Tag: free speech
The ugly reality of American education

The ugly reality of American education

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If you’ve been following the news since the barbarous attack Hamas launched against innocent Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, you’ve seen the ugly reality of American education laid bare. One has to wonder what kind of education these kids are getting that they can openly support the butchering, burning, raping, and kidnapping of defenseless infants, children, women, and men. This goes well beyond one’s political views, which of course allow for policy disagreements over the seemingly endless and intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and goes to a profound darkness implanted in their young minds and souls.

Things we thought were laid to rest decades ago, such as Anti-Semitism — hatred of Jews for being Jews — have been on full display on college campuses and on public streets in cities across the nation. These same young mush brains — joined by some not so young — who cringe at mis-pronouning someone and demand safe spaces from so-called “micro-aggressions,” apparently have no problem with beheading babies, burning children alive, or raping, kidnapping, and murdering women, all in the name of the cause célèbre they have been brainwashed to believe is the One Twue Answer.

As awful and terrifying as it has been to observe this display of hatred, it is indicative of an even more dangerous tendency that begins not just at the university level, but long prior, in elementary and high schools across the nation. As we’re seeing in not just so-called blue states, but in red and purple ones as well, increasingly the emphasis by those who purport to be educators is on social issues and not the basics of education, actually teaching the skills needed to function effectively in society and (heaven forbid!) reasoning and analytical skills. I’ve been bitching about the latter ever since I was in high school some six decades ago, so that is not new, though I think it has reached new levels of mindless conformity. The other part, however, is relatively new, just a few decades old, and also is now reaching ever higher levels of incompetence.

Does anyone wonder why it is so easy to indoctrinate a generation among which many can’t read or write in cursive, if at all, can name the most obscure celebrity but can’t name their congressperson, senator, or even the vice president, have absolutely zero knowledge of history or American constitutional values, and get what passes for news (again, if at all) from social media?

Roots of the Problem

See those two tearing down posters with photos of kidnapped children and women and laughing as they do it? They’re students (along with a third not shown in the photo) at New York University, one of the nation’s preeminent institutions of “higher education.” The one on the left is Yazmeen Deyhimi, a junior and — frighteningly — pre-law student. She once worked for the Anti-Defamation League but now apparently has lost her way. This is her feeble excuse for doing what she did:

“I have found it increasingly difficult to know my place as a biracial brown woman, especially during these highly volatile times,” she wrote. “I have felt more and more frustrated about the time we currently find ourselves in, and that misplaced anger into actions that are not an accurate representation of who I am as a person.”

“In this age of social media and digital footprint,” she babbled on, “these moments of anger are selfish and self-absorbed, and not reflective of who I am as a person or who my family had raised me to be.”

Buried in the verbiage are all one needs to know about how these students’ minds and spirits have been hijacked:

“as a biracial brown woman” — read racial and sexual politics foisted on students from before kindergarten.

“highly volatile times” — read a lack of knowledge of world history and events.

“I have felt more and more frustrated . . . and that misplaced anger . . . these moments of anger are selfish and self-absorbed” — read as an unhealthy focus on the self, leading to free-form anger and rage, and the kind of mindless behavior she was caught engaging in.

“In this age of social media and digital footprint” — read where much of the biased and misguided “information” Gen Z gets originates.

“not reflective of who I am as a person or who my family raised me to be” — read as a failure to accept responsibility and acknowledgment of who she really is, who she has become. Her family may or may not have had anything to do with that, but it’s on her now and she need not deny that reality.

Blatant Hatred and Anti-Semitism

See the girl holding the racist pink sign that reads “Please Keep the World Clean” with a garbage can holding a Star of David and into which the Jews are to be placed? She is Fahima Karim, a 19-year-old high school student at the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women in Brooklyn. She was not alone in carrying that sign, and unlike Deyhimi, she makes no attempt at concealing her blatant racism.

“I really don’t give a fuck about white lives,” she said in a previous street interview. “I don’t like white people . . . I just don’t . . . for no reason.”

In response, her school put out a mealy-mouthed statement about how it had always supported “the voice and power of our young women.”

“Unfortunately today,” the statement said, “one of our community members made a serious error in judgment. She exercised that voice and power to spread hate and anti-semetism” — misspelling anti-Semitism. It went on to promise “a thorough investigation” (as if the visual and Karim’s former statements weren’t sufficient evidence of where her sentiments lie, and the “error in judgment” apparently was in allowing herself to be photographed displaying them) “and using our restorative justice tools to heal the harm in our community and outside our school.”

And there you see the other element of the problem. School administrators and teachers who tolerate and condone certain kinds of behavior, for which there are no real consequences, but have no tolerance for speech or behavior that is contrary to their own views. Call for racial cleansing of Jews — “investigate and use restorative justice (whatever that is) tools.” Mis-pronoun someone or say biological males shouldn’t be allowed to compete in sports against women or use school rest rooms of their choosing — grounds for the most serious sanctions.

The bigger problem

It’s not just a truism to say that the future of the nation lies with its young people and their education. Prejudice, hatred, repression of free speech and ideas don’t just exist on college campuses or within the walls of schools. Those same students graduate, get jobs, enter into professions, and their misguided notions spread throughout society. We see the evidence and results of that in virtually every walk of life: In the legal profession, among judges, among academics, in politics, in Big Tech, in journalism, in the military, in sports, in entertainment, and in the further propagation to new teachers.

If you have any doubt about where the sentiments of many school administrators lie, just ask Riley Gaines, whose photo is above. Riley Gaines was denied the honors she had earned on the University of Kentucky swim team, for which she had worked all her life, when being forced to compete against a transgender biological male, Lia Thomas, in intercollegiate competition. Gaines has taken it upon herself to speak out against allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports, in an effort to preserve their integrity. But after working for decades to further and protect the rights of women, the current generation on many college campuses — with the support of their schools’ administrators, the Biden administration, and many sports and other organizations — are now more than willing to gut those rights.

Gaines was physically attacked, maligned, and forced to barricade herself in a campus room for hours until police arrived to escort her out after giving a speech at San Francisco State University in April of this year. She was accused of transphobia — which she explicitly denies — and instead of listening to her position a group of student bigots chose to assault her. Bad enough, but the reaction of university administrators was far worse. Instead of condemning the violence and attempt at shutting down free speech, they came out in support of those things.

“Last Thursday, Turning Point USA hosted an event on campus that advocated for the exclusion of trans people and athletics. The event was deeply traumatic for many in our trans and LGBTQ+ communities, and the speaker’s message outraged many members of the SF State community,” SFSU President Lynn Mahoney wrote to the campus community. She called the attack on Gaines an “unfortunate disturbance . . . that delayed the speaker’s departure.” Nowhere was there any apology to Gaines for the attack nor any recognition of her position on preserving women’s sports. For their part, the police made no arrests.

Further doubts? Ask federal judge Kyle Duncan, who was heckled during a speech to — I’m not making this up — law students at Stanford University, supposedly one of the country’s preeminent schools of “higher learning.” His crime? Refusing to use an accused sex offender’s preferred pronouns during a 2020 opinion. And when Duncan turned to the dean officiating the event to bring order to the room, instead she sided with the hecklers, saying Duncan causes “harm” through his work as a federal judge and she was “uncomfortable” with the anger that Duncan’s presence on campus led to.

Perhaps no surprise, this was Tierien Steinbach, the law school’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. One might well interpret those words, which are spreading like a plague across the landscape, as Conformity, Selective Inequality, and Exclusion. In this case, unlike in the SFSU one, at least Stanford’s administration took some action and Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez and Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne eventually apologized to Duncan. Steinbach was reported to be “on leave.”

For his part, Judge Duncan was criticized for being argumentative and calling the students “appalling idiots.” Watching their behavior, I’m inclined to agree with that description, and given how conservative speakers have been treated on college campuses in recent years one might better understand why speakers like Duncan have their guard up.

“They are forcing you to think the way they want you to think”

That’s Yeonmi Park, who at age 13 escaped North Korea with her mother, in the photo. After being held by traffickers in China the pair made it to South Korea and then, finally, to the U.S., where Park is now a citizen. She came here expecting the country to be the beacon of freedom that had attracted her. And then she went to Columbia University.

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park told Fox News in a 2021 interview. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

The warning signs came during orientation. Park had the temerity, thinking it was a good thing, to tell a university staff member that she loved classical literature, such as novels by Jane Austen.

“Then she [the staff member] said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”

Things only got worse from there, and in every class students were asked to express their preferred pronouns.

“English is my third language,” she said. “I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?”

“It was chaos,” she told the interviewer. “It felt like the regression in civilization . . . Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”

Park’s experience at Columbia led to her second book, While Time Remains, published earlier this year. Her first book, published in 2016, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, detailed her escape from North Korea and the journey that led her to America.

Watching the outpouring of support for the barbarity of Hamas coming from 31 student groups at Harvard, one need not wonder why what is supposed to be America’s preeminent university ranked dead last — 248th out of 248 schools — in FIRE’s annual rating of free speech on campus. The school, whose ironic motto is “Veritas” (“Truth”), officially scored zero, but FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — said Harvard’s actual score was -10.69, “…more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings, its Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania. (Penn obtained an overall score of 11.13.)”

Michigan Technological University, with a score of 78.01, ranked first.

There is a huge amount more than can be said about all of this, including comparisons with my own experiences in college and grad school in earlier decades that illustrate the stark differences then — even in times of major student protest and upheaval — with now, but I think this initial installment sets the scene and provides the background for an overview of the issue. I’m sure more will follow, and this problem is one that is going to be with us for a very long time.

Featured Image: Anti-Israel students protest at Columbia University, Jeenah Moon, Reuters, via Aljazeera. Used under Fair Use.

NYU students tear down hostage posters, New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Hate on Display, Daily Mail. Used under Fair Use.

Riley Gaines, Outkick. Used under Fair Use.

Yeonmi Park, Fox News, via Insider.com. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.

Elon Musk accepts Axel Springer Award Berlin December 2020
Turning Twitter Around: A Battle Won in the War for Free Speech?

Turning Twitter Around: A Battle Won in the War for Free Speech?

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Unless you’ve been living in an ice cave deep in the far reaches of the Antarctic continent for the past couple of weeks, you’re aware of the battle between Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest human, and the guardians of the septic system known as Twitter. You’re probably also aware that on Monday this week the battle was ceded by Twitter’s board and, pending government regulator approval and a vote of the shareholders, Musk will acquire all of Twitter’s stock and take the company private.

With an offer of $54.20 a share — a price encapsulating a subtle hidden message — the deal, valued at about $44 billion, was achieved with finance from Morgan Stanley and some other banks. Musk, worth an estimated $268 billion, is expected to put in about $21 billion in equity, the balance coming from debt and margin loan finance.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement following announcement of the deal. In a recent public presentation, he also said, “Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization. I don’t care about the economics at all.”

One would think that those for whom free speech should mean a great deal — people like the journalists, commentators, writers, academics, politicians, and other members of the chattering class that populate the platform — would be buoyed by those words. And sadly, tragically, one would be disappointed, hearing the great outpouring of blather criticizing both Musk and his ideas about the importance of free speech. For those people, the only free speech that matters is that which promotes their own leftist, woke, elitist, and establishmentarian view of the universe, and anyone who disagrees with it can stuff it. That is the state of discourse in this country and beyond, Twitter being but a distilled version of it.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth

Judging by the wailing and gnashing of teeth, ranging from Twitter employees, themselves responsible for so much of the repression of free speech on the platform, to commentators on CNN and MSNBC, to so-called celebrities, both known and unknown, one would think Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was akin to the death of unbiased speech, instead of its — far more likely — liberation. But in a time when “misinformation” equals anything that doesn’t support the official party line, however ludicrous and discredited that line might be, and when the epithets “racist” and “homophobic” can be bandied about like beads at a Mardi Gras parade, a true supporter of free speech might take heart at Musk’s intents.

While one can factually argue that Facebook and Google are both far bigger platforms and far more repressive of free speech than Twitter, Twitter is — as Musk describes it — “…the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” So in that sense, it is where the society’s gatekeepers and opinion setters gather and, for that reason, it holds far more power over the direction the society takes. And those who have benefited the most from holding sway over that direction are now panic-stricken that their oversized power and prestige and position might be threatened.

Actress Jameela Jamil who, pardon my ignorance, I confess I’ve never heard of, tweeted, “Ah [Musk] got twitter. I would like this to be my what lies here as my last tweet. I fear this free speech bid is going to help this hell platform reach its final form of totally lawless hate, bigotry, and misogyny. Best of luck.”

Not to be outdone, an “activist” named Shaun King deleted his Twitter account after posting, “At its root, @ElonMusk wanting to purchase Twitter is not about left vs right. It’s about white power….He’s upset that Twitter won’t allow white nationalists to target/harass people. That’s his definition of free speech.”

Huh?

George Takei OOOH MYYY

Irony, irony, and more irony

Not a huge surprise, given contemporary realities, that the left, once married to principles of free speech, now dread, fear, and even condemn it. Irony? Or the result of the relentless erosion of traditional liberal values? Both you say?

Being unintentionally ironic, Star Trek actor George Takei, whom I’ve at least heard of, had this to say: “I’m not going anywhere. Should this place become more toxic, I pledge to strive even harder to lift up reason, science, compassion and the rule of law. The struggle against fascism, misinformation, and hate requires tough fighters. I hope you stay in the fight, right beside me.”

One has to wonder if “reason and science” include blocking and de-platforming, as Twitter has done, any questions that COVID-19, arguably the biggest story of the past two years, might — might — have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, or if they include the possibility that the COVID vaccines maybe aren’t all they were cracked up to be. One also wonders if “the rule of law” and “the struggle against fascism, misinformation, and hate” could extend to the criminal activities of the Biden crime family, given that Twitter not only blocked but locked out the accounts of those reporting, or even linking to the articles, on the Hunter Biden laptop, the so-called Laptop From Hell, and the damning evidence it contained in the days leading up to the pivotal 2020 presidential elections. Or possibly the “Russia hoax” story and all the hatred it generated, which Twitter and much of the mainstream media were more than eager to promote as “truth” (and still do, despite the proof we now have that it was a manufactured lie promulgated by the Hillary Clinton campaign).

Similar questions might be raised about the tweet of Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, founder of the World Health Network. who wrote, “Just a thought–next time we have $44 billion laying around, can we please spend it to solve the pandemic, climate change, hunger, poverty, and malnutrition?” Maybe, one might think, some honest debate on those subjects can lead to more reasoned understanding of them, rather than treating them as tenets of religious faith.

None other than the nearly canonized Barack Obama told Stanford University students last Thursday that not more, but less free speech is needed to combat dreaded “misinformation” (read: anything that disagrees with the ruling class and official orthodoxy) on social media platforms. This coming from a world-class spreader of “misinformation” in the form of promulgating the Russia hoax, among other falsehoods. Of course, this view encapsulates Obama’s inherent distrust of the ordinary citizen to make his or her own judgments when faced with conflicting information.

Some of the silliest outcries were raised by those who said billionaires shouldn’t own tech companies or media. Do they mean people like billionaire Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, who owns The Washington Post, or Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who owns a significant chunk of The New York Times? Or perhaps they mean billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, or Google billionaire founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or possibly billionaire Twitter founder Jack Dorsey? One suspects not, given the liberal tilt of all those billionaires. It’s just the billionaires, like Elon Musk, of a libertarian and free-speech tilt that they don’t approve of. Apparently lacking any sense of irony, one WAPO columnist went so far to say it was “dangerous” when billionaires buy media, seemingly oblivious to his own boss’s net worth.

And of course, behind much of the angst is the fear that the dreaded Orange Man, Donald Trump, might be allowed back on the platform. The horror! That a former president of the United States with tens of millions of supporters might be allowed to speak his mind. But those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome — which should be a bona fide mental illness listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM — might take comfort in Trump’s announcement that he didn’t plan on returning to Twitter but would stay with his own new platform, TRUTH Social.

A disclaimer

In the interest of fairness and honesty, things not much found on Twitter, let me offer a disclaimer of my own. Actually, two disclaimers.

First, I am not now nor have I ever been a member of Twitter. Even before it fully descended into the sewer of hatred and venom and bias in which it now wallows, I found it to be unconducive to effective communication. I wrote about this several years ago, and my opinion of it has not changed, except in a negative direction, since. Actually, it was back in 2015 when I had this to say in my comment about Twitter.

I am sure I could more effectively promote my own work, which continues to languish in obscurity, were I to take a place on Twitter, but I feel I have to deal with enough negativity in life without diving into the waves of mindless invective that permeate Twitter and, in truth, just about every other place online where people express their views, no matter how mindless and hateful. I fully acknowledge that that trend might continue, and possibly accelerate, if and when Musk takes the halters off the platform, but that is the price of free speech. Of course, as Twitter in its current manifestation demonstrates, it’s also the price of repressed speech.

I’ve long been a believer in the view expressed by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his concurring statement in the 1927 case of Whitney v. California: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

My second disclaimer concerns Elon Musk. There is much about Musk I admire — his brilliance, his acute business acumen, his successful track record in creating effective private access to space. I also admire his mouthiness and willingness to not to take guff from anyone, whether it’s the head of the Russian space program, Elizabeth Warren, or the raving critics of his acquisition of Twitter. On the other hand, I’m not a huge fan of Tesla and EVs in general, but especially since Tesla is arguably more a Chinese than an American company. I also strongly disagree with Musk over the role of hydrogen, which Musk calls “incredibly dumb,” as the fuel of the future. Further, I’m not a fan of naming one’s child X Æ A-12, as he and current wife Grimes, AKA Claire Elise Boucher, named their son, youngest of Musk’s six children. But I try not to be too judgmental of peoples’ parenting.

One can take heart in Musk’s invitation to his fiercest critics to remain on Twitter.

“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter,” he tweeted, “because that is what free speech means.”

The war to preserve free speech is far from over, but this could be an important win on the battlefield of ideas.

 

Featured image: Elon Musk accepts Axel Springer Award, Berlin, December 2020, Britta Pedersen/Pool, via Getty-Images. Used under Fair Use.

George Takei, OOOH MYYY, ed7, Giphy.Com. Used with permission.

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.