Category Archives: culture

Free Speech for Me

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…but not for thee.

‘Course, we’re all perfectly free to speak approved messages. This is demonstrated by Facebook’s overt, deliberate censorship of a political ad. Days after Mark Zuckerberg so piously said his company would not censor political ads (even though he considered all other speech of which he disapproved freely censorable), he had his Facebook pull a Trump campaign ad because he didn’t like what it said.

The ad in alleged question was a call-out of the dangers of far-left radical organizations, including antifa. The ad used one of antifa’s several symbols as part of the call-out, but Zuckerberg decided that even using the symbol to symbolize hate groups was too “triggering.”

Not only is Zuckerberg committing censorship—and illustrating one of the points of the campaign ad—he’s insulting ordinary Americans, insisting we’re all too stupid to evaluate speech on our own: we have to be instructed by our Leftist betters.

A carefully anonymous Facebook spokesman had this:

We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate…. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.

The only hate in this incident is Zuckerberg’s and his Facebook’s organized contempt for Americans, claiming as this Anonymous One does, that ordinary Americans are too stupid to understand the plain context of a political ad taken in its entirety.

Bigotry of the Left

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Within hours of each other, these happened.

A Philadelphia family court supervisor was fired after a video posted to Facebook shows him tearing down signs in support of Black Lives Matter.

Because it’s entirely appropriate to support a racist organization that prioritizes some black lives above all other lives, including other black lives. BLM doesn’t even give a rat’s patootie about all the black babies whose lives are aborted in the womb. But it’s forbidden to presume to criticize such a mob of thugs.

This, from a Progressive-Democrat Congressman:

Representative Sean Patrick Maloney (D, NY) accused conservatives of using the “bogus” term “religious liberty” in order to hide their desire to discriminate.

Because protecting—I’ll say it—religious liberty of individual Americans is dishonest, but trashing the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment of our Constitution is just fine.

This is what we can expect, in spades, with a Progressive-Democratic Party administration ruling over us.

Are They Serious?

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The (individual) bad cop events in Minneapolis and Atlanta, and the ensuing hoo-raw has prompted badly needed discussion of how we handle bad cops and their events, even overshadowed as the discussion is by the overarching hysteria of demands for cop-free zones and the Left’s larger demand to do away with all police forces everywhere forever.

This has prompted the editors of The Wall Street Journal to wonder:

…suddenly Democrats say public-union labor agreements are frustrating police reform. We’re delighted to hear it—if they’re serious.

Of course, they are not remotely serious. This is an election year, and I’m shocked, shocked to find that vote pandering in this season.

Police unions have many shortcomings, no small per centage of them very serious, but this is just another example of Progressive-Democrats vote pandering, throwing a temporarily inconvenient constituent under the bus, and blaming everyone but themselves for the problem.

Private employers often use arbitration to resolve complaints by and against employees, but cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis allow police unions essentially to select the arbitrator.

It’s those city governments’ carefully deliberated decision to surrender their responsibilities to the counterparty of any negotiation or disciplinary action.

Progressive-Democrat-run city governments. But it’s not their fault; it’s those nefarious cop unions. Watch for the Progressive-Democrat anti-police union opprobrium disappear from 4 November on.

Affirmative Action in California

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The good citizens of California banned discrimination on the basis of race and sex when they voted up Proposition 209 nearly 25 years ago. That proposition barred affirmative action programs.

Those citizens of a generation ago understood that affirmative action programs, by their deliberate use of race and sex as selection criteria, are fundamentally racist and sexist.

Here we have the California Assembly affirmatively supporting just that racism and sexism.

California Legislative Black Caucus Chair Dr Shirley Weber, primary sponsor of ACA 5, which is designed to rescind Prop 209 and to that end puts the matter on the November ballot, said this about her bill, claiming that the current political and social environment is

forcing Californians to acknowledge the deep-seated inequality and far-reaching institutional failures that show that your race and gender still matters[.]

However, rather than addressing the root causes of “inequality” (carefully undefined, that—inequality of outcome? of initial opportunity? of…?—of whatever seems convenient to the politician, apparently) and of “institutional failures,” the California Assembly has chosen to expand those failures, to strengthen the prejudice, by reverting to those inherently bigoted programs.

My irony alarm is sounding.

And the Assembly as a whole is proud of its bigotry.

Censoring the Media

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The censors have expanded their operation from the Facebooks, Alphabets, Twitters of our nation to our newsroom simulacra. Daniel Henninger noted the latest examples of the invasion:

In the past week, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the editors of Bon Appétit magazine and the young women’s website Refinery 29 have been forced out by the staff and owners of their publications for offenses regarded as at odds with the beliefs of the current protests.

It’s more than mere censorship, though. It’s George Orwell and Franz Kafka in the press room collaborating on the press’ editorials.

The…news…outlets and the society gossip magazines cited by Henninger are canonical examples.

Henninger, though, is mistaken in one respect. These editors may have been forced out by the institutions’ owners, but staff played virtually no role—it was those editors’ abject cowardice in the face of opprobrium from their subordinates that assumed that character’s place in the tragedy.