Julius Streicher and what to do about free speech?

How do we handle dangerous speech?

  • Good speech defeats Bad speech

    Votes: 13 52.0%
  • Something else

    Votes: 12 48.0%

  • Total voters
    25
This isn't my reason to boycott Amazon as far as I am able. My reasons haven't shifted since I started. But, the zeitgeist is now shifting such that apparently we're now approving of billionaire monopolists wielding power we'd never grant to democratic government. I see no reason to boost their relative power over you, merely for some goodies. :)
 
Yea, I know it wasn't your reason. And Amazon does do a lot of bad stuff; I just find it funny that this is the hill that some want to die on.
 
I've been thinking on all this "Deep State" crap. Like, why did Traitor Trump and the Fellow Traveler Traitors always harp about the Deep State?

See, turns out that it was the "Deep State" which prevented the overthrow of the US government by Trump and the Trumpiestas. Which is to say, the "Deep State" is the institutional strength of the American government to resist collapse in the face of deliberate attempts to destroy it.



Just as an example:



Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General
Trying to find another avenue to push his baseless election claims, Donald Trump considered installing a loyalist, and had the men make their cases to him.

By Katie Benner

  • Jan. 22, 2021
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.

The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.

The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?

The answer was unanimous. They would resign.

Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.

The previously unknown chapter was the culmination of the president’s long-running effort to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda. He also pressed Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels, including one who would look into Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election equipment that Mr. Trump’s allies had falsely said was working with Venezuela to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
This account of the department’s final days under Mr. Trump’s leadership is based on interviews with four former Trump administration officials who asked not to be named because of fear of retaliation.

Mr. Clark said that this account contained inaccuracies but did not specify, adding that he could not discuss any conversations with Mr. Trump or Justice Department lawyers. “Senior Justice Department lawyers, not uncommonly, provide legal advice to the White House as part of our duties,” he said. “All my official communications were consistent with law.”

Mr. Clark also noted that he was the lead signatory on a Justice Department request last month asking a federal judge to reject a lawsuit that sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election.

Mr. Trump declined to comment. An adviser said that Mr. Trump has consistently argued that the justice system should investigate “rampant election fraud that has plagued our system for years.”

Continue reading the main story
The adviser added that “any assertion to the contrary is false and being driven by those who wish to keep the system broken.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did Mr. Rosen.

When Mr. Trump said on Dec. 14 that Attorney General William P. Barr was leaving the department, some officials thought that he might allow Mr. Rosen a short reprieve before pressing him about voter fraud. After all, Mr. Barr would be around for another week.

Instead, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Rosen to the Oval Office the next day. He wanted the Justice Department to file legal briefs supporting his allies’ lawsuits seeking to overturn his election loss. And he urged Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate not only unfounded accusations of widespread voter fraud, but also Dominion, the voting machines firm.

(Dominion has sued the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who inserted those accusations into four federal lawsuits about voter irregularities that were all dismissed.)

Mr. Rosen refused. He maintained that he would make decisions based on the facts and the law, and he reiterated what Mr. Barr had privately told Mr. Trump: The department had investigated voting irregularities and found no evidence of widespread fraud.

But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in phone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence that supported conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had espoused. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.

As Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election results.

Mr. Trump quickly embraced Mr. Clark, who had been appointed the acting head of the civil division in September and was also the head of the department’s environmental and natural resources division.

As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.

As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.

Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.

On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy to the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.

Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.

Unwilling to step down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear straight from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.
Even as Mr. Clark’s pronouncement was sinking in, stunning news broke out of Georgia: State officials had recorded an hourlong call, published by The Washington Post, during which Mr. Trump pressured them to manufacture enough votes to declare him the victor. As the fallout from the recording ricocheted through Washington, the president’s desperate bid to change the outcome in Georgia came into sharp focus.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark’s latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.

Mr. Rosen planned to soon head to the White House to discuss his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.

The Clark plan, the officials concluded, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law. For hours, they anxiously messaged and called one another as they awaited Mr. Rosen’s fate.

Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark present their arguments to him.

Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department’s remaining top officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone at the department.

Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.

After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.

Mr. Rosen and his deputies concluded they had weathered the turmoil. Once Congress certified Mr. Biden’s victory, there would be little for them to do until they left along with Mr. Trump in two weeks.

They began to exhale days later as the Electoral College certification at the Capitol got underway. And then they received word: The building had been breached.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.

Katie Benner covers the Justice Department. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @ktbenner


https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/...t-election.html#click=https://t.co/7zMEOQwYlp



So turns out the "Deep State" did protect America from becoming a full on Banana Republic under fascist rule.
 
Yea, I know it wasn't your reason. And Amazon does do a lot of bad stuff; I just find it funny that this is the hill that some want to die on.

Overt breach of contract and conspiracy for monopoly tend to be pretty unpopular though.
 
"The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to their critics" - Chris Hedges
 
"The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to their critics" - Chris Hedges

you mean the elites like Trump who want Section 230 gone so Twitter et. al. are actually shut down?
 
you mean the elites like Trump who want Section 230 gone so Twitter et. al. are actually shut down?

If Twitter wants section 230 immunity it should act like something for which 230 is defined. Or it can operate w/o immunity like many others organizations/people operate.
 
you mean the elites like Trump who want Section 230 gone so Twitter et. al. are actually shut down?

Can we ask the elites if they count Trump as one of their own? I think 230 is a protection from lawsuits for platforms that helped them get wealthy. The idea was they cant be treated like book publishers or news outlets who can be sued for their content. Thats a good thing given the 'town square' nature of the internet. What is not a good thing is the Democrats told these platforms to censor critics and thats what they're doing, hence the backlash from the people being censored.

As for what Trump wanted, maybe he wanted these platforms to stop censoring people. Maybe he wanted to keep 230 in place for platforms that wouldn't censor people. I dont know what he planned to do about it other than complain.
 
As for what Trump wanted, maybe he wanted these platforms to stop censoring people. Maybe he wanted to keep 230 in place for platforms that wouldn't censor people. I dont know what he planned to do about it other than complain.

Death to America == bad
Death to Amazon == good

Amazon says it repeatedly warned Parler about death threat posts
Amazon’s AWS unit flagged to Parler “more than 100” posts advocating violence between mid-November and January, when it finally cut them off, according to the Seattle federal court filing.
The filing pointed to often profane threats targeting tech executives such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, as well as liberal political figures including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic voting-rights activist Stacey Abrams.

https://nypost.com/2021/01/13/amazon-slams-parler-for-failing-to-police-death-threat-posts/
 
Can we ask the elites if they count Trump as one of their own? I think 230 is a protection from lawsuits for platforms that helped them get wealthy. The idea was they cant be treated like book publishers or news outlets who can be sued for their content. Thats a good thing given the 'town square' nature of the internet.

Yes, imagine if twitter had to pre-approve every tweet before it could be posted, for fear of lawsuits.

What is not a good thing is the Democrats told these platforms to censor critics and thats what they're doing, hence the backlash from the people being censored.

Censor 'critics'? Or stop allowing posts/tweets of flat out false information that was radicalizing people, eventually resulting in deaths.

As for what Trump wanted, maybe he wanted these platforms to stop censoring people.

There has to be a good response to this, with Trump complaining of 'Fake News', while spouting his own Fake News, but I'm just not witty at the moment.

I dont know what he planned to do about it other than complain.

I think he wanted to either:
1. Be allowed to sue platforms for 'censoring' 'speech'
2. Get rid of the 'good samaritan' clause which allows the platform to pick and choose what content they want to remove, as long as it's done in 'good faith' as to content they find obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected"

I would lean on #2, as obscene, to put it mildly, fits his online persona.
 
There has to be a good response to this, with Trump complaining of 'Fake News', while spouting his own Fake News, but I'm just not witty at the moment.

It's completely incoherent. Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he wanted Twitter to stop censoring people? Section 230 is what allows them not to "censor" everything, as you point out:

Yes, imagine if twitter had to pre-approve every tweet before it could be posted, for fear of lawsuits.

And this would, in fact, be a form of "prior restraint," which makes the irony all the greater.
 
Death to America == bad
Death to Amazon == good

Hmm... an article from the NY Post. Didn't they publish an article before the election about Hunter Biden? An article that was censored by Democrat friendly media platforms. I dont have a problem if they told Parler to get rid of death threats, I do care that Democrats in Congress have been advocating censorship and thats what is happening.

I'd have to see how Amazon treated Parler in comparison. If one standard applied to everyone then I wouldn't argue bias. I suspect last year social media was busy with talk about how riots are justified etc. Maybe Parler can show bias if Amazon didn't apply the same standard to Democrats and friends.

Censor 'critics'? Or stop allowing posts/tweets of flat out false information that was radicalizing people, eventually resulting in deaths.

The people who gave us 4 years of Russiagate want to stop flat out false information? And they'll be our factcheckers too. Yes, they want to censor critics. They censored a NY Post article about Biden family corruption days before the election. They will soon be censoring what China tells them to censor if they aren't already.

There has to be a good response to this, with Trump complaining of 'Fake News', while spouting his own Fake News, but I'm just not witty at the moment.

Looks to me like the pols pointing at 230 are doing so to tell the platforms to cut out the censorship. People in government commonly uses threatening language to get what they want without following thru. It would be similar to how congressional Democrats scolded media CEOs for allowing unapproved misinformation except for the fact they actually want the censorship Trump et al oppose.

Notice how those Democrat emails that started all this nonsense weren't lies? Thats so ironic, the Democrats spent 4 years smearing Trump as a traitor to cover up their malfeasance vs Bernie and now they're telling us we need them to censor the internet to stop liars. They are liars.

It's completely incoherent. Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he wanted Twitter to stop censoring people? Section 230 is what allows them not to "censor" everything

But they were censoring people and he wanted them to stop so he threatened them with their cash cow. If they called him on it (and he could actually do something) he could have turned tail or revoked their status and kept 230 for platforms that didn't censor people. I suspect if they thought that could happen they'd stop censoring people before it got that far.
 
Yes, imagine if twitter had to pre-approve every tweet before it could be posted, for fear of lawsuits.
I do not think there is any chance they would go this way, one mistake and they would be sued. I think twitter could survive perfectly well with no moderation, I guess they do very little (previous to this whole thing I had not heard of any). Facebook however would be in trouble, as they have much more control over what people see, and youtube would have no chance. My concern would be for CFC, this place could get pretty messy with no moderation.

However, if the price we had to pay to kill facebook and google was to have to take this discussion to usenet I think I would be willing to pay it.

Without section 230, we had the cases of compuserve, which had no moderation and hosted forums that were a cesspit, and was found not liable because they were mere conduits (like a bookshop). We also had Prodigy, who did moderate their forums but did not remove a post saying the Wolf of Wall Street was a crook, and they were found liable as they were more like a newspaper letters page.

EFF Legal Eagle Youtube Wiki
 
Last edited:
The people who gave us 4 years of Russiagate want to stop flat out false information?
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress represents a critical opportunity for the legal community to help the American people understand what is in his March 2019 Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election. The following summary presents key findings from the Mueller Report and is intended to help lawyers and other concerned citizens speak and write about the Special Counsel’s findings in an informed manner. The summary was prepared by the Presidential Investigation Education Project, a partnership between the American Constitution Society (ACS) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to promote an informed public evaluation of the investigations of Special Counsel Mueller and others into Russian interference in our elections.

The Special Counsel investigation uncovered extensive criminal activity
  • The investigation produced 37 indictments; seven guilty pleas or convictions; and compelling evidence that the president obstructed justice on multiple occasions. Mueller also uncovered and referred 14 criminal matters to other components of the Department of Justice.
  • Trump associates repeatedly lied to investigators about their contacts with Russians, and President Trump refused to answer questions about his efforts to impede federal proceedings and influence the testimony of witnesses.
  • A statement signed by over 1,000 former federal prosecutors concluded that if any other American engaged in the same efforts to impede federal proceedings the way Trump did, they would likely be indicted for multiple charges of obstruction of justice.

Russia engaged in extensive attacks on the U.S. election system in 2016
  • Russian interference in the 2016 election was “sweeping and systemic.”[1]
  • Major attack avenues included a social media “information warfare” campaign that “favored” candidate Trump[2] and the hacking of Clinton campaign-related databases and release of stolen materials through Russian-created entities and Wikileaks.[3]
  • Russia also targeted databases in many states related to administering elections gaining access to information for millions of registered voters.[4]


The investigation “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign” and established that the Trump Campaign “showed interest in WikiLeaks's releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton”
  • In 2015 and 2016, Michael Cohen pursued a hotel/residence project in Moscow on behalf of Trump while he was campaigning for President.[5] Then-candidate Trump personally signed a letter of intent.
  • Senior members of the Trump campaign, including Paul Manafort, Donald Trump, Jr., and Jared Kushner took a June 9, 2016, meeting with Russian nationals at Trump Tower, New York, after outreach from an intermediary informed Trump, Jr., that the Russians had derogatory information on Clinton that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”[6]
  • Beginning in June 2016, a Trump associate “forecast to senior [Trump] Campaign officials that WikiLeaks would release information damaging to candidate Clinton.”[7] A section of the Report that remains heavily redacted suggests that Roger Stone was this associate and that he had significant contacts with the campaign about Wikileaks.[8]
  • The Report described multiple occasions where Trump associates lied to investigators about Trump associate contacts with Russia. Trump associates George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, and Michael Cohen all admitted that they made false statements to federal investigators or to Congress about their contacts. In addition, Roger Stone faces trial this fall for obstruction of justice, five counts of making false statements, and one count of witness tampering.
  • The Report contains no evidence that any Trump campaign official reported their contacts with Russia or WikiLeaks to U.S. law enforcement authorities during the campaign or presidential transition, despite public reports on Russian hacking starting in June 2016 and candidate Trump’s August 2016 intelligence briefing warning him that Russia was seeking to interfere in the election.
  • The Report raised questions about why Trump associates and then-candidate Trump repeatedly asserted Trump had no connections to Russia.[9]


Special Counsel Mueller declined to exonerate President Trump and instead detailed multiple episodes in which he engaged in obstructive conduct
  • The Mueller Report states that if the Special Counsel’s Office felt they could clear the president of wrongdoing, they would have said so. Instead, the Report explicitly states that it “does not exonerate” the President[10] and explains that the Office of Special Counsel “accepted” the Department of Justice policy that a sitting President cannot be indicted.[11]
  • The Mueller report details multiple episodes in which there is evidence that the President obstructed justice. The pattern of conduct and the manner in which the President sought to impede investigations—including through one-on-one meetings with senior officials—is damning to the President.
  • Five episodes of obstructive conduct stand out as being particularly serious:
    • In June 2017 President Trump directed White House Counsel Don McGahn to order the firing of the Special Counsel after press reports that Mueller was investigating the President for obstruction of justice;[12] months later Trump asked McGahn to falsely refute press accounts reporting this directive and create a false paper record on this issue – all of which McGahn refused to do.[13]
    • After National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was fired in February 2017 for lying to FBI investigators about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Kislyak, Trump cleared his office for a one-on-one meeting with then-FBI Director James Comey and asked Comey to “let [Flynn] go;” he also asked then-Deputy National Security Advisor K.T. McFarland to draft an internal memo saying Trump did not direct Flynn to call Kislyak, which McFarland did not do because she did not know whether that was true.[14]
    • In July 2017, the President directed former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to instruct the Attorney General to limit Mueller’s investigation, a step the Report asserted “was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the President’s and his campaign’s conduct.”[15]
    • In 2017 and 2018, the President asked the Attorney General to “un-recuse” himself from the Mueller inquiry, actions from which a “reasonable inference” could be made that “the President believed that an unrecused Attorney General would play a protective role and could shield the President from the ongoing Russia Investigation.”[16]
    • The Report raises questions about whether the President, by and through his private attorneys, floated the possibility of pardons for the purpose of influencing the cooperation of Flynn, Manafort, and an unnamed person with law enforcement.[17]


Congress needs to continue investigating and assessing elements of the Mueller Report
  • The redactions of the Mueller Report appear to conceal the extent to which the Trump campaign had advance knowledge of the release of hacked emails by WikiLeaks. For instance, redactions conceal content of discussions that the Report states occurred between Trump, Cohen, and Manafort in July 2016 shortly after Wikileaks released hacked emails;[18] the Report further notes, “Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming,” but redacts the contextual information around that statement.[19]
  • A second issue the Report does not examine is the fact that the President was involved in conduct that was the subject of a case the Special Counsel referred to the Southern District of New York – which the Report notes “ultimately led to the conviction of Cohen in the Southern District of New York for campaign-finance offenses related to payments he said he made at the direction of the President.”[20]
  • The Report also redacts in entirety its discussion of 12 of the 14 matters Mueller referred to other law enforcement authorities.[21]
  • Further, the Report details non-cooperation with the inquiry by the President, including refusing requests by the Special Counsel for an interview; providing written responses that the Office of the Special Counsel considered “incomplete” and “imprecise” and that involved the President stating on “more than 30 occasions that he ‘does not recall’ or ‘remember’ or ‘have an independent recollection.’”[22]
 
Hmm... an article from the NY Post. Didn't they publish an article before the election about Hunter Biden? An article that was censored by Democrat friendly media platforms. I dont have a problem if they told Parler to get rid of death threats, I do care that Democrats in Congress have been advocating censorship and thats what is happening.

I'd have to see how Amazon treated Parler in comparison. If one standard applied to everyone then I wouldn't argue bias. I suspect last year social media was busy with talk about how riots are justified etc. Maybe Parler can show bias if Amazon didn't apply the same standard to Democrats and friends.



The people who gave us 4 years of Russiagate want to stop flat out false information? And they'll be our factcheckers too. Yes, they want to censor critics. They censored a NY Post article about Biden family corruption days before the election. They will soon be censoring what China tells them to censor if they aren't already.



Looks to me like the pols pointing at 230 are doing so to tell the platforms to cut out the censorship. People in government commonly uses threatening language to get what they want without following thru. It would be similar to how congressional Democrats scolded media CEOs for allowing unapproved misinformation except for the fact they actually want the censorship Trump et al oppose.

Notice how those Democrat emails that started all this nonsense weren't lies? Thats so ironic, the Democrats spent 4 years smearing Trump as a traitor to cover up their malfeasance vs Bernie and now they're telling us we need them to censor the internet to stop liars. They are liars.



But they were censoring people and he wanted them to stop so he threatened them with their cash cow. If they called him on it (and he could actually do something) he could have turned tail or revoked their status and kept 230 for platforms that didn't censor people. I suspect if they thought that could happen they'd stop censoring people before it got that far.



But the fact is that Russiagate factually happened. Hunter Biden's laptop factually did not happen. That's the difference. What you are arguing for is Pravda. A party run and approved media outlet which does only propaganda supporting your side.

What the rest of us want is a free media. One that does the best job it can to report facts.
 
So I've been skimming a few posts and wanted to chime in on this. IMO the general idea of a Deep State of the West isn't actually that unreasonable. The problem is the concept's use in practice. The corruption isn't very hidden. Who pays which politician is generally something you can google, most of it is laid out and readily available if one actually cares about it. And following the things we actually know about US politics, it's clear that it's generally those that are using the concept that are the most paid off. The Deep State is usually something you hear among Republicans when their party is by far the worst participant in it. As such, the egregiousness of right wing lobbyism, corruption and voter suppression becomes sidelined. The Deep State instead of being useful understanding of clear corruption becomes a nebulous hidden thing that's useful as conspiracy instead of revelation, all while being primarily used by proponents of conspiracy.

The Deep State concept becomes more of a rhetorical device for voters and politicians to force through policy rather than actually wanting to dismantle the Deep State. Policy X becomes valid because of the nebulous Deep State. If anti-deep-staters wanted to, they'd curtail corporate power in politics, but to them, corporations are fine by default, so it cannot be morally wrong by default. Asterisks apply here, but it's assumed by default that power is good as long as it's private. Private power only becomes a problem the moment the corps turn on you, re: the massive backlash against social media companies recently. They've been actively silencing the left for a decade now, but the moment they start blocking off right wing nutters for market reasons, the right becomes aware of it, enraged, and start blaming a leftist conspiracy. As if Microsoft ever wanted Marxism.

And yes, I know some people will read this and go "what about the democrats", and yes, they're also quite corrupt, but again, do the god damn research.

I'm reminded of that iceberg conspiracy meme. Basically most of the top, the readily available information, makes it clear which politicians are actually the most corrupt. These same politicians claim the massive hidden iceberg doesn't reflect the top, and this allows them to push whatever through the voter base likes. In the abstract, there's nothing wrong with liking a policy and wanting it passed. The problem is when you manufacture ghosts that do exist guys trust me as the premise to push through policy. Instead of, you know, relying on the facts that are laid bare. That's why it's more of a rhetorical device and why the concept is rarely used properly in practice. And it's why I usually tune out when people say "but the Deep State". I know what kind of people like to use it.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom