Tag Archives: rights

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.

A Department of Veterans Affairs Fail

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Yet another in an appallingly long list of Veterans Affairs fails.

This time it’s the VA’s conscious decision to deprecate, if not outright ignore, our nation’s veterans and to give priority access to limited resources to illegal aliens instead. Yes, yes, they signed a contract with ICE to do this, but they were not forced to do so. Here’s Senator Marsha Blackburn (R, TN):

We checked this week; it is up to one million claims for healthcare and benefits. As we were doing some oversight work of the VA, we realized that what they were doing was using some of their resources and their money to allow veterans—to approve veterans for community care—and to process claims, or to approve community care, for illegal immigrants, not for veterans, and then also to process claims for illegal immigrants.

And

When you’ve got a backlog of a million veterans that are waiting to get healthcare, and are waiting to get benefit answers, and you find out that money that should be being used to solve their situations is being used for illegal immigrants…it is absolutely maddening[.]

Indeed.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Valid Arguments

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Several States’ Attorneys General have filed an amicus brief in a Supreme Court case centered on whether Texas and Florida statutes that limit Big Tech’s ability to censor speech done on their platforms are legitimate. The analogy they draw is one valid argument.

[Summarized by Fox News]: [G]iving Big Tech the ability to moderate or censor users’ content would be like giving cable or telephone companies permission to cut phone lines on speech at their discretion. The AGs note that under federal “must-carry requirements,” those companies are banned from subjugating any speech on their lines.

And:

The Eleventh Circuit concluded social media companies could censor content because they have “historically exercised” power to refuse transmission of disfavored ideas.
But telegraph companies have a much longer history of censorship. Social media is less than two decades old. Congress did not impose must-carry requirements on telegraphs until 1888, 50 years after their invention[.]
Yet it is well recognized today that those must-carry regulations were constitutional—even though this Court declared that telegraph companies are “not common carriers.” History thus provides no basis for dismissing the striking similarities between social media companies and telegraph and telephones by dubbing social-media censorship “editorial judgment[.]”
While the earlier laws applied to telegraphs and telephones, it is no different when the companies carrying other people’s speech are digital rather than analog[.]
The States thus have a paramount interest in urging this Court to affirm that longstanding, historic authority of States to protect freedom of speech and enable representative government by prohibiting dominant communication networks from censoring[.]

There is one more argument that is, IMNSHO opinion, dispositively on point. This is the status of those Big Tech platforms—X (nee Twitter), Meta’s Facebook, and Alphabet’s YouTube, for instance—as public forums. Indeed, some of these platforms have explicitly stated that they intend to be public squares for public discourse, even as they also provide mechanisms for exchanging private correspondence.

The public square is precisely where speech may not be censored except within a very few very narrowly defined boundaries—incitement to riot, explicit threats of violence against particular persons. Whether any Big Tech platform has explicitly styled itself a public square, each of these platforms have grown so large—become so dominant—that each one of them is, de facto, a public square. Their censorship practices must be barred.