Tag Archives: free speech

Joe Biden and the Press

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Simon Ateba is a Cameroonian journalist representing Today News Africa in the White House Press Corps. During the daily mid-day-ish press briefings, President Joe Biden’s (D) Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre routinely clashes with him, essentially telling him to shut up and sit down when she’s not ignoring him altogether.

Then came last Monday’s live stream of the day’s presser—and a lively exchange between Ateba and Jeanne-Pierre was excised from the stream. Completely stripped out. Censored.

The deleted portion was restored only after Fox News Digital asked the press secretary’s office how that worked.  “The White House” claimed the deletion was caused by a technical glitch. Apparently, no one in Jean-Pierre’s office monitors the feed to ensure a livestream upload goes smoothly. Or at least that’s the implication from the claim, since surely any such glitch would have been corrected in real time, had anyone been paying attention.

Former President Donald Trump (R) didn’t even treat CNN‘s deliberately combative, constantly interrupting Jim Acosta so shabbily, for all that he so frequently argued with Acosta.

Again I ask: of what is Biden so terrified that he won’t even let his Press Secretary engage with a journalist like Ateba?

More Political Censorship

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Alphabet‘s CEO Sundar Pichai strikes again. Alphabet wholly owns Google (of which Pichai also is CEO), and Google wholly owns YouTube.

Pichai has just engaged—again—in political censorship:

Social media giant YouTube took down an interview of Democrat presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy, Jr, claiming that chemicals in the water are turning kids transgender.

What makes this especially insidious is that Kennedy is a political candidate for the Progressive-Democratic Party’s nomination for President. Pichai is actively putting his thumb on the scale in an American election by censoring one of the candidates. His excuse for this, through his carefully anonymous Google spokesperson, is this:

YouTube “removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube‘s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities.”

Therein lies an additional act of censorship: no one is allowed to question vaccines (which is not what Kennedy was talking about with his allegations of those chemicals, anyway); the science is settled, Damn it!

Pichai objects to open debate and to the correction of false, mis-, or erroneous information by the provision of other information via free discussion and debate. His behavior provides yet another reason to heavily modify, or remove entirely, social media’s Section 230 protections. Social media has gotten too big, become too central to our nation’s public square, to be allowed to continue to abuse that protection.

Biden Censorship

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Now President Joe Biden (D) is moving to add his censorship requirements to artificial intelligence programming, to go along with his censorship actions vis-à-vis social media.

The Biden administration is pursuing regulations for artificial intelligence systems that would require government audits to ensure they produce trustworthy outputs, which could include assessments of whether AI is promoting “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

Here is the leader of the Progressive-Democratic Party once again asserting that Government definitions of misinformation and disinformation, and by extension true information, are the only valid definitions, and Government will inflict those definitions on us ordinary Americans.

And one more Government dictated definition, from Alan Davidson, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information:

The Biden administration supports the advancement of trustworthy AI. We are devoting a lot of energy to that goal across government.

Trustworthy—it’s what Government says it is.

The Progressive-Democratic Party as an institution, and its constituent politicians individually and collectively, are increasingly pushing their Newspeak Dictionary on us, seeking to replace our American dictionaries. This is right out of the playbook of the Left’s icon, Saul Alinsky:

He who controls the language controls the masses.

Rogue Judge

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A couple of teachers had the impudence to demur from compulsory “antiracism training” imposed by their Springfield Public Schools district managers.

In response, US District Judge Douglas Harpool, of the Western District of Missouri, not only ruled against the teachers, he ordered them to pay $313,000 in legal costs for bothering the district, and he did this cavalierly disregarding their arguments and issuing his ruling via summary judgment—which means the court—Harpool—never really took the case up, or took it seriously. He wrote in pertinent part, as summarized by Just the News:

They have not provided evidence they were compelled to “speak favorably” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.

Never mind that the very parts that Harpool cited demonstrates the compulsory nature of the requirement not to speak unfavorably about the district’s “message” and not to remain unaffiliated or unassociated with the district’s “message.” That pressure to not be unaligned or to not speak unfavorably is exactly the compulsion to speak favorably and to align. The fact that the beratement went unchallenged by the program’s instructors or the district’s managers further emphasizes the compulsory nature of the district’s “message.”

This is a Federal judge who needs to be removed from the bench forthwith. He has shown himself not just incapable of, but openly refusing to, adjudicating a case objectively and on the basis of the facts and statute(s) presented. Instead, Harpool reigns over his court on the basis of his personal agenda.

Harpool’s ruling can be read here.

Data Protections

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A couple of Letter writers in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section had concerns about a potential ban of People’s Republic of China-domiciled ByteDance’s TikTok.

I disagree with their concerns.

A TikTok ban isn’t the solution. It won’t protect our data privacy, it won’t protect children from the dangers of the internet, and it is a blatant violation of First Amendment rights.

No one is masquerading banning TikTok as the solution; that’s a strawman argument. Much more needs to be done to protect our data privacy and our children—and our intellectual and technology property—but banning TikTok is a useful step. Nor is banning it a violation of anyone’s 1st Amendment rights. No one’s speech would be barred, only a tool of the PRC would be barred.

TikTok can be an effective tool for fighting corruption within the government itself.

Not when it’s controlled by the PRC government.

…a communication tool that millions of Americans use….

Congratulations to this writer: he has successfully identified the breadth of the threat, just as TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, (accidentally) did when he pointed out the 150 million American users of TikTok.