Yesterday was a flagship day in corporate media. It was the day they were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear: they not only favor censorship but desperately crave and depend on it.
Even if Musk doesn't buy Twitter, never forget what yesterday revealed.
Zero Hedge reports on one of Rock & Roll’s heroes acting like a hero.
Pink Floyd song writer Roger Waters slammed Mark Zuckerberg during a press conference recently, announcing that the Facebook owner had offered a “huge, huge amount of money” to use the iconic song Another Brick In The Wall Part II in an advert for Instagram.
Speaking at an event to raise awareness about imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Waters noted the deep deep irony of Facebook wanting to buy and use a song that rails against ‘thought control’ and mindless conformity.
Waters described the development as part of Zuckerberg’s “insidious movement… to take over absolutely everything.”
Waters read out Facebook’s request, which noted “We want to thank you for considering this project. We feel that the core sentiment of this song is still so prevalent and so necessary today, which speaks to how timeless the work is.”
“And yet, they want to use it to make Facebook and Instagram more powerful than it already is,” Waters urged, adding “so that it can continue to censor all of us in this room and prevent this story about Julian Assange getting out into the general public so the general public can go, ‘What? No. No More.’”
“So it’s a missive from Mark Zuckerberg to me… with an offer of a huge, huge amount of money and the answer is, ‘f**k you! No f**king way!’,” Waters boomed to rapturous applause.
“I will not be a party to this bullsh-t, Zuckerberg,” Waters added.
He then asked “How did this little pr**k, who started off going, ‘She’s pretty, we’ll give her a four out of five. She’s ugly, we’ll give her a one’… How the f**k did he get any power in anything?”
“And yet here he is, one of the most powerful idiots in the world,” Waters emphasized.
Last night, as soon as I pasted in the URL for this John Derbyshire post on the Derek Chauvin verdict and hit POST, instantly, up popped a “THIS VIOLATES FACEBOOK COMMUNITY STANDARDS AND CANNNOT BE POSTED” notice.
Well, I have a work around: the URL to my post quoting Derbyshire will upload.
The jury’s verdict itself was absurd. Derek Chauvin did nothing wrong. The best case here was made by retired lawyer Harold Cameron over at Revolver News a week before the verdict came out:
When Floyd continued resisting arrest after being placed in handcuffs, Chauvin didn’t beat him with a baton. He didn’t taze him. He didn’t put in him a chokehold. He put one knee on what the prosecution is now optimistically calling Floyd’s “neck area” and waited for the ambulance to come save Floyd’s life … The worst that could be said is that he didn’t simply let Floyd go because he was still complaining about being unable to breath, just as he had been since the beginning of the encounter. The state’s case so far boils down to a collection of experts equating that to murder.
Hamilton also reminds us of the size discrepancy between Chauvin, who weighs a slight 140 lbs., and Floyd, 230 lbs. and all pepped up on chemical stimulants. If you have ever been involved in a close-quarters struggle for physical mastery with another adult, you’re impressed that Chauvin managed to subdue Floyd.
In the famous kneeling video, Chauvin has a look of being somewhat pleased with himself. I would have been, too.
Aside from that look of muted pride, I thought from the beginning, and still think, that Chauvin did not at all have the appearance of someone who was aware he was doing something wrong.
Come on: If you are doing something grossly wrong, something that might end another person’s life, you know you are, and it will show.
Chauvin’s entire affect in that video was of someone who’s done an unpleasant job, and believes he’s done it rather well.
How does that square with the charges as presented? Following the verdict, Jared Taylor just referred readers to Judge Peter Cahill’s instructions to the jury before they deliberated [Read: Judge’s instructions to Derek Chauvin trial jurors, Washington Post, April 19, 2021]
He quoted several phrases taken from those instructions, which Judge Cahill in turn took from the statutes under which Chauvin was charged, and asked:
Did the prosecution really prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Chauvin “intentionally inflicted substantial bodily harm”? That he was “perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life”? That he “consciously [took] chances of causing death or great bodily harm”? Was this “[un]reasonable force in the line of duty in effecting a lawful arrest or preventing an escape from custody”?
Jared, ever the punctilious gentleman and scholar, added: “I wasn’t in the courtroom, so I can’t answer these questions …”
But he knows perfectly well, of course, that they answer themselves: No, absolutely not.
So, to quote from Lady Ann, another virgin has been tossed into the volcano to appease the hungry god.
Roger Simon comes up with the mot juste for our self-appointed social media moderators and fact checkers.
[H]ere is why Big Tech is the way it is, why its leaders—with the exception of Peter Thiel and a few others—so uniformly think the way they do.
They’re extremely bright (largely) guys who have reinvented the way we communicate and even live and made giant fortunes in the process. They used to be nerds, but now they’re big shots, inhabiting expensive homes in the most expensive place in America, Silicon Valley.
Given their history and the monomaniacal, focused manner in which they got there, I would wager many of them suffer from Asperger’s—“a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests.”
They get technology, they get business, but they don’t really get people. They don’t read widely, only within their world. Their machines have revealed the truth and they want to make sure the world follows their orders, which are, after all, politically correct.
When they censor they are doing what they are convinced is the right thing. They are what we may call Asperger’s Fascists.
The New York Post reports that Marxism and protest politics have paid off big for Patrisse Khan-Cullors.
As protests broke out across the country in the name of Black Lives Matter, the group’s co-founder went on a real estate-buying binge, snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone, according to property records.
Patrisse Khan-Cullors, 37, also eyed property in the Bahamas at an ultra-exclusive resort where Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods both have homes, The Post has learned. Luxury apartments and townhouses at the beachfront Albany resort outside Nassau are priced between $5 million and $20 million, according to a local agent.
The self-described Marxist last month purchased a $1.4 million home on a secluded road a short drive from Malibu in Los Angeles, according to a report. The 2,370 square-foot property features “soaring ceilings, skylights and plenty of windows” with canyon views. The Topanga Canyon homestead, which includes two houses on a quarter acre, is just one of three homes Khan-Cullors owns in the Los Angeles area, public records show.
Some fellow activists were taken aback by the real estate revelations. …
Khan-Cullors embraced activism and Marxism at a young age. “It started the year I turned twelve,” she writes. “That was the year that I learned that being black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready.”
But she didn’t rise to national prominence until 2013, when she and two other activists protested the not-guilty verdict against George Zimmerman, who shot dead Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in Florida.
Black Lives Matter protests erupted again in 2020 after the May killing of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck during his arrest.
Donations and pledges from corporations and individuals poured into the movement at that point. In February, the BLM non-profit co-founded by Khan-Cullors told the AP that they took in $90 million in 2020, with $21.7 million committed to grant funding and helping 30 black-led groups across the country.
Black Lives Matter leaders would not specify how much money they took in from prominent donors, according to the AP report.
It’s also not clear how much Khan-Cullors makes in salary as one of the leaders of the movement, since its finances are split among both non-profit and for-profit entities and difficult to trace.
Jason Whitlock got suspended by Twitter for tweeting this comment:
Do you even comprehend my take? She had a lot of options on where to live. She chose one of the whitest places in California. She'll have her pick of white cops and white people to complain about. That's a choice, bro. https://t.co/rBkOnSjb4u
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
Matt Taibbi is still a man of the Left, but he wasn’t Woke enough for Rolling Stone, so being a victim of Cancel Culture himself, he’s basically on the right side on Free Speech and Censorship at the hands of Establishment Media and Big Tech. Here’s his latest:
For blue-leaning audiences, news that companies like Facebook and Google had begun shutting down or de-ranking accounts in ways we’d never seen before was, to my initial shock, mostly perceived as a good thing. In the wake of Trump’s election, many Democrats believed something had to be done about “fake news,” Russian trolls, and, especially, inflammatory right-wing speech.
Polls showed 40% of millennials believed the government should be allowed to limit speech offensive to minorities, a number significantly higher than the one for either Baby Boomers (23%) or GenXers (27%). If those levels of support among younger voters existed for outright government censorship, how would that audience ever be convinced to care about private companies zapping political accounts?
The issue was such a non-starter with younger, blue-leaning audiences that when I did a feature about Facebook’s 2018 purges of so-called “inauthentic” accounts, Rolling Stone headlined the piece, “Who Will Fix Facebook?”, as if to disguise what the story was actually about. (I got letters from disappointed readers who’d been drawn in by the headline, hoping to read a story demanding that Facebook wipe out more right-wing/conspiratorial content). After the expulsion of Alex Jones and Infowars from Apple, Facebook, Google, and Spotify, it seemed many younger readers didn’t see a problem with increased content moderation. If anything, Silicon Valley didn’t remove enough obnoxious content.
Conservative readers from the start have been significantly more unnerved by the content moderation movement, for the obvious reason that most higher-profile targets of tech crackdowns have been right-wing figures. After years of decisions like kicking Donald Trump off Twitter, suspending or banning figures like James Woods and Milo Yiannopoulis, and intervening to block access to the New York Post’s expose on Hunter Biden, the censorship issue in conservative media has usually been pitched as being a problem exclusive to them.
After the Hunter Biden story was blocked, Republican politicians like Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker and Colorado’s Cory Gardner hauled tech CEOs to Washington to face accusations of “bias.” At the much-covered hearing in October, Wicker railed at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. “Mr. Dorsey, your platform allows foreign dictators to post propaganda, typically without restriction,” he said, “yet you typically restrict the president of the United States.” Read the rest of this entry »
Big tech has launched an unprecedented and coordinated cyber attack on President Donald Trump and his 74,000,000 voters.
As this was happening — the GOP was dead silent.
On Friday, Twitter permanently banned hundreds, if not thousands, of Trump supporters and prominent allies — before banning the president himself. Nearly every account that helped to promote the Stop the Steal rallies or challenge the election results were banned, including Ali Alexander, Michael Coudrey, Gen. Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Lin Wood. Countless smaller accounts that supported the president were also getting suspended in a seemingly constant rate.
The same has been happening over on Facebook and Instagram.
TRENDING: BREAKING: Twitter Bans President Donald Trump — PERMANENTLY
At the same time, Parler was warned by both the Apple and Google stores that if they did not impose moderation on their free speech platform within 24 hours they would be banned entirely.
The Trump campaign is now blocked from emailing their millions of supporters after being suspended by their email service provider.
The suspension comes shortly after President Donald Trump and his campaign were permanently banned from Twitter.
The email service, Campaign Monitor, confirmed the suspension of the account to Financial Times’ Dave Lee.
The Nationalist Review reports “the move effectively cuts off communication between his team and his core supporters. What is not clear however, is what other services have banned his team. The Trump campaign sends out a massive amount of emails—33 in January so far. But, it has been 48 hours since the campaign has reached out to its supporters via email, prompting most journalists to speculate that other providers have shut off access as well.”
Snapchat locked Trump’s account.
Shopify removed Trump’s organization and campaign store.
Michelle Obama called on all tech companies to ban President Trump.
Facebook deleted the Walk Away movement page, including 500,000 Walk Away testimonials.
Twitter banned General Flynn.
Twitter banned Sidney Powell.
Google’s YouTube terminated Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast while 500,000 were watching in real-time.
Twitter permanently banned President Trump’s personal account.
The Gateway Pundit says that Twitter banned hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other lesser-known sites that challenged election results.
The Trump campaign’s email service has banned the campaign from its platform.
a lot of people have said for a long time that conservatives should leave those hostile, censorious platforms. There are free speech alternatives, most notably Parler (a Twitter alternative), Me-We (a Facebook alternative), Gab (another Twitter alternative), and Rumble (a YouTube alternative). Considering that we are the product, why in the world were we giving ourselves away for free?
And finally, on Friday, Trump apparently did go to Parler. The tech giants, though, were ready. Because Parler is a bulletin board, not a publisher, it does not moderate “parleys.” Google has therefore removed Parler from the App store for “user safety.” Apple is threatening to do the same unless Parler starts acting like the other tech companies and censors speech Democrats find offensive. Amazon is also making noises about deplatforming Parler.
This is what happens when private enterprise becomes the town square. It seemed to make sense in a time when the mainstream media was manifestly biased. It never occurred to people that the tech corporations would be just as biased, only with even more power. We currently have a situation in all the President has no avenues of communication because corporations have silenced him. Joseph McCarthy was a piker compared to today’s Democrats.
