First Amendment under attack again

image credit: sott.net

Today’s targets: James Woods and Pamela Geller. Via 100 Percent Fed Up:

He has over 2.1 million followers and is one of the most active and important conservative accounts on Twitter, but conservative actor James Woods is finished with Twitter until Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, stops being a “coward,” and affords conservatives the same free speech rights as liberals in his platform.

. . .

“Twitter demanded that I rescind my tweet paraphrasing Emerson,” Woods said in a statement to The Daily Wire. “It now seems they have chosen to delete that tweet from my account without my permission. Until free speech is allowed on Twitter, I will not be permitted to participate in our democracy with my voice. As long as Jack Dorsey remains the coward he seems to be; my Twitter days are in the past.”

President Trump and his outspoken, conservative son Don Jr., both came to the defense of James Woods over his censorship on Twitter.

Don Jr. pointed out the hypocrisy of the social media giants censoring the voices of popular conservatives while allowing terror groups to openly post on their platforms. Tweeting directly to Twitter and Facebook, Trump Jr. asked if they consider James Woods to be more dangerous than Hamas?

It’s interesting how @twitter and @facebook both seem more concerned with silencing non-violent people who hold political opinions they disagree with, than violent terrorist organizations and the people that support them,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted. “Is @RealJamesWoods really more ‘dangerous’ than Hamas?”

And Pamela Geller was censored on Facebook. After complaints, her post was restored. Just another “mistake” by Facebook.

Ms. Geller’s advice:

Attention readers: Challenge ever ban, appeal every deletion. Do not stand by while left wing corporate managers and paid foreign operatives strip us of our unalienable rights as Americans.

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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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Another bad idea: renaming Columbus Day

Robert Higgs at cleveland.com reports:

A typically united City Council divided Monday night over a non-binding resolution calling for the city to recognize the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day rather than Columbus Day.

Councilman Basheer Jones proposed the resolution, saying he wished to recognize that a culture already existed in North America when Italian explorer Christopher Columbus arrived in Oct. 12, 1492.

Council approves most proposed resolutions with little or no comment, but Jones’ proposal struck a nerve with colleagues Matt Zone, a second-generation Italian American, and Mike Polensek, who also is of Italian descent.

Zone spoke for several minutes in opposition to the resolution. He said that he grew up celebrating Columbus Day as a proud symbol of immigration to the United States. And it was a day important to Italian Americans who themselves had to endure bigotry in this country.

“It now is a universal theme with all people who come into this country,” Zone said. “One of the highest honors I ever had was in 2015 when I was the grand marshal in the Columbus Day parade.”

Zone said he had no problem doing something to honor indigenous people, but not at the expense of Columbus Day.

. . .

(Full report is here.) But it’s not about identity politics, in this case Native Americans vs Italians. It’s about using identity politics to push another attempt to erase the history of America. Yes, of course, Native Americans were here before Columbus, but it was the Old World coming to the New World that marked the inception of the early European settlements that led to the founding of the United States.

If you live in Cleveland, find your councilman here. The general phone number for council members is 216.664.2840. Give ‘em a call.

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Cartoon of the day

AF Branco cartoon of the day at Townhall and Legal Insurrection

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Fake groups

image credit: ojnetworks.com.au

A word of caution from our friends at Ohio Jobs & Justice Pac:

So many fake groups raising money via email requests making you believe they are associated with Trump, people in the administration, conservative, etc. Don't give a dime to anyone you can't call up personally or know you can contact directly. People are wasting tons of their money thinking they are helping when they may only be helping RINO's, globalists, or scammers enjoy the high-life on your wasted money.

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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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Cuyahoga County Council to ban plastic bags!

If California thinks it’s a good idea, I am probably against it. Here’s the report from Courtney Astolfi at Cleveland.com:

Cuyahoga County Council is poised to pass a countywide ban on single-use plastic bags after all the members of a council committee on Wednesday voiced support for the ban.

Four members of the Education, Environment, and Sustainability Committee signed on as co-sponsors of the ban during the Wednesday hearing, and Council President Dan Brady told cleveland.com he expects the measure to pass.

Committee Chairwoman Sunny Simon and Councilman Dale Miller are the primary sponsors. Signing on Wednesday were Brady, Council Vice President Pernel Jones Jr., and councilwomen Shontel Brown and Cheryl Stephens, giving the measure the six votes needed for passage.

A simple majority of the 11-member council is needed to pass legislation.

Contacted Wednesday, a spokeswoman for County Executive Armond Budish could not immediately say whether Budish supports the measure or whether he would sign the ordinance into law.

If signed into law, the ban would go into effect on Oct. 1 to give retailers time to use up their supplies of plastic bags, and allow time for community education.

The last time Council attempted to curtail the use of plastic bags was a 2017 proposal by Simon and Miller that would have added a 10-cent fee per plastic and paper bag. But that measure faced heavy pushback and never made it to out of committee.

Brady on Wednesday said he believed the proposed ban had garnered a “broad consensus.”

Jones and Stephens said they have received calls and emails in support of the ban from both urban and suburban residents of the county.

Simon acknowledged that the ban would be a difficult change for county residents. But she said it was a necessary one, and likened the environment in America to Paris’ fire-damaged cathedral of Notre Dame.

“This is our cathedral,” she said. “Teddy Roosevelt saw this as something as a legacy that we have to preserve. This is our future.” [hyperbole, anyone? -DP]

The ban applies to all single-use plastic bags and paper bags that are not 100 percent recyclable or made from at least 40 percent of recycled material.

The ban would not apply to plastic bags that customers bring with them to retailers, and bags used for carry-out orders of prepared food or restaurant leftovers.

It also would not apply to plastic bags used for newspapers, perishable items such as produce and meat, garbage, dry-cleaning, pet waste, prescription medication and bags provided at curbside pick-up or points of delivery and bags used for legally transporting partially-consumed bottles of wine.

Exclusions notwithstanding, what’s next? Plastic straws? (Rest of the report is here.)

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