Steyn on the GOP: “A Useless Political Party”

 

Mark Steyn weighed in on this insane election cycle, censorship in the media, the “useless political party,” and more.  He begins:

If anybody is around to write history in a generation or two, October 14th 2020 will go down as the first day of a new Year Zero. Yesterday, with less than three weeks to go in a national election in a settled democratic society with an ostensibly free press, the woke billionaires of the social media cartel decided to freeze and/or cancel the Twitter/Facebook accounts of the President's press secretary, the Trump campaign, Republican Senate candidates and Republican House members.

So America is now formally a one-party state, at least as far as fair access to media platforms is concerned. 

He ran an image of what looks to me like an old mimeograph machine.

Mark concludes:

What's next? And by "next" I mean Wednesday November 4th. Look for more woke pressure on website registrars and banks and credit card companies to cease doing business with Breitbart and Daily Caller and, well, me:

A couple of years back I used a phrase, not entirely in jest, on one of our Clubland Q&As with reference to the death of the big, messy, sprawling, decentralized internet of the turn of the century that I miss so much since it was replaced by a tyranny of ever more doctrinaire and capricious thought commissars. And I said that one day we'll be disseminating SteynOnline via the last rusting Xerox machine in the woods. Well, the day of the last rusting photocopier in the woods is heading towards us very fast.

Eight years ago conservatives blew $1 billion trying to drag Mitt Romney across the finish line so that he could become president and spend the next four years screwing us over. Imagine what that billion dollars could've done starting an alternative to PayPal or Facebook...

If Lindsey Graham and Martha McSally and the Republican Senate survive on November 3rd, so be it. But those of us who've expended our energies dragging this useless political party across the finish line every two years need to get serious about redeploying our fast depleting resources into fighting on the turf that matters. We are well past the eleventh hour.

Mark’s full column is here.  And I wonder if any in Congress – or on the state and local levels -- are able to move the GOP party back to core conservative values.  President Trump is one man, and he’s been up against both parties in the swamp that is DC.

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More Twitter censorship

Two days ago, this blog linked to Katie Hopkins’s column at Front Page mag; her column was about the celebrations marking the UK's Brexit from the EU. It was a thoughtful and heartfelt report. And today, we read Robert Spencer’s report at Front Page that “Twitter Suspends Katie Hopkins, and you’re next”:

Twitter has suspended UK's courageous freedom fighter Katie Hopkins, who had a million followers on the platform, and one thing is certain: she will not be the last foe of jihad violence and Sharia oppression who is banned from Twitter. It’s all about silencing “hate,” you see. But the banning of Katie Hopkins illustrates yet again that for the Left, there is good “hate” and there is bad “hate.”

According to the UK’s Independent, “Twitter said that Ms Hopkins had been temporarily locked out of her account for violating the site’s hateful-conduct policy, which bans the promotion of violence or inciting harm on the basis of race, religion, national origin or gender identity.”

Twitter has erased all but a handful of Hopkins’ tweets, so it’s impossible to tell what the offending tweets were, but it is abundantly clear at this point that for Leftist guardians of acceptable thought nowadays, virtually any dissent from the Left’s agenda will be read as “the promotion of violence or inciting harm on the basis of race, religion, national origin or gender identity.” While “promotion of violence” is fairly easy to spot, “inciting harm” can be seen in any critical word. 

And then the offender has to go.

Full column is here. And of course, this is not a one-off. Many conservative voices, such as Pamela Geller, Dennis Prager’s Prager University, James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, and Michelle Malkin (article at the link includes details on de-platforming and de-monetizing), have been censored on Twitter, Facebook, on campuses, on PayPal, etc. As Robert Spencer warned: we’re next.

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No Safe Spaces update: northern Ohio showings

This blog has reported several times on Dennis Prager's and Adam Carolla’s documentary No Safe Spaces.  See here (includes review by Bookworm Room).  The website for the documentary now lists four Ohio theaters, including one in Richmond Heights.  For the northern Ohio listings, click here and scroll down to the Ohio listings.

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No Safe Spaces documentary now in Ohio theaters

Last October, this blog reported on Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla’s documentary No Safe Spaces. BookwormRoom blogged her review a couple of days ago:

. . .every American ought to see this movie. The reality is that only conservatives who are already worried about the death of free speech in America will attend it. On the Left, they’re smugly happy with their increasing ability, both on campuses and in corporate America, to shout down and censor anything they don’t like. And in the vast middle, the Americans who need to start to care, people probably aren’t even aware that the movie is playing.

. . .

Carolla and Prager are the two pillars anchoring the No Safe Spaces. Carolla presents himself as a working class yob and comic (and also America’s most popular podcaster) who has a visceral belief that we are destroying our youth by mentally coddling them and that the answer is free speech for them and for everyone. Prager is the Jewish intellectual, the college educated man who spent time in the Soviet Union during the heyday of its totalitarianism. Prager too is a free speech fanatic. Both men are agreed (rightly) that free speech — true free speech, not the European or Canadian simulacrums — is a uniquely American attribute and that its destruction is the first step on the road to totalitarianism.

Bookworm's full review is here.

The website for the documentary now lists Ohio locations where this documentary is playing, including in Solon, Akron, and Elyria. Click on the website here and scroll down to the listings for Ohio.

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First Amendment documentary coming up

Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla were on Tucker Carlson’s program yesterday. They were there to unveil the trailer for their forthcoming documentary, No Safe Spaces. Fox News has an interview with Mr. Prager:

Radio personality Dennis Prager and comedian Adam Carolla's upcoming documentary "No Safe Spaces" is a film detailing the ongoing debate over the First Amendment on college campuses across the country and how identity politics enables it.

Prager and Carolla argue that younger generations have been trained to hate alternative, often right-leaning, opinions and unleash their anger on those with opposing views.

Prager says he's been working on the film since 2017 and was hoping for a PG rating but the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wouldn't budge from its PG-13 designation.

“Despite our best efforts to meet the MPAA more than halfway, they have continued to deny us the PG rating our film deserves," Prager said in an exclusive statement to Fox News.

"Jordan Peterson’s and my quotes will stay and we will not censor the real-life punching of a conservative student. The much more graphic films that regularly receive PG ratings only serve to illustrate what I have experienced with Google in their efforts to make PragerU videos hard to find: powerful forces in Silicon Valley and Hollywood have one standard for ideological allies and another for people like me," he added of the film which mentions "sexually transmissible disease" and "Debbie Does Dallas" and a student is seen getting punched. 

"I will urge my friends and fans who only go to PG movies to ignore the MPAA’s fake PG-13 rating and go anyway. And please bring friends," Prager continued.

The film features commentary from a variety of Hollywood actors, scholars, academics, political figures, and media members, including Van Jones, Alan Dershowitz, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Cornel West, and Tim Allen.

Carolla also talks to fellow comedians about the challenge of doing stand-up on a campus today. Many comedians, such as Jerry Seinfeld, have said they will not appear on college campuses.

"No Safe Spaces" is scheduled for release Oct. 25.

The home page for this documentary is here. The film premieres in Phoenix/Scottsdale. No dates yet for northern Ohio. Will keep readers posted.

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Indexing, advertising and payments: 3 threats to Free Speech

Daniel Greenfield has more on the threat to free speech, and how Big Tech censors information. At Front Page:

After the 2016 election, the claim that free speech had gone too far and needed to be controlled became widely accepted, first in the media, and then among the big dot coms who coordinated a censorship campaign with media fact checkers. The stated goal was to stamp out ‘disinformation’. And ‘disinformation’ was defined as any viewpoint that media lefties disagreed with or found disagreeable.

Fact checkers were embedded into Facebook and Google’s operations. Conservative content was censored, deranked, and pushed under corporate media content. The ‘disinformation’ pretext, which was supposed to describe foreign propaganda, was extended to apply to nearly any conservative view.

. . .

This push to suppress conservative content on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies is an attack on indexing. People find posts, articles, and videos through search engines, these days largely a Google monopoly, and peer feeds on social media. The indexing attack has been successful with conservative sites losing traffic, and conservatives being banned on social media.

But indexing is just one prong of the attack. The others are advertising and payments.

If you’re a leftist, you don’t want people finding conservative content. Going after indexing means that the people who aren’t specifically looking for conservative content won’t find it. The idea is to turn conservative media into a ghetto. The impact on elections and national debates is obvious.

. . .

There is much more in the full article here.

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Prager U. VS YouTube [Updated]

Last week, John Hinderaker at PowerLine had an update on Prager U’s legal battles against YouTube’s and Google’s censorship of its educational videos:

For several years, YouTube has suppressed Prager U’s videos by “restricting” them, which makes them invisible to viewers who are using the restricted mode, as is the case in many school environments, and by not allowing them to be monetized. After multiple appeals of YouTube’s discriminatory decisions, Prager U sued YouTube and Google in federal court, alleging violations of the First Amendment and the Lanham Act (the federal law that governs advertising in interstate commerce), as well as several causes of action under California law. The district court judge granted defendants’ motion to dismiss the federal counts, and Prager U appealed. That appeal was argued on Tuesday before a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

That YouTube has engaged in viewpoint discrimination to the detriment of Prager U is indisputable. That YouTube does this because its employees disapprove of conservatism is obvious. But YouTube and Google are private companies, and the First Amendment applies only to government. (“Congress shall make no law…”) The U.S. Supreme Court has articulated a narrow exception where the First Amendment can apply to private entities if they “exercise powers traditionally exclusively reserved to the State.” Prager U faces an obvious hurdle, in that hosting videos is not a traditional governmental function.

Mr. Hinderaker is not all that optimistic in a speedy remedy:

Prager U may yet win its case, which is in its early innings. Perhaps the 9th Circuit will hold that Prager’s First Amendment and Lanham Act claims state a claim, and give it a green light to pursue discovery. Perhaps Prager U will prevail on its state law causes of action, although I assume that California’s judiciary is securely in the hands of the Democratic Party, which generally is not in favor of free speech. But for the foreseeable future, the Left’s control over the principal means of public communication will remain a huge advantage.

The full article is here.

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A point of definition: Antifa

photo credit: www.dw.com

Dan Bongino has defined the otherwise misnamed Antifa (via Whatfinger.com):

Antifa is Anti-First Amendment NOT anti-Fascist.

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Protect your rights against those claiming a crisis

Our First Amendment rights are at risk because of corruption in Big Tech, and our Second Amendment rights are at risk because progressives are using crises and tragedy to go for the guns. Prof. William Jacobson puts both risks in perspective at Legal Insurrection:

Every time I think the media-Democrat frenzy could not get any more frenzied, it gets more frenzied.

How seamlessly they have transitioned from almost three years of Russia-collusion-mania to the current frenzy claiming that anyone and everyone who supports Donald Trump is a white supremacist.

Trump supporters now, according the narrative, are both Putin-puppet traitors AND Hitler-wannabees. It’s all so dishonest by design; the leaders of this charge don’t actually believe it, they cynically manipulate their media and social media power to drive their supporters, many of whom do believe it, into hating political opponents as an ideology. MSNBC is ground zero for this manipulative denigration of half the population.

If it only were dishonest, it would be bad enough. But it’s worse because it now has become a hunt to find heretics for public shaming. This is not new, but now it is legitimized as an anti-Trump strategy by the Resistance. Congressman Joaquin Castro naming names in his community, including retirees and homemakers, is a symptom of a culture of total political war on the left. Other symptoms include the attempt to deplatform non-liberal voices from the internet and airwaves, led by well-funded groups like Media Matters.

More here. And the Action Alert from my previous blog on proposed red flag legislation is here.

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Google: it keeps getting worse

art credit: tyranny.news

Yesterday, this blog linked to a report on Breitbart concerning the left-wing bias Google is employing by manipulating the search engines. Today we read more details reported by Lucas Nolan, again at Breitbart:

Google documents leaked to Project Veritas show the company referring to popular conservative personalities such as Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager as “Nazis.”

A recent report from investigative journalism group Project Veritas claims that leaked internal Google documents shows a Google employee and a member of a Google “transparency-and-ethics” group calling conservative and libertarian commentators such as Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson, “Nazis.” The email was sent as part of internal communications between the Google “transparency-and-ethics” group and suggests that content published by PragerU, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro should be removed from the “suggestion feature.”

A Google employee named Liam Hopkins can be seen stating: “…if we understand that PragerU, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro et al are nazis using the dog whistles…” The employee further suggests following through with the suggestion of another employee named Meredith: “I don’t think correctly identifying far-right content is beyond our capabilities. But if it is, why not go with Meredith’s suggestion of disabling the suggestion feature?”

Following the publication of an undercover video of Google executive Jen Gennai stating that the company was working to prevent another “Trump situation” after the 2016 election; the executive stated in a Medium blog post: “Google has repeatedly been clear that it works to be a trustworthy source of information, without regard to political viewpoint. In fact, Google has no notion of political ideology in its rankings.” Yet here we see Google employees discussing doing exactly that.

The rest of the report is here.

Related: Ned Ryun at American Greatness:

unless the tech companies are forcefully confronted, now, in the immediate, our self-governing republic will be over in less than a generation and we will be ruled by a tech oligarchy.

Or are we already there?

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Google vs President Trump

Not to beat a dead horse, but here’s most of the Breitbart report by Allum Bokhari that’s getting linked all over the place:

A Google insider who spoke anonymously to Project Veritas claims the company is devoted to preventing anything like the 2016 election of Donald Trump from happening again.

The insider who spoke to Project Veritas also drew attention to the covert suppression of non-progressive voices on YouTube, a Google-owned platform, said that stopping President Donald Trump and other politicians like Trump has become a priority for the tech giant.

The insider claimed that the company did a “complete 180 in what they thought was important,” abandoning earlier ideals of self-expression and “giving everyone a voice” in favor of crackdowns on “hate.”

Previous leaks from Google support the insider’s account of a dramatic shift in thinking following the election of Trump. An internal company document titled “The Good Censor”leaked to Breitbart News last year admits that the company has undergone a “shift towards censorship,” in part as a response to the events of 2016.

Earlier in the year, recently-fired Google software engineer Mike Wacker spoke of a colleague who informed him that a manager at the company said the tech giant “need[s] to stop hate [speech] and fake news because that’s how Trump won.” 

Via Project Veritas’ interview with the insider:

There’s this façade about what they’re doing, but what they’re actually doing, what the employees are actually seeing inside the company is different. And, people need to know what’s going on with Google, and that they are not an objective piece – they’re not an objective source of information. They are a highly biased political machine that is bent on never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again.

Right after Donald Trump won the election, in 2016, the company did a complete 180 in what they thought was important, before they thought self-expression, and giving everyone a voice was important, but now they’re like, “Hey, there’s a lot of hate.” And because there’s a lot of hate and misogyny, and racism, that’s the reason why Donald Trump got elected.

They started talking about the need to combat hate and racism online, and also at YouTube. They had the same talks by the CEO, Susan, and they talked about combating that and getting rid of unfairness.

In our household, we have switched from Google over to Start Page. All we need to do now is wean ourselves from YouTube videos. 

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Big Tech and social media vs free speech

In keeping with recent Tea Party blog themes:

 Mike Lester cartoon via Flopping Aces

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Are you a “Hate Agent?”

Allum Bokhari at Breitbart has this scary report:

Facebook monitors the offline behavior of its users to determine if they should be categorized as a “Hate Agent,” according to a document provided exclusively to Breitbart News by a source within the social media giant.

The document, titled “Hate Agent Policy Review” outlines a series of “signals” that Facebook uses to determine if someone ought to be categorized as a “hate agent” and banned from the platform.

Those signals include a wide range of on- and off-platform behavior. If you praise the wrong individual, interview them, or appear at events alongside them, Facebook may categorize you as a “hate agent.”

Facebook may also categorize you as a hate agent if you self-identify with or advocate for a “Designated Hateful Ideology,” if you associate with a “Designated Hate Entity” (one of the examples cited by Facebook as a “hate entity” includes Islam critic Tommy Robinson), or if you have “tattoos of hate symbols or hate slogans.” (The document cites no examples of these, but the media and “anti-racism” advocacy groups increasingly label innocuous items as “hate symbols,” including a cartoon frog and the “OK” hand sign.)

Facebook will also categorize you as a hate agent for possession of “hate paraphernalia,” although the document provides no examples of what falls into this category.

The document also says Facebook will categorize you as a hate agent for “statements made in private but later made public.” Of course, Facebook holds vast amounts of information on what you say in public and in private — and as we saw with the Daily Beast doxing story, the platform will publicize private information on their users to assist the media in hitjobs on regular American citizens.

Full article is here.

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Mark Steyn on “The Big Shut-Up”

image credit: webjunction.org

More censorship this way comes, and Mark Steyn nails it:

In this week of second-birthday celebrations for The Mark Steyn Club, the thing most worth celebrating is mere existence: We haven't yet been vaporized. Every day the Big Shut-Up advances: Last week Facebook eighty-sixed Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson and for good measure Twitter suspended the Hollywood contrarian James Woods. It's a bit unfair on poor old calypso conspiracist Louis Farrakhan, who found himself de-platformed with all the right-wing haters just because Speech Commissar Zuckerberg needed a bipartisan figleaf. He won't require that much longer, and indeed Big Social is growing ever more brazen in its preference for monitored speech over free speech. (See, for example, Google's thuggish and moronic censorship of the Claremont Institute.)

As readers may have noticed, I don't do Facebook posts or Tweet: We have social media accounts but we use them only to link to content here or to promote radio, TV and stage appearances. To be honest, I don't really understand why so-called "conservatives" write (for free) on Facebook and Twitter, providing the Big Social cartel with more free content and thus enriching them and cementing their near total control of the Internet. Nor do I understand why Dennis Prager, for whom I have almost boundless admiration, sued YouTube for giving his Prager University videos insufficient prominence. Conservatives demand that YouTube cease "de-monetizing" their videos. For what it's worth, the first time I was de-monetized on YouTube, I self-de-monetized all my other videos on the platform. Because whatever percentage of ad revenue you might get from them, YouTube takes more - much more. So you're getting pennies while they're getting even more stonkingly mega-rich: Conservatives who think more YouTube revenue is the way to close the gap don't seem to grasp that they're actually widening it.

In the end, the solution to Facebook and Google/YouTube is to break them up before they police every aspect of human existence on the planet. And right now the only prominent politician pledging to do that is ...Elizabeth Warren. In the meantime, in our modest corner of the Internet, our policy is to try and do as much as possible independent of the Big Tech oligarchies - because anything else just accelerates the shrinking number of entities that control access to all information.

A decade ago, we free-speechers were fortunate enough to fight our battles in Canada just before Facebook and Twitter came along and wrecked the Internet. Today, Twitter's main function is to provide a pretext for destroying random lives pour encourager les autres.

. . .

These are very dark times for a meaningful culture of free speech. Its subordination to identity politics and political correctness is now taken for granted by the Institute of Directors, Rugby Australia, the Philadelphia Flyers and on and on. In such a world I am grateful still to be here, and I thank all of you who swing by each morning even as the lights flicker and die around a once lively Internet.

And today we read that David Horowitz (Freedom Center, Front Page Magazine) has been suspended from Twitter. Anyway, read the rest of Steyn’s column here.

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Cartoon of the day

AF Branco cartoon of the day at Townhall and Legal Insurrection

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Censorship on the march

John Nolte at Breitbart has more bad news (“Poynter [Institute] Temporarily Pulls Blacklist with a Big Lie and Promise to Return”)

“Marketers can create blacklists,” Poynter helpfully points out, but since your blacklist might not be as comprehensive as our blacklist here’s a handy blacklist that will allow you to blacklist those we believe should be blacklisted.

Poynter’s list includes… Breitbart News, the Media Research Center, Pajamas Media, Washington Examiner, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, Red State, Project Veritas, Newsmax, Zero Hedge, LifeSite, Judicial Watch, Frontpage, The Washington Free Beacon, The Daily Caller, and the Drudge Report…

But nowhere on this list will you find the establishment media outlets — CNN, NBC, the Washington Post, Politico, the New York Times, MSNBC, etc. —  responsible for blowing the biggest stories of the last five years:

·         The Trayvon Martin Hoax

·         The Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Hoax

·         Donald Trump Can’t Win

·         The Russia Collusion Hoax

·         The Brett Kavanaugh Serial Rapist Hoax

·         The Covington High School Boys Hoax

Poynter’s blacklist was only about one thing, had only one goal — one — and that was to tell advertisers to starve alternative media, alternative thought and ideas to death.

But here’s the real news, Poynter is not retracting its McCarthyite blacklist in shame — oh no… Poynter is promising to return with a better and bolder blacklist:

Therefore, we are removing this unreliable sites list until we are able to provide our audience a more consistent and rigorous set of criteria.

“Rigorous” or righteous? This report is one of several over the past months concerning ongoing efforts to blacklist or de-platform or otherwise shut down a debate. For example, see Daily Caller report here. Iain Murray at Instapundit has another:

Leftist activists have forced a vote at the Mastercard AGM next month to establish an Orwellian “Human Rights Committee” aimed at cutting off the rights of anyone they disagree with. The initial aim is to choke off the income stream to right-wing activists.

Master Card? Well, if Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube can get away with blocking our First Amendment rights, and companies such as Dick’s Sporting Goods bow to political correctness, what will stop Master Card?  

UPDATE from Breitbart's James Delingpole: 

Facebook is Big Brother.

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How we are losing our Freedom of Speech

Jeffrey Lord has an article titled “Google Bigots and the High-Tech Lynching of Kay James” at The Spectator. The opener:

Kay Cole James, the president of the Heritage Foundation, steps to the podium of the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in suburban Harrisburg and gives the startling update.

Ms. James, at a laughing, self-admitted 70 and famously one of the best known, longtime conservative leaders in the country, announces to the PLC crowd (the PLC is the Pennsylvania version of CPAC and was celebrating its 30th anniversary) that this was her first public comment since she had learned only hours earlier that she had been removed as a recent appointee to Google’s Advanced Technology External Advisory Council. The board, on which she would have served without salary, was designed to review artificial intelligence ethics.

Among other things the outrage mob of over 2000 Google employees accused Kay James of being a “white supremacist.” Kay is an African-American. With a gay son. But Google quickly caved to the mob, dismissing Kay and then dissolving the board entirely.

And Mr. Lord concludes: 

In sum what we are witnessing in Google culture and on too many college campuses is what Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the then-new Soviet Union’s secret police known as the Cheka, described this way: “We represent in ourselves organized terror — this must be said very clearly.” And that “organized terror,” Dzerzhinsky emphasized, involved “the terrorization, arrests, and extermination of enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or of their pre-revolutionary roles.” Or, as in the case of Kay James, the mother of an openly gay son [and] her race.

Kay James just had an up-close and personal encounter with this totalitarian mindset — from a major American high-tech company. The organized terror of a Google lynch mob came for her. The quite deliberate message for the rest of America from Google is: Watch out. The next time it could be you.

Full article is here. Alternative search engines to Google include DuckDuckGo and StartPage.

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Censorship and the tech companies

This blog has been linking regularly to reports about political correctness, censorship, and the attacks on our First Amendment rights. Ned Ryun at American Greatness reports:

Just over six years ago, I attended Google’s Political Innovation Summit in New York City. Over the course of the day, it dawned on me that, in the not-too-distant future, Google and other social media companies like Facebook and Twitter would have the power to control and manipulate information flow in unforeseen and dramatic ways. That power would give the tech giants the ability to manipulate elections and policy debates and even to re-define what free speech actually means.

That future has arrived.

. . .

Every single decision of these tech companies seems to cut the same way—against a conservative worldview, against religious communities, against anything that doesn’t fit comfortably within their little Silicon Valley bubble.

. . .

To err in any direction but toward the free flow of information is to sow the seeds of our eventual demise. 

Full report is here.

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Political correctness and the decline of Fox News

image credit: Flopping Aces

Fox News suspended Judge Jeanine Pirro for asking a fair question: Is Sharia Law compatible with the United States Constitution? This isn’t just about immigration or Sharia Law. It’s yet another indication that we are losing our free speech. (And Fox seems determined to circle the drain; they just hired Donna Brazile.)

Here’s some reporting from Flopping Aces:

Sharia Law may become the third rail of America politics if one is to judge by the suspension/cancellation for at least one episode of Judge Jeanine’s weekend Fox News show “Justice with Judge Jeanine. A cowardly Fox News has extended the protective canopy of political correctness apparently barring its hosts from asking the tough and obvious questions about a doctrine few non-Muslims are aware of and few Americans understand.

. . .

Pirro’s March 9 comment [was] about Rep. Ilhan Omar ( D-Minn.), who wears a hijab, a traditional head covering worn by Muslim women.“Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?” 

. . .

A question that deserves to be asked and answered. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has in the past observed that those who follow Sharia law can’t also be loyal to the U.S., Constitution and the Western values it represents, and either shouldn’t be allowed to enter the U.S. or should be deported from it, much less serve in its legislative assemblies.

Full report with links is here.  Fox is losing credibility, and viewers are turning the channel - sometimes to Fox Business, also to OAN. Or to talk radio. Or to the conservative blogosphere - which is also encountering censorship, de-platforming, etc. 

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Google memo 'The Good Censor'

image credit: spartareport.com

Yesterday’s blog was about the film Gosnell, free speech, and free markets. Now comes an American Thinker report by Thomas Lifson titled

“Stunning 85-page Google memo 

'The Good Censor' leaked to Breitbart”

Lifson's blog begins:

If you are not worried about the power of Google to shape debate and elections according to its leftist political bias, you're not paying attention.  I congratulate Breitbart.com for the scoop, and I urge everyone – I am looking at you, President Trump and Congress – to read and ponder the fate of the Republic unless this company is defanged, most likely by antitrust action, but possibly also via civil courts. 

He then quotes Allum Bokhari's introduction and summary of the memo here, including:

An internal company briefing produced by Google and leaked exclusively to Breitbart News argues that due to a variety of factors, including the election of President Trump, the "American tradition" of free speech on the internet is no longer viable. ...

[T]he 85-page briefing, titled "The Good Censor," admits that Google and other tech platforms now "control the majority of online conversations" and have undertaken a "shift towards censorship" in response to unwelcome political events around the world.

The briefing labels the ideal of unfettered free speech on the internet a "utopian narrative" that has been "undermined" by recent global events as well as "bad behavior" on the part of users. ...

It acknowledges that major tech platforms, including Google, Facebook and Twitter initially promised free speech to consumers.  "This free speech ideal was instilled in the DNA of the Silicon Valley startups that now control the majority of our online conversations," says the document.

The briefing argues that Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are caught between two incompatible positions, the "unmediated marketplace of ideas" vs. "well-ordered spaces for safety and civility."

Terrifying. The Breitbart scoop is here. Our household is exploring alternatives to Google, including Brave. Does anyone see an alternative to Facebook? 

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