Cartoon: First Amendment up in smoke

Mike Lester cartoon

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Get ready for more riots

 

CNN's "Baghdad Bob" moment

The Kyle Rittenhouse trial is almost concluded.  Perhaps the judge will dismiss the case with prejudice.  Perhaps the jury will be able to withstand doxxing and other pressures to convict.  JD Rucker at NOQ predicts that the jury will acquit.  If the verdict is anything other than a conviction, JD Rucker is sounding the alarm: 

Leftists, Media, and Big Tech Are Colluding
to Burn Down Cities After Kyle Rittenhouse is Acquitted

This isn't the case of a common narrative being circulated. This is collusion that is so blatant, lawsuits need to be filed.

When Kyle Rittenhouse is acquitted, many cities will likely experience what we saw last year following the release of the George Floyd video. It may even be worse this time if the powers-that-be get their way. But unlike the BLM and Antifa riots that sprung up after the Floyd video, the riots that will come with Rittenhouse’s acquittal have had months of planning and coordination.

At the heart of the conspiracy are mainstream media and Big Tech. They’re doing their part to make sure there’s as much carnage as possible. Let me break it down briefly before getting into more details.

The tag-team efforts of mainstream and social media are crystal clear. We have the CNNs, MSNBCs, and network news outlets all spreading coordinated lies about the trial. They are painting Rittenhouse as a murderer; CBS News literally called him that while the trial was still going which is a blatant obliteration of any remnant of journalistic standards they may have once had. They are attacking the judge. They are attacking the defense team. They’re even attacking the prosecutors to create a scapegoat for why this “murderer” was set free.

Meanwhile, Big Tech is suppressing the truth. Free Beacon reported that social media companies are suppressing claims that Rittenhouse is innocent. While mainstream media spread the lies, Big Tech suppresses the truth. It’s a one-two punch designed to make the people unaware that the trial was a mockery and clearly demonstrated Rittenhouse as acting in self-defense.

. . .

One would think that law enforcement will be prepared for the riots that are coming. Some will be. Others will not. We will likely see Democrat-run cities burning while Republican-run cities are able to contain most of the domestic terrorism that is coming. It isn’t just inefficiency or ineptitude in leftist cities. It’s also the greatly depleted police forces that are already allowing criminals to rule in Seattle, Portland, New York City, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and similar cities across the country.

When Rittenhouse is acquitted, those cities will almost certainly be overrun with violence and property destruction. This is by design. It has many benefits for the powers-that-be who want to see America torn down, replaced by an ugly “utopia” under the Neo-Marxist tenets of The Great Reset.

Law enforcement has been warned. Will they act accordingly?

Mr. Rucker’s full article is here.

I don’t agree with every assumption in Mr. Rucker report (e.g., I don’t agree that officer Derek Chauvin should have been fired after George Floyd died while in police custody;  body cam transcripts and the medical examiner’s report incl. the toxicology report, demonstrate that Chauvin was following protocols and that Floyd died of a drug-induced heart attack).

However, the main point – that if Mr. Rittenhouse is NOT convicted, there will be blood in the streets -- is why I’m linking to the report.  And downtown Cleveland was on the target list in May 2020. 

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Donald J. Trump's new website

 

It's up.  And here's the link:  <https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk>

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Journalism: RIP. Again.

 Instapundit published this today:

#JOURNALISM:

Or click here.

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Face mask control

 Seen on social media:

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Instagram blocks Larry Elder

Image credit: www.mic.com

Another conservative is blocked. This time it’s Larry Elder on Instagram’s blacklist. Elder reported on PJ Media:

After averaging 450 new followers a day since March, when I became active on Instagram, my number of new followers suddenly stopped growing. Dead stop. The count read 68.9K. It remained 68.9K for over two weeks. Then, the number dropped by 100. Meanwhile, over the same two-week period, on Twitter and Facebook, which owns Instagram, I continued gaining hundreds of new followers per day.

. . .

After following Instagram's complaint procedure to no avail, after writing a column about my frozen follower number, after consulting with several people who made contact or tried to make contact with the company, I received a polite letter from a Facebook representative identified as working for its "U.S. Politics & Government Outreach" team. 

. . .

After following Instagram's complaint procedure to no avail, after writing a column about my frozen follower number, after consulting with several people who made contact or tried to make contact with the company, I received a polite letter from a Facebook representative identified as working for its "U.S. Politics & Government Outreach" team. [Rep. made several "innocent" lame excuses.]

. . .

Elder then references Robert Epstein’s testimony before Congress; Cleveland Tea Party reported on that recently (go here and here).

. . .

[Rick] Chapman, the hi-tech expert, does not buy the Facebook rep's innocent explanation. Chapman said: "The answer is because they can. And they're not stopping. This attack on you is an example of how bold they're becoming." The challenge is for conservatives to invent and use alternative platforms not subject to liberal bias. For instance, in its June 2019 press release, a startup called Safe Space said it established its social media site for "conservatives frustrated over the censorship taking place on mainstream platforms." Safe Space's CEO said: "Instead of begging Twitter and Facebook to change, or pretending Reddit isn't a puppet for the Chinese, (we decided to) find a solution through capitalism. We've decided to offer a competing platform where no voices will be unfairly targeted."

Full article is here. I’ll ask our household's web expert to have a look at the Safe Space option.

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Twitter: a virus of the mind?

Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a Mr. Instapundit, has a think-piece on the Spectator; his subject is about one of the Big Tech giants, in this case Twitter. Here’s a sample:

Twitter . . . is tightly coupled. The ‘retweet’, ‘comment’, and ‘like’ buttons are immediate. A retweet sends a posting, no matter how angry or misinformed, to all the retweeter’s followers, who can then do the same to their followers, and so on, in a runaway chain reaction. Unlike blogs, little to no thought is required, and in practice very few people even follow the link (if there is one) to ‘read the whole thing’. According to a study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, 59 percent of people who share a link on social media don’t read the underlying story. . . .

. . .

You can reject Twitter’s toxicity by leaving the platform, as I did in the fall of 2018. But . . . this doesn’t really solve the problem: ‘Absent large-scale collective action by the political/media class to reject the platform, simply logging off Twitter is merely a personal defensive mechanism — a sometimes necessary mental-health break that all too often correlates with diminished influence in the national political debate.’ With Twitter, you can participate and be driven crazy – or you can stay sane, and lose influence. That’s a bad trade-off.

. . .

Rather than focusing on the content of what individuals post on social media, regulators might better focus on breaking up these behemoths, policing anticompetitive collusion among them, and in general ensuring that their powers are not abused. This approach, rooted in antitrust law, would raise no First Amendment or free speech problems, and would address many of the most significant complaints about social media.

As Mr. Instapundit is wont to say, read the whole thing – here.

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Big Tech is hiding behind the law: update

President Trump convened a summit of social media giants, including Facebook and Twitter. Following the summit, President Trump announced:

“Today, I am directing my administration to explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech and the free speech rights of all Americans,” POTUS Trump announced. “We hope to see transparency, more accountability, and more freedom.”

J.D. Heyes at NewsTarget further reported:

In 2016, before the tech giants began altering their search, publication, and distribution algorithms, conservative speakers were dominant on social media, likely helping propel the president to victory. But by the 2018 elections, based on several studies and investigative reporting, the tech giants had begun — in concert — campaigns to silence conservative, pro-Trump voices, led by the behemoths Facebook and Twitter.

The companies are taking advantage of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which “provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an interactive computer service who publish information published by others,” the Minc Legal Resource Center noted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation added that “Section 230 says that ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.’” 

But, argue opponents, when Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and other platforms begin censoring content they find politically objectionable, that makes them publishers, and they therefore should lose their immunity to face legal consequences for those acts of censorship, especially if they have taken money from users they are censoring.

The president’s summit may already be having a positive effect on conservative and independent publishers. For instance, The Western Journal, whose Facebook traffic had been reduced significantly, suddenly found its traffic returning to normal levels a day before the summit — after months of battling with the platform to get it restored.

There is a long way to go, however, to ensure that all conservative and indy publishers’ traffic from their subscribers and followers returns to normal. The president has at least gotten the ball rolling, and well ahead of the 2020 elections.

Well, good. It's a start.

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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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Social media, surveillance, and your vote

image credit: picstopin.com

Breitbart has reported on the "the extent to which major technology companies such as Google are surveilling their users." But the segment that I hope everyone will watch (it’s less than 4 minutes) is Dr. Robert Epstein’s appearance on Tucker Carlson from (apparently) a few months ago and re-broadcast last Friday. 

Video credit: YouTube [another platform for surveillance] via thelibertydaily.com

Here’s a partial report and transcript from The National Sentinel: 

Dr. Robert Epstein, a research psychologist at the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology, joined Carlson to discuss an upcoming presentation on “The Search Suggestion Effect (SSE): How Search Suggestions Can Be Used To Shift Opinions and Voting Preferences Dramatically.”

The researchers looked at the power of Google and Facebook to influence elections over a period of five years and came up with powerful results.

“I can tell you we should be paranoid because what Google and Facebook can do is really mind-boggling,” he told the host.

“For example, if Mark Zuckerberg on election day last year, if he had chosen to press the enter key early in the morning and just sent out a message to Hillary Clinton supporters only saying, ‘Go out and vote,’ that would have sent her an additional 450,000 voters that day with no one knowing that this had occurred. And that’s just Facebook,” he added.

“What Google can do is really off the scale. Our studies show that Google can take a 50-50 split among undecided voters and change it into a 90-10 split with no one knowing they had been manipulated and without leaving a paper trail,” the research continued.

“It has to do with those search suggestions. Literally from the very first character that you type into the search bar you are being manipulated,” Epstein said. “And we’ve done 16 months of experiments. We’ve done all the research now and we know exactly how this works… The threat is absolutely, positively profound.”

Read the rest here or watch the video. Please share with all your social media friends.

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