Category Archives: rights

The Disingenuousness of Government Censorship

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The Supreme Court is hearing a case centered on, among other speech-related matters, whether the Federal government illegally—unconstitutionally—pressured social media companies to suppress or delete altogether posts of which the government disapproves regarding Wuhan Virus vaccines.

The government’s arguments in the case are telling.

US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar…likened the government’s interactions with social-media companies to Ronald Reagan’s urging the media to help combat drug abuse, George W Bush’s inveighing against pornography, and Theodore Roosevelt’s denunciation of muckraking journalists.

This is one of the government’s disingenuousnesses. All of Reagan’s, Bush the Younger’s, and Roosevelt’s inveighing were publicly done. Us ordinary Americans knew what those Presidents were telling “the media” what they wanted them to do, and we knew it as soon as they spoke. The Biden administration, on the other hand, pressured today’s social media outlets behind the scenes, in secret. For instance,

When Hank Aaron died in 2021, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, suggested in a tweet that the baseball legend’s death was caused by a Covid vaccine.
The next day, a White House employee asked Twitter, now known as X, to take down Kennedy’s post. “Wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP,” the White House’s Covid-19 digital director wrote to two Twitter employees.
The social-media platform did so.

Here’s another of the Biden administration’s disingenuousnesses, if not an example of its outright cynicism, this one regarding the 5th Circuit’s ruling forbidding officials including the president’s counsel, press secretary, director of digital strategy, and other White House staffers from coercing, “significantly encouraging,” or supervising content moderation.

The Biden administration appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court. It warned that the restrictions would prevent the government from talking to tech companies about matters of national security and public safety, as well as urging them to protect teens from the harmful effects of social media.

Nonsense. The appellate court’s bar in no way prevented or prevents anyone in the Biden administration from talking to tech companies or anyone else about anything at all. Those officials just have to do it publicly—like those prior Presidents had done, and in the same vein those prior Presidents had—and they aren’t allowed to attempt to apply pressure to comply.

Prelogar does have an argument, of sorts.

The government is entitled to speak for itself by sharing information, urging action, and participating in debate over issues of great concern to the public[.]

Absolutely, the government is so allowed. However, government—in the present case, the Biden administration—is not speaking for itself when it moves to suppress the speech of others who disagree with the administration position.

Nor is the Biden administration “urging action” regarding the subject of a debate when it is urging suppression of views that run counter to the administration’s position.

Nor is the Biden administration participating in debate over issues of great concern to the public when it acts to suppress the speech of others, which also is of concern to the public, thereby barring the public from participating in what the Biden administration wants to be a one-sided debate.

The Biden administration should exercise its “entitlement” to speak for itself by answering disagreeing comments in the commentary with its own—public—comments saying why those disagreeing comments seem erroneous; asserting what the administration believes to be accurate information; and explaining in concrete, measurable terms why it believes its own claims to be the more accurate.

There are no alternatives in a nation that believes free speech to be a fundamental right intrinsic in each of us citizens.

Home Defense and Property Rights Get a New Tool

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In Florida, at least.

The Florida Legislature unanimously passed a bill that would allow police to immediately remove squatters—a departure from the lengthy court cases required in most states.
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The legislation, which passed both chambers earlier this month, would allow police to remove squatters without a lease authorized by the property owner and adds criminal penalties. Landlords, under the current law, typically have to wade through a long and expensive legal process to remove squatters.

The bill now goes to Governor Ron DiSantis (R) for signature and final enactment.

If the Florida legislation becomes law, intentionally presenting a phony lease would be designated as a misdemeanor, and selling or leasing someone else’s property would be a felony, as would causing more than $1,000 in property damage.

This is a good move. Squatters of this sort are nothing other than criminals, slow-motion home invaders.

Further Reasons to Ban TikTok

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And not just force its sale by ByteDance. ByteDance is domiciled in the People’s Republic of China, and as such it’s subject to PRC laws, including the PRC’s national security law requiring PRC companies to answer queries from that nation’s intelligence community, queries which can range from “what do you know about this subject in that country” to “go find out, conduct the espionage.” That’s reason enough to ban the company (that subordination of PRC-domiciled companies to that nation’s intelligence apparatus is reason enough to ban all PRC-domiciled companies from the US, but that’s a different story).

Another reason to ban TikTok stems from this claim made by the company in response to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s unanimous vote (that’s 50 (of 52 Committee members; 2 weren’t present to vote) Representatives of both parties agreeing on something) to advance legislation that would require TikTok to be sold by ByteDance to a non-PRC affiliated company or be barred from operating in the US. That claim by an anonymous spokesman for TikTok:

This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States. The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.

That’s a lie on two fronts, explicitly intended to create hysteria. The first front is the business about “total ban.” It is no such thing, and TikTok managers—and their ByteDance owners—know full well: that claim cynically ignores the primary option the legislation offers, the sale of TikTok to an acceptable, non-PRC affiliated buyer.

The second front is that business about stripping TikTok users of their Constitutional right to free expression. Of course, it’s no such thing, as those TikTok and ByteDance persons also know full well. Were ByteDance to refuse to sell and TikTok barred, no one’s free speech would be stripped away, only a single pipeline would be stripped away. All of TikTok’s users, every single one of them, would have access to any and all of a plethora of other pipelines through which to speak, pipelines like Facebook YouTube, Gab, Truth Social, CloutHub, GETTR, MeWe, LinkedIn, Parler, X, and on and on. Further, were TikTok to be sold, that question would never even arise since the TikTok pipeline would be free to continue operating.

Additionally, the ability of this PRC company to mobilize all of its members to manipulate an American internal political matter demonstrates the influence the PRC is able to exert on American domestic politics.

As lawmakers prepared to consider the legislation on Thursday, users of the app…saw notifications urging them to complain to their House representative about the bill. Then the app let people call their representative with a few presses of buttons, fueling congressional concerns about TikTok.
TikTok’s campaign quickly overwhelmed the phone lines of some congressional offices…illustrated how TikTok could mobilize an army of people and gather data to push user behavior, which some lawmakers say is the exact reason they don’t want the company to have ties back to [the PRC].

That PRC manipulation by itself is yet another to ban TikTok altogether.

Another Reason to Rescind Chevron Defense

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As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it in their editorial last Tuesday, nothing is stopping the

Securities and Exchange Commission and prosecutors from finding [regulatory] meaning in statutory penumbras.

Now the SEC is manufacturing a rule based on nothing but the æther in SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s mind. Gensler has hailed into court a pharmaceutical company employee for the “insider trading” crime of trading in options on the stock shares of another pharmaceutical company, a company about which the man had no insider information at all. Not a whit.

Gensler, however, in plumbing the depths of his shadowy æther, has claimed to have found something in a penumbra of Federal law and Court decisions regarding insider trading. The man he’s charging knew from an employee-broadcast email from his company’s CEO that his company might be about to be acquired by another company—not the company in which our man did his trading.

Poof—Gensler has waved his hands and conjured an insider trading beef centered on no insider trading information at all. As the WSJ noted,

Federal law doesn’t explicitly ban trading on confidential information. But courts have said that insiders defraud companies by “misappropriating” private information for personal gain.

It’s in the phantasmal penumbra of “private information” that Gensler has conjured his offense: private information in one company (not even that private, it was a company-wide email that revealed the potential for an acquisition of the employee’s company) casts a shadow over other, Gensler-unspecified, companies, and so brings those other companies into the reach of one company’s allegedly private information.

And this, regarding those chimeric penumbras[1] of which too many of our courts still claim to see:

If something is in a penumbral region, it is not in the text.  If it is not in the text, it does not exist ….  If it does not exist, a judge cannot rule on it.  If in the end, all a judge can do after carefully reading the text is go more than a toe’s dip into its shadows for meaning, then he must not go in: he must rule a lack of governing statute or strike the statute for vagueness, and in either event return the matter to the political branches.

And this, from Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in denying a 2014 cert petition in Whitman v US [emphasis in the original]:

Only the legislature may define crimes and fix punishments. Congress cannot, through ambiguity, effectively leave that function to the courts—much less to the administrative bureaucracy[.]

Now the Supreme Court must overrule the SEC outright, which would be much easier to do were it to also—or already have by the time this case reaches it—rescinded the Chevron Defense foolishness which subordinates, by Constitutional design, the coequal Judiciary not just to the Executive, but to Executive subordinate branches led by political appointees and peopled by unknown and faceless bureaucrats.

[1] Hines, Eric, A Conservative’s View of the American Concept of Law

Wrong Reasons

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Canada’s reigning government, led by the Liberal Party’s [there’s a misnomer] Justin Trudeau, has “delayed” its plan to kill euthanize its mentally ill population.

[H]ealth officials are slow-walking plans to expand the program, stating there are not enough doctors, specifically psychiatrists, in Canada to evaluate mentally ill people who wish to die, according to the announcement made by Health Minister Mark Holland and Justice Minister Arif Virani.

This is the wrong reason for slowing down the march to killing off the inconveniently mentally ill. The goal remains in place.

Holland went on:

The system needs to be ready, and we need to get it right. It’s clear from the conversations we’ve had that the system is not ready, and we need more time.

There is no right way to kill off the mentally ill. Suicide, assisted or otherwise, may or may not be the right answer for those with the mental capacity to decide that for themselves.  Those who are that mentally ill don’t have the capacity to decide, though, and having third parties decide whether a person should live or die is just state-sanctioned execution by reason of those persons being inconvenient for the state to support or to assist the person’s family to support.

So much for Canada’s erstwhile reputation for being…nice.