Restrict Act ~ Another muzzle on free speech

Emmy Griffin at Patriot Post explains the “Restrict Act”, presently gaining support in the Senate:

RESTRICT stands for Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats That Risk Information and Communications Technology, and of the several bills presented to the Senate on the issue of social media abuses, this one has the most popular support.

. . .

However, one thing to take into consideration is that when crafting legislation that restricts or bans TikTok, other social media companies need to be part of the calculous as well. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, and others all data-mine their users. It’s a good rule of thumb that if a product is free, the actual product is you, the user. In this case, data-mining and microphone-tapping are used to provide users with targeted ads. It is an invasion of privacy, albeit one that mostly feels innocuous — for now.

The RESTRICT Act would delegate regulation to a bureaucrat in the executive branch. The secretary of commerce would be given carte blanche to make several decisions that are troubling, to say the least. According to Senator Rand Paul: “The bill’s application is far from limited to Tiktok or other internet-based companies. The third section of the bill would enable the Secretary of Commerce to investigate any business that is in any way subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary to determine if its transactions ‘pose an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States.’ Though the bill already designates China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba as foreign adversaries, the RESTRICT Act also empowers the Secretary of Commerce to unilaterally add any other country to this official enemies list.”

The current secretary of commerce, Gina M. Raimondo, has already stated that banning TikTok would be a politically deleterious move for the Democrats. In an interview, she said, “The politician in me thinks you’re gonna literally lose every voter under 35, forever.”

. . .

The RESTRICT Act takes away freedoms from the American people. It is just another thinly veiled attack against the First Amendment. The powers granted to the secretary of commerce give her the authority to remove, investigate, or outright censor companies that aren’t toeing the Democrat Party line. In fact, if any company resists her edicts, those responsible could go to jail for 20 years.

Do we really want that sort of power in the hands of an unelected bureaucrat?

That sane answer is no. . . .

Read the rest here.

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Losing our First Amendment rights

 

Dr Robert Malone is in a very good position to share with his readers the risks we all face as our First Amendment rights are attacked.  He’s been vilified, censored, and ostracized, but fortunately, the propaganda aimed at destroying him has failed to shut him up.  His Substack column the other day discusses the protections and freedoms we are losing:

. . . Thanks to the Matt Taibbi’s Twitter Files and the Louisiana/Missouri lawsuits, we know much more about the censorship and propaganda during COVID-19. Then we have the Congressional investigation of the “The Great Barrington Declaration” as well as Congressional investigations of other censorship/propaganda operations run by the US government during the last three years of the COVID crisis. There have also been various Epoch Times exposes and other FOIA documents (in particular thanks to Project Veritas and Judicial Watch), documenting that the Federal government has been involved in these types of propaganda campaigns for many years. The extent of these operations has been vast, with billions of dollars funneled into astro-turf organizations and NGOs. The military, HHS, the White House, big pharma companies, and big tech have been partnering together to conduct these operations. These include money, meetings, strategic sessions, technical help, “hit” lists of people to take down, etc.  . . .

. . .

After the leak of Justice’s Alito draft opinion on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, there was and is an organized campaign to physically intimidate and harass conservative justices by activists. Individual supreme court justices have been doxed, with agitators protesting outside their homes. These violent protests have been allowed to continue unabated, despite there being a Federal law on the books prohibiting the targeting of Federal judges. The Department of Justice refuses to take action against the protestors. There was an attempt on Justice Kavanaugh’s life. For which President Biden and the media were mostly silent. The Supreme justices must now travel in armoured cars and have full time security.

Living with this kind of fear is one of the most insidiously damaging psychological campaigns one can imagine. I know. I have at least seven cyberstalkers that repeat malicious defamation against myself and my wife on a daily basis. This is different from having some corporate media doing a hit piece. This is repeated defamation which is repeated daily.

The systemic attacks of both Supreme Court justices and conservative judges continues unabated. It is not just those seeking to return federal abortion rights to the USA. Justice Thomas has been the victim of co-ordinated attacks by the press for years, including coordinated racist and downright libelous articles written about him and his family. Yet, despite all these media hit pieces, no charges have been brought forth. More evidence that this is a coordinated propaganda campaign.

Other conservative judges have been harassed by trans rights protestors, gay rights protestors, and have even been harassed for the sin of for being appointed by President Trump to a judicial position. These are not peaceful assembles, as is our right under the First Amendment, but are concerted efforts to harass and physically intimidate officers of the court. The tools being used include cyber stalking, gang stalking, violence, physical intimidation and harassment.

Who is leading these systemic efforts? What agencies? How deep does the propaganda and censorship go? Is this even a real concern or just another conspiracy theory? These are legitimate questions and the public deserves answers.

The American people can no longer trust that the US government to be neutral. Our rights to a free press and free speech are being stripped away daily. The US government, big tech, media, pharma, the military are acting in a coordinated fashion to censor and create propaganda. We know that media and big tech are getting paid by the government to do this. That the HHS also paid out a billion dollars to both advertise the jab campaign and to censor critics of the “vaccine” program.

I am pro-America and a patriot. I am a Constitutionalist. I believe in free speech. A strong nation. A free press. Our republic. Our democratic institutions. This is not an anti-government tirade. I am not anti-government, I am a conservative constitutionalist, but I am shocked and saddened by how quickly our great nation is falling into corruption rationalized by the thesis that censorship is necessary to “preserve democracy”.

I truly believe that if the American people, Congress, and the courts do not act fast, that very fabric of this great nation will be torn in ways that cannot be repaired. Our rights of free speech and free press will soon be consumed by the US Governments’ need to control. Is this a national government we want to live under? . . .

Read the full column here.

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The Real State of the Union

 

President Trump's Real State of the Union was reported and transcribed by Mike Landry at Western Journal:

Rather than reviewing what was said Tuesday to Congress, it’s better that you know the thoughts of Donald Trump, as he responded — point by point — to the claims by Biden.

Trump’s entire speech is less than 2 minutes, and it’s worth hearing every word because it shows us how things really are.

“Here’s the real state of the union,” Trump began. “Over the past two years, under Biden, millions and millions of illegal aliens from 160 different countries have stormed across our southern border.

“Drug cartels are now raking in billions of dollars from smuggling poison to kill our people and to kill our children.

“Savage killers, rapists and violent criminals are being released from jail to continue their crime wave.

“And under Biden, the murder rate has reached the highest in the history of our country.

“Biden and the radical Democrats have wasted trillions of dollars and caused the worst inflation in half a century.

“Real wages are down 21 months in a row.

“Gas prices have soared and are now going up much higher than even before. And the typical American family is paying $2,200 in increased energy and food costs each year.

“Joe Biden’s weaponized Justice Department — and I’m a victim of it — is persecuting his political opponents.

“His administration is waging war on free speech.

“They are trying to indoctrinate and mutilate our children.

“He’s leading us to the brink of World War III.

“And on top of all of that, he’s the most corrupt president in American history, and it’s not even close,” Trump said.

“But the good news is, we are going to reverse every single crisis, calamity and disaster that Joe Biden has created,” Trump continued.

“I am running for president to end the destruction of our country and to complete the unfinished business of making America great again.

“We will make our country better than ever before, and we will always put America first.

“Thank you,” Trump concluded.

If you prefer the video via Rumble, click here.

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Mark Wauck: “settled science” and "misinformation"

 

Whether it’s challenges to the claims about “man-made climate change,” the COVID vaxx, or other examples of “misinformation,” a judge in California has issued an injunction against that state’s attempt to muzzle and penalize any doctors who disagree with the CDC’s and other government mandates on COVID (vaxx, masks, etc.). Mark Wauck at Meaning in History reports:

This tactic cleverly relies upon the common misconception that “science” consists of a body of settled knowledge that is above challenge, rather than being a process of continuing inquiry that relies to a great degree precisely upon challenges to previous consensus (I simplify, of course). This notion of a settled body of knowledge—identified as such by Leftist ideologues without regard to evidence as such—is then used to shut down debate on whatever happens to be the latest Leftist pseudo scientific cause—”settled science” so just shut up! You’re an ignoramus if you dare object, or if you demand evidence to back up the Left’s latest campaign.

We’ve seen this tactic employed repeatedly, first in “social science” fields and now even in the “hard” sciences. Most recently, with the use of the charge of “misinformation—it has evolved into a full assault of the First Amendment and an instrument of social control. The Covid Regime, with its numerous scientifically unjustified mandates—masks, distancing, plexiglass screens, and so forth—has offered fertile ground for the extension of draconian anti-freedom controls over the populace. All in the name of an invented and often contradictory “scientific consensus” which usually boils down to an uninformed and arbitrary bureaucratic consensus.

. . . Specifically, [Judge William] Shubb attacks the definition of “misinformation” as something that is contradicted by a supposed “scientific consensus”—a highly problematic concept.

In an order Wednesday, Shubb criticized the law’s definition of “misinformation,” which is “false information contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.”

Shubb, who called the definition “nonsense” at a court hearing Monday, said in Wednesday’s order that it was “grammatically incoherent.”

Beyond that, Shubb’s order also criticized the phrase “contemporary scientific consensus,” saying that it doesn’t have an established meaning in the medical field.

“The statute provides no clarity on the term’s meaning, leaving open multiple important questions,” the order said. “For instance, who determines whether a consensus exists to begin with? If a consensus does exist, among whom must the consensus exist (for example practicing physicians, or professional organizations, or medical researchers, or public health officials, or perhaps a combination)?”

That lack of clarity, the judge added, makes it impossible to determine what the new law prohibits.

“I think he correctly analyzed the facts and the law and understood that the concept of a ‘contemporary scientific consensus’ is highly problematic,” said Richard Jaffe, an attorney representing one of the challenges to the rule.

Mr. Wauck concludes:

Given that the federal judiciary—right up to the SCOTUS—has largely been missing in action while the Left has been running roughshod over our constitutionally protected freedoms, it’s refreshing to see a judge directly challenging these tactics. Hopefully this case will establish a precedent for dismantling this Leftist assault on freedom.

Source links are here and here.

# # #

 

Phantom ballots: who is cleaning the voter rolls?

Jay Valentine at American Thinker has published a couple of columns expressing his concern:

You would think rational electioneers in the Republican Party would, in 2022, do everything to stop the election jiggering that took place in 2020.  You would be wrong.

And from his column yesterday:

Two years ago, most Americans thought phantom voters were comic book characters.  Nobody had ever seen one.

This week, we reached our 5,000th volunteer request (in 60 days) to help clean voter rolls — and we never asked for a single volunteer.  We are just technology guys.

Americans are fed up; they get it that their elected officials are not going to clean voter rolls.  Perhaps some people did not dig the Big Steal for the Trump election — but after Kari Lake, the Senate in Nevada, and dozens of local races, they are on fire now.

Mr Valentine’s Omega4America website is here. And he has expressed frustration at the lack of attention to election fraud from top politicians.

However, Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch mailed subscribers, including this blogger, the following message:

President Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States, delivered the keynote address last night [Jan 19] at our 6th Judicial Watch Annual Roundtable, a private event, which was held at the Trump National Doral in Miami, FL.

President Trump engaged in a historic battle against government corruption and abuse, a battle that continues to this day. We are honored that he addressed and educated our supporters about the ongoing rule of law crisis that so threatens our Republic.

The Roundtable also featured important discussions on the election integrity crisis, the border crisis, the Left/government/Big Tech attack on free speech, the January 6 political prisoners, Biden corruption [emphasis added] and more!

This is good news:  President Trump participated in an event that directly addressed election integrity.  Judicial Watch is one of the few watchdog agencies that regularly files FOIA lawsuits to expose government corruption, and their recent conference tells us that they have their eye on the ball, so to speak.

# # #

Mark Steyn, Richard Dreyfuss, & multiculturalism

 

Jaws image seen on SteynOnline

Mark Steyn’s column yesterday was in part a renewed pitch for his book America Alone The End of the World as We Know It.  Having read the book some years ago, I can highly recommend it.  But it’s Mr Steyn’s reaction to actor Richard Dreyfuss that prompted the column. Here’s some of it:

American conservatives on the Internet are abuzz with the recent interview given to Glenn Beck by Richard Dreyfuss, star of Jaws, Mr Holland's Opus, American Graffiti and many more. Mr Dreyfuss has given up acting to save his country:

@RichardDreyfuss tells me he gave up acting "ONLY for something I loved as much, which was saving my country...It infuriates me that people don't understand what this place means."

SteynOnline regulars will not be surprised by this development. Mark and Mr Dreyfuss have met only once, very briefly, two decades back at the memorial tribute in Montreal to their mutual friend Mordecai Richler. But seven years ago it emerged that the actor was one of many who had read Steyn's bestselling book. As Mr Dreyfuss put it in a three-part theopolitical dialogue with Susannah Black:

Mark Steyn, a writer with an irritating case of the smart-alecs, has written a book I urge you read called America Alone. Just the first few chapters are a geo-political wake-up call, and he is not someone I agree with very much. But he quotes bin Laden: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." And he quotes Donald Rumsfeld: "If we know anything it is that weakness is provocative."

We are on a clock we don't see or comprehend. We will not survive this century unless civic virtue is revived. We can discuss its origins all day—if we have the right to speak at all, and aren't dead under jihad.

Seven years after that observation, "the right to speak at all" is increasingly imperiled, in ever more areas - even for those as celebrated as J K Rowling, and even in Richard Dreyfuss's own field, the arts. As Mark mentioned on his first post-heart-attack appearance, he ran into an actress friend, a lifelong leftie, who nevertheless has grasped the essential fact of our time - that western civilization is sliding off a cliff. And, as Steyn put it, once that is seen it cannot be unseen.

Mark's book was never Harry Potter boffo, but it kept selling year on year, and picking up new fans en route, including from Hollywood. For a tome by an irritating smart alec, America Alone proved somewhat prescient, but its warnings went unheeded by the presidents and prime ministers in a position to do something about them.

. . .

Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis. After all, most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school "holiday" concert instead of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug. . . . Multiculturalism was conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb.

For the rest of it, click here.

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Don Surber's "unreliable and harmful clams"

 

Don Surber is in the process of closing down his blogspot and moving to Substack.  He’s wing-walking during the transition:

A reader sent me this graphic [above] mocking Google’s censorship of my blog posts for what Google called “unreliable and harmful claims.” Two recently censored posts relied on reporting by the New York Times and the Washington Post, so Google might have a point.

Readers know this Substack account is my response to Google censorship. Eventually I will abandon Google and my blog — https://donsurber.blogspot.com — in favor of Substack. The censors don’t bring me down. They are an annoyance. They are not even mosquitos. They are mere midges. Censoring is a sign that we are winning because they cannot handle the truths we tell.

Mr Surber goes through the laundry list of what he perceives as recent victories for conservatives and patriots.  I am still waiting to see how much election fraud there is in next month’s elections.  Still, this blog also plans to migrate over to Substack;  it is no longer possible to use a Google search even to find this blog -- you’ll eventually find a robot instead.  I also know from tracking the traffic patterns over the past year that someone has tampered with the algorithms.  So we’ll see.  Meanwhile, Mr Surber closes his column with optimism and another clam:

Be of good cheer. We are winning. We will — we will — rock them with our “unreliable and harmful claims.”

We won’t clam up.

Source link is here.

# # #

Political Censorship: it's everywhere

 

Here's Kyle Becker at Trending Politics reporting on unconstitutional censorship:

This is Not America:
Political Censorship Campaign Unconstitutionally
Targeted Millions of Americans

The United States government is unconstitutionally targeting millions of Americans for their political speech by directly contracting with private ‘third parties’ that flag their viewpoints for alleged ‘misinformation.’

The federal government has contracted with at least five private companies or public non-profits to ‘flag’ Americans’ views on everything from Covid-19 to the 2020 election.

In an editorial at Just the News, John Solomon and Greg Piper reported on four of these groups, but the report suggests that the radical left’s operation to chill free speech is just the tip of the iceberg.

. . .

“The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika,” the article adds. “It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to file ‘tickets’ requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.”

“Three liberal groups — the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP — were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content,” the article goes on. “A Homeland-funded collaboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access.”

. . .

It should be noted that the U.S. Constitution not only guarantees Americans’ right to free speech, but the right to consume information freely in the marketplace of ideas.

To conclude:

The U.S. government is violating the Constitutional charter that brought it into existence by violating the rights of Americans in states across the country. 

So where are the lawsuits?  Read Mr. Becker’s full report here.

# # #

Cartoon: First Amendment up in smoke

Mike Lester cartoon

 # # #

A cartoon to start the week

Another excellent A.F. Branco cartoon, this one seen at The Patriot Post:

# # #

Blockchain Republics: good news?

 

 image credit: takeneo.com

I would not have been able to define the word “blockchain” before reading J B Shurk’s column at American Thinker.  Here’s how he describes it -- and why it makes him optimistic:

. . . blockchain is a decentralized database of transactions, and the rate of its adoption around the world is occurring twice as fast as the internet's during its genesis.  It is transforming the world of finance by introducing the existence of digital cryptocurrencies and other financial instruments that cannot be controlled or manipulated by central banks or government spendthrifts.  It will not stop there.  It represents a revolutionary redesign in the ways information, wealth, and governance function by undercutting centralized authority and empowering everyone else.  It is the ultimate tool for slicing and dicing international authoritarianism into parts too dispersed for search engine and social media censors, corporate news propagandists, central bank thieves, or one-world government oligarchs to control.

If you have wondered why totalitarianism has come back into fashion and why Western leaders have spurned freedom for talk of wobbly notions of "democracy," it is because the decentralizing benefits of blockchain technology have the potential to flip the hierarchy of power on its head.  Imagine a future where banks become unnecessary, central banks become obsolete, trade of goods and services no longer requires third-party lawyers or brokers, and personal wealth is secure from the snooping eyes of State agents.  Imagine if Google's search engine, Twitter's and Facebook's fake "free speech" platforms, and breaking news websites could not be manipulated by corporate intermediaries working to stifle certain points of view and push others.  Imagine if services once traditionally left to the government sphere could be contracted among private towns and citizens without any space for regulators or lawmakers to intervene.  Imagine a world in which free speech and free trade are truly free, private property is secure from government taxation, Election Day votes are all easily verifiable through a public ledger, and people can choose to share information and ideas without the cultural Marxism of political correctness turning rights into liabilities.  Moving away from transactions controlled and monitored by "elites," corporations, and governments and toward blockchain transactions that are "housed" nowhere, cannot be altered, and remain secured from bad actors means a system where censorship, coercion, and government monopoly fade away.  

In other words, blockchain technology is the mother of all nuclear warheads against the Davos crowd's dreams of global empire and domination.  No wonder we've had to go into medical lockdown for two years while the super-secret 1% of the 1% figure out how to "Great Reset" the world before the world figures out how to great reset them.

I remain convinced that we are on the threshold of a renaissance for freedom that cannot be terminated early by the collection of corporate, banking, and government powers working so hard today to maintain total control over their populations.  . . .

Read the full column here.

# # #

Liberals Keep Voting for the Progressive Left

 

Dennis Prager posted "The Left Is Evil and Liberals Keep Voting for Them" last week at AmericanGreatness.  As we head into the next election, maybe we can try again to explain to our liberal family member and friends. 

. . . liberalism and leftism have virtually nothing in common. In fact, leftism is the enemy of liberalism—as a handful of liberals such as former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, former Young Turk Dave Rubin and others have come to recognize.

The Left has never believed in free speech and has suppressed dissent wherever it has assumed power. Free speech is a pillar of liberalism, and it has always embraced dissent.

The Left rejects the anti-racist ideal of colorblindness. Colorblind is the liberal racial ideal.

The Left supports racial segregation—such as all-black dorms and separate black graduations. Liberals have always advocated racial integration.

The Left has always loathed capitalism. Liberals were always major advocates of capitalism—recognizing that only capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty.

The Left has always been anti-Israel. Liberals have always been fervent supporters of Israel.

The Left has always held America in contempt. Liberals loved this country. A liberal wrote “God Bless America.” No leftist would write such a song.

Leftists want to defund the police. No liberal does.

The list of liberal-Left differences is as long as the list of left-wing positions.

Yet, it is liberals who keep the Left in power. Were it not for the liberal vote, the Left would have no power.

Why do liberals vote Left? Why do liberals vote for those who have contempt for virtually everything they, the liberals, hold dear?

The question is all the more apt given that it is conservatives who protect virtually every liberal value. It is conservatives who seek to preserve free speech, racial integration, love of America, a strong Israel and capitalism.

So why do liberals vote for the Left, for the very people who hold liberals and their values in contempt?

Mr. Prager has answers;  click here.

# # #

Mark Steyn on free speech: another casualty

 

image credit: contrarypedant.blogspot.com

Mark Steyn’s column today reports on another grim milestone: the death of Lars Vilks, one of the vocal few who made up the front line in the “free speech wars”:

Here's the score card from that 2010 event [in the free-speech wars, gathered to mark the fifth anniversary of the Danish Mohammed cartoons in Copenhagen in 2010]: Lars Hedegaard, of the Danish Free Press Society, had invited five of us that day - a Dane, a Swede, a Norwegian, a Dutchman and yours truly:

~The Norwegian comedienne Shabana Rehman had already had her family's restaurant firebombed; she now lives under 24/7 police protection, which is not the easiest way to practice observational standup;

~The Dutch cartoonist Nekschot was obliged, for security reasons, to appear on stage with his face obscured and unidentifiable. So he chose to wear a burqa. Funny, but not quite secure enough. Nekschot had already been arrested for "hate speech" with the authorities openly taunting him about the impending loss of his anonymity. He now lives in hiding, and is no longer a cartoonist;

~Our host Lars Hedegaard was subsequently shot at point-blank range, but fortunately by an incompetent, so he survived. Mr Hedegaard also lives in hiding; the would-be assassin lives free in Turkey, where Sultan Erdogan refuses to extradite;

~and now Lars Vilks is dead.

Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, he was being driven in a bulletproof car by two of his protection officers when there occurred what Swedish police regard as a freak collision with a truck. An almighty fire ensued and neither Lars nor the policemen survived; the driver of the other vehicle is seriously wounded and in hospital. This all happened near Markaryd, about an hour north-east of Helsingborg, where Lars was born. Helsingborg, like many Swedish cities, is utterly transformed, which is why Lars Vilks ended his life in an unmarked car being driven home under police protection from a guarded lunch with an old friend.

The BBC reported his demise thus:

Muhammad cartoonist killed in traffic collision

He was not, in fact, a cartoonist. He was an artist, primarily a sculptor - of limited technical skills (as he conceded) but of whimsical imagination. Yet, as the gates clank shut on free speech across Europe, it's easier for lazy Beeb hacks to lump every dissenter under the category of "Muhammad cartoonist".

. . .

It was an unusual traffic accident. On a divided carriageway with a sturdily fenced median, the police vehicle somehow managed to cross into the oncoming lane to find itself just in front of a large truck. As Robert Spencer puts it:

The names of his police guards need to be released. As does the name of the truck driver. Note that 'the rescue service and the police said it would take a lot for a vehicle to be able to pass into the other lane, given that it is separated by a wire fence.'

The Swedish police continue to investigate. Whatever the circumstances of the fatal crash, Douglas Murray is correct as to the broader cause of death:

Lars Vilks was a man, and an artist, of enormous courage. He should never have been in this situation, and if other artists and others across Europe had not been such cowards then he never would have been.

I ponder the grim arithmetic of that 2010 event. Six of us on stage that day: One firebombed, one forced into hiding and out of his job, one shot, and now one dead. It's like Agatha Christie for jihadists: And Then There Were None. Maybe someone would like to produce a film or a play on the theme. Ah, but no: As Douglas says quite correctly, Lars Vilks was only in that van because of the miserable cowardice of our so-called artists, a "community" that spends the whole year giving each other awards back and forth for their "courage" and "heroism".

Mark’s full column is here.

# # #

Happy Independence Day

 

At Front Page, Don Feder offers 17 ways to celebrate America’s birthday.  Here’s his closing:

Never give up! – America wasn’t started or safeguarded over the course of 245 years by quitters. Think of Valley Forge, the string of defeats the Union Army suffered in 1861-62, Belleau Wood and Bastogne. To pledge allegiance to the flag means that you will fight to keep it waving, regardless of the odds.

We are in a war for America’s survival, every bit as desperate as the Revolution, the Civil War or the Cold War.  It includes the metaphorical equivalent of house-to-house fighting.

We are fighting for the preservation of free speech, religious liberty, private property, limited government and public safety. If the Founding Fathers could pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, the least we can do is to risk our reputations and jobs to stand up to the cancel culture and other types of leftist tyranny.

Happy Fourth of July.

Read all 17 ways to celebrate here.

# # #

Mark Steyn: Our Increasingly Unrecognizable Civilization

 

The most recent edition of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis features an essay (adapted from a speech) by the inimitable Mark Steyn.  It begins:

I live about 20 minutes south of the Canadian border, which used to be called the longest undefended frontier in the world. People moved freely back and forth across it all day every day. But now it’s been closed for over a year. At one point my daughter asked me to drive her up there, because there was a 30-minute opportunity for people on one side to talk to their friends on the other. “Sad!” as President Trump would say. It was like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War, except that both sides are now like East Berlin.

I don’t know how this happened, but it is just one indication that America, and the West in general, have become almost unrecognizable from what they were not that long ago.

Look at just three things we have lost.

One is equality before the law, something absolutely essential to a free society. In its place, we now have politicized law. If a policeman fatally shoots someone, whether his name is released to the public depends on whether the shooting is consistent with the preferred narrative of the ruling class. A policeman recently took down a young woman who was threatening the life of another young woman with a knife, and that policeman was immediately identified—indeed, his photo was posted and he was threatened by NBA superstar LeBron James on Twitter. On the other hand, we know nothing of the policeman who shot dead an unarmed woman in the U.S. Capitol on January 6. His name will apparently never be released to the public.

Second, border control. Functioning societies, at least since the Peace of Westphalia three centuries ago, have borders. America has no southern border and no plans to get one. The official position of our government seems to be that any of the seven billion persons on this planet has a right to come and stay in the U.S. for three years, until his or her assigned court date comes up. As the number of people with pending cases continues to grow, that three years will extend out to five or seven or 15 years. If we get all seven billion people to come here, the court system will break down entirely and maybe we can go back to having a functioning border.

And third, dare I bring up the fact that it is a real question whether we can go back to agreeing to have open and honest elections? And if we don’t have open and honest elections, control of our borders, and equality before the law, then we don’t have the conditions for politics or free government.

And here’s the thing. It is not at all clear to me that many of America’s conservative politicians understand the seriousness of all this. You can see it in the fact that they go around trying to scare people with the specter of a “radical socialist agenda.” For well over a year now, we have been living in a world in which it’s accepted as normal that the state has essentially unlimited power—and in which our freedom to decide for ourselves has been diminished almost to invisibility. Why do these conservative politicians think the words “radical socialist agenda” still scare anyone in a time when the state can tell us whether we can have Aunt Mabel over for Christmas? They are completely out of touch.

Over the same period as the pandemic lockdowns, we have seen an escalation of so-called wokeness. And if you look at one of the most startling manifestations of this, transgender fanaticism—which involves, after all, the abolition of biological sex and, I’m sorry to have to say it, the physical mutilation of children—one notices that America is farther down this road than any other country in the Western world. In other words, at this moment of crisis for Western Civilization, or for what we used to call Christendom, the leading country of the free world is pulling the wrong way.

Think of it. Your daughter has been training since she was a little girl to run in school sports. Now at 17, she’s in the state high school track championships, and you are forbidden even to notice that she’s competing against a woman who is 6’2” with thighs like tugboats, a great touch of five o’clock shadow on her face, and the most muscular bosom you’ve ever seen. You’re not supposed to notice the craziness of this, and the craziness is at its craziest right here in America.

We traditionally think of France as being a bit screwy, but today there are French intellectuals who regard themselves as hardcore leftists and yet who think America has gone bonkers on this transgender issue. President Macron himself has said that American wokeness is an existential threat to the French Republic, and he even found bureaucrats in France’s education bureaucracy who agreed. There is not a single bureaucrat in the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., who would agree, but there are apparently a few in Paris.

If you look further east in Europe to the lands that were once behind the Iron Curtain—to Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, which still function as conventional nation-states calculating their best interests—you find tremendous fear of the threat of wokeness that is being exported, sometimes aggressively, from America. So it is here in the U.S. where we have to put the stake through these ideas.

But again, even most of our conservative leaders and institutions seem oblivious. School districts in America are talking about revising their curricula to cover transgender issues from grade school on. Now, I went to an English boys’ school, and we were expected to pick up sexuality on our own time. In those days people would have looked puzzled if you had said, “We’re going to have to cancel geography or Latin, because we need to put gay studies in there.” These days, instead of going off behind the bike shed during recess to learn about sex, kids need to sneak behind the bike shed to do a little bit of closeted geography or closeted Latin. It’s completely backwards. And yet what do we hear from most conservative politicians? That it would be nice to offer people a tax cut!

We are way beyond tax cuts. We’re broke. We’re just a smidgen away from $30 trillion in federal debt—something with no historical precedent. Talking about tax cuts today is like talking about VAT tax refunds on the Titanic. It’s not actually what’s necessary at the moment.

Another big issue that should take our minds off tax cuts is China. I can’t get over the way we in the U.S. have been ordered by our governors and the CDC to punish ourselves by living small, shrunken lives, while the people in China who loosed this pandemic on the world have paid no price for it.

Dr. Fauci has been a federal government bureaucrat since 1968. He’s the J. Edgar Hoover of public health. He talks about the COVID virus as if we’re at war. But he seems to think a country wins a war by taking it out on its own population rather than the enemy, which is what we’ve done.

. . .

Lots more here.

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The Tyrants Among Us

The Editorial Board at Issues and Insights gives us fair warning on returning to normalcy:

 Of course they’re not going to let a crisis go to waste.

   . . . 

There’s a natural progression from the pandemic lockdowns to restrictions on freedom in the name of saving the sky from global warming. But the tyrants among us won’t stop there. We find it useful here to quote the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s international affairs analyst, who realized more than six months ago that “the virus of tyranny has already found itself in the bloodstream of liberal democracies.”

For instance:

• President Joe Biden and his party hope to saddle Americans, through undisciplined spending, with debt and a de facto tax (inflation) that can be repaid only by mortgaging the future and bondage to the federal monster.
• There is a core on the left, not even the hard left, that is resisting a return to normal. It wants liberty-shackling rules in place in perpetuity.
• Our freedom to speak will continue to be abridged.
• Our ability to make independent and individual health care decisions will be curtailed further.
• Second Amendment rights will be in danger of being rolled back because of “public health” needs.
• Expect to be forced out of our fossil-fuel-burning automobiles and herded into mass transit.
• Protests and rallies will be put down as insurrections – unless they are in service of the “right” groups, such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

Once lost, freedom is difficult to regain. “Be warned,” says author Michael Walsh. “If you think the petty tyrants currently making your lives miserable are going to willingly relinquish their illicit powers, think again. They’ve got a taste for it now.”

So intoxicated from their deep swig of power are they that they no longer see boundaries, just opportunities to subjugate. Fight back, or lose in a few years what has made America unique and great for more than two centuries

The entire editorial is here.

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Mike Lindell, Frank Speech, and 2020 election fraud

 

JD Rucker at NOQ Report has news:

MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell has . . .  been in the news lately for multiple reasons. One of the biggest is his upcoming social site, Frank Speech, which officially launches next week. He described it as a combination of YouTube and Twitter with a focus on free speech.

“They’ve attacked our First Amendment rights like nothing we’ve seen in our history,” he said. Users can go to the website today and sign up early.

This report has more:

That “something” turned out to be arguably the most important bombshell he’s dropped regarding 2020 election fraud. The forensic evidence of technological voter fraud has been widely discussed but never fully sourced, nor has it been attributed directly to irregularities in vote counts. Now, the truth is finally starting to come out.

He talked about the teams he put together for Absolute Interference and how he wanted to dig deeper into certain topics. “I said, ‘You know what? I want you to take some [cyberattacks] specifically where it came out of China… take like 20 of them… I want those attacks that came direct out of China, I want a team on the ground, a separate cyber-team.'”

What were they looking for?

“They checked out physically where the attacks came from, the longitude-latitude, the IP addresses of the machines, the IDs of the computers, who did it?” he said.

His team cross-referenced the timestamps of the cyberattacks with the “flips” of votes that he and others have documented before. They were a perfect match. He had the results audited by a third-party who confirmed the findings.

Folks, this is huge. It tells us what many have speculated about over the last five months. There was a literal hack (not to be confused with the fake news “Russia Russia Russia” hacks of 2016) on our elections in which vote totals were changed to reflect a Biden victory.

If "Absolute interference" does indeed document the “smoking gun,” I remain skeptical that anything can be done at this late date to remedy the phony election results.  Still, better to KNOW the details than to speculate.  The rest of Rucker’s report is here.

In the meantime, if you are so inclined, sign up at Frank Speech at the link.

# # #

Media losing power?

 

Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a Mr. Instapundit, makes a good case:

Media’s censorious gatekeepers are mad —
because they’re losing power

With Donald Trump out of office and de-platformed, you’d think mainstream media gatekeepers would be happy. You’d think wrong.

Though the media-Big Tech regime is doing its best to silence opponents and seize control of the high ground, the news from within is grim. They aren’t happy with how things are going. 

That’s because they know they’re losing. Some are losing audiences and revenues. But more important, they’re losing control of the narrative.

And since control of the narrative, and the power and self-importance that accompany that control, is the most important thing in their lives, they can’t be happy.

Consider the cri de coeur of Washington Post public editor Hamilton Nolan, inspired by Tesla’s decision to scrap its media-relations department. How could that happen?

Nolan knows how, and that’s what bothers him: Tesla scrapped its media-relations department because the media don’t much matter to it. Tesla has plenty of ways to get its story out without relying on the media, and that makes the media much less important — and much less powerful. And it’s the power part that hurts the most.

. . .

I hope it’s true.  Read the rest here.

# # #

Parler: FAIL

 

So we all thought that Parler would be a viable alternative to Twitter.  Alas, Shane Trejo at Big League Politics reports:

The alternative social media provider Parler is back online after inexplicably relying on Amazon to provide their initial web hosting, but apparently the operatives behind the platform have not learned their lesson for the relaunch.

Parler’s new hosting provider, SkySilk, has a blanket ban on all “hateful material” without specifying what that term exactly means.

“We specifically reserve the right to refuse to provide the Service to customers or End Users engaged in dissemination of material that may cause us to be subject to attacks on our network, or that while technically legal, run counter to our corporate principles,” SkySilk wrote in their terms of service.

So Parler, while advertising itself to be a free speech platform, will really be operating off and dependent on the “corporate principles” of a far-left tech company.

The full report is here.  The online definition of Parler at not-so-reliable Wikipedia is here and it's not pretty.

# # #

Are we asking the right questions?

 

Ned Ryun at American Greatness asks some serious questions. 

You can quibble with me about it all, and no doubt there are some good and well-meaning people mixed up in all of this, but a look at the world around us, from exploding debt to the expansive powers of our massive administrative state to our broken immigration systems to a failed electoral process to Big Tech monopolies crowding out our First Amendment freedoms, should answer all objections. No serious movement would have allowed that to happen or appear to be so full of people who, even now, think all of this is fine. We will just keep pushing on doing the same things that haven’t worked in more than a generation. 

Perhaps if we became more sophisticated in our use of 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 funds, we could address some of our problems in a meaningful way. But instead, we insist on funding retreads like the Heritage Foundation at $80-$100 million a year, AEI at $50-$60 million a year, and the mostly worthless state policy think tanks sucking down hundreds of millions of donor dollars every year. To what end? Serious question. 

None of that money will be or has been used to address the greatest threats to our democracy, from election integrity to Big Tech. Honestly, you could pile 90 percent of that money in the street, light it on fire, and it would be just as effective. 

But instead of thinking about adjusting our priorities, we’re sitting here like programmed robots ready to repeat the same mistakes. Again. And again.

A provocative read;  Mr. Ryun’s full column is here.

# # #.