite there being no legitimate reason to interview her, she fully cooperated with the committee’s inquiry. Mrs. Thomas voluntarily met with the committee for four hours and answered every question posed to her to the best of her recollection. 

After this inquiry, the 100 percent partisan Democrat-appointed J6 Committee did not mention her name once in its comprehensive 845-page final report. Nor was Mrs. Thomas mentioned in any of the committee’s hearings. So much for Simson’s baseless argument that she had “intimate involvement” in the 2020 post-election activities.   

Refusing to Recuse, a Precedent 

In one of the most celebrated recusal cases in modern times, leftist Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to recuse from an appeal of a challenge to a same-sex marriage ban despite his wife’s organization, the ACLU-Southern California chapter (ACLU-SC), weighing in in the district court proceedings below.

The ACLU-SC, and specifically its Executive Director Ramona Ripston, vocally opposed this law. In fact, the ACLU-SC joined two amicus briefs in the district court arguing that this amendment violated the U.S. Constitution. At the time, Ripston was married to Judge Reinhardt.

Judge Reinhardt refused to recuse, and his opinion setting forth his reasons should be read aloud by every critic who believes Justice Thomas must recuse from these Jan. 6-related cases because of his wife’s views:

[M]y wife and I share many fundamental interests by virtue of our marriage, but her views regarding issues of public significance are her own, and cannot be imputed to me, no matter how prominently she expresses them. …

My wife has no “interest” in the outcome of this case that might be substantially affected by its outcome, over and beyond the interest of any American with a strong view concerning the social issues that confront this nation.

Five judicial ethics experts, including Professor Stephen Gillers, filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting this decision: 

Ms. Ripston’s opinions, views, and public pronouncements of support for the district court decision below do not trigger any reasonable basis to question Judge Reinhardt’s ability to honor his oath of office. A contrary outcome would deem a judge’s spouse unable to hold most any position of advocacy, creating what amounts to a disabling marriage penalty.

The left celebrated Judge Reinhardt for not recusing on this case and attacked anyone who raised any concerns about Reinhardt not recusing. But this fits a pattern where the left rarely if ever has any ethics concerns about the spouses of liberal judges.

The left did not have any concerns when Justice Ginsburg never once recused from cases in which her husband’s law firm represented clients in cases before the Supreme Court. She even ruled in favor of the clients of her husband’s firm. 

The left had no problem when D.C. Circuit Judge Nina Pillard’s husband, David Cole, who is the ACLU’s national litigation director, publicly agreed with a district court judge’s ruling rejecting President Trump’s argument that he did not have to produce his taxes pursuant to a congressional subpoena, and then Judge Pillard participated in a full D.C. Circuit proceeding that allowed that district court ruling to stand.  

Ginni Thomas does not have an “interest” in the presidential immunity case, which involves whether Trump has immunity for any official action he took as president, or any Jan. 6-related case that will come before the Supreme Court, as that term is defined in the statute. She is not a party, nor a lawyer in the proceeding, nor a witness, and she has no “interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome” of the case. Justice Thomas has no reason to recuse.

But the left likes to gaslight the American people by claiming Justice Thomas’ “impartiality might reasonably be questioned” in these cases, when they ignore all the other times they were perfectly fine with liberal justices sitting on cases where their spouse had some connection or more serious questions could be raised about impartiality.

[READ: If Democrats Are Worried About SCOTUS Ethics Rules, They Should Look Into Lefty Justices First]

It’s only Justice Thomas who must recuse from cases because his wife has expressed her views on a general topic, but, unlike Judge Reinhardt’s wife, never on the legal merits of a specific case before the court. This double standard also has a whiff of racism, with the left portraying Justice Thomas as heavily influenced by his wife’s views. Leftist memes on X showing Ginni Thomas removing a mask of her husband’s face to signal that it’s really her making these decisions reveal the despicable racism that characterizes the left’s ideology and decades-long campaign against Justice Thomas.

These attacks demanding Justice Thomas recuse have nothing whatsoever to do with ethics or a concern about the public’s trust in the court. The left’s recusal demands are meant to shrink the court so that the left has their preferred leftist justices deciding these cases. Thanks to Trump’s three appointments to the court, the left is furious they no longer have a court that acts like a super-legislature implementing left-wing policies like race-based affirmative action.   

More generally, Simson and his leftist allies’ baseless and vicious smears are meant to undermine the public’s trust in the court and gaslight the American people to believe there is an ethics crisis. They should be ashamed of themselves and ignored as the partisans they are.

The author represented Ginni Thomas in the Select Committee to Investigate Jan. 6.

That Civil War Movie Is a Symptom of Hollywood’s Problems

posted by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall 

I saw the new movie "Civil War" so you don’t have to. You’re welcome, and you owe me. Fifteen years ago this month, I started writing for the legendary Andrew Breitbart at Big Hollywood, where we drew attention to the increasing wokeness of Tinseltown. That’s why I saw this movie – to see if Hollywood had learned any lessons. I think it did, but it learned the wrong lessons.

Spoiler alert—it’s a bad movie, and you don’t want to see it. I’m going to tell you some of what happens, but you shouldn’t care because, if you’re smart, you’re going to listen to me and not spend money on it.

The problem with "Civil War" isn’t its point of view, to the extent it has one. Now, you can tell that, beneath the surface, it has a generic left-wing orientation. The bad guy president is vaguely Trumpy. He’s a straight white male, of course. In fact, every single villain is a straight, white male. None of the major heroes is a straight, white male. You can make movies where the villains are straight, white males, and where none of the heroes are straight, white males, but it’s now a woke Hollywood cliche to make all the villains straight, white males, and none of the heroes straight, white males. You can’t unsee it. Rural white guy? Definitely a villain. Black woman? Hero!

But the mandatory pseudo-diversity of Hollywood is not the main problem with "Civil War." Nor is how the movie employs the hackneyed device of characters doing stupid, impulsive things to drive the plot. Don’t go do that thing, don’t go do that thing, don’t go do that thing – and then the character goes and does that thing, and all the other characters have to deal with the consequences, and that’s how the plot progresses. Weirdly, it’s always a young female character who seems to go do that thing. Anyway, it’s annoying.

But the real issue with "Civil War" is that it is not about the cinematic civil war. When I go to a movie called "Civil War," I’d like to learn a little about the civil war, like what happened and why it happened and what one side believes, and what the other side believes, and how our society degenerated into open combat nearly two centuries after the Democrats started – and lost – the last civil war. But you don’t get that. I spent two hours watching this movie and I still have absolutely no idea what caused this civil war. I know that the Trumpish president character – he’s not a complete Trump clone, but it’s pretty clear he’s Trumperrific – is supposed to be a bad guy. But that doesn’t mean that his side is necessarily bad. The good guys can be led by a bad guy. Or a good guy can lead the bad guys. The movie seems to attribute the cause of this civil war to a single personality instead of illuminating the politics that drove it. That’s not particularly compelling as drama.

I know a little about Second Civil War fiction since I’ve written a best-selling series of novels about it. And you know what I focused on? How America gets into a Second Civil War and what happens when it does. How do things change? What expectations are upended? How would things work out in that situation? That’s what’s interesting about the concept. That’s what we want to know. And frankly, that’s what teaches us what to avoid so we never get into that situation again no matter how much the Democrats try to provoke Round Two.

But this movie ignores the civil war stuff and is all about journalists on a road trip. Despite the fact that most journalists today are loathsome communists, that’s not necessarily a bad way to show us around the Second Civil War. You could get lots of perspectives, and you can see and learn what happens and why through reporter characters. But the only perspectives we get are about the reporters themselves, and they’re annoying people – which is at least a taste of realism. But they never talk about the war itself. There’s no context to all the mayhem.

Remember, it’s the world-building that’s interesting to us, not these characters. I don’t care about the characters. You have a jaded war correspondent. And another jaded war correspondent. And a third jaded war correspondent. And a fourth war correspondent who’s young and isn’t quite jaded yet but who gets jaded at the end. That’s not interesting, and that’s not what I’m trying to buy when I throw down nearly 20 bucks for a ticket to a movie called "Civil War."

Look, the actors are competent. They’re just playing boring people. And the movie is boring. That’s the crime. The lesson Andrew Breitbart always taught about political movies is to be good first. Be interesting. Make a good movie. Then you can get your message across. He didn’t object to the idea of a left-wing viewpoint. "JFK" is a left-wing movie with an idiotic message, but it was interesting. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, even though it was unbelievably stupid. I barely kept my eyes open here.

Alex Garland is not an untalented filmmaker. The Englishman has made a few vaguely interesting movies. The problem is he shoots this one like a movie-of-the-week. It is very workmanlike. What he wants to do is set up really interesting shots like helicopters flying around the Washington monument. That’s a pretty cool image. A gun battle at the White House? Yeah, that’s an interesting concept. But not the way he does it. You can see this was not a big-budget movie. All the battles have like 10 people.

Another beef – as a military guy, all the military stuff bothered me. It doesn’t look like a military operation, and it’s kind of hard to explain to civilians why. For instance, you’ll have a weird mix of vehicles with a HUMVEE and a truck and a tank and another HUMVEE and a tank rolling, and overtop are helicopters flying really low, and F-35s are flying at treetop level just because it looks kind of cool. But it’s not realistic. Military guys, be prepared to bust out laughing at the scene where a guy is sleeping on the ground around a bunch of parked trucks. Yeah, sleep on the dirt among parked trucks and see how that works out for you. Look, some of the battles do look kind of cool, but not as cool as they could. The movie isn’t particularly spectacular, though it tries to be. The imagery is kind of distracting.

But not as distracting as the relentless breakaways to boring expositions about the characters’ backgrounds. I think way too many Hollywood people have been watching Netflix shows where they stuff three hours of drama into nine hours of episodes. Here’s how I wrote the People’s Republic novels – I made it all good parts. If it didn’t make you think, or laugh, or get your pulse racing, I cut it out. Here, something interesting happens, and all of a sudden the action comes to a flying stop for a five-minute dialogue scene with the characters in a head-on two-shot sitting on benches talking about their childhoods. It’s a movie called "Civil War." I don’t care about your feelings or these characters.

Garland’s objective in not having any discussion of the politics in "Civil War" was clearly to take politics out of the movie. But here’s the problem. It’s a movie about a civil war. You can’t take politics out of it. That’s the essence of it. To make an effective drama about it, you have to have a point of view. In interviews, all the actors denied that the movie had an agenda, and maybe that was what they intended. But that’s the problem. Without a clear point of view, none of it makes sense.

My books have a point of view. I’m a conservative, and the conservatives in the books are right. Not perfect. Not faultless. And not always nice. But generally right. The conservatives are the good guys. In my books, the red states are who you should be rooting for. You know that going in, and you can evaluate what I say on that basis. Am I right? Am I wrong? What am I missing? You don’t have to agree with me, but at least we have something to debate.

What’s not interesting is a bowl of mush. This was a missed opportunity. We’re at a very dangerous time in our country. That’s the point of my Second Civil War novels. That should be the point of this movie. But the movie is afraid to make a point because it doesn’t want to alienate anyone. And that’s why it’s a missed opportunity.

But conservative billionaires, you have an opportunity to make a real difference. Instead of wasting cash donating to DC think tanks like the Forum for Families, Liberty, Eagles, and Forums, throw a few million bucks behind some conservative movies. That was Andrew Breitbart’s hope – that we make quality, thought-provoking entertainment with a conservative message. Note the order – the thought-provoking and entertaining parts come before the conservative message part. And until we make our own movies, we’re going to be stuck with stuff like "Civil War."

Oral Argument In J6 SCOTUS Case Lays Bare DOJ’s Partisan Lawfare

The solicitor general’s argument painted a picture of the Biden administration enlarging or contracting statutory language to serve political purposes.

Margot Cleveland reporting for The Federalist

The Supreme Court heard oral argument Tuesday in a criminal appeal challenging the Biden administration’s use of a catch-all provision in a federal statute focused on the destruction of evidence to charge hundreds of J6 defendants with a 20-year felony. Over the course of the hour-long argument, the government made clear its view that the federal statute at issue, 18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(2), had an expansive reach — other than when Antifa burns a courthouse, a member of Congress pulls a fire alarm, or mostly peaceful protesters delay court or congressional proceedings.

Anyone paying the slightest attention to the Biden administration’s prosecution of J6 protesters and its slap-on-the-wrist coddling of other protesters knows there’s a double standard in play. But the justices’ questioning of the Biden administration during Tuesday’s oral argument in Fischer v. United States forced the government to attempt to justify that disparate treatment.

“There have been many violent protests that have interfered with proceedings,” Justice Thomas opened the questioning of Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar. “Has the government applied this provision to other protests in the past?” the justice queried. 

After sidestepping the question, Prelogar replied that she couldn’t give an example of Section 1512(c)(2) being enforced “in a situation where people have violently stormed a building in order to prevent an official proceeding,” because nothing like Jan. 6, 2021, had ever happened before.

Justice Gorsuch then posed several more hypotheticals: “Would a sit-in that disrupts a trial or access to a federal courthouse qualify? Would a heckler in today’s audience qualify, or at the State of the Union address? Would pulling a fire alarm before a vote qualify for 20 years in federal prison?”

Prelogar responded in the negative, saying none of those events would likely qualify because, in the Biden administration’s view, Section 1512(c)(2) does not reach “conduct that has only a minimal effect on official proceedings.” 

The text of Section 1512(c), however, does not exempt de minimis interference with official proceedings. Rather, subsection (c) provides: 

(c) Whoever corruptly — 

(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or 

(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

So, why would the Biden administration seek to exempt protests or other disturbances that have only a minimal effect on official proceedings from the scope of Section 1512(c)? 

Simply put, because the Department of Justice has never used Section 1512(c) in the way it is being used against the J6 protesters. 

In charging Fischer, the defendant in the case, as well as hundreds of other individuals involved in the Capitol demonstration on Jan. 6, 2021, the DOJ relies on subsection (2) quoted above, maintaining that subsection, in effect, criminalizes the obstruction, influence, or impeding of an official proceeding, no matter the conduct at issue. 

That reading of Section 1512(c)(2) conflicts with the DOJ’s historical interpretation of subsection (2), which limited prosecutions to situations where the defendant had interfered with evidence that would be used in an official proceeding. To explain away the lack of prior prosecutions of protesters under Section 1512(c)(2), the Biden administration needed to make the statute about only non-minimal interferences.

Prelogar also argued that prosecutions under Section 1512(c)(2) were rare because the government lacked evidence in most cases to show the protester intended to impede a specific proceeding. 

“Maybe you’re protesting a branch of government, you’re outside this court, but you don’t have this specific argument in mind,” that would not be a violation of Section 1512(c)(2), according to Prelogar. The solicitor general also stressed the need for the government to show a “nexus” between the protest and the official proceedings to prosecute under the statute at issue.

Prelogar’s argument to the court seemed to serve a dual purpose: to placate the court’s concerns that the government’s reading of Section 1512(c)(2) is overbroad and to convince the justices that the DOJ applies the statute uniformly. 

Judging by the questions and responses from the bench, a majority of the justices remained unconvinced — as they should be. Far from establishing that the DOJ enforces Section 1512(c)(2) uniformly, the solicitor general’s argument painted a picture of the Biden administration enlarging or contracting the statutory language to serve political purposes.

From Tuesday’s argument, it appears unlikely a majority of the court will acquiesce in the Biden administration’s reading of Section 1512(c)(2) as creating an independent obstruction of official proceedings felony. Rather, the questioning from a majority of the justices suggests the Supreme Court will hold that subsection (2) only criminalizes conduct that impairs evidence for use in an official proceeding — which is the better reading of the statute.

Are Iran’s Nine Lives Nearing an End?

By unleashing war in the Middle East and targeting Israel, Iran may soon learn that Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression.

 https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/18/are-irans-nine-lives-nearing-an-end/

The theocracy of Iran has been the world’s arch-embassy attacker over the last half century.

So it has zero credibility in crying foul over Israel’s April 1 attacks on its “consulate” in Damascus and the killing of Iran’s kingpin terrorists of the Revolutionary Guard Corps there.

Remember, the world was first introduced to the Iranian ayatollahs by their violent takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1980.

Iranian surrogates next bombed the American embassy in Beirut and the Marine barracks in 1983.

In fact, Iran has attacked US and Israeli diplomatic posts off-and-on for decades, most recently in 2023, when Iran helped plan an attack on the US embassy in Baghdad.

For this reason and several others, Iran’s justification for sending 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles into Israel on the grounds that Israel had bombed an Iranian diplomatic post is completely ridiculous.

One, Iran has never honored diplomatic immunity. Instead, it habitually attacks and kills embassy personnel and blows up diplomatic facilities across the world.

Two, on April 1, the Israelis attacked a pseudo-“consulate” in Damascus which was hosting grandees of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as they planned terrorist attacks on Israel.

Without Iran, the Middle East might have had a chance to use its enormous oil and natural gas wealth to lift its 500 million people out of poverty rather than to be mired in constant tribal and religious anti-Israeli, anti-American, and anti-Western terrorism.

During the Iraq War, Iran’s Shiite terrorists and its massive supplies of deadly shaped-charge explosive devices killed hundreds of Americans. It routinely hijacks container ships in the Straits of Hormuz and stages near collisions with American ships and planes.

How does Iran get away with nonstop anti-Western terrorism, its constant harassment of Persian Gulf maritime traffic, its efforts to subvert Sunni moderate regimes, and its serial hostage-taking?

The theocrats operate on three general principles.

One, Iran is careful never to attack a major power directly.

Until this week, it had never sent missiles and drones into Israel. Its economy is one-dimensionally dependent on oil exports. And its paranoid government distrusts its own people, who have no access to free elections.

So Iranian strategy over the last few decades has relied on surrogates—especially expendable Arab Shia terrorists in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, along with the Sunni Arabs of Hamas—to do its dirty work of killing Israelis and Americans.

It loudly egged all of them on and then cowardly denied responsibility once it feared Israeli or American retaliation.

Two, it has fooled Western governments and especially left-wing American administrations by posing as a persecuted victim. Iran claims it is the champion of aggrieved Shiite Arab and Persian minorities, unfairly exploited by Israel, moderate Arab regimes, and rich Sunni Gulf monarchies.

Three, Iran hopes its pseudo-diplomatic outreach to left-wing Western governments, coupled with its lunatic existential threats and unleashing terrorist attacks on its enemies, can coax or bully the West into granting it concessions—especially time to acquire a dozen or so nuclear weapons.

Yet for all its loud, creepy threats, Iran is incredibly weak and vulnerable.

Israel and its allies shot down almost all its recent nocturnal missile and drone barrages. Lots of other missiles reportedly blew up on liftoff in Iran or crashed in transit.

Before the Biden appeasement of Iran, the Trump administration had isolated and nearly bankrupted Tehran and its proxies. Its Revolutionary Guard terrorist planners proved to be easy targets once they operated outside Iran.

Iran’s only hope is to get a bomb and, with it, nuclear deterrence to prevent retaliation when it increases its terrorist surrogate attacks on Israel, the West, and international commerce.

Yet now Iran may have jumped the shark by attacking the Israeli homeland for the first time. It is learning that it has almost no sympathetic allies.

Does even the Lebanese Hezbollah really want to take revenge against Israel on behalf of Persian Iran, only to see its Shia neighborhoods in Lebanon reduced to rubble?

Do all the pro-Hamas protestors on American campuses and in the streets really want to show Americans they celebrate Iranian attacks and a potential Iranian war against the United States?

Does Iran really believe 99 percent of any future Israel barrage against Iranian targets would fail to hit targets in the fashion that its own recent launches failed?

Does Iran really believe that its sheer incompetence in attacking Israel warrants them a pardon—as if they should be excused for trying, but not succeeding, to kill thousands of Jews?

In sum, by unleashing a terrorist war in the Middle East and targeting the Israeli homeland, Iran may wake up soon and learn Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression—and mostly to the indifference or even the delight of most of the world.