Category Archives: culture

Banning Violence and Extremism from Social Media

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That’s what France and New Zealand want to do and want others to join them in doing, all in response to the terrorist murders in New Zealand.  The two intend to host a conference involving G-7 members’ IT chiefs and a separate “technology summit” aimed at getting commitments

to end the use of social media to organize and promote terrorism and extremist violence.

But whose definition of violence? Whose definition of extremism? We’re already seeing, in our nation, the Progressive-Democratic Party and their violence-oriented arms, Antifa and BLM, and their university management team associates, defining conservative speech as triggering, dangerous to mental health, violent.

This is a very slippery slope, onto which the first step may well be fatal.

Censorship

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The Wall Street Journal opined the other day on the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers banning Kate Smith and her rendition of God Bless America from the opening of their home games.  The WSJ takes the position that this is overwrought concern for perfection in today’s persons, demanding even perfection of their past.  Smith was, as we all are, and the WSJ notes, a person of her time. The WSJ went on:

Smith’s fate suggests the dominant impulse of our era is in fact to censor—and that those rifling through the histories of people long dead for evidence to destroy their reputations are progressive Puritans, seeking to suppress or cover up anything they object to.

I’m not so sanguine.  The Yankees and Flyers aren’t censoring Kate Smith for her early last century-era songs that very few of us knew about, or remembered—and some of which were satirical, not straight up. No, they’re showing their Liberal bona fides by censoring a song that glorifies America.

Citizen’s Arrests

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New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) has no understanding of duty or of law.  It seems that an armed group of citizen militia caught 200 illegal aliens in the act of illegally entering our nation near Sunland Park, NM, and they detained those illegal aliens until US Border Patrol agents—which those citizens called—could arrive and take charge.

In her response to this, Grisham said,

It should go without saying that regular citizens have no authority to arrest or detain anyone[.]

On the contrary, it should go without saying that regular citizens have both the authority and the duty to arrest and detain until the arrival of formally constituted authority—police or Border Patrol agents, for instance—persons committing crimes in the presence of those citizens.  It also should go without saying that that authority and that duty derive from the plain duties of citizenship.

It’s both instructive and illustrative that this Progressive-Democrat does not understand the obligations of citizenship.

An Outcome of Open Borders

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Two members of MS-13, having been deported, have been arrested trying to illegally reenter our nation.  These thugs were traveling separately and were caught in widely separated locations.

The fact that they were caught might be an argument that we don’t need walls at key areas of our border.  However, such an argument elides the fact that many others get through without being caught because we don’t have those walls, which would both seal off the particular areas and would funnel penetration attempts to other areas more limited and more easily patrolled.

The continued flow of these thugs and of drugs is an outcome—intended or not—of the open border policy of the Progressive-Democrats.  Progressive-Democrats just don’t see thugs and drugs as much of a problem.

Progressive-Democrats do insist that they want secure borders, and that this can be achieved by technology.  However, they carefully do not say how technology will stop anything, since all technology is capable of doing on its own is watching—a necessary component of security, but very far, indeed, from sufficient.

These same Progressive-Democrats know that full well, which contradicts their pretense of not wanting open borders.

The Tyranny of Progressive-Democrats

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In the ongoing saga of the Progressive-Democrats, and others, to get their hands on President Donald Trump’s personal and business tax returns, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Congressman Richard Neal (D, MA) requested demanded the IRS surrender several years of those documents to him by 10 Apr.  The deadline came and went as IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said they needed more time to study the Neal-cited law to be sure they could turn over the returns.  After all, other laws demand that tax records be kept private, as the personal information they are, for all Americans, and the cited law only permits tax records to be given to the House Ways and Means Chairman (and/or to two other Congressional positions) and only under tightly circumscribed conditions.

Since neither Rettig nor Mnuchin said, “Yes, Sir” and meekly and unquestioningly submitted, Neal now has sent a letter to Rettig giving a 23 April deadline or he, Neal, would yank Rettig into Federal court over the latter’s disobedience.  That letter says, in part,

It is not the proper function of the IRS, Treasury, or Justice to question or second guess the motivations of the Committee or its reasonable determinations regarding its need for the requested tax returns and return information[.]

Because the Executive Branch is not a coequal branch of our Federal government with the Legislature and the Judiciary.  It, together with its subordinate Departments and Agencies, are the obedient servants of Progressive-Democrat committees of the House of Representatives.  The Executive is not permitted to make its own determination of the legality of complying with Neal’s demand.  They’re supposed merely to shut up and deliver.

Law be damned.  Constitution, especially, be damned.  These are just more-or-less guidelines to be ignored whenever they show themselves inconvenient to the Left and their Party.