One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is the crushing of free expression. Speaking against the state is not allowed. What, then, to make of the Biden’s administration’s efforts to silence Americans?
We’ve editorialized against the Disinformation Governance Board, which is wounded though not as dead yet as it should be. That’s but one example. Add to that the White House’s campaign to enlist the private sector in muzzling voices that dare oppose the loony green energy policies Democrats have been trying to force on the country for decades. It’s not just the Second Amendment this administration wants to erase, it’s the first one, too.
Many Americans are skeptical of the promises that renewables like wind and solar will not only meet this country’s energy needs but will do it at low cost. We have many times over the years shown why this distrust is warranted. So have our valued contributors, most recently when H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute wrote that “belief that wind, solar, batteries, and electric vehicles combined can effectively and cheaply power the nation … is foolish and belied by existing evidence.”
I&I has also made the case over and over, as we did last month, that the claims that man is overheating his only planet are, well, overheated themselves. Doing so has probably put us on a White House blacklist of dissenters whose ideas have to be squashed. We think of it as an honor.
Though he served under the pen-and-phone president, Joe Biden has not issued an executive order that would prohibit challenges to the green narrative. This is not necessarily to his credit, because, for now, the administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress want to enlist the private sector to censor speech it doesn’t like.
This became clearer than ever in an interview last week in which White House National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy, the Obama EPA director whose current “job” should not even exist, said “tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation.”
“We need the tech companies to really jump in,” she added.
McCarthy’s friendly media inquisitor set up this useless bureaucrat to further endorse speech-policing when she asked: “Isn’t misinformation and disinfo around climate a threat to public health itself?”
To which McCarthy replied: “Oh, absolutely.”
This is a variation on a theme to chill speech that the ruling class and party don’t like. This administration has already asked the private sector to be its agent in censorship. Before that, congressional Democrats were using hearings “to exert control over the content on these online platforms,” independent journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote last year, because they wanted the country to believe that “misinformation and disinformation” was “plaguing online platforms.”
The First Amendment doesn’t specify what speech can and cannot be uttered, and says no law can be made to abridge it. The Democrats want to circumvent this protection by using the executive branch and private companies to purge opinions, comments, and information that threaten their power. We make no apologies in saying that this is tyranny.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Tyranny is indeed a key work product of the Born-Again Bolsheviks (dba Dems, Progressives, Media, Big Tech, etc.). Unfortunately, they are proud of their authoritarian tactics, and seem insatiable in their quest for absolute power and dominance. It is a pathology, a cancer from the old Soviet Union now infesting the USA. Not sure how to best expunge this disease from the body politic.
As you’re still collecting Google ad revenue via the trackers you’re running, please stop helping to frame the left’s narrative by claiming that you’re a bigger deal than you are. If you were being censored by the WH, Google would have cut you off already.
They are apparently in the process of doing that. We get daily reports on “content violations” from Google’s AdSense.
Google’s “content editing” functions (e.g. adding, deleting, ranking, monetizing) make them analogous to a publishing house. Yet they have the same immunity from lawsuit as a sovereign state agency or vaccine manufacturer. After Durham’s trial of DNC lawyer Michael Sussman, we learned that since 2012 the FBI had a branch office in Sussman’s DNC law offices. Might not Google be similarly in bed with or embedded? For example, with the DNC and its allied government agencies (e.g. NSA, Homeland Security, CIA)? Perhaps a high-tech, voluntary version of Pravda enforcing the DNC agenda or party line? Is the DNC at the top of the pyramid? If not, who is the top driving force and why? Worthy of investigation.
The left is going to be cast off into the wilderness in November.
From your keyboard to G_d’s ears.
It seems to me that the courts, long ago, would have noticed this problem: that the government asking a private entity to do what the government is explicitly prohibited from doing is just a transparent ploy, and easy to counter. In effect the private entity simply becomes the government, and is subject to the same prohibition. Surely this has been tried before and there ought to be some case law to point to. In fact, I have a vague memory of such. Can anyone provide something more concrete?