Precedents in SCOTUS nominations

 

Instapundit has the goods (click to embiggen if necessary):

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: But the important thing to Alyssa Milano is that someone is paying attention to Alyssa Milano.

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Pamela Geller: Big Tech censorship and the Election

 

At American Thinker, Pamela Geller comments on Allum Bokhari’s new book on Big Tech censorship.  It’s worse than we thought.  Ms. Geller begins:

Allum Bokhari, the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News, has performed an extraordinarily valuable service by giving us his new book #Deleted: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election. 

. . .

In #Deleted, Allum Bokhari tells the whole shocking story. For those who don’t realize the implications of what is going on, he includes a Prologue entitled “The Typewriter That Talked Back” that is as amusing as it is disturbing, and that makes abundantly clear even to the most technically challenged among us what is really happening to our foremost and most important freedom, right under our noses. Bokhari paints a vivid picture of a 1968 in which a typewriter refuses to type, typing instead its own message: “We regret to inform you that your last letter violated our terms of service (Rule 32: Abusive & Offensive Content). We have suspended access to your typewriter for 24 hours.” Newsstands remove from sale magazines that third-party “fact-checkers” have deemed to be “fake news.” The Post Office returns your mail because you told a joke in a letter that a censor found offensive.

It’s all funny until you realize that all this is exactly what email providers and big tech censors are doing to Americans today, every day on the Internet. In the pre-Internet world of 1968, it would have been preposterous. Americans would not have accepted it. But it has all happened gradually, as we gave away our freedom by clicking our agreement to dense and unreadable Terms of Service that turned over our right to say what we believe to shadowy, anonymous guardians of acceptable opinion. Most Americans today are only dimly aware, at best, that it is happening at all, and those that are approach it with grim resignation. After all, what are you going to do? Start your own Facebook?

Having been one of the early targets of social media censorship on Facebook, YouTube et al, I have for many years advocated for anti-trust action against these bullying behemoths. Bokhari makes an airtight case in #Deleted for why such action is necessary.

Read the full column here.  And it’s scary to think that even if millions of Facebook users cancelled their accounts, nothing would change.

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Today’s meme on next week's debate

The Trump - Biden debate is scheduled for next Tuesday, Sept. 29 in Cleveland.  Will it actually take place? Meme via Patriot Post:

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Boos for Gov. DeWine

 

Paula Bolyard at PJ Media reports on the Trump rally in Dayton and his introduction of Gov. Mike DeWine:

President Trump, as is customary at these events, introduced Republican Gov. Mike DeWine at his rally in Dayton, Ohio, on Monday—only to have the audience loudly boo the governor, who had imposed a statewide masking order in July that has been wildly unpopular with the president’s base.

“We’re joined today by a real good friend of mine, somebody that’s been with me from the beginning and I’ve been with him from the beginning, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine,” the president began. “Where’s Mike?” he asked, to a spattering of applause. Trump looked around, seemingly unable to spot DeWine in the crowd—and then the boos began. “What’s that all about?” he quipped, looking a bit confused. “He’s opening up,” Trump said, trying to defend the governor. “He’s a good man.”

The rest of the report is here.  President Trump describes Gov. DeWine as “a good man”?  The Ohio Governor who keeps moving the goalposts on mask mandates and onerous regulations that hamper opening up businesses?  Gov. DeWine seems to have been enjoying his role as a petty tyrant.  Not good.

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Rent-a-mobs: Update by Michelle Malkin

Sunrise logo (yes, the outfit has its own logo) via Wikipedia

Michelle Malkin is now blogging at UNZ.com.  In her column today, “Sunrise Movement: the Riotous Left's Pot-Banging Brats,” Ms. Malkin names names and puts the endless rioting and violence in context. She begins:

Wake up. The “community organizers” of the left are in full wildebeest mode. Now is not the time for bending down, rolling over or playing nice. From now until Election Day (and likely until the end of the year), you can expect screaming banshees carrying identical, preprinted signs to turn up in the middle of the night at the private homes of elected politicians, Donald Trump campaign and administration officials, law enforcement officers, judges and conservative leaders.

This is not conjecture. A nationwide agitation force milked the dead body of George Floyd to create the current anarchotyranny. Now, in keeping with her dying wish, the mob will use the fresh corpse of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to try to bully Republicans into submission over President Donald Trump’s rightful Supreme Court nomination. The ultimate goal: obstruction and delegitimization of Trump’s reelection.

On cue, a bunch of demonstrators all in matching yellow-and-black T-shirts from the Sunrise Movement turned out in front of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s house in Washington, D.C., this weekend, banging pots, pans and buckets. The disrupters also blasted airhorns, pointed strobe lights at the windows and crashed cymbals to punctuate their collective fit over Ginsburg’s passing. Not a single one was arrested for disturbing the peace.

One organizer shrieked at Graham (who was not at home at the time): “You are an old white man desperately clinging to power that you can’t hold onto much longer because we’re coming for it. And in the meantime, you are not filling that Supreme Court seat. Not on our watch. The people will decide who fills that seat. No justice, no sleep!”

Another threatened: “Anyone who is seeing this can do the same thing to your representative, can do the same thing learning about how to hold them accountable. Make sure they know if they do some evil (expletives), they know there will be consequences for it.”

Shrieker Number One concluded: “We will vote, we will organize, we will strike, and we will keep showing up in your goddamned driveway at the crack of dawn to let you know that WE ARE WIDE AWAKE!”

Who is the Sunrise Movement? It’s as organic as Spam and as genuine as AstroTurf. This full-time rent-a-mob is an adjunct of the Sierra Club (annual budget: $100 million; top donors: Michael Bloomberg, George Soros). The Sierra Club provided five-figure initial seed grants to Sunrise’s educational arm, as well as Beltway office space. Other original funders of Sunrise: The Rockefeller Foundation and Wallace Global Fund (which has also contributed to the George Soros-subsidized Tides Center, Color of Change cancel culture guerilla warriors, and far-left legal policy groups Alliance for Justice and the Brennan Center for Justice).

The Sunrise Movement’s co-founder, Evan Weber, is a former Occupy Wall Street organizer. Two others, Sara Blazevic and Varshini Prakash, are Green New Deal zealots and Bernie Sanders activists who teamed with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to push the Democrats even further left. Prakash serves as an advisory board member of Climate Power 2020 along with Soros-funded Center for American Progress head John Podesta, former Obama administration environmental czar Carol Browner, former Obama administration science czar John Holdren, former Obama administration Secretary of State John Kerry, former Obama administration EPA head Gina McCarthy, and former Obama administration U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power.

Ms. Malkin's full column is here. And guess what?  Here's from the Sunrise Movement's website:

Sunrise is a movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process. We currently have 8 hubs in Ohio looking for volunteers including: Athens, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Kent, Oberlin and Youngstown. See website for contact information for each hub.

It sounds so benign.

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Therapeutic totalitarianism

 

Nicholas J. Kaster’s column today at American Thinker has a sobering analysis of the local and state governments’ endless mask mandates, lockdowns, and other joys of the never-ending pandemic:

We have entered the seventh month of coronavirus panic, with large parts of America still partly or wholly shut down. What began as a 15-day expedient designed to “flatten the curve,” has gradually become the norm in American life. The goalposts have continued to shift. First, the focus was on hospital overcrowding; then it moved to overall deaths; then it moved to number of positive cases; now it seems to be shifting to the availability of a vaccine. The real endgame appears to be the November election.

. . .

Many have seen parallels in this creeping authoritarianism to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And indeed, there are some: the obsessive mask conformity, the endless and often contradictory edicts by state governors and mayors, and the tiresome mantras celebrating obedience (e.g., “Alone together”).

But a closer analogy to our current predicament can be found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley’s novel, published in 1932, 17 years before Orwell’s, envisions a dystopia that is sated but soulless, where the people’s every earthly need is met, but at the cost of their liberty and humanity.

. . .

The idea of a riskless utopia is pure fantasy, of course, but the power that will accrete to the ruling class is very real.

Mr. Kaster’s column is here.

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Where are the alternatives to Facebook?

Dan Bongino is investing in an alternative to YouTube.  I hope he and others also attempt to start up alternative to Facebook.  From the Patriot Post: 

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