Tag: free speech

Techno-Censorship: The Slippery Slope from Censoring “Disinformation” to Silencing Truth

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”― George Orwell

This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all still applies.

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

In our case, however, it started with the censors who went after extremists spouting so-called “hate speech,” and few spoke out—because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shamed for being perceived as politically incorrect.

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Larry Flynt, ‘Hustler’ Founder and First Amendment Activist, Dead at 78

Larry Flynt, the publisher of the sexually explicit Hustler magazine whose legal battles turned him into a flamboyant crusader for free speech rights, has died at 78. Flynt’s famed legal battles — which he took to the Supreme Court — were memorialized in the 1996 film The People Versus Larry Flynt, starring Woody Harrelson. Flynt’s death was first reported by TMZ and his brother Jimmy Flynt confirmed the news to The Washington Post. A cause of death has not been revealed.

Larry Flynt was a Navy veteran who built a small empire of nude adult clubs in the late 1960s. He took those strip clubs and built them into one of the world’s most successful sex-based brands, transforming a newsletter about the clubs into Hustler magazine in 1974, publishing adult entertainment that critics frequently lambasted as obscene and degrading to women. The magazine once published a photo illustration of a nude woman being passed through a meat grinder. The feminist Gloria Steinem famously described Flynt as “a violent, sadistic pornographer.”

Always brash and opinionated, in his later years, he traveled most places in a gold-plated wheelchair. But he prided himself on being a self-made man who came from very humble beginnings. Larry Claxton Flynt Jr. was born in Lakeville, Kentucky on Nov. 1, 1942. His father was a sharecropper and he grew up in poverty; in his 2004 book Sex, Lies & Politics: The Naked Truth, Flynt cited his meager beginnings as an influence on his attitude toward sex. “I’m a hillbilly, and people like me come to sex without all the hang-ups imposed by the hypocritical, ‘you must maintain proper appearances’ morality of the middle class,” he wrote. “When good Christian folk tell me that sex is dirty, I say, ‘Yeah, when it’s done right.’ For me, sex has always been a way of saying, ‘I am outside the reach of your power.’ “

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Will Biden and Harris Criminalize Memes?

There is no doubt that Douglass Mackey, the man behind the 2016 election-era alt-right “Ricky Vaughn” Twitter troll account, is a miscreant. He spewed anti-Semitic and otherwise abhorrent bile from his pseudonymous perch, contributing to a hostile Twittersphere climate. 

Nevertheless, the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) is legally wrong—and engaging in petty harassment of a political enemy—to expend limited prosecutorial resources to target Mackey, whose Twitter account has long been suspended, for alleged conspiracy to deprive others of their constitutional rights. 

DOJ’s press release summarizes Mackey’s legally relevant underlying conduct: “As alleged in the complaint, between September 2016 and November 2016, in the lead up to the November 8, 2016, U.S. presidential election, Mackey conspired with others to use social media platforms, including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages designed to encourage supporters of one of the presidential candidates…to ‘vote’ via text message or social media, a legally invalid method of voting.” The DOJ complaint specifies that the law Mackey is charged with violating is 18 U.S.C. § 241, which covers, in relevant part: “two or more persons conspir[ing] to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

Hold aside the point that voting in the United States constitutional order is, contrary to what myriad progressive Supreme Court justices have mused, better understood not as a “right” but as a state-regulated privilege subject only to federal oversight via circumscribing constitutional (namely, the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments) and statutory (namely, the Voting Rights Act of 1965) provisions. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York (EDNY) still have to prove an actively coordinated, multi-party conspiracy, and that such a conspiracy did not merely produce fraudulent tweets, but that those tweets actually had the effect of oppressing, threatening, or intimidating Hillary Clinton supporters who intended to vote for their preferred candidate. That is, in short, highly dubious—this case isn’t going anywhere. Moreover, who would have guessed that the Biden DOJ took such a dim view of Clinton voters, believing them to be so easily manipulated? 

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Tennessee Cops Arrest Man For Posting Photoshopped Picture of Men Urinating on Dead Officer’s Grave

Tennessee law enforcement arrested a man last week for posting a photoshopped picture of two men urinating on a dead police officer’s grave.

The Dickson County Sheriff’s Office, following an investigation by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), arrested and charged Joshua Garton with harassment after Garton posted a picture to Facebook that appeared to show two men desecrating the tombstone of Sgt. Daniel Baker, who was shot and killed on duty in 2018. Garton was held on a $76,000 bond.

“Agents subsequently visited Baker’s gravesite this morning and determined the photograph was digitally manufactured,” a TBI press release says. The agency launched the investigation at the request of 23rd District Attorney General Ray Crouch.

While the picture was in poor taste, constitutional experts say law enforcement violated Garton’s First Amendment rights by arresting him for the image.

“The First Amendment clearly and unmistakably protects this man’s right to post an offensive photo about a police officer,” says Daniel Horwitz, a Nashville civil rights attorney. “The only people who broke the law here were the police officers and TBI agents who participated in this flagrantly unconstitutional arrest.”

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Biden Signs Executive Order To Ban The Term ‘China Virus’

The White House website confirms that Biden signed this EO.

CBS News reported ‘Biden to address racism toward Asian Americans during pandemic with executive action’.

The report notes that “The Biden executive order is also expected to direct federal agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to examine whether there are xenophobic references like “China virus” in any existing policies, directives or government websites published by the Trump administration.”

NBC News lists all the executive actions Biden has instigated thus far, with the last being the ban on the term ‘China Virus’. The report notes that “additionally, the order directed the attorney general to work to prevent discrimination and hate crimes.”

Given that literally anything is now being touted as a ‘hate crime’, that could mean banning or canceling absolutely everyone and everything.

As we noted earlier, Biden admitted back in October that anyone who legislates by executive order should be considered ‘a dictator’.

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No, AOC, It’s Not the Government’s Job to ‘Rein in Our Media’

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) told her social media followers earlier this week that Democrats in Congress might respond to the Capitol riot with some sort of “media literacy” initiative.

The phrase media literacy ordinarily implies helping individuals make sense of the media landscape, but AOC seems to have more in mind than that: She suggested “we’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation.”

It’s true that both traditional media and social media sometimes spread “disinformation and misinformation.” But the federal government has no formal role to play in suppressing its spread. The First Amendment explicitly bars Congress from infringing on freedom of the press or freedom of speech, and the Supreme Court has recognized no exceptions for disinformation. If the government could ban disinformation, after all, it could use that as a cover for banning speech that is not actually false but merely critical of the government, or of specific politicians. Recall that Democrats swiftly denounced The New York Post‘s report on Hunter Biden’s foreign connections as “disinformation,” even though many underlying aspects of the story have since been confirmed.

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