Whose Kids Are They?

And who are the real parents? Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe (D) claims schools, worse than being merely ex loco parentis (which is bad enough), are actually the parents themselves, at least during school hours and while homework is being done at, you know, home. At Tuesday’s debate with Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, McAuliffe said in all seriousness:

I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach[.]

McAuliffe also bragged about a bill he vetoed that would have acknowledged that parents have the right to veto books.

I’m not going to let parents come into schools, and actually take books out, and make their own decision[.]

Not even about the sexually explicit material in the library that parents would have been notified was present under the vetoed bill.

Parents being barred from telling schools what they should teach also includes, under McAuliffe’s claim of who controls children, parents having no ability to block racist CRT teaching; or teaching children that America is systemically racist; or teaching children that blacks have no hope because they’re black and so permanently victims and whites have it all because they’re successfully permanent oppressors; or teaching children that boys can be girls and girls boys; or schools insisting that it’s OK for biological boys to have access to girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, athletic endeavors, and vice versa.

By extension, too, McAuliffe seems to be exposing himself to opposing home schooling or any other form of school choice—since by making those choices, parents would be “telling schools what they should teach.”

This is how extremist the Progressive-Democratic Party has become.

Political Censorship

Mark Zuckerberg is at it again. This time he deleted a Republican gubernatorial candidate’s—a sitting governor’s, yet—Facebook campaign page. The campaign page was Alabama Governor Kay Ivey’s, and it’s no secret that her Conservative positions are anathema to the woke Zuckerberg and his censoring minions. Ivey thinks Zuckerberg’s Facebook censorship stemmed from her opposition to vaccine mandates.

The messages Zuckerberg’s censors sent to Ivey, though, consisted of these carefully uninformative items:

And those details:

Because being anti-vaccine mandate is somehow…graphic? Hateful? Harassing? Bullying? Really? Or maybe it’s related to sexual activity/exploitation? Nudity?

Wow.

It’s true enough that her campaign page was restored later the same day it was deleted, but c’mon, man. If anyone at Facebook had any integrity, Ivey’s page never would have been deleted in the first place.

Censorship and Timidity

YouTube censored took Alexei Navalny’s material down from the video sharing social media platform ahead of the Russian “election” of Vladimir Putin to yet another term as President. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, in an interview with Bloomberg refused to say whether she ordered the material removed at the behest of Putin.

Bloomberg: Navalny said that YouTube deleted a video—one of his videos. Was that at the request of the Russian government?
Wojcicki: I mean, we certainly, we certainly get requests from government. Umm, and, and we look and consider what, you know, why are we getting the request, what’s actually happening on the ground, umm, and based on a whole bunch of different factors, we make a decision. We don’t always, those are not always requests that make sense for us to honor, but in certain cases, we will honor them, um, in that country.

Since Wojcicki is too timid to explain her company’s censorship, apparently at the behest of “that country”—Russia—the question should be put to her boss, Google CEO Sundar Pichai. If that individual is too jittery regarding Putin to answer the question, it should be put to his boss, Alphabet CEO…Sundar Pichai.

It’s a Start

A coalition of 10 States, led by Texas, has filed an amicus brief in the 11th Circuit Appellate Court supporting Florida’s law requiring Big Tech to

consistently apply content-moderation practices and disclosures to affected users.

The Texas law, in particular and on which Florida’s law was modeled, specifies that

…social media sites in question must…disclose their content management and moderation policies and create a complaint and appeals process. The new law also prohibits email service providers from impeding the transmission of email messages based on content.

So far, so good for the two laws, but not far enough for either.

These platforms’ moderation teams also must be required to advise the poster/communicator, in advance of any adverse action, that the team is contemplating such action. In that advance notice, the moderation teams must advise the poster/communicator which platform criterion or set of criteria that the moderation team believes is being violated, and how—in concrete, measurable terms—the team believes that violation(s) is occurring.

For instance, in the case of “might offend some,” that notice must specify the group or groups the team believes might be offended and how that offense might occur—vis., if the potential offense is along the lines non-inclusiveness, the team must specify precisely how the non-inclusion is believed to be occurring.

The team also must suggest alternative phrasings (yes, plural) and for each alternative explain how the team’s suggestion conveys the same message as the original.

This advance notice also must provide the name and business contact data of the moderation team lead and the name and business contact data of the platform Director or Senior Vice President overseeing the platform’s moderation function.

The appeal itself must go to an independent arbitration board agreeable to both the poster/communicator and the platform and at the platform’s sole expense.

John Kerry Fails Again

[L]ife is always full of tough choices and the relationship between nations. That was John Kerry answering David Westin, a Bloomberg Television anchor, who asked Kerry, “What is the process by which one trades off climate against human rights?” Kerry actually said that in all seriousness regarding the Biden-Harris administration’s prioritizing global warming over the People’s Republic of China’s genocide against Uyghurs.

Never mind that the Uyghurs are being murdered today, and even if Climatistas are right, nobody dies for generations under the warming.

But Kerry wasn’t done.

The point I’m making is that even as there were egregious human rights issues, which Ronald Reagan called them [Gorbachev and his Soviet Union] out on it, we have to find a way forward to make the world safer, to protect our countries, and act in our interests[.]

Never mind, either, that the Soviets—the Russians—were pushing serfdom, slavery. Serfs, slaves, however horrific their lives, are in fact alive and have a chance of escaping, of getting help to escape, their condition. The dead have no such opportunity.

This is what the Biden-Harris administration appoints and supports.