Category Archives: rights

Censorship

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Douglas Vincent Mastriano is a Pennsylvania State Senator. He’s also a retired United States Army Colonel.

Last week, he organized the State Senate’s Senate Majority Policy Committee hearing to uncover[] exactly what happened in the Keystone State regarding the just concluded Presidential and down ballot general election.  Never mind that the Committee heard testimony

from multiple witnesses who gave evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 elections….

Now State Senator Mastriano also is a Twitter Account Suspendee. After the hearing, without warning or explanation, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter suspended Mastriano’s account. His account wasn’t restored–again without explanation–until late Friday.

This is the rank censorship about which Big Tech is getting ever more blatant.

This is a prime example of why Twitter, Facebook, and Alphabet must lose their Section 230 protections.

The Dangers of a Biden Judiciary

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It’s well enough known that Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden disdains the conservative nature—which is to say that of adhering to the actual text of our Constitution and any statute in a case—of the judiciary as populated by President Donald Trump (courtesy of Biden’s BFF, ex-President Barack Obama (D), who left so many judicial seats empty).

Now, it’s become especially crystalline. Here’s Cynthia Hogan, who was then-Vice President Biden’s counsel and earlier, then-Senate Judiciary Committee member Biden’s counsel:

Joe Biden thinks the law should be interested in protecting the little person. Not to determine an outcome, but to say people should not be at a disadvantage because they’re working class, they’re poor, they’re Black, they’re women, they’re immigrants.

Laudable as those goals are, they’re fundamentally political and not judicial goals. Demanding potential judges and Justices to push for those ends from the bench can only accomplish two things. One is to force those judges to violate their oaths of office to support and defend our Constitution rather than to alter it from the bench. Related to that is forcing those judges to agree similarly to alter the text of any statute before them, and thereby arrogate to their bench legislative authority that is the sole province of our Congress.

The protection of the little person, the person who is working class, poor, black, a woman, an immigrant is best done through strict adherence to our Constitution, which is changeable, legitimately, solely by We the People, us citizens. That protection is best implemented by us citizens through our choices for representation in our Congress and our White House—a representation that has the responsibility for legislating the means by which those goals will be implemented and that protects all Americans. Its also a representation that is directly answerable to us.

Those two tightly related things aggregate to the second, even more dangerous, thing: it makes our judiciary a political branch rather than the legal, judicial one that it is designed to be. That would reduce our nation from a nation of laws to a nation ruled by a few robed individuals who would make law according to their views. Law would no longer be a political matter determined by We the People through our elected political representatives.

Those few men, unelected and so unanswerable directly to us, will not protect all Americans, not even the little person. Instead, law—our very Constitution—will be whatever those few say it is. Beyond that, what those few will say will change over time and vary widely from man to man as each acts according to his own imperatives.

In very short order, those few will be protecting those imperatives, not Americans, not even the little American.

Mark Gitenstein, a former Judiciary Committee chief counsel under Biden:

We want to have as many vacancies as possible and get as many modern progressives in those slots as we can.

Indeed.

And Ted Kaufman, a Biden confidante:

We want to make sure that the courts, and not just the Supreme Court, really are a mirror of America[.]

Here is the danger emphasized, as these worthies don’t care that the courts are designed to be mirrors of our Constitution and of our statutes. It’s the elected political branches of our government who are the true and sole mirror of America.

Tech Company Protections

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Tech companies, primarily Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet, get nearly blanket immunity from responsibility for the content that’s published on their outlets. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was instrumental to their initial success, gives them that broad immunity, based on those companies’ initial status as agnostic pipelines that merely provided a place for disparate commentary to be promulgated.

Protected monopolies (vis., pre-breakup Ma Bell) gave government-sanctioned special, protective, treatment to selected companies in order to facilitate their initial success. There came a time when that protection no longer was warranted, and the protection was eliminated.

So it is with Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet. Their special, protective, treatment is no longer warranted, and it needs to be withdrawn. Those companies are no longer agnostic pipelines; they’ve taken—increasingly over the last few years—the role of controlling (some might say censoring) the content they allow on their platforms. They block some content, limit access to other content, even delete content after promulgation. They’re no longer agnostic; they limit discussions to directions that satisfy their management teams’ approval. They’ve become publishers of content.

Tech companies acknowledge they need to improve their content moderation practices, but they deny negligence or political bias.

These tech companies cannot be trusted to “improve their content moderation practices,” not when they issue such openly ridiculous denials. Those denials demonstrate either those companies’ management teams’ dishonesty or those teams’ inability to recognize their own negligence or bias.

Indeed, the very existence of “content moderation practices” beyond that required by the FCC—which center on barring active incitements to violence—demonstrates the teams’ dishonesty or inability to recognize their own bias.

Too Much Deference

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On Wednesday last, the Supreme Court enjoined Governor Andrew Cuomo’s (D) New York State administration from enforcing its gathering rule that had the effect of targeting, particularly, religious institutions and gatherings.

Much has been made of the ruling, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, and Chief Justice John Roberts’ dissenting opinion.

Here’s the pertinent part of the ruling’s opening paragraph:

Respondent is enjoined from enforcing Executive Order 202.68’s 10- and 25-person occupancy limits on applicant pending disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and disposition of the petition for a writ of certiorari, if such writ is timely sought.

Thus, the Court granted, it turns out, only temporary injunctive relief pending rulings in the case itself as that case wends its way through the appellate process.

The temporary nature of the ruling, in turn, drove (I suspect) Gorsuch’s separate concurrence. Here’s the opening sentence of his opinion:

Government is not free to disregard the First Amendment in times of crisis.

He bookended that opening with this conclusion:

It is time—past time—to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques.

That’s a clear foot stomp to the lower courts, and especially to the Second Circuit in the present case, about the sanctity and the supremacy of our Constitution.

On the other hand, here’s the key part of Roberts’ dissent:

[I]t is a significant matter to override determinations made by public health officials concerning what is necessary for public safety in the midst of a deadly pandemic.

Justice Sonya Sotomayor went further:

Justices of this Court play a deadly game in second guessing the expert judgment of health officials about the environments in which a contagious virus, now infecting a million Americans each week, spreads most easily.

No, the deadly game is subordinating our courts to other parts of our government so easily and routinely. It’s a far more significant matter—a matter of national political health—to defer to public health officials on the basis of their public health official-ness at the expense of foundational (or any other) individual liberties that are the core and basis of our nation’s existence.

It’s a far more significant matter—a matter of national health writ large—for a coequal branch of our Federal government to blithely subordinate itself to another branch of our Federal government, and it’s even worse for that coequal branch meekly to subordinate itself to an inferior division of that other branch.

It is time—past time—to make plain that Article III courts, from the Supreme Court on down, can no longer consider themselves subordinate formations in our tripartite form of federal governance.

The Court’s ruling can be read here.

I Have to Wonder

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The administrators of Presentation College Carlow, an Irish college a bit south of Dublin, told the female students there

not to wear tight clothing that could “distract” staff members….
[or] revealing clothing, including tracksuit bottoms and gym leggings.

I wonder: why does this school have so many supposedly adult men on its staff who are so easily and pruriently distracted? Or, since the school’s students are as young as 12 years old, why are so many seeming pedophiles on staff?

It’s a concern shared by the students’ parents.

A petition called the policy sexist and noted that male students’ attire was not discussed.
…
“This is appalling, majority of students are 12-18 years old and should not feel [sic] sexualised by their teachers who they are meant to feel safe around,” [the petition] continues.

And

[A parent] told local media outlets that adult male teachers should not be distracted by young girls in the first place.

Indeed.