Monthly Archives: January 2021

The Censor Campaign

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Open MIC is a Left-wing activist organization that buys stocks in companies and then uses that shareholder status to push policies having nothing to do with the companies’ business and everything to do with “social justice,” sham diversity goals, and other attempts to alter the nature of commerce in our American economy.

Now the group has joined the censorship campaign against free speech.

New shareholder resolutions call upon advertiser Home Depot Inc and agency group Omnicom Group Inc to investigate whether their advertising policies inadvertently contribute to “violations of civil or human rights” by funding platforms that spread inappropriate content, according to copies of the proposals filed in late 2020.
The effort was organized by Open MIC, an organization that uses shareholder engagement to promote causes such as diversity and privacy.
Advertisers have come under pressure to withhold their spending from controversial TV programming or social-media platforms such as Facebook Inc. and to use their weight to push for more content moderation.

“Inappropriate” is as defined by Open MIC. No disputes of that definition are allowed.

Such attempts to censor do not constitute an open microphone; they move to prevent disfavored groups of Americans from having access to the microphone.

They’re claims that ordinary Americans are too grindingly stupid to be trusted with our own decisions regarding what to listen to and how to evaluate what we hear.

They’re borne of the terror the Left has of views and of speech that contradicts the Left’s Received Wisdom.

Veto Authority

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The People’s Republic of China has once again reached into American businesses to control what they do.

This time, it was the proposed acquisition by Cisco Systems of Acacia Communications, both of which are American companies. The PRC condescended to approve this acquisition—subject to certain conditions the PRC dictated.

The PRC also is actively interfering with the American company Applied Materials’ proposed acquisition of Kokusai Electric Corporation, a Japanese company.

Earlier, the PRC interfered with, to the point of blocking, a merger between Qualcomm, an American company, and NXP Semiconductors NV, a Dutch company.

A question that the Biden administration must answer: why do we allow an enemy nation—the PRC—to have veto authority over American business’ decisions such as mergers and acquisitions?  I’m not sanguine that the administration will even take on the question, much less answer it in any way favorable to our businesses.

Related to this is why Europe’s nations, the European Union, or Asian nations cede similar authority over their businesses to the PRC.

None of us need the PRC market that badly, especially since the non-PRC Asian markets are readily available, as are those of South America and Africa—the latter two which could easily lose much of their own government graft with the greater economic prosperity that would result from greatly increased trade and business penetration.

These are private companies making these decisions, to be sure. The PRC, though, isn’t only dictating how those companies must operate within its border–a right of any nation–the PRC is dictating how those companies must operate anywhere in the world. The PRC’s vetoes of mergers and acquisitions are global.

In aggregate, such companies’ desperation to do business in or with the PRC at the expense of acceding to the global diktats of our common enemy threatens the security of each of our nations.

More Bigotry of the Progressive-Democratic Party

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This time as espoused by President Joe Biden (D). In describing one way his administration would fight the Wuhan Virus situation, then-President-elect Biden said this:

Our priority will be Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American owned small businesses, women-owned businesses, and finally having equal access to resources needed to reopen and rebuild.

He went on to call this “equal access to the resources needed to reopen and rebuild.”

That’s not equal access; that’s preferential access. And that preference isn’t based on merit or actual need, it’s based—in Biden’s own words—on race and gender. Progressive-Democrat disapproved of Americans are to be sent to the back of the bus—if they’re allowed to board at all.

This is a racist- and sexist-based form of “assistance.”

Biden also commented on working to get around “systemic barriers to relief.” As a Supreme Court Justice has already noted, [t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. The concept easily extends to sex and to all other forms of non-merit discrimination.

The Progressive-Democratic Party, now as openly espoused by its head, has chosen not to do so.

The Unimpressed Congresswoman

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…is unimpressed. Recall that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, GA) was censored by Jack Dorsey and his Twitter company by his shutting down her account for 12 hours for tweets of which Dorsey disapproved and which Dorsey considered us ordinary Americans too stupid and too weak of character to be able to process properly.

Now that she’s back on the air (until Dorsey melts again), she expressed her disdain for Dorsey’s censorship and especially for his and his cronies’ arrogance (summarized by Newsmax below).

Contrary to how highly you think of yourself and your moral platitude, you are not the judge of humanity. God is. And you and the rest of your pals from the Silicon Valley Cartel are not God. Difficult for you to grasp I know, however it’s the truth. The tweets that you deem ‘appropriate’ and ‘safe’ and ‘true,’ compared to tweets you deem ‘inciting violence’ and ‘spreading false information’ and ‘claims of election fraud is disputed’ are so many times, in the opinion of many, quit hypocritical and false.

What she said.

More More Censorship of Conservatives

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And now it’s not even particularly conservative voices, it’s the center-right voices of Newsmax TV and OANN that the Left is desperate to shut up.

Oliver Darcy, CNN Senior Media Reporter:

[I]t 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[.]

Certainly lies according to that which may not be questioned, CNN. There were, actually, quite a breathtaking number of election irregularities in that election. Maybe Biden would have won anyway, absent those irregularities, but that’s beside the point. Discussions, debates, regarding those irregularities and the election itself are entirely proper.

And Alex Stamos, ex- of Facebook and now an occasional CNN contributor, on a CNN television show:

We are going to have to figure out the OANN and Newsmax problem. These companies have freedom of speech, but I’m not sure we need Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and such bringing them into tens of millions of homes.

Listen to what passes for logic in that. Freedom of speech appears to be confined to the OANN and Newsmax bathrooms, since they’re not to be allowed to speak in public. Neither are pipelines like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, “and such” allowed actually to be pipelines—they are to be required to censor what us ordinary Americans are to be allowed to hear.

Here’s Darcy again:

Just a reminder that neither @Verizon, @ATT, nor @comcast have answered any questions about why they beam channels like OAN [sic] & Newsmax into millions of homes. Do they have any second thoughts about distributing these channels given their election denialism content? They won’t say.

Neither are any of these carriers required to say. Aside from the lack of obligation to answer the inquisition, there’s no need: the foolishness of Darcy’s characterization is its own answer.

If the timid ones of CNN were able to form coherent arguments with which to counter the concerns, surely those so-smart ones would do so. Instead, they cower behind the shield of censorship. So long as its their own words that aren’t censored.

RTWT. The stuff CNN and its cronies are pushing isn’t merely disgusting, it’s a deliberate assault on American liberties, a careful attempt to destroy one of our core values, the stuff that makes America America.