Tag: repression

Marina Ovsyannikova holds sign protesting war in Ukraine on Russia's Channel One TV
Back to the USSR: America’s Media Corruption

Back to the USSR: America’s Media Corruption

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America’s newsrooms could use more people like Marina Ovsyannikova. That’s her there, holding up that sign on Russia’s state-run Channel One TV informing viewers that they’re being lied to about Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.

“NO WAR,” the sign says, and then in Russian, “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you here,” and finally ending with, “Russians Against War.”

Facing possible prosecution and severe punishment, Ovsyannikova, a news editor at the station, felt she couldn’t stay silent any more as state television pumped out falsehoods to gin up public support for the country’s invasion of its neighbor. Her dramatic display of dissent was followed in short order by the similarly inspired resignation of Lilia Gildeyeva, a long-time anchor at Gazprom Media-owned NTV — technically a commercial station but closely aligned with the Kremlin — who fled the country before submitting her resignation, saying she feared she wouldn’t be allowed to leave if she resigned first. Just last year Gildeyeva was on a list of journalists praised by Putin for “achievements in developing mass media.”

While many in Russia know they’re being lied to by their so-called news media, many Americans have been slow to catch on that their so-called news media have been lying to them, too. Incessantly fed tall tales of “Russian collusion” and “Russian misinformation” and “Russian interference in American elections” by their own print and broadcast news sources, Americans have been led down a path of divisiveness, lies, coverups, and political fraud that would put Russian propagandists to shame.

Some of us have known for a long time that the mainstream media were complicit in deceiving the American public, largely on behalf of the Democratic Party and party elites and in the rabid and irrational manifestation of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). As a recovering journalist, I’m more attuned to these things than most, and have been calling out the lies and deceit in the nearly five years I’ve been posting my pieces on FJY.US and now on Substack. It’s always nice to be right, and as the truth inexorably comes out, things I’ve reported and opined on have almost in all cases been proven correct. It’s bitter pleasure, though, seeing how readily so many people, including people I know personally, bought, and continue to buy, into the lies being fed them.

Unless one is a regular viewer of Fox News — itself maligned by the media and political propagandists — or is willing to search out and read or listen to knowledgeable sources not corrupted by the prevailing political orthodoxy, one wouldn’t have a clue what really is going on in this country.

It only took 17 months and what amounts to a fraudulent presidential election for the exalted New York Times to finally acknowledge that the laptop reported in October 2020 by the New York Post to belong to First Son Hunter Biden is, in fact, authentic. The Times couldn’t even admit that it had covered up the story at the time it broke — part of a massive media and Big Tech coverup geared toward getting Hunter’s father, Joe, elected president, and to block the reelection of the Orange Menace. It buried the acknowledgment in a story this week reporting how Hunter borrowed money to pay a million dollar delinquent tax bill and remains under a federal investigation into his shady international business deals.

“People familiar with the investigation,” the Times bleated, “said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer [Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner convicted and sentenced to prison for fraud] and others about Burisma [the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Biden served for a cool million dollars a year despite knowing nothing about either energy or Ukraine] and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

Duh. Ya think?

Hunter Biden himself from his laptop

Covering Up Biden’s Corruption

If you were reading my posts — or the New York Post — in October 2020 none of this would be news to you. You’d already know about the connection between Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Burisma, and the whole sordid affair. And if you were reading my posts or watching Tucker Carlson on Fox News, you would know about how the corruption involving Hunter ties directly to his father, then Vice President and now doddering about the White House masquerading as President while Ukraine goes up in flames. And if at the time you listened to Carlson’s interview with Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski you’d also know how that corruption extends to China and the Biden family’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

If you didn’t listen to that interview or read the Post stories and other key pieces of information I linked to in my October 29, 2020, piece on Applying RICO to the Biden Crime Family, the Dems, and the Media, now would be an opportune time to do so. Better late than never.

In a coordinated move that would make the Russian censors proud, most of the U.S. media and Big Tech — led by Twitter and Facebook — squelched the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 election, going so far as to lock out the Post‘s own accounts and shutting down anyone who even mentioned them. They were given cover by a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials — including such professional Obama Administration liars and current CNN pundits as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, who has admitted previous support for the Communist Party — which said the Hunter laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Never mind that, by their own admission, they had no evidence to support this audacious claim.

“If we are right” — operative word if — “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this,” the letter said.

What would have been correct, and honest, would have been if they wrote “this is the Democratic Party trying to influence how Americans vote in this election.” But that was the last thing they wanted Americans to know as they were already casting their votes. Now these same “former intelligence officials” refuse to withdraw or apologize for their own misinformation discrediting the laptop story.

Following the election, one-in-six Biden voters polled — 17 percent — said they would have changed their vote had they known about the laptop story or the other stories concerning scandals related to the Biden-Harris ticket that the media and Big Tech suppressed. Of course, I wonder what it would take, if all that isn’t enough, for the other 83 percent to change their vote. In any case, what even the 17 percent number says is that the outcome of the election would have been very different had the media and Big Tech not conspired to pull the wool over the eyes of American voters. Russian disinformation, indeed.

Hillary and Vlad Vladivostok Sept 8 2012

Back to the Beginning: Hillary Clinton

As I said, some of us have known all along that the so-called Russian collusion theory, which attempted to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, was a hoax perpetrated by Hillary Clinton and her campaign. Once the Mueller investigation ended in March 2019 with no evidence of collusion, prosecution of the real guilty parties should have been commenced, but wasn’t. The wheels of justice, to the extent they turn at all, turn exceptionally slowly, especially when highly placed individuals are concerned, and 14 months later, in May 2020, we began to get further confirmation of the extent to which the effort to discredit Trump essentially amounted to an attempted coup d’etat.

Once the 2020 election was over it was considered safe to reveal details of the conspiracy that led to the election of Jell-O Joe Biden and, more at issue, the defeat of Donald Trump. The full details of this conspiracy — that’s the actual word used by the author of the Time story detailing the process — were contained in a pivotal February 2021 piece by Time‘s National Political Correspondent Molly Ball. Titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” in it Ball writes that she gained access to “the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum.”

Admitting the story sounds like “a paranoid fever dream,” Ball wrote of “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” And this from a highly placed media person who ostensibly approves of this sort of thing.

“They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it,” she wrote. “And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.”

Ignoring, if you can, Ball’s use of a semi-colon, you can be excused if you think this sounds a lot like incessant Democratic blathering about “saving democracy,” which you also would not be wrong to equate to the same sort of electoral manipulation that led to the 2020 results. Only they want it in perpetuity. The classic one-party state. All with the full complicity and collusion of the “liberal” mainstream media. Back to the USSR.

In July of last year I posted a piece I titled If You Don’t Read Anything Else This Year, Read This. If you didn’t follow that guidance then, now would be a good time to do it. That piece quotes 36 tweets by researcher, writer, and podcaster Darryl Cooper in which he lays out why, exactly, ordinary people know that the 2020 election was stolen. It closely parallels what Ball says about the conspiracy involved in its “fortifying,” and things I’ve been reporting on all along.

Finally, last month, we got the latest filings from the long-enduring investigation being conducted by Special Counsel John Durham which ties the whole Russian collusion hoax back to its source: Hillary Clinton. We already knew that she was willing to sacrifice national security by conducting classified and sensitive official business on an unsecured private server when she was Secretary of State under Obama, but we now have evidence that her campaign was actually attempting to garner information directly from the Oval Office during Trump’s presidency.

We’ve also had evidence, which predates even the 2016 election and Clinton’s ludicrous “reset” with Russia, of her ties to Putin and his oligarch cronies. We also had evidence, which alarmed even some in the FBI, how Clinton Foundation — the Clintons’ family business — activities in Russia posed a potential threat to U.S. national security and risked providing “. . .  a means for the Russian government to access our nation’s sensitive or classified research development facilities and dual-use technologies with military and commercial application.”

With grifters like Clinton and Biden and their cronies, and with media that coverup the facts and perpetuate the lies and deceit, that collude to “fortify” our elections, who needs Russians? It might be too much to hope for a Marina Ovsyannikova, but at least some journalistic ethics and integrity and less malpractice and corruption would go a long way. Even those things, it seems, have gone beyond the range of expectation. And with them goes the viability of our democracy.

Featured image: Marina Ovsyannikova Tells It Like It Is, AFP via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Hunter Biden, from his own laptop, via the New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Vlad and Hillary Cozy Up in Vladivostok on Sept. 8, 2012, AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel, Pool. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.
Cracks Form in the New World Order

Cracks Form in the New World Order

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The Beijing Olympics have helped focus world attention on China’s concentration camps where it interns, rapes, tortures, enslaves, and otherwise abuses its Uyghur minority. But it’s not just China that has concentration camps. The former democracy known as Australia has them, too. Other countries, including both the U.S. and Canada, have considered setting them up, and a number of countries, including another former South Pacific democracy, New Zealand, have maintained draconian quarantine and border controls.

The modern plague known as coronavirus, AKA SARS-CoV-2, AKA COVID-19, for more than two years now has served as the perfect pretext for petit dictators and power hungry politicians to pursue very undemocratic agendas. Not just the virus, but autocratic and dictatorial attitudes and techniques more associated with Communist China than Western democracies, emerged and flourished across the globe over the course of the pandemic.

Some looked to the pandemic to usher in what can be called a New World Order. One book, co-authored by the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum and a colleague at the same organization, is titled COVID-19: The Great Reset, which tells you how many so-called global influencers and elites have seen the pandemic. As most ordinary people wanted nothing more than to get back to their normal lives, those people and many in positions of power saw it as their chance to reshape the world in their own vision.

Read some of the reviews of the book and you’ll see how readers, both in the U.S. and overseas, have seen through the book’s premise.

“Know your enemy,” one reviewer warns, “this is their manual. I think they have greatly underestimated the fact that populations will return to their own normal, or close to it, naturally. Opportunistic malfeasance by the Davos ‘elites’ will be their own downfall.”

More succinctly, another says, “Technocratic Totalitarianism on a Global scale. This was horrifying, and they’re using this pandemic to do it .”

Events on the ground, almost anyone now can see, confirm that this has been the agenda being pushed by not just governments, but by Big Tech, Big Pharma, and, almost universally, the complicit media establishment.

Cracks Appear, and Spread

Now stunning events of the past few weeks are showing that serious cracks are forming in the push toward the New World Order. Mass demonstrations in places as far-flung as Australia and Western Europe and Africa were the first harbingers that people had had enough. And then, on Jan. 21, Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin announced the country was lifting most of its COVID restrictions, effective the next day. In short order, the U.K. — prompted by the scandal of PM Boris Johnson being caught violating his own rules, which was far from the first time the COVID autocrats put their hypocrisy on full display — lifted its restrictions, followed by the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Norway, and Sweden. Even Greece loosened some of its rules.

Meanwhile, holdouts remained. Along with China and the repressed Antipodes, Democrat-controlled states in the U.S., and our neighbor to the north, Canada, remained among the most restrictive stalwarts. And then a convoy, reportedly 43 miles (69 kms) long, of Canadian truckers began their journey from the West Coast to the national capital in Ottawa, igniting the spirit of freedom-loving people not just in Canada but around the world, and the cracks really began to spread. What started out as a protest against a Canadian government mandate requiring truckers crossing the U.S.-Canadian border to be vaccinated or go into forced quarantine morphed into a more broad-based protest against all COVID restrictions and mandates. While not all Canadians support the truckers, the country’s mass media, like good toadies to the power structure, have painted the truckers as right-wing crazies.

Once the convoy, now called the Freedom Convoy, entered Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cowardly fled the capital to an undisclosed location, and then attacked the truckers, implying that they were racists — this coming from Monsieur Visage Noir lui-même — and neo-Nazis. This now seems to be the language of discourse, on both sides of the border, as employed by the autocratic left to discredit anyone who disagrees with them.

The truckers appear to have started a movement as other convoys have blocked border crossings between Alberta and Montana, shut down the busiest international crossing, the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, and invaded Québec City. Meanwhile, other trucker convoys sprang up in the Netherlands and New Zealand, truckers in the latter threatened with arrest in just three days by the dictatorial government there. At the same time, New Zealand’s autocratic PM and media darling Jacinda Ardern announced that the country would reopen its borders, sort of, to returning Kiwis and some others, after vying to be a Hermit Kingdom for most of the pandemic.

The truckers have made an impact, with four provinces — Alberta, Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, and Québec, Trudeau’s home province — lifting all or some restrictions, with Ontario and Manitoba saying they are considering following. At the same time, a number of repressed blue states in the U.S., led by New Jersey and California and spreading to include Oregon, Illinois, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, and Pres. Biden’s home state of Delaware — most red states, such as my own state of Florida, have already been free — loosened, almost in unison, the bulk of their own restrictions. As they do, some of the same idiotic inconsistencies that were hallmarks of the restrictions throughout the pandemic were left in place. One of the biggest sources of discord remains over masking mandates of school children, still existent in some states, even as other restrictions are lifted.

Retrenchment

All these developments might be viewed positively, and for the moment they are. But given the hunger for control that the elites and autocrats have developed throughout the pandemic, and some of the more insane and irrational and often counter-productive restrictions they put in place, it would be a mistake to think that they’re going to quietly give up the field to the common rabble without a fight. The current phase might be better seen as a strategic retreat, and actually it would not be the first time such a retreat (anyone remember “two weeks to stop the spread”?) has been made over the course of the past 24 months.

The elites can sense the prevailing winds, whether it’s the Freedom Convoy in Canada or parents and students raising hell and staging walkouts in the U.S., or massive street demonstrations in other countries. They see the polling numbers, and can feel the winds blowing against them that those numbers represent. But they also know the power of fear, and how they’ve managed to instill it in a large proportion of the population. They count on that segment to push back, to call for continued restrictions, to keep those elites and autocrats in power and calling the shots.

See the photo at the head of this section? That’s one of Australia’s COVID concentration camps. How, one wonders, can such a thing come to exist in a democratic country unless there is a significant number of Quislings ready to carry out the repression for the autocrats? And who, during this ordeal, has not run into a Mask Nazi or Vaccine Commissar?

The real irony — a better word would be tragedy — is how most of the restrictions imposed on people have had little to no positive effect and have resulted in massive social, economic, and human costs. One of the points I’ve made since the beginning of all this is that costs need to be balanced against benefits: The cure can’t be worse than the disease. But what we’ve seen is that, more often than not, the costs have been worse, far worse, than the benefits obtained. We now have the Johns Hopkins University study – widely ignored by the mainstream media — which looked at 24 different studies. The Johns Hopkins researchers concluded that lockdowns, which did so much economic and personal damage, prevented just .2 percent — two tenths of one percent — of COVID deaths in the U.S. and Europe. Clearly the benefits did not outweigh the cost.

“We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality,” the researchers said in the report.

It’s been known from the beginning — even the revered if thoroughly erratic Dr. Anthony Fauci said it — that cloth masks have little or no effect in blocking the virus. And now, after all the mask sturm und drang of two years, finally the CDC has come out and said it: Cloth masks don’t work. Meanwhile, many states and school boards continue to force school children — the segment of the population least vulnerable to COVID — to wear masks in schools, even when it is known, and has been for at least a year, how much damage masking does to kids. This is but one negative consequence that results when the media and Big Tech conspire to block any information that deviates from the official orthodoxy, no matter how wrong that orthodoxy is.

As for closing borders, it has been clear to me for some time that the draconian measures taken in Australia and New Zealand were only postponing the inevitable. And we’re now seeing the evidence of that as cases surge in both New Zealand and, especially, Australia (look particularly at the charts at the bottom of those linked pages to see the dramatic trend graphically depicted), with deaths trailing as the case load grows exponentially.

At this juncture, let’s hope the forces of sanity and freedom prevail and they make those cracks grow bigger and more durable and life all over can return to some semblance of normalcy. Sometimes People Power does hold the autocrats in check. Maybe it will now. Nothing less than the future of the world depends on it.

Featured image: Ottawa police come down on truckers’ peaceful protest. Image taken from New Freedom Media video. Used under Fair Use.

Truckers demonstrate for freedom in Ottawa. Dave Chan/AP via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Australia COVID concentration camp. Rotter News. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.
Democracy Dies in Darkness

Democracy Dies in Darkness

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Democracy dies in darkness. If you care at all about the very survival of American democracy, you should be absolutely terrified of what is happening right now with the cold-blooded and utterly partisan repression of information being perpetrated by the social media giants, bolstered by the mainstream media. Unprecedented in the nation’s history – in the world’s history – it is not government carrying out this bald-faced censorship, but private enterprises, arguably the most powerful corporations on the face of the earth.

This frightening trend toward non-governmental repression, whether it is from the social media giants, cancel culture, or militant forces on the left such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter, was the subject of my recent posting on Banned Books Week: Canceling of Thought in 2020 America on my Stoned Cherry blog. In just two weeks, its prescience has come to the fore in what I would assess to be the single biggest threat facing our democracy.

When the New York Post broke the story confirming what many of us have long suspected, that former Vice President Joe Biden had used his official position to favor the business and financial fortunes of his son, Hunter, and, worse, may have himself gained vast financial benefit, not just in Ukraine but in China, the social media giants Twitter and Facebook immediately shut down the story. They then went even further, and blocked any attempts to repeat the story, such as through retweets, and even shut down the accounts of the Post itself and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. The mainstream media, in lockstep, hardly even mentioned, or downplayed, what the Post reported, and Biden and his campaign have been virtually silent on the story, and has not been pressed on it. You can be excused if you feel you’re in Belarus, Russia, China, or even North Korea, and not in the United States of America, with the concerted attempt to keep the public from even knowing about this story.

What we are witnessing is the utter crushing of the free flow of information in this country, and it is coming from private, but extraordinarily powerful, actors. And it is coming entirely from one side of the political spectrum. This is something I have been warning about on this blog for years now, but it has now reached a critical state.

Keep in mind that the Post is not some frivolous journal. Depending on the method and time of calculating circulation, its readership ranks anywhere from No. 1 to No. 6 nationally, and, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, it is the oldest continually published newspaper in the country. Despite allowing dubious stories negative about President Trump to appear and remain on their platforms, including stories based on anonymous sources and illegally obtained (and never verified) information, Twitter and Facebook justified their actions based on these very grounds, as well as the untrue grounds that the Post‘s information had been “hacked.”

This piece isn’t intended to deal in detail with what the Post found and reported about the senior Biden’s involvement in furthering his son’s business dealings, but rather with the egregious repression of the information to keep it from reaching the voting public. I’d direct you — and strongly urge you – to read the actual stories (we, not being Twitter or Facebook, are happy to be a medium for the free flow of information), which, if accurate, confirm in detail what I previously opined about Biden’s abuse of his office while he was Vice President in the Obama Administration:

The initial Oct. 14 story reporting on emails that reveal how Hunter introduced a top Burisma official to his father

The Oct. 15 story detailing Hunter Biden’s murky business dealings in China

The Oct. 16 story about Hunter’s troubled life and pained soul

The Post stories

In brief, the stories report what some 40,000 emails – as well as thousands of texts, videos, and photos, some showing Hunter in “very compromising positions,” including having sex with an unidentified woman while smoking crack cocaine – to and from Hunter Biden reveal about his personal life, business dealings, and the leveraging of his father’s position to further his business interests and prodigious income, both in Ukraine and China. The emails were on a water-damaged laptop left in April 2019 with a computer repair shop in Delaware, and which was never picked up. While the shop owner couldn’t identify the customer as Hunter Biden, the laptop bore a sticker of the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother, and the email address was that of Hunter Biden at that time.

The shop owner, after numerous unsuccessful attempts at contacting the customer, eventually informed the FBI of its existence, and the agency seized the laptop in December. Meanwhile, the shop owner had made a copy of the hard drive, which he turned over to Robert Costello, attorney for Trump legal advisor Rudy Giuliani. In due course, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon informed the Post about the emails, and on Sunday Giuliani turned the drive copy over to the Post.

While it is true that the authenticity of the emails has not been confirmed, the Biden campaign initially did not deny their existence or authenticity, pointing only to the action by the social media platforms to block stories concerning them as “proof” they weren’t true. Subsequently, the campaign painted them as promoting some sort of “conspiracy theory.” The Democratic smear campaign went into full “Russia conspiracy” mode, with California Rep. Adam Schiff, Liar-in-Chief in the Congress, hauling out that now long-debunked theory to attempt to delegitimize the emails. That there are people foolish enough to continue to believe that sort of nonsense is indicative of the deliberate failure of the media to propagate truthful information in this country.

As further confirmation of the clear media bias that has taken hold, moderator George Stephanopoulis did not ask Joe Biden a single question about the Post reports during Thursday night’s townhall on ABC, and neither did any of the voters posting their softball questions. How this is not considered journalistic malpractice eludes me. Meanwhile, on NBC, moderator Savannah Guthrie, sounding more like a petulant high school girl than a professional journalist, hurled accusatory statements (often inaccurate) at President Trump who, to his credit, responded to them, and the often challenging questions put to him by voters, with grace and directness. Given that NBC came under attacks both from without and within even for hosting the townhall with Trump, can there be any residual doubt that there is almost no fairness or honesty left in the mass media?

There are so many things wrong with this whole state of affairs it leaves one grasping for what to include and what to leave out, so as not to confuse the issue or wind up going on for thousands of words on the topic. With some 20 million people reported to have already voted in this critically important election, how can it be considered a democratic process when virtually all the powerful levers of information are working to suppress reports that, in earlier times, would have been considered crucial to determining the outcome of an election?

Applying the Twitter standard used to suppress the Post stories, the American public would not have known about the Pentagon Papers (hacked), COINTELPRO (stolen), Watergate (unidentified sources), or the revelations of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks (hacked and unidentified soures), or Edward Snowdon (also hacked and unidentified sources). Would America be a different country today were those revelations suppressed? Undoubtedly. Would it be a better country? I doubt many would even attempt to make that argument. Further underscoring the issue, news of the trial of Assange has been largely ignored in the same media that relies on the First Amendment to defend its egregious actions, posing a further threat to freedom of expression, even more under attack in the U.K. than in the U.S.

Pushing back

There are some efforts going on to bring the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, all tech giants, to heel before things go further down the rat hole of Chinese-style repression. Senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley have called for a subpoena to haul Twitter CEO Jack Dempsey to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 23, and Hawley – a key advocate for limiting the power of social media to suppress ideas they don’t like – is calling for the Committee to subpoena Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Hawley also has joined senators Marco Rubio, Kelly Loefler, and Kevin Cramer in seeking a clarification of the Section 230 rules which protect platforms from civil liability when third parties post false or misleading information. The argument is that the platforms are abusing the special protection Section 230 gives them and, if they are going to censor third-party posts, then they should be subject to the same liability as any media source not given such protection.

Additionally, the RNC has filed a complaint against Twitter with the Federal Elections Commission, alleging that its censorship of the Post stories amounts to an illegal campaign contribution to the Biden campaign.

I would contend that the time for hearings and testimony has past, and it’s time for action. In any event, note that all the concerns are being raised by Republicans. If you think the Democrats are concerned about protecting free speech, you would be seriously mistaken. When they have the weight of what amounts to state media on their side, they remain unmysteriously silent. Partisanship and the pursuit of power supersedes basic American and human rights, as far as they’re concerned. In the one-party Democratic state of California, for instance, an Orwellian-style “Ministry of Truth” has been proposed to seek out and block what it determines to be “fake news,” and a similar measure has been introduced by a Dem in Congress. They see themselves as the arbiters of what is “truth,” and the less you know about what is really going on, the better for them, they reason. But is that better for you?

How would you feel to learn that Joe Biden used his influence and public funds to have a Ukrainian prosecutor, who was investigating the company on whose board his son served, fired? Or that he lied to you about not meeting with a top executive of that same company? Or that he sold out American interests to companies and institutions controlled by the Chinese Communist Party to benefit his son, and very possibly himself? Who, you might wonder, is the “big guy” referred to in one of the reputed Hunter emails, promised a carve out of 10% of a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars with China’s largest private energy company? Might it be Papa Joe himself? And have you ever wondered how Biden got as wealthy as he is, living off his government salary for 47 years?

Read the Post stories and see what you think.

If it’s up to Big Tech, the majority in the mass media, and the Democratic Party, you won’t ever find out answers to these, and many other, questions. And you should be very terrified, indeed. Democracy dies in darkness, and night is closing in all around us.

Featured image: Candle in Darkness, Rahul, Pexels. Used with permission.