You Are Being Lied To

An incident took place last night in Vancouver, Washington, that illustrates not just the increasingly hostile police-state tactics being taken against ordinary people, but also the way the media can so easily distort reality.

At Legacy Salmon Creek hospital, a daughter came to take home her 74-year-old mother who had earlier been admitted for a urinary-tract infection. However, the hospital refused to release the woman. Conflicting reports say that either the woman refused to take a COVID test or that the hospital forced a test on her and wouldn’t let her leave for 24 hours.

The mother, who is suffering from a brain tumor, can be heard on her daughter’s phone at one point saying “yes,” she wanted to leave. Her daughter has power of attorney and wanted nothing else from the hospital than to take her mom back home.

The daughter called in allies to help her stage a protest at the hospital entrance. Soon, police arrived on the scene. The daughter thought — foolishly, as it turns out — that the cops were going to help her sort things out.

Instead, the cops escalated the situation.

The following video is a livestream of the incident. I have a feeling YouTube will take it down. I’m going to try to download it and will post it at another video-sharing site if that happens.

[Update: It’s now backed up at https://odysee.com/Hospital-holds-patient-hostage--cops-assault-daughter-and-ally:1] 

Shortly after the 38:00 mark, you’ll see the daughter and her allies in the breezeway. On the other side of a pair of glass doors, just inside the entrance, is a group of heavily armed police. When the daughter finally gets the cops to respond to her pleas, one of the officers cracks open the doors wide enough to reach his arm through the opening, whereupon he grabs her by the throat and violently shoves her backward.

The crowd, now growing enraged at the behavior of the police, begins to shout at the cops inside. As one man steps forward and attempts to push open the doors, a cop shoots him point-blank in the mouth with a canister of pepper spray. (Mad props to the guy, incidentally, who spits out the spray like it was water from a squirt gun.)

Now, let’s switch gears. Portland TV station KOIN wrote an article on the incident that exposes not just its own willingness to lie about the situation, but also how the cops framed it in the aftermath. Here’s a link to an archived version of the article, just in case the station tries to hide its own shenanigans.

And here’s KOIN’s headline:

If you watch the livestream, you’ll see that no one, not even once, mentions a single thing about vaccinations. KOIN simply went with the police department’s characterization without bothering to do its own research:

The sheriff’s office said the group consisted of “exceptionally unreasonable” people who were “anti-vaxxer, anti-science types” who live-streamed the incident on social media.

Maybe if someone at KOIN had actually taken the time to watch the livestream, they would have seen that no one was being “unreasonable,” let alone “exceptionally” so. And the claim that they were “anti-vaxxer, anti-science types” has no basis in anything that occurred during the incident. It’s obvious the department chose to frame the protestors that way simply to poison public opinion against them.

There was no “anti-vax” protest, or even any talk of vaccinations. A daughter just wanted to take her mother home, and her friends showed up to help make that happen. That’s it. Nothing more.

But KOIN wasn’t done yet. Get this: “The group of people tried to enter the hospital through the emergency room entrance and someone in the crowd used pepper spray.”

Someone in the crowd. That “someone” was a cop who stuck a canister through a crack in the doors and gassed a man point-blank.

The KOIN story is a complete lie. It was framed to make ordinary people look like a crazed mob that necessitated a lockdown — a lockdown that the hospital chose to enact, and that it could have avoided altogether had it just released the patient to the care of her daughter.

Keep this in mind when you’re watching or reading the news. In a time when people are silenced by social-media “fact-checks” to control narratives, and when the drumbeat quickens of calls for censorship to combat “misinformation,” consider how blatant lies are allowed to go unchecked to manipulate your perceptions of the world. Reality is being distorted by the very people who insist on silencing “misinformation.”

As a reminder, one of these incidents was characterized as a “mostly peaceful protest,” while the other has the media shrieking about a coup attempt by a crazed rioting mob:

It’s quite distressing how easy it is for those in power to frame someone as a “violent insurrectionist” or a “domestic terrorist.” It’s also a grim reminder that we are ruled by psychopaths who want to gaslight us all into accepting their version of reality.

One potentially bright spot from the Vancouver incident is that those in the crowd — presumably law-and-order Trump supporters, based on comments made as the incident unfolded — spoke openly of how they felt betrayed by the same police they had so ardently backed. You can practically see the scales falling from the eyes of the woman recording the video, as she observes the heavily armed, militarized cops forming a semicircle around her and her friends:

It took us a few decades longer than the left, but we’re figuring it out. You guys just do what you’re told. You’re not here for us. You’re not here to defend and protect us.

[…] Let’s make sure, you guys, that they have more equipment, under Trump, right? We all pushed for that, right? Better equipment was what we said. We want them all heavily equipped to protect us, is what we said. Y’all are teaching us how freaking stupid we were.

Ever so slowly, more and more people from all points on the political spectrum are beginning to wake up. These Trump supporters now see with their own eyes that when push comes to shove, the police will take the side of those in power. Always. Every time. That’s their job. That’s what they do.

And make no mistake: The last thing those in power want is for us to stop attacking each other and see that we have more in common with each other than we think. The real battle in our world today is not right vs. left, but the people vs. the ruling elites. It’s a story that has repeated itself over and over throughout history. I can only hope that the story of our time can find a peaceful ending.

Incidentally, this story did have a happy ending, as the hospital relented and released the patient. In a follow-up video, the person behind the camera suggested that everyone get together to burn some blue-line flags, to protest what she now rightly sees as “tyrants” in her midst. Hope somebody brought the marshmallows.

It's Not About Right vs. Left Anymore

Let’s make one thing abundantly clear right off the bat: When governments and corporations formally unite in their goals toward a common purpose, that is the literal definition of fascism. Fascism can overlap with racial supremacy, but the two are not synonymous. If we’re going to throw provocative words around, we ought to at least strive to use them correctly.

And now let’s turn to the case of the populist investors who are driving beaten-down stocks like GameStop through the roof. Wall Street pros are losing their minds that ordinary people are gaming the market the same way wealthy investors do every single day. Hedge-fund short-sellers essentially bet on the death of these companies and make money if the stocks tank. So a collection of everyday people from a Reddit subgroup called WallStreetBets started using investing tools like Robinhood — designed to let ordinary folks without a lot of money get started in the market with small investments — to scoop up these beleaguered stocks.

The result is that GameStop and other left-for-dead stocks have gone through the roof, trading at hundreds of percentage points above where they were just a few short days ago. And what it means for these hedge-fund managers who bet against the stocks is that they’re having to cover their short positions — because the more the stocks go up, the more money they lose. One fund, Melvin Capital, has had to take on a cash infusion of more than $2 billion just to close out its positions.

It’s been glorious to see these vultures and robber barons take it on the chin. Critics say that the stock prices of GameStop, AMC, and others targeted by these populist renegades are now completely unmoored from the value of their companies — but that’s the whole point. This is no different from seeing wealthy investors talk up a company to drive up a stock or talk down a company they’ve shorted. Putting your thumb on the scale disconnects a stock’s price from the company’s value, too.

This episode is also a good reminder of how the stock market was already disconnected from the economic reality of everyday Americans. The markets continued to hit record highs last year, during severe lockdowns that kept companies closed and saw countless small businesses shut their doors forever. In a normal world, the stock market would reflect that reality. The fact that it doesn’t exposes the ugly truth that the stock market is, for the most part, a rigged game that involves wealthy people buying from and selling to other wealthy people. It’s a casino where the house always wins, but they’ll throw enough chips into your 401(k) to keep you from complaining about it.

The growing trend of stock buybacks illustrates the problem. In times past, companies were generally far more willing to share their profits with all their stakeholders. They might direct money toward helping the people in the communities where their businesses are located. They might direct it toward infrastructure improvements. They might use it to create more jobs, or to give their existing workers better pay and benefits. Anyone who helped the company achieve its success would be rewarded in some way.

These days, what happens more often than not is that companies use their profits to buy back their own shares and retire them. That means there are fewer shares available to trade, which means that the company’s earnings become spread across fewer shares. And that artificially inflates earnings per share, which benefits shareholders but no other stakeholders in the company.

Just how bad is this problem? Buybacks on the S&P 500 reached $806 billion in 2018, and the trend shows no sign of stopping. That’s $806 billion that could have been shared with communities, workers, the everyday people who allow the companies to succeed. And that’s why Bernie Sanders, just a few years ago, was pushing to ban buybacks. They were considered market manipulation before the rules were changed to allow them in 1982. They still are market manipulation. All they do is make the rich richer, while everyone else gets frozen out.

Keep that in mind when these same companies have the gall to complain about policies like minimum-wage increases and then use those things as excuses to send American jobs overseas, where they can pay people in countries with sketchy labor rights and a poor record on civil liberties a fraction of what they’d pay an American worker.

When you think about what’s going on in that context, you realize how utterly pathetic it is for Wall Street insiders to complain about investors who are disconnecting stock prices from the underlying companies’ value. They do the same thing all the time.

It surely makes them even more upset that the WallStreetBets folks aren’t doing anything illegal. They’re just buying stocks on the open market.

And that’s precisely why those in power are determined to make it stop.

As of this writing, Robinhood — again, a company created to democratize investing — has outright banned trading in GameStop, AMC, and the other stocks the WallStreetBets gang are buying up. This comes after TD Ameritrade and other companies had already placed trading restrictions on the select stocks. Meanwhile, Robinhood and other trading outlets are jacking up margin requirements on those same stocks. All this, of course, is a nakedly obvious attempt to stop ordinary people from doing what happens on Wall Street every single day.

But not to be outdone, Discord decided to ban the WallStreetBets server on its platform on Wednesday. Why, you ask, when the traders are doing nothing illegal? Hate speech, of course:

The server has been on our Trust & Safety team’s radar for some time due to occasional content that violates our Community Guidelines, including hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation. Over the past few months, we have issued multiple warnings to the server admin.

“To be clear,” Discord continued, “we did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks.” No, of course you didn’t. The timing of the ban is just a wild coincidence — just like it was a wild coincidence that Facebook on Thursday banned a 157,000-strong Robinhood discussion group for a TOS violation that a Facebook spokesperson said was “unrelated to the ongoing stock frenzy.”

No rational person is going to buy these excuses, of course, even as CNN and other news outlets fall in line blaming racists and Donald Trump for the whole thing. Forbes quotes one of the group’s moderators as calling out the Discord ban for what it was:

A moderator of the group acknowledged “if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad,” but added that “Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community instead of stepping in with the wrench we may have needed to fix things, especially after we got over 1,000 server boosts. That is pretty unethical.”

Draw a straight line from that comment to the coordinated takedown of Parler, and you can see exactly what’s happening here. Google, Apple, and Amazon all used similar excuses of “white supremacy” to remove Parler from the internet, even as they overlooked the abundance of hate, violence, doxxing, and trolling that occurs on places like Twitter and Facebook. Twitter was just sued for refusing to take down pornographic material of an underage victim of sex trafficking, on the basis that the company couldn’t find any TOS violations in the content. But, strangely, there are no howls from the establishment or the mainstream media to blast Twitter out of existence.

Google, meanwhile, isn’t even bothering to offer an excuse for why it has so far wiped out some 150,000 negative reviews of Robinhood that have poured in since the trading platform put its trading ban in place. The corporate behemoths are simply doing whatever they want and daring us to do something about it. No phony explanations are even necessary. They know they hold all the cards.

No, none of this is about “white supremacy.” It’s about power. It’s about the ruling elites taking back control of the nation and the narrative, and making sure that Trump supporters and populists of all stripes never think again about trying to exert control.

That is why you can’t question the COVID narrative. That is why you can’t question the election results. That is why the ruling class, with Joe Biden as its figurehead, re-established control behind razor wire and 25,000 soldiers. They are making it crystal clear that they are in control and you aren’t. And they’ll use the dog whistle of racism and white supremacy to get the public on their side and demonize anyone who strays from the narrative.

And what the government can’t do, being constrained by the First Amendment, they’ll simply coordinate with their multibillion-dollar unaccountable corporate cronies to do for them.

That is fascist totalitarianism. There is no other way to describe it.

“But wait,” you say. “Weren’t you just complaining a few days ago about the left’s Marxist sympathies?”

Yes, I was. The thing is, it’s possible for the system we live under to have characteristics of both Marxism and fascism. The Marxism expresses itself culturally, blending notions from the Frankfurt School of thought with a postmodern assertion that only narratives exist, not objective truth. The result is a society driven by identity politics instead of economic class, with the “privileged” class pitted in an eternal war against victimized identity groups, just as Marx imagined a never-ending binary battle in which you were either the proletariat or the bourgeoise, and those on the wrong side were to be shown no mercy.

Now, instead of proletariat vs. bourgeoise, we have “white supremacists” against everyone else. And not only are we using that false dichotomy as a basis for institutionalizing reverse discrimination — putting whites to the back of the bus rather than continuing to strive for equal protection under the law — but we’re also using it to silence voices that dissent from the postmodernist consensus narrative, whatever that happens to be at any given time.

The state is thus pressing the cultural aspect, while it hands off the censorship to its corporate allies. Hence, fascism.

Where is this all leading? Well, consider how we followed the lead of Communist China in taking a heavy-handed approach to a virus that far outweighed the danger it posed. And consider how much of our corporate output depends on Chinese labor — some literally enslaved, and all underpaid and exploited with no recourse. While China has adopted capitalistic reforms but still remains a one-party dictatorship, so America seems to be on course to become an authoritarian nation propelled by virtually unlimited corporate power. The two nations seem destined to meet somewhere in the middle, with the only real difference being that while the state sits at the top of the pyramid of power in China, giant global corporations occupy the top spot in America. The nightmarish results of this unholy alliance of communism and fascism will be similar, in terms of both economic and political freedom, for the ordinary citizens of both countries.

I don’t know if we have any hope of stopping our progression toward such a horrible future. But I do know that it would behoove us to stop thinking so much in terms of a battle of right and left, because the battle is really between the powerful ruling class and the increasingly disenfranchised everyday man and woman. While I use the term “left” here when I talk about the madness of the ruling class, which does indeed tilt hard to the left, the larger problem is that the cultural leftists’ goals are inextricably entwined with those of global capitalism, the very force that has been sending U.S. jobs overseas and wants to suppress national interests in favor of international ones that benefit global corporations, crushing individual liberty in the name of collective authoritarianism. That’s one of many reasons why an unrepentant nationalist like Donald Trump couldn’t be tolerated and had to be removed, by way of an election whose outcome — again, through a coordinated effort of state and corporate power — you’re not allowed to question.

Consider, for example, that the U.S. Justice Department has arrested a man for making jokes about voting access in the 2016 election. Douglass Mackey put out posts on social media telling Hillary Clinton voters to skip the lines by texting their votes for president. Somehow, Joe Biden’s DOJ argues that this deprived people of their right to vote — as if the whopping 4,900 people who texted the number and apparently fell for the joke were somehow prevented from later actually going to a polling place. The man could go to prison for 10 years. For a joke.

This is the future of free speech. And this is our own government, arresting people on a charge of spreading “dangerous misinformation,” which will undoubtedly be used more and more as a weapon to shut down free expression, both online and otherwise. If truth doesn’t exist, only narratives, then any speech the ruling class doesn’t like can be shut down under the argument that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to spreading “dangerous misinformation” or “conspiracy theories,” whether what’s being spoken is really misinformation or not. (See again the crackdowns on any discussion of the 2020 election.)

It also allows unabashed propaganda to flourish. Just look at the past year, when we’ve all been told to cower in fear from other human beings and consent to crushing lockdowns over a virus that for healthy people under 70 has a survival rate of 99.5% to 99.997%. And now, miraculously, with Trump out of office, some of the most left-leaning mayors and governors in America, who kept telling us it was too dangerous to go to bars and restaurants, are now reopening bars and restaurants. Never mind how many small businesses had to go under in an apparent attempt to spite the former president.

On top of that, there are now signs that the establishment is changing its tune on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, the decades-old malaria drug that the media and leftist bureaucrats attacked as a dangerous quack treatment for COVID, even after many doctors themselves reported success in using it as part of their treatment regimen. The difference between now and then? Trump advocated for HCQ, so it had to be demonized.

Oh, and did you hear that you shouldn’t wear one mask but three? Actually, four would be even better. Why not 10? Why not 50?

If it feels like you’re being gaslighted, that’s because you are. This is all propaganda, but you’re expected to treat it as fact and never question it. If you do, you will be punished.

And remember, what the government can’t get away with punishing you for, it will simply do through its corporate allies. Which is ultimately even worse, since corporations don’t answer to anybody. And as long as useful idiots continue to make the argument that private companies can do whatever they want, even as they crush free expression in the virtual town square, the corporations have absolutely no incentive to stop what they’re doing. After all, they’re only fighting “white supremacy” and “dangerous misinformation.”

These attitudes then go on to affect public opinion, and in a time of McCarthyist hysteria such as the one we’re living in, individuals and organizations alike feel empowered, even compelled, to join in the witch hunt. Consider a few recent examples:

• A former U.S. ambassador is suing Google and Apple to force them to take Telegram off their app stores — because, of course, Telegram is a haven for “hate speech.”
  
  
• A literary agent lost her job for having accounts on Parler and Gab. Not for anything she posted; just for having accounts there.
  
  
• College kids are being threatened with losing their internet access and having their ID cards blocked if they refuse to obey campus COVID directives, including getting regular tests, reporting symptoms, ignoring mask requirements, or leaving a specified area around campus. It doesn’t take a great imagination to see how these same kinds of punishments could easily be doled out to everyday people for failure to comply with future government orders, whether COVID-related or not.

I hate to think of where this is all going to lead us. It can’t possibly end well.

There is an aggressive attempt under way to stamp out any opinions that challenge the narrative, and it’s being driven by a government-corporate alliance that has almost unlimited power to do whatever it wants. Take the events at the Capitol. I don’t care what anyone thinks about what happened that day: The underlying cause was not Donald Trump, or racism, but a long-simmering resentment among those who have been victimized by globalization and cultural shifts, while all the ruling elites can do is sneer at them, dismissing them as bigots and deplorables, just as they’ve continued to do in the days since.

In many significant ways, their anger is not all that different from the anger driving the violence we saw last year in the BLM riots. (I don’t give the same pass to Antifa; they’re just troublemaking idiots.) People are angry at a system that exploits them, that doesn’t listen to them, that stomps on them over and over again and tells them that they’re the bad guys who need to shut up and fall in line.

The same impulse is driving the push-back against the WallStreetBets gang. The ruling elites can piss on you all day long, but when you dare to push back, they declare all-out war on you.

At some point, all these everyday people are going to stop fighting with each other and band together in common cause. As one, they’re going to point at the ruling elites, and they’re going to serve notice that they’re not going to be pushed around anymore.

I can only hope and pray that there will be a peaceful resolution when that day comes.

Goodbye, Old Republic. Hello, People's Republic.

In a pivotal moment in American history when free speech is under relentless attack, Donald Trump had a grand opportunity to stand up for those who sacrificed their freedoms to bring the truth to the American people and, indeed, the world.

Instead, Trump used the dying moments of his presidency to pardon white-collar criminals and his own crooked allies. Bribe-takers, insider-traders, liars, and thieves made up the list. Even Kwame Kilpatrick was set free — the notoriously corrupt Detroit mayor who let the already indebted city pay for his extravagances and wild parties and was serving a 28-year sentence after being convicted on 24 felony counts, including racketeering, bribery, and fraud.

But Edward Snowden and Julian Assange? Two whistleblowers who risked everything to reveal the abuses and corruption that that our own federal government commits on a regular basis behind the scenes? Well, sorry, but that’s too big of an ask.

Word is that Trump was considering pardons for them both, but then Mitch McConnell, arguably the biggest snake in the pit of vipers that is Congress, allegedly threatened to vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial if Trump pardoned Assange.

Did Trump call his bluff? Did Trump decide that standing up for the truth was more important than his own political hide?

Nope. In the end, Donald Trump bent the knee to the same swamp that he claimed to be fighting for four years. He let corrupt government officials walk free, while leaving those who expose government corruption to twist in the wind.

Trump revealed his true colors on his way out the door. Americans, he took you for a ride. He was in it for himself and always was. He’s the same raging narcissist he always was. And now Snowden will remain in exile in Russia, while Assange will probably die in prison.

Signs of What’s to Come

Before Trump slipped out town, D.C. took on the look of an Eastern European city in the dark days of Soviet communism. Razor-wire fences surrounded the National Mall, with the city patrolled by 25,000 U.S. soldiers — 10 times as many troops as we have stationed in Afghanistan.

Word is that Nancy Pelosi wanted “crew-manned machine guns” on top of that — and was flatly told no by Acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli.

“That was rejected because there’s simply no use for that in a security arrangement for a civilian undertaking,” he said, adding that “some of this has gone beyond any legitimate security need.”

Gee, ya think?

And all this for what? An inauguration that the public wasn’t even invited to?

I don’t know about you, but if you have to hide from the people behind fences and swarms of soldiers to take the oath of office, only after vetting those same troops surrounding you to ensure their loyalty, then maybe you weren’t really elected by the people. The only thing it tells me is that you’re afraid of your own citizens.

I mean, let’s be honest: This is what a genuine coup looks like. Not people questioning the outcome of some very fishy election results.

Of course, the excuse for all of this is the protest at the Capitol that’s being characterized as something far worse than it actually was. With breathless hysteria, our ruling elites are using the incident as a pretext for shutting down alternative social media, silencing conservative news outlets, “deprogramming” Trumpers, and using federal intel agencies to begin a 9/11-style crackdown on “domestic terrorists,” a.k.a. Trump supporters — and “even libertarians,” in the words of former CIA chief John Brennan.

But let’s not forget that unlike the BLM/Antifa riots last summer — where homes, businesses, and entire neighborhoods were torched to the ground, looting was actually defended, and people lost their lives — the Capitol protest resulted in a few broken windows, and the only person who died during the actual protest was an unarmed protester herself. One guy puts his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. Another guy in a Viking outfit leads a prayer at the Senate podium, and then the cops politely ask him and his pals to leave the chamber.

And yet this is the protest we’re supposed to be terrified of. The one where some Trump true believers forced their way into a house that We the People own, a lot of them stayed inside the velvet ropes, a few took selfies with the cops who pretty much let them in, and most just stood around just chanting slogans and waving flags.

But while the media kept insisting that last summer’s violent, fiery riots were “mostly peaceful protests,” the protest that actually was mostly peaceful is the one characterized as a riot, a violent insurrection, an invasion, an assault on our very democracy.

Here, consider what the Associated Press has instructed writers and editors to say in the wake of both incidents. Back during the summertime riots, the AP urged journalists not to call them riots, because that was somehow racist. Instead, the AP urged more “vague” terminology, like “unrest.” (Because vagueness is something journalists should always strive for.) But now the AP is telling journalists that the word “riot” is perfectly acceptable to use, as are things like “violent protest,” “mob,” even, yes, “insurrection.”

Words matter. And that’s why The Washington Post is now erasing history to make an administration that they favor look good. WaPo, whose motto, ironically, is “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” was caught red-handed deleting a passage in an old article in which Kamala Harris mocks prisoners. And so, just days into the new presidency, we see mainstream media taking on the role of the Ministry of Truth, which tasked itself with constantly rewriting history to make it square with Big Brother's current narrative. In the world of 1984, as in every dictatorial regime that has ever existed, there is no past — just an eternal present in which whatever the state says is true, has always been true, and can never be questioned.

See? Look for yourself. There’s nothing there. Kamala never said anything bad about anyone. The election was totally free and fair. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Biden As the Opening Act

And so now we have Joe Biden, the doddering grandpa who just wants all us kids to get along. To help his administration get off on the right foot, Amazon — the same woke corporate behemoth that nuked Parler, don’t forget — wrote Biden to say the company would be happy to help him distribute vaccines. I guess they couldn’t have done that under Trump all along? Giving Trump the middle finger was more important than helping people?

That just proves what we’ve always known about how COVID has been wielded as a convenient political weapon every step of the way. After all, why else would Andrew Cuomo in New York state, Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, Muriel Bowser in D.C., and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan all suddenly decide that it’s now magically OK for people to go back to bars and restaurants? Remember, bars in particular had to close because they were hotbeds for viral transmission. But now we have to worry about the economy all of a sudden, after untold numbers of small businesses have already gone under.

But Trump’s gone now, so it’s OK.

Brittany Hughes, incidentally, would like a word with all you leftist hypocrites:

This all appears to come on the back of a study showing what we already knew, and that the WHO and the Great Barrington Declaration already said: that lockdowns haven’t worked any better than voluntary measures in controlling the spread of the deadly virus-with-a-99%-plus-survival-rate. Better late than never, but again, it’s painfully obvious that these decisions to start opening back up things that Sweden and South Dakota showed should never have been closed in the first place are politically motivated in their timing.

Meanwhile, speaking of hypocrisy, Biden is caught violating his own executive order mandating masks on federal property. And just like every time leftists are caught violating the edicts they place on everyone else, his press secretary cavalierly blows off the double standard by saying the inauguration was a “historic day” and he had “bigger issues to worry about.”

OK, so which is it? Are masks necessary life-savers and you’ll kill Grandma if you don’t wear them, or can you just toss them aside if it’s a big day and you have other stuff on your mind?

But then this is Jen Psaki, who also thought it was no big deal to wear a hat with a hammer-and-sickle emblem given to her back in 2014, while on a diplomatic visit with Russian officials in Paris. Back then, Psaki was a spokeswoman for John Kerry’s State Department.

When critics pointed out the inappropriateness of her headwear, it was blown off as part of an awkward exchange of presents, in which Kerry gave some Idaho potatoes to the Russian diplomats. Har-har, sure. You can just imagine the 24/7 media uproar if a Republican official wore, say, a Confederate flag hat given to him as a gift. At some point, common sense should kick in and say, “You know, a hammer and sickle was the emblem of a tyrannical empire that extinguished freedom for millions and killed millions more. Maybe I shouldn’t pose for the camera with this thing on.” But no.

To any normal person, it’s every bit as inappropriate as wearing a swastika. But hey, at least it telegraphs to us where the sympathies of this administration clearly lie behind its figurehead, as if there was any doubt.

Granted, Biden is already tossing bones to the neoliberal warmongers and the insurance companies, by respectively ramping up the Syrian conflict and bailing on a healthcare public option. He’s also frozen a Trump order to lower prices for insulin and epinephrine, in a nod to Big Pharma’s ability to maximize its profits on the backs of sick people.

Killing off the Keystone XL pipeline wasn’t even a surprise — though you know you’ve really stepped in it when the labor unions that backed you are pissed off and even Canada’s far-left PM says he’s disappointed in you. With the stroke of a pen, Biden destroyed thousands of jobs, weakened America’s energy independence, and will most likely cause gasoline prices to rise. Remember the good old days of $4-a-gallon gas in the Obama years?

Still, all that kind of stuff is expected from corporate neoliberal Democrats, which I think in the early days of his administration is going to be the point — to lull the masses into not paying attention. (Oh, there go those wacky tax-and-spend, tree-hugging Democrats again.) Because we know that Biden’s real purpose is to serve as a Trojan horse for the woke far left, whose members dominate his administration. They’ll be ready to take over with Kamala Harris as the smiling face of authoritarian rule once old Uncle Joe is put out to pasture. My guess is the establishment will let him hang around long enough to get the virus under control, so he can look like a conquering hero as he rides off into the sunset.

The thing is, Biden is an old-school liberal with questionable mental faculties, so one even wonders if he understands the consequences of some of the insanely woke executive orders he’s already signed.

Consider, for example, that Biden signed an order that strips women of their sex-based rights in the name of defending “gender identity.” In short, women can say goodbye to their own sports and their right to private spaces to accommodate men who identify as women.

Another of Biden’s orders, equally disturbing, openly allows for reverse discrimination in federal hiring. What Biden proclaims to be a system of “equity” is really just government-enforced equality of outcome, with historically “privileged” groups taking it on the chin.

I’m going to defer to Andrew Sullivan, who recently summed up the situation well:

[E]equity means giving the the named identity groups a specific advantage in treatment by the federal government over other groups — in order to make up for historic injustice and “systemic” oppression. Without “equity”, the argument runs, there can be no real “equality of opportunity.” Equity therefore comes first. Until equity is reached, equality is postponed — perhaps for ever.

[…] The paradox, of course, is that to achieve “equity” you have to first take away equality for individuals who were born in the wrong identity group. Equity means treating individuals unequally so that groups are equal.

[…] Biden is therefore enforcing the Ibram X. Kendi view that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” And he’s enforcing it across the entire federal government and any institution the federal government funds. To show he’s serious, he’s appointed Susan Rice to enforce equity in a “whole-of-government” approach. America is no longer about individual freedom; it’s about identity group power, and its constant management by government.

Biden’s executive order on “LGBTQ+” is also taken directly from critical gender and queer theory. Take the trans question. Most decent people support laws that protect transgender people from discrimination — which, after the Bostock decision, is already the law of the land. But this is not enough for Biden. He takes the view that the law should go further and insist that trans women are absolutely indistinguishable from biological women — which erases any means of enforcing laws that defend biological women as a class. If your sex is merely what you say it is, without any reference to biological reality, then it is no longer sex at all. It’s gender, period. It’s socially constructed all the way down.

[…] I wonder if Joe Biden even knows what critical theory is. But he doesn’t have to. It is the successor ideology to liberalism among elites, a now-mandatory ideology if you want to keep your job. But Biden’s emphatic backing of this illiberal, discriminatory project on his first day is relevant. He has decided to encourage “unity” by immediately pursuing policies that inflame Republicans and conservatives and normies more than any others.

And those policies are obviously unconstitutional. The federal government cannot actively discriminate on the basis of race, sex or group identity under the Constitution. It cannot strip women of their rights as a distinct biological class. It cannot void religious freedom for individuals. Biden’s woke rampage in the federal government won’t last, because it cannot last if our constitution means anything.

Biden even wants to push “equity” in economics. Imagine opening up your tax forms one day, and you see tax brackets based not on income but on your pigmentation, your sex organs, and who you sleep with. That is quite literally how these people think.

We’ve been heading in this direction for years, and it was only a matter of time until it worked its way up to the federal level. And Sullivan is right to call it “illiberal,” because it all flies in the face of the classically liberal ideals that shaped not just the American nation but Western civilization as a whole. It’s tragic enough that we’re reverting to a pre-Civil Rights era, when blacks were pushed to the back of the bus, and replacing it with revenge-based policies that push whites to the back of the bus. But to enforce the notion that men can be women and vice versa simply by saying so undermines our entire foundation of objective and rational thought.

None of this is to say that people deserve to be treated unfairly, or that past discriminations didn’t happen. The point is that two wrongs don’t make a right, and that all people are guaranteed equal protection under the law through the 14th Amendment and civil-rights legislation. That is as it should be, and that ideal ought to remain the goal we strive toward. We need nothing else.

Anyone who says we do wants to lead us down a dangerous road that we may not recover from.

And none of this even takes into account the potential for ending the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, adding Democrat-friendly new states to the union, or ending the Electoral College. People say it won’t happen, that there would be a backlash and Democrats would end up losing the Senate and maybe even the House in 2022. Yeah, sure. Let me know how those free and fair elections work out. No, I don’t think we’ll ever again be free of the rule of these people. Trump was the last gasp of the America we once knew, and it didn’t help that he was the wrong person for the job all along. For all practical purposes, he was the final nail in the coffin, as the old republic gives way to the People’s Republic.

Buckle up. The next few years are going to take America into some pretty ugly places.

Has the American Ideal Taken Its Last Breath?

I started looking for a new social-media home back in September, because I saw the writing on the wall at the Big Tech companies. I ended up settling at Minds, because it seemed like a more grown-up place with thoughtful conversations, and at VK, because, being based in Russia, it's somewhat immune from whatever purges happen in the USA.

But it feels like there's no escape from the censors now. Parler was the test balloon and the scapegoat, but now Google and Apple have started chipping away at Minds the same way they did with Parler, and they're working hard on ending Wimkin, another Facebook free-speech alternative.

American Thinker, a site for conservative commentary that’s been around for a long time, had to wipe out its comments section or face going offline.

A woman looking to build a free-speech platform had her GoFundMe campaign canceled, and PR Newswire banned her press release complaining about it — and the tragic irony is that this woman is the daughter of Cambodian immigrants whose parents came here to escape the brutal dictatorship of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

We're living in a nightmare. There's no end to the woke puritans' witch hunt, and no one can stop them. Big Tech is accountable to no one. And the Woke Left, which controls all our major institutions, is firmly on Big Tech's side.

It's a very sad time for anyone old enough to have been on the internet back in its Wild West days, when it held unlimited promise and you could talk about pretty much anything to pretty much anyone. Then the corporations moved in and took over, no one stopped them from growing into gigantic monopolies, and now they're so powerful that they can ban the president of the United States.

No one is safe in this environment. Cancel culture was just the prelude to a Chinese-style social-credit system. Now you can be debanked, lose access to credit, be silenced online, lose your livelihood, lose your house — all for wrongthink, and all with the click of a mouse. Who needs gulags when you hold that much power over the entire world?

Social media has long been my outlet to the world. I've met lots of people with lots of interesting ideas and perspectives. But how can a sane person go on, not knowing where the censors will strike next? They’ll never stop. The net will be cast wider and wider. "Tolerant" "liberals" will continue to silence and demonize their enemies, while conservatives seem incapable of saying anything about any of it but "I condemn the Capitol protest" and "private companies can do whatever they want," as if they think concessionary language will win them some kind of reprieve from the Left.

Meanwhile, the poor Trump diehards still cling to their belief that somehow a last-second miracle will happen and their guy will serve another four years. It's like watching one of those religious cults who go to the mountaintop, certain of the date and time of the rapture, only to go home shattered and disillusioned when nothing happens.

I don't want to sound mean toward the Trumpers. I never liked Trump, but I know the people who support him, and I understand their pain. It didn't start with Trump. It started when greedy corporations sent their manufacturing jobs overseas, Democrats abandoned the working class for corporate favoritism and woke identity politics, and conservatives lost the culture wars. Trump was their last gasp, their only hope. But he was never the right person for the job. Time and again, he's given ammo to those with Trump Derangement Syndrome and made things worse for everyone.

At the very least, Trump was a bulwark. But now the Left will control every major institution in America, and they don't want reconciliation. They want silence and punishment. They want revenge. In league with their corporate cronies, they've already shown that they'll stop at nothing to purge those they disagree with.

More censorship is coming. Minds was one of my favorite places on the internet, but I think its time is short in the current hysterical political climate. I hope I’m wrong, but I think no one will be spared.

I took it as a sign the other day when I saw two different articles talking about how social media distorts our view of the real world and how people are looking for something to fill their spiritual void. I could relate. My remaining faith was annihilated over the past year. Others seem to have turned to politics to fill the void. But as much as I talk about politics, I actually hate politics. It's just that politics is inescapable, as we've seen over the past year and as we're seeing now. And it's just going to get worse after Jan. 20. We face a future of censorship, cancel culture gone wild, health passports for a virus with a 99%-plus survival rate, and the inability to even talk about simple things like election outcomes. Everything that doesn't fit the narrative will be banned as dangerous misinformation, and anyone on the political right can eventually expect to be de-personed.

Anyone left will be relentlessly propagandized and gaslighted into accepting the official narrative... because in this Orwellian world, truth is disinformation, and disinformation is truth. Big Tech is assaulting free speech, but Trump is the fascist. You get the idea.

I’m afraid we've lost the fight. The America so many of us grew up with, the one that at least clung to some thread of constitutional liberty in the pre-9/11 days, appears to have collapsed. And I don’t think there’s any getting it back. Supporting our nation’s founding ideals now marks you as a domestic terrorist, while the masses cheer on the same censorship that will eventually come back to bite them.

I think we've crossed the point of no return. Americans would do well to hunker down and prepare for the worst.

When Apple Became Big Brother

Remember this iconic Apple ad from late 1983?

In a gray world where everyone looks the same, dresses the same, and even walks, stands, and sits the same, a group of drone-like humans take their seats before a video screen. A Big Brother figure on the screen bleats out his propaganda to the masses:

Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology — where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

Meanwhile, an athletic blonde-haired woman is rushing toward the auditorium with a sledgehammer in hand, being chased by a group of helmeted police. She hurls her hammer at the screen, and it explodes in a blinding flash of light.

Then the voiceover:

On Jan. 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.

So the new Mac, symbolized by the woman, will smash computer users out of their hypnotic stupor and stultifying sameness — at that time, no doubt, represented by IBM computers and their users. Apple, the cutting-edge “Think Different” company, would loose the binds of conformity, leading the world away from an Orwellian dystopia and into an era of original and independent thought.

That was then.

Fast-forward three and a half decades, and Apple the corporate behemoth, with a $2 trillion-plus market cap that’s larger than the GDP of most nations on the planet, is now officially the Big Brother on the screen.

In booting upstart social-media company Parler off its App Store, Apple demanded a level of moderation that (1) would be impossible to enforce and (2) attempted to set a standard that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not demand of either Parler or Apple. Section 230 gives online-facing companies immunity from what its users may do or say on their platforms.

Apple knows this. Apple also knows that it doesn’t set the bar so impossibly high for any other company whose apps appear in the App Store.

But Apple decided to become part of the hysterical rage mob that’s demanding Parler be canceled. Because celebrating an entire summer of BLM and Antifa violence is A-OK, but Parler was supposedly a breeding ground for the dangerous insurrectionist white supremacist radicals who invaded our sacred Temple of Democracy and took selfies with the cops.

Apple didn’t deliver the fatal blow. That came from Amazon, which caved in to its crybaby employees demanding that Parler be kicked off Amazon Web Services’ browsers.

So Google and Apple got the ball rolling by banning the app from their stores, but then Amazon piled on, in a breathtaking act of anti-competitive collusion by three massive tech monopolies to take down a comparatively tiny company that was getting too popular, too fast, for their liking.

Remember, these were the people telling you that if you didn’t like Silicon Valley’s censorship, go build your own social media. So Parler did. And now the same people who said “go build your own social media” are canceling Parler.

They don’t want conservatives to have a voice anywhere. They’re trying to pressure cable providers to drop conservative TV channels like Fox News and Newsmax. They won’t stop until they’ve purged every conservative voice in the media.

Of course, this entire effort is framed in terms of a pearl-clutching moral panic: We can’t let people coordinate any more violent insurrections using these dangerous right-wing echo chambers. (But, again, letting people celebrate far worse BLM/Antifa mayhem is just fine.)

Why are they acting like this? Because this seems to be the way people with this fearful mindset deal with things. It’s a pattern. Just as we’ve seen a massively hysterical overreaction to COVID, with the enactment of draconian lockdowns and mandates that far outweigh the danger the virus poses, and the suppression of any narratives critical of the official narrative, so we are now seeing the exact same thing with the insanely overwrought and completely irrational reaction to the Capitol incident. Rather than take a moment to reflect on why the incident happened in the first place, let’s instead wring our hands and claim that we’re facing a national emergency that imperils the safety of the entire nation, and the only way to stop it is to silence every single person who might share even a single viewpoint with the dangerous insurrectionists threatening our very democracy.

It’s essentially another woke witch hunt. This one just happens to come with an apocalyptic 9/11 level of panic from the usual suspects.

What’s so baffling about people who act like this is that they sincerely seem to think that if you just ban enough websites and news networks, it won’t enrage and even radicalize the banned. No, they’ll just go quietly away, never to be heard from again. And then you can step out of your safe space that protects you from scary opinions, and everyone will be secure and happy again.

It’s an astonishingly childlike view of the world that fails to think through the actions and consequences of behaving like this. For example, people like Amazon’s employees have no concept whatsoever of the slippery slope they’re creating. Not only have they eroded trust with current and future customers who wonder when they’ll be targeted next for their politics, but they also don’t seem to comprehend how quickly the same censorship weapons they wield against others could so very easily be turned around on them one day.

And that’s why you set an extremely high bar for silencing someone. It’s also why you defend speech you don’t approve of. The cost of living in a free and open society is that you get to say and do things I may not like, and vice versa. As Noam Chomsky once famously said, and as the woke censors need to be reminded, if we don’t believe in freedom of speech for those we despise, then we don’t believe in it at all.

Moreover, what does it say about people who are so eager to hand unbridled power over what we can say online to a tiny handful of tech billionaires? By silencing the de facto leader of the free world, Twitter has served notice that it thinks it’s more powerful than the president himself. And you know what? Twitter is not necessarily wrong about that.

That should scare the hell out of any rational human being, because it’s setting us up for the kind of tech dystopia that already exists in places like communist China, whose heavy-handed example we unfortunately followed on our response to COVID. The next step will be denial of banking and credit services based on your political beliefs. We’re already seeing websites being shut down by their server hosts and domain registrars. Trump has even had his ability to send emails banned.

If they can do all this to the president of the United States, what makes you think they can’t do it to you, too? Yet your raging case of Trump Derangement Syndrome blinds you from the consequences of the actions you support today. If you really want to make the argument that private companies can do whatever they want, then you’d better be prepared for it when a private company decides it can do whatever it wants to you. Because eventually, it will.

With all the tech overlords in bed with the government, all this censorship is just a convenient end-run around the First Amendment anyway. The tech overlords are simply doing for the politicians they own what the politicians are barred from doing by law. The resulting censorship is the same for the person being censored, just one degree removed. But it’s also worse because the person being censored has no constitutional recourse against an unaccountable corporation that has monopoly control over the public square. At least you can (in theory, anyway) vote out politicians who abuse their power over you. Multibillionaire CEOs, you’re stuck with.

The censorship nightmare we’re living through now is precisely why these social-media monopolies needed to be either broken up or regulated when Republicans had the power to do it. They did nothing, and now we’re heading into an administration that wants to give Big Tech more power, not less, to censor its users.

I’ll concede that some of these companies being deplatformed have only themselves to blame. If you know that the company that provides your Web hosting is run by people who have nearly unlimited power and are likely to bow to the rage of a woke mob, then you’re stupid to have put the fate of your company in their hands in the first place. This is exactly why Gab has its own servers. You have to take defensive measures against these corporate monopolies that have shown time and time again that they will censor and silence people without a second thought and then, in a page from Kafka, never tell you what you did wrong, with no real chance to appeal.

This is why I started looking for an alt-tech company to call home back in the fall. It’s not enough to just sit there on Facebook and complain about how much you hate Facebook. You have to do something. No one is going to do it for you. And eventually it’ll be too late.

Parler, for its part, should be fine. CEO John Matze says there are plenty of server providers willing to work with his company. It’s just a matter of getting everything ported over, which could leave Parler offline for 12 hours to a few days. Hopefully this incident will lead to better things and leave the company less vulnerable to attacks from woke mobs and corporations. May it be a lesson learned.

And so here we are, with Apple having “secured us from the pests purveying contradictory truths.” We can now all enjoy Unification of Thoughts, in our gray world of sameness and conformity. We can take refuge in our “garden of pure ideology,” where we are “one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause” — and no contrary thoughts to shake us from our ideological unity.

The woman coming to set us free was shot down by the helmeted cops chasing her.

1984 may not have been like 1984. But 2021 is very quickly turning out to be.

We Need a Digital Bill of Rights

I’m old enough to remember when the internet held the enormous potential of democratizing free speech on a level unlike anything the world had ever seen. For the first time, you could communicate instantly with anyone around the world. You could exchange and discuss ideas freely.

Then, seeing dollar signs, the corporations moved in. Cutting in line ahead of even government regulators, the corporations grew and grew, essentially unchecked by anyone, until they amassed so much power that they ended up becoming the gatekeepers of the internet. If you wanted your voice heard, or if you wanted to hang out online with your friends, you had no choice but to go through the gatekeepers, who made you click a checkbox saying you had just agreed to their terms of service.

You might as well have signed your soul away to the devil.

Suddenly, you were no longer in control of what you said online. They were. Sure, you could leave if you didn’t like the terms, but where were you going to go? They held all the cards.

And when the government gave them protection from liability from the things you might say on their platforms, they abused the incredibly generous gift they’d been given and censored you anyway. They would point to violations of their TOS, or they’d claim you were spreading “dangerous misinformation,” but in reality they were just controlling their own narratives. In true Kafkaesque fashion, they might not even tell you what you were guilty of doing. And if you appealed, they could just say no, leaving you with no recourse.

And then… and then, they banned the leader of the free world. The president of the United States.

And suddenly, you realized that these tech titans, rich and powerful beyond anyone’s dreams, now held infinite power in their hands. Not even governments could rein them in. They were accountable to no one.

And that’s why we need a Digital Bill of Rights.

The U.S. Constitution includes a Bill of Rights because enough people at the time of the framing wanted explicit guarantees that the people would be free from the kind of oppression the Redcoats had visited on the American colonists before and during the Revolution.

That was almost two and a half centuries ago, when no one could have foreseen that private companies would ever grow large enough to ruin our lives with the click of a button, or powerful enough to silence the president.

So what do we do? We have constitutional protections against government overreach, but very little to protect us from massive tech monopolies with virtually unlimited money and power. (Apple’s market cap alone would make it the eighth largest nation on the planet in terms of GDP.) There is no constitutional amendment protecting you from having your access to credit and banking services shut off. No Digital First Amendment protecting your right to free speech in the Virtual Town Square, nor a Digital Fourth Amendment that would prevent these same tech oligarchs from digging through your personal data and either selling it to advertisers, using it an excuse to cancel you, or blackmailing you with it to ensure you don’t speak up.

Yes, we have antitrust laws, but we don’t appear to have anyone in D.C. with the fortitude to use them to either break up or regulate these monopolies — presumably because the corporations own the politicians or have enough digital dirt on them to keep them quiet. Probably both.

And so we live under the de facto rule of a tiny handful of billionaires controlling what we can say, what we can believe, and whom we can associate with, leaving us powerless to do anything when our banks, credit card companies, email providers, domain registrars, Web servers, and ISPs can simply cut us off on a whim, socially and financially isolating us. The gulags are here, just in a different form from what Solzhenitsyn experienced in his lifetime.

The problem is made worse when all of our institutions of power — media, education, entertainment, business, and government — are controlled by people sympathetic to the tech tyrants. If we’ve seen anything in recent years, it’s that these institutions are perfectly comfortable with promoting cancel culture and a Chinese-style social credit system to monitor and control our behavior. And in a matter of days, we’ll have a presidential administration sympathetic to their cause as well.

The techno-authoritarians have shown us quite clearly that they’re the ones in charge, and they have virtually every institution of power on their side. A sympathetic federal government can’t legally silence you, but it can get our tech overlords to simply do an end-run around the First Amendment on their behalf.

Can you see why it’s well past time to stop saying private companies can do whatever they want? Not only is the premise false — think ADA compliance, health-department codes, child-labor laws, antidiscrimination statues, and so on — but making excuses for their prejudicial behavior only lets them amass more power and control over your life and the lives of everyone else. (Plus, if private companies can do whatever they wanted, then the lockdowns would be over and small businesses everywhere would be back open.) And make no mistake: The power that you might enjoy seeing wielded against your enemy today can very easily be turned around on you tomorrow.

That’s why this fight matters. That’s why you fight to defend the rights even of those you disagree with. Remember, the First Amendment wasn’t written to protect popular speech, uncontroversial ideas, or only the things you agree with. Popular, mainstream ideas don’t need constitutional protection, because no one is attacking them. But what happens when, tomorrow, someone decides your opinion constitutes hate speech and you get canceled? What then? Who or what will protect you?

Woke capitalism is literally calling all the shots now. Government only exists to carry out its edicts and expand its power. And unlike our elected politicians, the people who run these companies answer to no one.

So the question remains: What do we do about it?

We can stop expressing our opinions online so that we don’t get canceled, in which case the tech overlords win anyway. Or we wait on those with the means (paging Elon Musk) to create digital infrastructure systems that are friendly toward free expression. Or we go back to writing letters and using landline phones, and/or learning how to use radio communication like CBs, walkie-talkies, and ham radio. (Of course, ham radio requires licensing, which means the government could even shut you down there.)

In the short term, the most you can do is to minimize or eliminate your use of Big Tech’s products and services. Find a local company or online small business to buy from instead of Amazon or Walmart. Use alt-tech social media like Gab, MeWe, and Minds (and Parler, once it comes back). Shut down your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Use Brave instead of Chrome for your browser. Use DuckDuckGo, Gibiru, SearX, Swisscows, Qwant, StartPage, or some other search engine not named Google. Use Bitchute or Rumble or Odysee instead of YouTube. Ditch Gmail for ProtonMail.

You can even write to your senators and congressman if you want. Encourage them to take up antitrust legislation against the tech behemoths. Tell them to work toward amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to force social media companies to allow all legal speech on their platforms. It’s unlikely that your pleas to D.C. will get anywhere, for the reasons already stated, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

Ultimately, starving these tech behemoths of revenue is the only thing that will get their attention. They respond to money and power. Deprive them of the former, and maybe they’ll eventually lose the latter.

That battle has to begin with us, and the choices we make. Until we get a Digital Bill of Rights — and don’t count on it anytime soon — we have few other options.

This Is What a Witch Hunt Looks Like

In less than a week, we’ve gone from a demonstration that got out of hand at the Capitol to a level of retaliation that would make the Spanish Inquisition proud.

Consider: Trump supporters are kicked off their planes — for singing the national anthem… and simply for voicing their support for the president. In another incident, the pilot threatened to dump everyone off the plane if they didn’t stop chanting “USA.”

Meanwhile, with a heart symbol above a post showing that Parler has fallen from the top of the Apple App Store, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wordlessly expresses his glee that three corporate monopolies — Apple, Google, and Amazon — engaged in anticompetitive collusion to topple the upstart competitor that was attracting conservatives fleeing from Big Tech censorship.

And without a shred of self-awareness of how his own argument could be turned around on him one day, CNN’s Brian Stelter, whose job exists because of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press, writes an article expressing why conservative TV news should be denied the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press.

Of course, he doesn’t state it that way. The piece instead reeks of concern-trolling propaganda:

Somehow, these companies have escaped scrutiny and entirely dodged this conversation. That should not be the case anymore. After Wednesday's incident of domestic terrorism on Capitol Hill, it is time TV carriers face questions for lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories. After all, it was the very lies that Fox, Newsmax, and OAN spread that helped prime President Trump's supporters into not believing the truth: that he lost an honest and fair election.

Translation: These biased media companies made concerned citizens, which we’re going to smear as “domestic terrorists,” question the official narrative on a completely clean election that we will not allow them, or you, or anyone else, to ever question for any reason whatsoever. And they should be silenced for doing so.

There’s more loaded language in there than you could fit in a U-Haul truck. You might as well be reading Pravda.

Then we get to the heart of it:

Tech companies have community guidelines governing the content posted on their platforms. Do cable carriers? If so, what are they? Surely, these companies — many of which boast about their social and civic responsibilities — have limits to the content they disseminate. It's hard, for instance, to imagine they'd carry a fringe and conspiratorial network like InfoWars.

So why do AT&T (which I should note is CNN's parent company), CenturyLink, and Verizon carry OAN? Why do AT&T, CenturyLink, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, and Dish carry Newsmax? And why do they all carry Fox — which is, frankly, at times just as irresponsible and dangerous with its platform as its smaller competitor networks?

And there it is: Why do these companies, which I’m going to name by name so you can target them with your woke wrath, allow these vile news networks to exercise their First Amendment rights on their platforms?

The obvious goal here is to demonize all conservative thought as dangerous far-right polemics, so that all conservative thought can be cleansed from the national conversation — and so that only the enlightened woke far left can fill your head with their propaganda.

We also have to talk about Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed Air Force veteran murdered in cold blood by a Capitol police officer... because she's now being de-personed in all major media. They did this after 9/11, and now they’re doing it to an American citizen. Because when you de-person someone, you make that person into an abstraction that’s simpler to attack. If she were a protestor, you might have some sympathy for the fact that her life was taken. But if she’s an invader, well, what do you do with invaders? You shoot them. Justification by propaganda.

Naturally, you could never imagine the media slandering George Floyd like this.

Related to the Capitol protest, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (because who else?) is demanding that if Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz don’t resign, then the Senate should expel them. If that weren’t enough, Students and alumni of Yale Law School are calling for both men to be disbarred. And for what? For raising an objection on the floor of Congress to the electoral vote count from a handful of states — which is literally all they did, and which was rejected anyway? (And which Democrats have also done in the past?) No, for supposedly fomenting violence and stirring up conspiracy theorists — which they never did.

And then there’s Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser. Mozilla, whose mission statement is literally this…

…is now arguing this:

Does the cognitive dissonance hurt yet, Mozilla?

Over the past year, we’ve seen our world taken over by one hysterical moral panic after another. This overblown reaction to one event, which pales next to an entire summertime of violent leftist mayhem, mirrors the overwrought reaction to a virus with well over a 99% survival rate.

And these moral panics all come from the same source: from a citizenry raised on trigger warnings and safe spaces, who then went on to college and demanded to be protected from opinions different from theirs. Those people now either control all our major institutions or have sympathetic ears within the institutions.

Thus, “Wear your mask and don’t you dare leave your house, you selfish super-spreader” has simply morphed into “Trump is a Nazi, and if you have an opinion different from mine, it needs to be annihilated by any means necessary.”

The mobs today don’t carry pitchforks and torches on their way to the town square to burn the witch, but the impulse is exactly the same.

Sadly, human nature never changes.