Category Archives: culture

Criminalizing Speech

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That’s what a Progressive-Democrat President Elizabeth Warren would try to do.

She would also lead a charge to criminalize the mere spreading of false information about the process of voting in US elections.
“I will push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote[.]

She masquerades her initial move as a criminalization of false claims concerning when and how to vote, but she ignores the fact that it’s already illegal to interfere with an election; there’s no need for additional laws.  She also declined, as Progressive-Democrats do regarding all efforts to regulate, to identify her limiting principle.

This is just an opening move to a broader speech censorship effort by the Left.

The…foolishness…of such an effort is illustrated by commentary concerning her plan. Senator Rand Paul (R, KY):

Would this apply to the tall tales you tell and those networks allow @ewarren?

Jeff Blehar of the National Review:

Elizabeth Warren is an American Indian. Go ahead Liz, charge me.

No, this is yet another example of the utter contempt in which Progressive-Democrats hold us deplorable average Americans. We’re just too stupid to do our own sorting of accurate speech from inaccurate speech from deliberately inaccurate speech. Our Betters must do this for us.

It’s also a very short step from there to criminalizing all speech of which this or that party disapproves, and from there it’s an even shorter step to criminalizing all speech of which this or that person in power disapproves.

No Room

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There’s no room for certain disfavored Democrats in Pete Buttigieg’s Progressive-Democrat Party; he made that clear in Sunday night’s townhall hosted by Fox News.

A pro-life Democrat named Kristen Day asked Buttigieg whether he wanted the support of “people like me….”

First Buttigieg showed his courage by weasel-wording an evasive answer that in Day’s view completely ignored half her question.

I am pro-choice, and I believe that a woman ought to be able to make that decision[.]

Day:

He didn’t answer the second part of my question, and the second part was: the Democratic platform contains language that basically says, “we don’t belong, we have no part in the party because it says abortion should be legal up to nine months, the government should pay for it.” In 1996 and several years after that there was language in the Democratic platform that said, “We understand that people have very differing views on this issue but we are a big tent party that includes everybody and therefore we welcome you—people like me—into the party so we can work on issues that we agree on.”

Buttigieg on being challenged over his evasiveness:

I support the position of my party—that this kind of medical care needs to be available to everyone, and I support the Roe v Wade framework that holds that early in pregnancy there are very few restrictions and late in pregnancy there are very few exceptions.

Buttigieg paraphrased: “Screw you, lady. I’m pro-abortion, and that’s the end of it. Medical care needs to be available to everyone but the babies involved; aborting babies is perfectly fine medical care.”

Authoritarian

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Recall the slowed down video of a House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) press conference in which the slow-down was done to make Pelosi’s speech seem slurred. It was an obvious, if poor taste, parody of Pelosi’s speaking style and of the incoherence of her anti-Trump position, as viewed by many.

In a The Atlantic interview, Hillary Clinton expressed her outrage over Facebook’s handling of that video.

Google took it off YouTube…so I contacted Facebook. I said, “Why are you guys keeping this up? This is blatantly false. Your competitors have taken it down.” And their response was, “We think our users can make up their own minds.”

Zuckerberg’s view, according to the Atlantic‘s author, is this:

“It’s not about saying, ‘Here’s one view; here’s the other side’,” Zuckerberg had said when I’d asked him to reconcile the apparent contradiction between fact and opinion. “You should decide where you want to be.”

Then Clinton said, in response to the author’s prompting about that,

It’s Trumpian. It’s authoritarian.

It’s true enough that opinion should be clearly discriminated from fact. But underlying Clinton’s (and the author’s) angst is their dismay over people making up our own minds, rather than being told what to think, what to believe, by our Betters.  Not allowing journalistic gatekeepers and filters to control our opinions is somehow authoritarian.

This is highly instructive, and it should be kept in mind this fall as we vote.

Political Revenge

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Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the…Warren.

And so she intends. Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) has issued her administration transition and “anti-corruption” document. She even intends to establish a “Justice Department Task Force” to put a veneer on her venal program of political vengeance. Ex-President Barack Obama (D) and his Attorney General Eric “Wing Man” Holder were pikers.  So was their kind-of distant ancestor, Joe McCarthy.

She’s already personally threatening Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, White House Adviser Kellyanne Conway, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson. Who knows how far she’ll go with her already out-of-control rage?

Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Republican Party?

Warren’s document makes her attitude plain.

This will be no ordinary transition between administrations….

Keep this in mind in November.

More Censorship in the Offing

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Amazon and YouTube are two companies peddling streamed videos, and they’re looking at “filtering” certain content.

An (unidentified) Amazon spokeswoman says

We continuously review and monitor titles to ensure that they are in accordance with our policies and guidelines. If content is identified as not meeting those standards, it is immediately removed.

YouTube, also:

[A] self-avowed creature of user-generated video, also has faced the challenge of policing objectionable content on its site.

Policing objectionable content.

Indeed.

It’s the same “challenge” faced by all sites, not only Amazon or YouTube, though, and it’s rank censorship.  Whose definition of “objectionable,” what “policing” techniques are used—with whose consent? Not the user, not a citizen.  This is a challenge best ignored altogether.

The Wall Street Journal, at the link above, also asked a question:

What steps, if any, should Amazon take to help viewers differentiate between professional and amateur content in its video library?

I’ll extend the question to include “objectionable” content, and the answer is plain: the same steps any site should take, and they’re similar to those taken since movies were invented: ID the producer(s), director(s), and leading actors, and if those names are unavailable, note that, too.

Viewers are fully capable of taking this information and determining for themselves what programming is legitimate or unobjectionable. It is, after all, their criteria of “legitimate” and of “objectionable” that matters, and these criteria are unique to each person.

In the end, it is, or should be, the viewer’s choice of what to watch, not the censors’.