RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/democrats-outsource-political-repression-corporate-daniel-greenfield/

The repression will be televised. It will go better with Coke, it will promise to clear up your bad breath and make your toilet shine. It will be in the cloud, it will be digitized and monetized.

It will have a trademark, a brand, and it will be outsourced to the private sector.

Democrats love public-private partnerships and they outsourced political repression to the private sector. The Constitution has inconvenient things to say about freedom of speech and so the Democrat government of elected and unelected officials outsourced the problem of censoring and suppressing speech to the handful of Big Tech monopolies of the internet.

That same old document written by old white dead men, not to mention centuries of jurisprudence and tradition, prevents the government from kicking down your door in the middle of the night for wrongthink. But nothing keeps corporations from firing you for wrongthink, for being related to someone who committed wrongthink, or for insufficient political correctness.

The public-private partnership between big government and big monopolies is based on Democrats and corporations doing the dirty work of repressing each other’s opponents.

Corporations can’t write regulations that suppress competition from upstart rivals, and so the government steps in and keeps the marketplace under the control of a few cartels. And the government can’t censor, deplatform, fire, bankrupt, and bar its political opponents from speaking, flying, and doing business. But the monopolies it’s been partnering with can and do.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/parlers-website-back-online-with-a-message-from-its-ceo_3660235.html?utm_source=news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-01-17-4

Parler’s website suddenly appeared online on Jan. 17 with a message from its CEO, John Matze, who said, “Hello world, is this thing on?”

The message suggests Parler was able to find another hosting service, coming about a week after Amazon Web Services booted the social media website from its services, taking the site down. It came as Parler—billed as a “free speech” platform—was seeing an unprecedented surge in users as prominent conservatives, among others, were being banned from Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms.

Matze also issued a temporary status update.

“Now seems like the right time to remind you all—both lovers and haters—why we started this platform,” Matze wrote. “We believe privacy is paramount and free speech essential, especially on social media. Our aim has always been to provide a nonpartisan public square where individuals can enjoy and exercise their rights to both. We will resolve any challenge before us and plan to welcome all of you back soon. We will not let civil discourse perish!”

Amazon Web Services’ rationale behind jettisoning Parler was due to a lack of moderation, and came in the backdrop of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riots. Parler, in a court filing, citing text messages between Matze and an Amazon representative, claimed Amazon was primarily concerned with whether President Donald Trump would migrate to Parler after his Twitter account was banned last week.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/fox_news_reportedly_considerin

If Fox News wants to restore its cable news ratings dominance, changes will have to be visible far lower in its organization than what is being reported.

Though I was angry over its election night coverage and have been dismayed at the behavior of a number of its on-air personalities, I take no joy in the ratings crisis that seems to be engulfing Fox News. For all its faults, its reach, resources, and stable of outstanding talent like Tucker Carlson make it an essential voice in a nation with a media scene that is getting scarier by the day. There is no doubt in my mind that, if FNC disappeared or lost its cable system distribution, as at least one of its rivals seems to be advocating, conservatism would be in a much weaker position.

Yesterday, The Daily Beast published an article with four authors, one of them a departed FNC staffer who charged sexual harassment and settled for an undisclosed sum, claiming:

Amid ongoing ratings struggles, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and President Jay Wallace are fighting for their jobs as their boss Rupert Murdoch has swooped in to take a more hands-on role at the network in recent days, multiple network insiders told The Daily Beast.

NATIONAL REVIEW TODAY

Try Him Now

By Matthew Continetti

Donald Trump has spent his life dodging the consequences of his misbehavior. For once, he must be punished.

An Impeachable Offense

By The Editors

The prudential questions shouldn’t be brushed aside, but this gross misconduct is what the impeachment clause was written to address.

The ‘Late Impeachment’ Question

By Ramesh Ponnuru 
Precedent and purpose cut against the argument that the Constitution bars lawmakers from holding an impeachment trial after Trump leaves office.

McCarthy Says Trump ‘Bears Responsibility’ for Capitol Riot, Advocates Censure Instead of Impeachment

By Zachary Evans 
‘The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,’ McCarthy said.

Shame
By Kevin D. Williamson

A paltry ten House Republicans mustered the guts and the patriotism to vote to impeach Donald Trump. By way of comparison, 139 Republicans in the House voted to overturn the 2020 election. If the American public concludes that this is a party of irresponsible crackpots who can no longer be trusted with power, it will be impossible to blame them.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/12/the-new-york-times-keeps-imitating-a-chinese-propaganda-outlet/

It’s gross that the Times and other outlets effectively carry out Chinese information operations. But maybe we should appreciate the inadvertent candor.

After the Capitol riots of Jan. 6 and the aftermath, you’d be forgiven if you missed the latest egregious example of The New York Times shilling for Communist China. Yet, on Jan. 4, that’s exactly what we got — the Times ran as straight news Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agitprop fit for the pages of The People’s Daily.

Imagine, that during the height of Stalinism, as millions died from a Communism-induced famine, an American publication ran headlines like “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving?”

Imagine, that during the height of Nazism, as Adolf Hitler worked to exterminate the Jewish people, an American publication consciously downplayed and buried coverage of the Holocaust?

The New York Times did precisely these things. Now, it appears it wants to complete the trifecta of effectively shilling for the world’s most monstrous regimes by glorifying that of Communist China as it seeks to supplant the United States as the world’s preeminent power.

“The [coronavirus] pandemic has upended many perceptions, including ideas about freedom,” wrote columnist Li Yuan in the Jan. 4 article. While Chinese citizens “don’t have freedom of speech, freedom of worship or freedom from fear — three of the four freedoms articulated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt,” she continued, unironically, “they have the freedom to move around and lead a normal day-to-day life.”

The idea that the Chinese people have the “freedom to…lead a normal day-to-day life” might be news to the Uighurs laboring in Xinjiang’s modern-day gulags, the Falun Gong practitioners facing forced organ harvesting, and the Christians seeing the Bible “Sinicized” while their churches are demolished and their pastors are detained. It might be news even to prominent CCP members like Jack Ma.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/01/12/the_great_social_silencing_145014.html

Last week Silicon Valley silenced the president. In unison, the social media giants, with an assist from Amazon and Apple, also eliminated their most popular conservative competitor and announced that their own moderation policies would now extend to other companies. Meanwhile, CNN openly called for Fox News to be banned from cable, while a major talk radio network issued new speech rules to its hosts, extending tech’s moderation policies to the offline world. Beyond all this, Congress and the European Union called for powerful new regulation of online speech.

As a handful of unelected billionaires declare sovereignty over digital speech, where might the coming months take us?

Twitter once touted itself as “the free speech wing of the free speech party” and rebuked Congress’ calls for it to ban terrorists, proclaiming that “the ability of users to share freely their views — including views that many people may disagree with or find abhorrent” — was its mission. Indeed, most of the early social platforms emphasized unfettered speech above all other considerations. Over the years, this utopian dream has given way to an emphasis on “healthy conversation” and ever-changing enforcement.

Yet for most of their existence, social media platforms have largely avoided censoring elected officials in the U.S. even as they have deleted the accounts of foreign leaders. That all changed last year as Silicon Valley for the first time began labeling President Trump’s tweets as “disputed” and “false.” As progressive segments of the public embraced this new censorship, platforms moved from merely fact-checking posts to deleting them entirely and threatening to ban some lawmakers.

The courts have repeatedly ruled that Trump’s Twitter account is an official government outlet and thus he is prohibited from blocking users with whom he disagrees. How then is a private company able to establish “acceptable speech” rules for a government publication or silence it entirely? 

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/we-need-a-new-media-system?token=

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.

Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.

It’s why Fox News uses the term, “Pro-Trump protesters,” while New York and The Atlantic use “Insurrectionists.” It’s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon shut down the “Free Speech” platform Parler over the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of potentially armed protests reportedly planned for January 19th or 20th.

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.

News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan? Fox slices off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for “economic reasons.” The New York Times counters by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White House staring at poor results in midterm elections.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/forbes_boldly_announces_its_intention_to_discriminate_against_staffers_of_president_trump.html

Common decency and morality, not to mention US law, prohibit not hiring an individual on the basis of race, creed, gender, religion, national origin or physical challenge.  Merit should be the basic hiring criterion.  In recent years this lofty ideal, admittedly not always practiced, has been modified with additional criteria of affirmative action and diversity which often clash with and negate the former. 

But now Randall Lane, chief content officer and editor of Forbes Magazine, which specializes in business and technology, publicly announced a “truth reckoning” as he calls it, a new discriminatory  business relationship  and future content policy towards anyone or any business daring to hire prominent staffers who worked in President Donald J. Trump’s (R) administration.

Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.

Hmmm, so this hollow threat suggests that when Forbes works with, writes about others in the business world who are not tainted with “Trump’s fellow fabulists” they will not “scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet” and will therefore be more likely to accept anything they say; print their public relations puffery verbatim.  Or maybe with slightly altered nuance as he later slightly qualifies, “this standard needs to apply to liars from either party,” thus admitting that up to now Forbes hasn’t done that scrutinize, double-check thing very thoroughly very often; that Forbes itself is “a potential funnel of disinformation.”