Back in 2008, Barack Obama famously harnessed the internet and social media to help win the White House. He kept up the embrace once he got there.
Now he worries that the internet and social media have helped create “the single biggest threat to our democracy.”
Obama has been saying a version of this for four years — since he left the White House — but his words are getting steadily more pointed. He’s clearly sounding an alarm, but it’s not exactly clear what he thinks we should do about it.
The newly Woke National Association of REALTORS® has long had requirements that you behave in a professional manner while on the job.
“The recommendations propose a new Standard of Practice, 10-5, that states: ‘REALTORS® must not use harassing speech, hate speech, epithets, or slurs based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”
Sure, a list like that can be problematic, but at least now it only applies TO YOUR ENTIRE LIFE.
“Additionally, the recommendations propose changes to professional standards policy to expand the Code of Ethics’ applicability to all of a REALTOR®’s activities, not just those that are real estate–related.”
Their speech codes no longer only apply to real-estate related activity but also to everything-related activity as well. What if your activities include being active in your church and your faith is at odds with current progressive orthodoxy?
Why, it’s almost as if the NAR’s rules prohibiting discrimination against someone for their religious beliefs themselves discriminate against people for their religious beliefs. This suggests the motive here might be something other than being anti-discriminatory.
Which reminds me, you know why the NAR is really excited about these new rules?
“We have this amazing ad campaign that says ‘That’s Who We R,’ ” Difanis said, which includes being leaders and role models in the community, ‘and this is who we need to be.'”
Whatever it takes to get that “SOLD!” sign!
Of course, we all have to remember that this is not a government or state actor enforcing a law. It’s merely a private organization with great cache, they are America’s largest trade association after all. They hold enormous sway over state licensing boards requiring that you behave in a manner they prefer ALL the time. If you don’t comply with the new speech codes, you risk being reported as a bigot to your state licensing board which determines whether or not you can continue to work as a real estate agent.
“As a result, associations would be required to share with the state real estate licensing authority final ethics decisions holding REALTORS® in violation of the Code of Ethics in instances where there is reason to believe the public trust, as expanded by the proposed revision, may have been violated.”
But it’s not like that’s censorship or anything.
That would be wrong.
“Discussions started in the wake of nationwide social unrest after the death of George Floyd and after local, state, and national REALTOR® associations fielded an ‘unprecedented’ number of complaints about members posting hate speech on social media.”
Work as a real estate agent? Watch what you say because they can search your social media accounts going back three years should there ever be an alleged infraction.
But this is not censorship, okay? Stop thinking that.
Hmm, maybe we can discipline you for that, too.
Speaking freely has suddenly become really problematic. After all, what is a “slur?” The definitions of words are a lot more fluid than they used to be. Remember a month ago when “sexual preference” was okay? Yeah, it’s not anymore.
On Friday, Strangio’s very un-ACLU-like views of free speech were on full display. On Friday morning, Abigail Shrier — author of a new book exploring the rapid, massive increase in teenage girls self-identifying as trans boys and undergoing permanent gender reassignment therapies and surgeries in their teens — published an article in Quillette describing the extraordinary efforts by major corporations and various activists to prevent her book from being purchased:
The efforts to block my reporting have been legion, starting with staff threats at a publishing house, which quickly reversed its original intention to publish my book. Once I obtained a stalwart publisher, Regnery, Amazon refused to allow that company’s sales team to sponsor ads on its site. (Amazon allows sponsored ads for books that uncritically celebrate medical transition for teenagers)….
Because the book tackles an interesting phenomenon, a number of established journalists wanted to review it….[T]he issue has created surprising bedfellows. Religious conservatives are concerned about the trend—but so are lesbians, who look upon the shocking numbers of teen girls transitioning with abject alarm. Many suspect that all this transitioning of girls is effectively euthanizing a generation of young lesbians….In any case, every major newspaper and legacy magazine summarily turned interested journalists down.
The recent protest by Spotify employees over Joe Rogan’s podcast was triggered in large part by his decision to invite Shrier onto his program. Many liberal employees inside the streaming service demanded this episode be removed. “Many LGBTQAI+/ally Spotifiers feel unwelcome and alienated because of leadership’s response in [Rogan’s] conversations,” was one of the questions posed to Spotify’s CEO at a tense staff-wide meeting, along with a demand to know why that program had not been deleted from the platform.
Anderson says he got banned from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in quick succession on Sunday night with little to no explanation after being vocal online about the attack he suffered at the hands of an Antifa activist, who knocked out his teeth.
He says it began with a notice on Sunday that his Facebook had been banned for 30 days. A screenshot of the notice provided to Human Events cites posts advertising the event that “didn’t follow [Facebook’s] community standards” against “dangerous individuals and organizations.”
But “an hour later,” Anderson says his Facebook was shut down completely.
Anderson showed Human Events evidence of at least one instance where a tweet of his, including a video of the assault, was shared to a Facebook account and flagged by Facebook as “False information” that had been “checked by independent fact-checkers.”
“I’m like you’re saying it’s false information that a man hit me in the face and my teeth came out my mouth like are you serious right now?” Anderson said.
“Instagram literally just banned me because the shadow ban wasn’t working anymore after Antifa knocked my teeth out yesterday and everyone was coming to follow me and look at my posts,” Anderson wrote on Twitter Sunday night “Instagram & Facebook are against our right to Free Speech and peaceful protest.”
His Twitter account was suspended shortly afterward.
As America’s acid bath of a presidential campaign boils to a merciful close, the political clamor is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from a shouting match about, over, and against the media. Twitter is still blocking the New York Post‘s main account a week after the tabloid’s controversial article on Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption. President Donald Trump has been waging preemptive war against upcoming debate moderator Kristin Welker and 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl. Sacha Baron Cohen, in a Borat sequel that ends with a plea for viewers to vote, just tried to honey-pot Rudy Giuliani.
The partisan lopsidedness to this debate, between attempted authoritarian and “enemy of the people,” can give off the misleading impression that the divide over free speech and its applications is a clean philosophical schism, with conservatives on one side, progressives and most journalists on the other. In fact it is not.
The fight over media is more a fight over power, and who gets to wield it, than a fight over principle, and how it should be applied. Trump and Joe Biden both want to roll back the speech protections in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act; the difference is that the president would do it in the name of protecting conservatives and the former vice president would do it in the name of restricting conservative misinformation. Sens. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) agree that Facebook and Twitter are guilty of “election interference”; it just depends on which election. Google faces antitrust enthusiasm from House Democrats and Bill Barr’s Justice Department alike. (This morning, on Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria, Donald Trump, Jr., asserted that this election would be a referendum on the First Amendment, because only his father could be trusted with following through on his promise to break up Big Tech, because Democrats who talk a big game are actually in bed with their censorious Silicon Valley overlords.)
The more politics (and its worst form, war) subsumes life, the more free speech is treated as a means to an end rather than as a magnificent if always-threatened achievement of the Enlightenment. It is no accident that the bipartisan clampdown on speech in the governmental realm is coinciding in the intellectual realm with a noisy right-left rethink of the Enlightenment itself.
Hellbound and Down 
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