Instagram has deleted a clip of President Joe Biden falling up the stairs of Air Force One three times, stating that it is “violence and incitement.”
The post was shared by Ashley StClair, a political commentator, along with the caption “Joe Biden vs his biggest opponent yet…stairs.”
“We removed your story because it goes against our Community Guidelines. We created these guidelines to support and protect our community on Instagram,” Instagram stated.
Bill Maher made an interesting point on his show last Friday, arguing that America’s obsession with political correctness is crippling its institutions, leaving the country hobbled in the geopolitical race with China. That’s an accurate assessment, one that also tasks the defenders of cultural sanity with resisting wokeness while not getting bogged down by trivialities at the cost of basic efficiency.
That’s an impossible balance to strike. Despite the left’s false but emergent narrative that conservatives are foolishly and disproportionately obsessed with the culture war, I’d contend the response is largely proportionate. That isn’t to say flashpoints like the fight over Dr. Seuss are never milked or depicted inaccurately by some. Of course they are.
But it’s clear that ignoring and conceding perceivably small battles like, for instance, six Dr. Seuss books or Mr. Potato Head is what empowers the left’s culture warriors to take control of everything. By dismissing flare-ups of insanity on college campuses or in the legacy media, leftists normalized their radical new standards before the public even saw it coming. It’s like the metaphor of the boiling frog. Death by a thousand cuts.
Standards are set in the small dust-ups. The legacy press covers them from the left, then corporations and government institutions respond to the pressure, sometimes convinced the cost-benefit analysis suggests it’s easier to roll over. But rolling over sets the standards, and the standards are unjust.
But those standards are also now the ones by which we’re forced to live, lest we face social and professional consequences for alleged bigotry. Bear in mind that workers without the financial means of a canceled celebrity or journalist are hurt most by those rigid strictures of cancel culture, forced to violate their consciences or suffer financial consequences for perceived transgressions.
Very shortly after the stories were published, they were quickly deleted from the websites. However, National File was able to retrieve this portion of the Daily Beast article from Google’s cache:
“Bill Clinton’s former body man and aide has cooperated with the federal investigation into the former president’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Radar Online reports. Doug Band, normally reticent to speak about his former boss, spoke with prosecutors for the Southern District of New York around December 2020 about the millionaire sex trafficker and his alleged madam, according to the site. Band made frequent appearances on Epstein’s flight manifests in the early 2000s, at one point traveling with his alleged girlfriend Naomi Campbell to the financier’s private island Little St. James, known locally as “pedophile island.” He also accompanied Epstein and Clinton on lengthy trips through Africa and Asia. Band has claimed he urged the Clintons to cut ties with Epstein and Maxwell for years, but photos as recently as 2007 show him partying with the pair. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s many victims, named Band in a 2016 court filing as one of 70 people who would have knowledge of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s alleged sex trafficking.”
Additionally, users on Reddit posted what appears to be the full Radar Online story, as pointed out by the anti-human trafficking Twitter account known as “An Open Secret.”
The articles were removed in the early afternoon of March 5. Less than an hour after the deletions, National File reached out to Daily Beast and Radar Online for clarification and explanation, but has not received any response. National File specifically asked if the respective outlets intended to notify readers of a retraction.
Facebook announced Wednesday that it will restrict the popularity of groups and users that accrue violations and, in some cases, remove them altogether in order to reduce harmful content and misinformation.
“We’ve taken action to curb the spread of harmful content, like hate speech and misinformation, and made it harder for certain groups to operate or be discovered, whether they’re Public or Private. When a group repeatedly breaks our rules, we take it down entirely,” Facebook announced in a press release Wednesday.
Building upon its decision to stop recommending political groups to U.S. users in January after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Facebook will now reduce the privileges and popularity of groups that violate its content moderation rules.
This means users will be less likely to discover groups that have had Facebook community violations in the past and will see warnings when they try to join them.
Groups with a large number of members who have broken Facebook rules will be required to get administrator and moderator approval before posts can be published.
Individual users who have repeatedly violated Facebook policies within a group will be blocked altogether from posting in groups or inviting others to groups and creating new groups themselves.
In 2008, I wrote a book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. In it I warned, based on my study of closing democracies in 20th century history, that America needed to beware of an all-too-possible slide into totalitarianism.
I warned that would-be tyrants, whether they are on the left or the right, always use a map to close down democracies, and that they always take the same ten steps.
Whether they “Invoke an External and Internal Threat” or “Develop a Paramilitary Force” or “Restrict the Press” or the final step, “Subvert the Rule of Law, these steps are always recognizable — and they always work to crush democracies and establish tyrannies. At the time that I wrote the book, the “global threat” of terrorism was the specter that powers invoked in order to attack our freedoms.
The book was widely read and discussed, both at the time of its publication and over the last 12 years. Periodically over the last decade, people would ask me when and if we had reached “Step Ten.”
We — my brave publisher, Chelsea Green, and I — are releasing videos of me reading the first and last chapters (see videos below) of “The End of America” now, in 2021, for free. And I am calling the sequel to this book, which I am now writing, “Step Ten” — because as of March of last year, we have indeed, I am so sad to say, arrived at and begun to inhabit “Step Ten” of the 10 steps to fascism.
Though in 2008, I did not explicitly foresee that a medical pandemic would be the vehicle for moving the entire globe into “Step Ten,” I have at various points warned of the dangers of medical crises as vehicles that tyranny can exploit to justify suppressions of civil rights.
Today, a much-hyped medical crisis has taken on the role of being used as a pretext to strip us all of core freedoms, that fears of terrorism did not, despite 20 years of effort, ultimately achieve.
Spotify has removed an anti-lockdown song by Ian Brown, the former lead vocalist of English rock band The Stone Roses. The music streaming service claims the song violated its policies against COVID-19 misinformation.
Brown released the anti-lockdown song “Little Seed Big Tree” last September. “NO LOCKDOWN NO TESTS NO TRACKS NO MASKS NO VAX,” he tweeted while launching the song.
On March 12, Brown took to Twitter to announce that Spotify had removed his song.
“SPOTiFY stream the streams and censor artists like they have with my last song TOOK IT DOWN just put it down the memory hole! FREE EXPRESSiON AS REVOLUTION,” he wrote.
Hellbound and Down 
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