Concerning Freedom Of Speech

     When the wheel turns under your hand, you must watch your words. – Ursula Le Guin

     This is a piece I feel obligated to write. I don’t want to write it. It comes near to being an insult to my readers’ intelligence. It’s mandatory even so. The yammerers of the Left have made it so.

     Here’s the text of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:

     Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

     It’s noteworthy that of all the rights mentioned in the original Constitution, or any of the Amendments, only the First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law.” The other Amendments speak of rights without mentioning any particular possible abridger or infringer. Even when Civics was a routine part of American education, insufficient attention was drawn to that difference. Few lecturers dared to speak of the reason for it.

     The reason is simple: The Bill of Rights was a compromise document. Its drafters urgently desired that all thirteen colonies sign onto it. For that reason, they had to make room for certain practices that existed in those colonies at that time. Just as several of the colonies legislatively protected slavery, several had laws that did infringe upon the freedom of speech and religion. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire had an established church: the Congregational Church. Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia had established the Church of England. Several colonies had laws against public vulgarity and blasphemy as well.

     When the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment federalizes all the rights mentioned in the Constitution, such that no state government could pass laws abridging or infringing them, those established churches and laws infringing on freedom of expression were history, de facto if not de jure. It was a landmark in judicial practice, as never before had the Court deliberately ignored the plain language of the First Amendment, nor the care with which the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment had averted any talk of rights. For comparison, here’s the complete Fourteenth Amendment:

     1: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

     2: Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

     3: No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

     4: The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

     5: The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

     Read it closely. You won’t find the word rights anywhere in it. Moreover, note that the original ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights don’t say anywhere that “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” That too was deliberate. The whole point of those Amendments was to keep Congress from legislating about the rights mentioned there.

     There’s a whole education in those differences... and damned near no one even thinks to mention them today.

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     The above is my gesture at providing some real and important information, something worth saying that my readers might not know. The rest of this piece will be of a different color.

     Various Leftist figures, many of them in the media, have felt their positions shaken because of viciously intemperate remarks they’ve made in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The most recent is Jimmy Kimmel. ABC announced that it has suspended Kimmel “indefinitely” for his statements, and has pulled his late-night show from its schedule “for the foreseeable future.”

     Other Left-aligned figures have called such actions on the part of media organs offenses against freedom of speech. They’ve striven to equate those things with Biden Administration strong-arming of various organs into muting conservative voices of note. There is some justice to those claims, as the Federal Communications Commission has been involved:

     FCC chairman Brendan Carr has threatened to take action against ABC after Jimmy Kimmel said in a monologue that “the MAGA gang” was attempting to portray Charlie Kirk‘s assassin as “anything other than one of them.”
     Appearing on Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday, Carr suggested that the FCC has “remedies we can look at.”
     “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

     I can’t approve of that, but it’s just one more example of the perniciousness of licensing. Whoever’s in power decides what will and what won’t be considered licit under a license; note the etymology. Just as they have with tax law, left-wing Administrations have used licensure to suppress voices contrary to their preferences before this. It was wrong then and it’s wrong now.

     All that having been said, when governments are not involved in a pressure campaign to punish intemperate remarks, “freedom of speech” as guaranteed by the federalized First Amendment is not an issue. Media barons are fully within their rights to hire, fire, and discipline their employees on whatever basis those barons find appropriate. If well-known media giant Octopus Corp. should decide that some fire-breathing conservative is hurting its bottom line, terminating his employment is merely one more corporate decision. We in the Right might not like it, but it would have nothing to do with “freedom of speech.”

     Both Left and Right have been inconsistent about this. Newspapers – say, remember newspapers? I do – have routinely selected and dismissed commentators on the basis of what their readerships tell them they want to read. That’s not a freedom-of-speech issue. Neither is it when a broadcaster or cablecaster does the same. Even so, the partisans of dismissed commentators will try to make it one. This only confuses the issue of freedom of speech still further.

     Similarly, when a business loses customers and patronage because one of its owners or employees has said or done something customers find repugnant, no freedom-of-speech issue exists. Indeed, the customers are exercising their freedom of speech: i.e., their right to disapprove and to take their business elsewhere. It’s moderately distressing that anyone should need to say this, but such are the times we live in.

     What’s strangely humorous is that many on the Left, having been chastised for belittling Charlie Kirk’s murder or attempting to gloss over its horror, are asserting something akin to a right to be free from criticism. I cannot imagine where or how such a notion originated. It certainly wasn’t honored on the Left when the Bidenites were in power. But people stung by the popular lash will say anything.

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     Other, better known commentators have reframed the matter in the best possible terms: There is freedom of speech, but there is no freedom from consequences. All actions have consequences. Word gets around, as I’ve said far too many times already. People will decide with whom to associate from several criteria, and what a man says to others is one of them. With whom he associates is another... and several persons of relatively moderate disposition have discovered that to their chagrin, as well.

     Yes, your words are protected by the First Amendment. That means that, with the exception of incitement to violence, they are not criminally actionable. But the First Amendment cannot limit the freedom of others to regard you as they see fit, including on the basis of your words.

     Words matter. Watch yours, for others surely will.

National Discourse Chronicles 2021-01-16

     Just now, things are looking bleak. If you feel the same, I’m sure you know your reasons. But they might not be the same as mine. My malaise is because we’re letting ourselves be atomized and bludgeoned into silence.

     One of the oldest and most consistently intelligent of blogs in the Right is the venerable American Thinker. Its comments section has frequently been as informative and thoughtful as its articles. But that comments section is going away:

     On January 14, American Thinker founder Thomas Lifson published a blog post about shutting down the comment section. An update to the post said it was either that or shut down the website. AT appears to be very worried about the comments they are getting. The blog post didn’t explain anything. It did say people who read AT are upset about the elimination of the comments, but it didn’t dissuade them.

     From Lifson’s post announcing the change:

     Because AT lacks the ability to monitor comments in real time, and because our position that comments are a forum, not something we publish, is being called into question, we can no longer publish comments.

     We take this action with a heavy heart.

     As our Gentle Readers are surely aware, The Federalist did the same some time back, and for the same reason: certain sentiments being expressed in the comments were being used to attack it through “lawfare,” potentially leading to the destruction of the site.

     Comments sections are becoming rare among Right-inclined sites for that reason.

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     Its support for finding and communicating with others of like mind has been one of the great benefits of the two-way World Wide Web. Comments sections have been a major component of that support. But one by one, they’re going away as Leftists seek them and threaten the site owners with expensive lawsuits and threats of other legal entanglements. The largest Right-inclined sites have been the first targets. When faced with the prospect of prolonged, very expensive legal actions, few are willing to stand their ground.

     If you’ll give a few moments of your time to Breitbart’s “Great Purge” section, you’ll get a good sense for the evils abroad. Tellingly, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor says that claims that the election was stolen are not “protected free speech” — a position that, despite its absolute falsity, is being echoed by many other Leftists and Left-inclined sites.

     It’s a sign of something that Pennsylvanians would elect such an arrogant idiot to the second-highest executive position in their state. Something not too good. But I digress.

     This morning, John Hinderaker weighs in:

     Democrats are making extraordinary efforts to suppress all discussion of whether Joe Biden actually won the 2020 presidential election. In fact, they go even farther: they want to suppress all discussion of the extent to which voter fraud occurred. That naturally makes me want to write about voter fraud, and who really won the election.

     First, this question: why are the Democrats so hysterical in their insistence that fraud not be mentioned? One reason is obvious. Joe Biden will take office under a cloud, since close to half of all Americans doubt that he really won the election. The Democrats want to stamp out such doubts to preserve Biden’s authority as president.

     But there is a second reason that may be more important. The Democrats want the lax voting procedures that prevailed in 2020 to continue in the future. They know that efforts will be made in many states to improve ballot integrity, and they want those efforts to fail. By rendering all discussion of voter fraud out of bounds, they hope to forestall reforms that would make it harder for them to cheat, or enable cheating, in the future.

     I’m sure Hinderaker’s assertions are accurate. Add to them another, which has been mentioned in discussions of other Left-promulgated lies:

If you can get a man to parrot a falsehood,
When the truth is plain and open,
You can break him to harness
Through his own sense of humiliation.

     It won’t stop with censorship of our convictions and opinions. It never does.

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     Brendan Eich could tell you about what happens to anyone the Left targets. He dared to donate to a California campaign to recognize marriage as applying solely to unions of one man and one woman. You can read about the scurrilous attacks on Eich for yourself. I’m not going to propagate the viciousness of activist homosexual Leftists determined to utterly destroy marriage and its defenders any further than that link.

     As of today, Parler founder John Matze can tell a similar tale:

     A new court filing on Friday from the legal team of Parler, an alternative social media platform favoured by conservatives in the US, has revealed that its CEO John Matze and his family are now in hiding after facing death threats and security breaches.

     "Matze himself, as the CEO of the company Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to vilify, has had to leave his home and go into hiding with his family after receiving death threats and invasive personal security breaches," read the filing....

     "Although AWS's motion to seal focuses only on its own employees, Parler's employees have been similarly harassed and threatened...Parler's CEO, John Matze, Jr., reports in his declaration in support of Parler's TRO motion that many Parler employees are suffering harassment and hostility, fear for their safety and that of their families, and in some cases have fled their home state to escape persecution," the filing read.

     Cross the Left and it will do everything in its power to destroy you utterly – after first attempting a 1984-style “reeducation” on you:

     “We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was ‘Thou shalt not.’ The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt.’ Our command is ‘Thou art.’ No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean.”

     That is the Left’s ideal. That is the end for which they strive.

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     You may be aware that I’m in the process of going to a new host for Liberty’s Torch. While Blogger has been good to me, it’s a subsidiary of Google, and Google has already shown its hard-Left character. So I’m getting out while the getting is good...hopefully, to a host that won’t turn tail and run should the Left attack this blog and / or its commenters.

     There must be places where we in the Right can congregate, can exchange opinions, and can discuss methods. It is my intention that Liberty’s Torch remain such a place, for as long as I’m alive to operate, maintain, and defend it. I hope others in the Right-leaning blogosphere (what remains of it) will do the same, but we shall see. And now, I must be off to other tasks.

     Have a nice day.

“Social Media”

     What’s that, citizen? You have opinions you’d like to express where others can see them? It’s not that simple anymore. This is the Twenty-First Century. We have procedures today.

     First, you’ll need an expressive-activities permit. You’re in for a long hard slog getting that, my friend. You’ll have to prove you never supported any cause disapproved by our political class, and never opposed any of their institutions. You’ll have to certify that you never, ever voted for a Republican. And of course, you’ll have to swear that you won’t foster any anti-Establishment ideas among your family members, friends, or colleagues.

     But let’s say you get through that set of wickets. Next comes the application phase. That’s right: you must apply for a soap box from which to orate. The three soap-box vendors that currently hold federal licenses are notoriously picky about who they’ll let through their gates. It takes a while for them to reach their verdict, too – and no, you cannot apply to several of them at once.

     And once you’ve acquired a perch from which to opine, that’s not the end of it. Your words will be monitored, to ensure that you remain in compliance with the Terms of Service. They’re quite simple, in comparison to the vague and wordy documents of yesteryear: If we don’t like what you’re saying, we’ll terminate your soap-box privileges. No, there’s no appeal.

     But really, how important to you is the “right” to express yourself? Important enough to jeopardize your employment? Your community relations? The security of your family and property? Give that a long hard ponder, citizen. This is no longer classical Rome, where it was said that “words fly away.” This is the Age of the All-Seeing Eye, whose memory is eternal. Whatever you may say, it will adhere to you forever.

     And We the Watchers only do as we’re told.

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     The above is not fiction...not really. It’s more of a prognostication. In some ways it’s a bit of a status report.

     We in the Right have passed the story of the wild pigs of the Okefenokee Swamp back and forth for many years. We thought we knew what it meant. We believed we were on guard. Yet all the while we were being herded into a pen designed not for our bodies but for our speech and our minds.

     Remember blogging? At its peak, there were many millions of active blogs, where the proprietor could say whatever he pleased without fear of “deplatforming.” Those blogs have dwindled to a few bitter-enders. You know: old cranks like your humble Curmudgeon.

     The millions who once blogged freely migrated, lemming-like, into the “social media.” Now those media are chokepoints: institutions that can choke off disapproved news and opinions with little effort and no recourse to him who presents them.

     Freedom of expression may still be the case de jure, but it’s been powerfully inhibited by the tech barons who control the big sites. And nothing much can be done about them. They have the protection of the political Establishment. Unless the multimillions they seduced into their parlors should rebel, exit, and go back to blogs, they will continue to exercise de facto powers of censorship over the communications of Americans.

     So here you are, citizen! What next? How do you plan to cope with the Age of the All-Seeing Eye? Will you remain under its lidless gaze, forever subject to its scrutiny, or will you remove yourself from its vista and head toward freer climes?

     Don’t take too long making up your mind if you want to remain at all free.

Chronicles Of The Cleansing, 2021-01-10

To all Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch:

     Keep an eye on Cold Fury for news about our relocation away from Blogger. Proprietor Mike Hendrix assures me that his host will not terminate him – or us – for our content. It’s become imperative that we move, for a reason you’re about to learn.

     Here it is, just in case you haven’t yet heard:

     Amazon notified Parler that it would be cutting off the social network favored by conservatives and extremists from its cloud hosting service Amazon Web Services, according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News. The suspension, which will go into effect on Sunday just before midnight, means that Parler will be unable to operate and will go offline unless it can find another hosting service.

     Like that “conservatives and extremists,” don’t you?

     In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective.

     I’ve been on Parler for more than a year. I haven’t seen any of these “calls for violence and hate speech.” (Just what is “hate speech,” anyway? The definition seems a bit...fluid.)

     Mind you, Facebook and Twitter are chock full of leftists proclaiming their hatred for us in the Right, slandering us in every imaginable way, and wishing us all sorts of harm and death. Outcries against Facebook or Twitter from the other tech barons? None. Yet there are people scoffing at my concerns about Blogger. I must be some sort of crackpot, eh what?

     Why Parler first? Because President Trump just joined it. The Left feels he must be silenced above all things. A man with 74 million supporters could be dangerous. He must be kept from inciting the masses to resistance!

     The tragedy of Amazon is staggering in its breadth and depth. While a multitude of conventional businesses have been forbidden to operate because of the Wuhan Flu, Amazon has allowed ordinary persons access to innumerable goods and services from the security of their homes. It’s been of immense use to millions. (As I reside in the Vampire State, I could hardly have done without it.) Amazon has profited hugely from the pandemic. The pandemic was Amazon’s biggest friend! But its masters cannot allow us to speak freely to one another through its servers. And there’s essentially nothing to be done about it.

     Worse for me personally, Amazon is how I sell my books. I have no other outlet. No other channel to the market means anything much to an indie writer. How much longer that channel will be open to me – or to any other indie who refuses to kowtow to the Left – I cannot say.

     It’s become painfully obvious that no organization of any size can be trusted to remain free and open. The antidote is non-organization: a system that, like TCP/IP itself, requires only that the user conform to its communication protocol. Such an arrangement is usually called a peer-to-peer network. We need such a network, independent of any central control, and we need it now. Something like Kazaa. (Remember Kazaa?)

     Stay tuned.

“Freedom Of Expression BUT”

     If you’ve been walking this ball of mud for any length of time, you’ll be aware that a sentence constructed as follows:

“I’m all for X, but...

     ...really means “I’m against X but don’t want to say so out loud.” It’s wise to pay close attention to people who speak in such a fashion. They’re examples of what Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote that “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” (Hamlet) They could turn on you at any moment.

     And so we come to today’s adventure.

     I’ve been anticipating that Google, which owns Blogger, will sooner or later turn on Liberty’s Torch. We’re small fry as such things are reckoned, but after the big fish have all been filleted we’ll surely have our turn. The megapowers of the Left / Establishment coalition intend that no one shall remain unbowed and unbound.

     So I’ve been looking into freedom-of-expression-guaranteed Web hosts. So far, I have serious qualms about every one I’ve investigated.

     Every Web host has a “Terms of Service / Acceptable Use” document the prospective customer must read before committing himself. And every one of them promises to suspend or delete Websites that violate those terms. But what’s missing in such documents is a description of the procedures involved – and that should get one’s danger flag well up the pole.

     Take that perennial no-no, copyright infringement. I’ll allow that copyright infringement ought to be penalized. I’ve been the victim of such, and I didn’t care for it. But let’s imagine that someone were to allege that Liberty’s Torch had infringed on his copyright. How would the Web host react to such an allegation? Specifically, would the host immediately suspend or delete the site, or would there be an investigation first, allowing us to defend ourselves against our accusers?

     I have yet to come upon a ToS / Acceptable Use document that answers that question in an acceptably specific fashion: i.e., a fashion that guarantees that an unsubstantiated, unverified, or unjust allegation would not be used against a hosted site. They never mention procedures. They make no assurances of protection or indemnification against villains who simply want to destroy a disliked site.

     In this age of all-out, no-holds-barred information warfare, that’s an omission no content originator should accept.

     There are other varieties of harassment that can be used to bring down a Website, of course. An allegation that it has at some time hosted child pornography can be used to destroy any site. The hosting provider will act as reflexively as Dracula to a crucifix...and will seldom offer an apology or make amends, should the accusation be proved false later on. Accusations that a site facilitates commerce in drugs, guns, bombs, or other illegal things are almost equally effective.

     These things can constitute a deadly “but” after a hosting provider’s guarantee of freedom of expression. This is not an argument that the laws concerning such things should not be followed. It’s an observation that the accused site and its management might be denied anything resembling due process.

     Plenty of conservative, patriotically oriented, or otherwise controversial but entirely legal sites have been destroyed by accusations that have proved unfounded. The host was more concerned with not becoming a target itself than with right, wrong, and justice.

     So I’m torn. I don’t know where to find a host that I could trust with Liberty’s Torch Mark II. I welcome suggestions from our Gentle Readers about hosts that have proved trustworthy in the past. I’m also interested in hearing about hosts that have shown no interest in the possibility that an accused might be innocent, his accuser being motivated simply by malice.

     Please post your suggestions in the comments, or email them to morelonhouse – at — optonline – dot — net.

The Fix And How To Get In On It

     “A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers...and its greatest strength is a free press when ‘free’ is defined as ‘responsible’ and the managers define what is ‘irresponsible.’” – Professor Bernardo de la Paz, in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

     In his masterwork The American Tradition, Dr. Clarence Carson wrote:

     [W]e are told that there is no need to fear the concentration of power in government so long as that power is checked by the electoral process. We are urged to believe that so long as we can express our disagreement in words, we have our full rights to disagree. Now both freedom of speech and the electoral process are important to liberty, but alone they are only the desiccated remains of liberty. However vigorously we may argue against foreign aid, our substance is still drained away in never-to-be-repaid loans. Quite often, there is not even a candidate to vote for who holds views remotely like my own. To vent one's spleen against the graduated income tax may be healthy for the psyche, but one must still yield up his freedom of choice as to how his money will be spent when he pays it to the government. The voice of electors in government is not even proportioned to the tax contribution of individuals; thus, those who contribute more lose rather than gain by the "democratic process." A majority of voters may decide that property cannot be used in such and such ways, but the liberty of the individual is diminished just as much as in that regard as if a dictator had decreed it. Those who believe in the redistribution of wealth should be free to redistribute their own, but they are undoubtedly limiting the freedom of others when they vote to redistribute theirs.

     Whereupon I commented:

     Dr. Carson was quite as incisive as Rand. Yet he might not have anticipated that once freedom of speech became dangerous to the Left, it would strive to eliminate that vestige of American liberty just as it had striven to eliminate all the previous ones. Note also how Leftists have striven to corrupt the electoral system. They can’t abide that any longer, either; after all, it rejected their anointed candidate in favor of a real estate magnate from Queens!

     There’s a moral here, and it shouldn’t take a lot of skull sweat to divine it.

     Action to suppress freedom of expression, Constitutionally forbidden to the federal government, has been “delegated” to Big Tech. This is not news. But consider afresh, please, how the suppression of important stories dovetails with the ongoing campaign to install a corrupt, senile puppet in the White House by any means necessary.

     If this isn’t clear evidence that the Republic is tottering, I can’t imagine what would qualify.

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     In John Brunner’s early novel The Squares of the City, he depicted the attitude of the managers to their “managed democracy:”

     "Senor Hakluyt, you are a stranger in Aguazul. You will therefore be inclined to dispute the dogmatic assertion that this is the most governed country in the world."
     Again that air of throwing down a gauntlet in debate, again that cocking of the head to imply a challenge. I said, "All right—I dispute it. Demonstrate."
     "The demonstration is all about you. We make it our business, first, to know what people think; we make it our business, next, to direct that thinking. We are not ashamed of that, senor, incidentally. Shall we say that—just as specific factors influence the flow of traffic, and you understand the factors and can gauge their relative importance—we now understand many of the factors that shape and direct public opinion? What is a man, considered socially? He is a complex of reactions; he takes the line of least resistance. We govern not by barring socially unhealthy paths, but by opening most wide those paths which are desirable. That is why you are here."
     "Go on," I invited after a pause.
     He blinked at me. "Say rather what is your view. Why is it we have adopted this round-and-round policy of inviting an expensive expert to solve our problems subtly, instead of saying, 'Do this!' and seeing it done?"
     I hesitated, then counter-questioned. "Is this, then, the extension of an existing policy rather than a compromise between opposed personal interests?"
     He threw up his hands. "But naturally!" he exclaimed, as though surprised to find me so obtuse. "Oh, it is ostensibly that there is conflict between one faction and another—but we create factions in this country! Conformism is a slow death; anarchy is a rapid one. Between the two lies a control which"—he chuckled—"like a lady's corset in an advertisement, constricts and yet bestows a sense of freedom. We govern our country with a precision that would amaze you, I believe."

     This tool of “managed democracy” – specifically, the control of information and its dissemination – is half of The Fix. The other half is the control of elections: making sure “the right people” win and “the wrong people” are cast into the darkness. For as we saw in 2016, the control of information alone cannot guarantee such a result. To ensure victory only by “the right people,” the managers employ:

1. Fictitious polls, including exit polls;
2. Multiple voting and voting by noncitizens;
3. Voter intimidation and control of polling places and hours;
4. Deliberate loss of “unfriendly” votes and the manufacture of others.

     In combination, those tactics can ensure that the hoi polloi are kept ignorant of how they’ve been fettered, and incapable of throwing off their fetters by nonviolent means.

     Quite a lot of people would like to get in on The Fix. There’s obviously money in it. (Just ask Hunter Biden.) But it’s not a club that just anyone can join.

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     To be a participant in The Fix, you must possess one of the following two qualifications:

• Control of an information-dissemination chokepoint; or:
• Leverage over persons in power, and the willingness to use it. (“It’s not who you know; it’s what you’ve got on ‘em.” – Lawrence Block)

     Note how nicely those qualifications fit the visible participants in today’s Fix. Note also how remorselessly they act against others who dare attempt to break their stranglehold. Andrew Torba could tell you all about that.

     The point of The Fix is, of course, the reservation of power to a select group, whose members share certain attitudes and interests. The most important of the attitudes is that If you’re in, you can do as you please. The only crime is acting against another member. The most important of the common interests is in maintaining the exclusivity of The Fix.

     Members of The Fix are expected to take part in the suppression and disparagement of non-members who dare to offer disapproved information to a general audience:

     Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey explained with an eerie calm that The Post can regain access to its Twitter account anytime it wants — once it deletes a tweet with an image his company has decided violates its standards.

     Dorsey’s words echo the ­assurances offered writers in authoritarian states that they will be allowed to publish their other scribblings . . . just so long as they burn the manuscripts the censors find offensive in front of the censors.

     Such an insistence would once have resulted in screams of outrage and professions of solidarity by other journalists. But now we see reactions like this on Twitter, from New York Times opinion staffer Charlie Warzel:

     “The NY Post leaving a violating tweet up in order to stay locked out of an account in order to use it as a political cudgel is a classic tactic, but it’s usually one you see from individual MAGA influencers.”

     Thus did a key employee at the Times suggest it was perfectly reasonable for Twitter to demand that another newspaper send its wares down a memory hole.

     Failure to collaborate in such operations would indicate a lack of commitment to The Fix and the common interests of its membership. Can’t have that.

     Plainly, as power dispersed is power reduced, the number of The Fix’s members must be tightly controlled. Don’t bother to ask for an application.

---

     So there’s no way to “get in on it.” Either you’re already on the inside, or you must languish forever in the cold and the dark. Establishments are like that; their members prize their membership status because it’s shared by so few. They preen about being “among the elite,” “the best people of the nation,” but in truth their one true distinguishing feature is being one of the few who are in on The Fix.

     Andrew Torba has scored a remarkable success with Gab. He’s surmounted innumerable obstacles, many of which were deliberately placed in his path by The Fix. In time, Gab could rise in size and importance to eclipse Twitter. But he will never be invited into The Fix, for he does not share the existing members’ interests. Indeed, his presence among them would be massively disrupting. What’s this about free speech? Are you seriously proposing that we not control the information flow, Andrew?

     May God grant His protection to such mavericks. Only they who are willing to challenge The Fix on its own turf stand between us and the loss of all freedom of expression. And they who would applaud that loss are only one potentially stolen election away from their dream.

Quickies: Threatened By Freedom

     Everyone has his likes and dislikes. That, in itself, isn’t a problem. It’s the unwillingness to tolerate others’ likes and dislikes that causes problems.

     I know virtually nothing about Mastodon. Apparently it offers an open-source code base, available to anyone who’d like to use it, that simplifies the production of a “social media” site, and a federation of servers that will – under certain conditions – support the sites produced from it. So far, so good.

     The most recent version of Gab was apparently derived in part from the Mastodon code base. Gab’s developers are still refining it, solving problems, and introducing advanced features, which has some Gabbers a bit peeved. But no one on Gab is nearly as peeved as whoever wrote this:

     Hm. So apparently people who deviate from the Left’s prescriptions about “racism, sexism, and transphobia” aren’t allowed to express themselves, even to others of like mind. Well, that’s typical for the Left’s bilge about “hate speech,” though I’d have expected people bright enough to have created the Mastodon infrastructure to be somewhat more sensible.

     What pinheads such as the one who wrote the tripe above don't realize is that they are fomenting racism, sexism, etc. You cannot counter a conviction or an ideology if you suppress the expression of it. The sense of exclusion and oppression will help it to flourish. It will grow in the darkness, and you will lose all knowledge of its extent or its virulence. You will also lose any skill you might have at arguing against it. And one day, when it’s grown muscles and become confident, it will roar out of the shadows and take you by the throat.

     Full disclosure: By some definitions of the word, I’m a racist. That is, I’m aware of various statistical disparities among the races, some of which can be important in certain contexts. I’m not ashamed to speak of what I know, any more than an NBA franchise owner is ashamed to field an all-black basketball team. But these days, any deviation from conformance to Leftist goodthink is enough to draw the SJW crowd’s condemnation. I’ve been condemned often enough that these days I merely smile and say “Yes, I’m a racist. So what?” The PC / SJW hall monitors walk away baffled and angry – and I’m only the tip of the iceberg.

     The same goes for “sexist,” “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “ageist,” “ableist,” “lookist,” and all the other terms of condemnation the Left uses to silence those who differ with it. They have no idea the extent of the harm they’re doing. When the reckoning comes, the streets will run red with their blood.

     Would you like to get the bloodshed started? Ask the Mastodonites who pledge to the above for their opinions about the emerging drive to normalize pedophilia. Ask them if they’re aware of the strong and well-verified correlation between pedophilia and homosexuality. Ask them right out in the open, in front of God and everybody, then stand back and watch as the long knives are unsheathed. You’ll need more of a stomach for gore than I. Anyway, I have a lawn to mow.

Rules

     One of the funniest scenes in the original Ghostbusters movie comes when Sigourney Weaver’s character attempts to seduce Bill Murray’s character, and he replies “I make it a rule never to get involved with possessed people.” Weaver starts petting him, and he continues, “Actually, it's more of a guideline than a rule.”

     If you’re a typical moviegoer, you laugh. If you’re a permanently constipated hypercritical observer of linguistic patterns and modes of implied communication – i.e., if you're your humble Curmudgeon – you laugh, but you jot down the incident for use in a future essay about semantic dissimulation.

     Yes, I really am that monomaniacal about words and how they’re used to convey meanings or conceal them. And today you, Gentle Reader, are the beneficiary. Don’t you feel lucky?

---

     Every word in the English language has an exact meaning, and no two of them have the same one. “Rule” and “guideline,” in the above segment, are today’s focus. Obviously they refer to different standards for behavior. A rule has hard boundaries: there are no thou shalt nots that can become well, okay, just this once. A guideline allows for unspecified exemptions, awarded according to someone’s personal judgment.

     A rule’s boundaries are only real if they’re enforced by prescribed penalties. If there’s no penalty, then there’s no rule. He who claims to abide by a rule yet allows himself to violate it without suffering a penalty – indeed, without even a conscience pang – is lying to you. He might have a guideline; he certainly doesn’t have a rule.

     (I once became incredibly incensed at a Catholic priest who characterized the Ten Commandments as “guidelines.” I told his pastor about it. He never did it again as far as I’m aware. Think about what his characterization would imply before passing on.)

     Just recently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, in public, that YouTube, a Google subsidiary, would start restricting content that doesn’t violate its published standards. Clearly, those standards aren’t rules. Consider, by analogy, a traffic cop who tickets a driver for driving “too fast” even if his radar gun reports the poor guy as having been within the speed limit, and you’ll get the idea.

     The tech giants are increasingly revealing themselves as bound by no rules. They certainly don’t regard themselves as bound by the ones they promulgate for the rest of us. What they like, they’ll carry, promote, monetize, and so forth; what they don’t, they’ll forbid, demonetize, or “shadow ban” — and there is no appeal from their whims.

     This is at the heart of the arguments over whether the federal government should impose regulations – real, enforceable rules – on Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other companies that, up to this point, have been allowed to posture as open to all, tolerant of content that falls within openly promulgated standards, and are therefore immune to laws and regulations that pertain to “publishers” who exercise the privilege of censorship.

---

     The case of greatest immediate interest involves one of the most completely benevolent yet widely despised organizations in the U.S.: Lila Rose’s pro-life group Live Action. Recently, for reasons that have yet to become perfectly clear, Pinterest classified Live Action’s outreach materials as pornography and banned them. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas delved into this affair:

     YouTube immediately banned the video above. As O’Keefe himself put it, apparently investigative journalism doesn’t meet YouTube’s community standards. (The video has since been re-uploaded to YouTube by a third party.)

     What does this signify? Does YouTube have rules, guidelines, or merely personal whims exercised as it pleases its insiders to do so? Should YouTube continue to get away with such behavior in contravention of its supposed standards, what message will that deliver to the rest of Big Tech, most particularly the “social media” companies that constitute the contemporary “town square?”

     Alternative, freedom-of-expression-oriented services such as Gab and BitChute should beware. They’ve been targeted for takedown by the forces behind the practices at Google, YouTube, Pinterest, et alii, precisely because they don’t censor or suppress content their owners and administrators disagree with. If the Left-colonized behemoths of Big Tech can’t break them, the Left’s next step will be to try to infiltrate them and colonize them, just as they’ve infiltrated, colonized, and conquered Google and the rest from within. Remember Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics. This process is founded on the essentials of human motivation: what we prize most, we are most willing to labor for. Like the Peter Principle, Parkinson’s Laws, and The Law of Unintended Consequences, it never sleeps.

     Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom – and freedom of expression is the first freedom of all.

It’s War To The Knife Time (UPDATED)

     We’ve already had indications of this. AntiFa committing mass assaults and vandalism and getting away with it. Organized bands of hecklers shutting down talks by conservative and libertarian spokesmen. Public harassment of Republican Congressmen and Trump Administration figures. Major Web service providers Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube censoring anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. And of course, pustules on the body politic such as Maxine Waters and Eric Holder slyly encouraging all the above and more.

     The latest casualty brings a unique poignancy to the situation:

     If you’re unfamiliar with Gab.com, it’s a Twitter replacement that doesn’t censor. It excludes illegal materials – e.g., child porn, doxxing, threats of violence – but that’s all. Everyone is welcome to say whatever he pleases as long as what he posts doesn’t violate the law. Its founder and chief executive, Andrew Torba, has been stalwart in his defense of absolutely free expression. Yea verily, even for folks whose views nearly everyone would find repugnant.

     But the Left is determined that we in the Right shall not be permitted to express ourselves. So ever since this affront to Leftist domination of social media got seriously rolling, the Left has conducted a campaign to have Gab.com “deplatformed:” i.e., deprived of a Web host, payment processors, and anything else a social medium requires for survival.

     Web hosts and payment processors are apparently pusillanimous enough to be bullied into denying Gab.com their services. As of this morning, Web host provider Joyent has pulled its service out from under Gab’s site. The rationale? Pittsburgh synagogue shooting suspect Robert Bowers had posted there:

     The alleged gunman in Saturday’s mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue spewed anti-Semitic posts on a social media platform where he claimed that Jews were "the enemy of white people," according to a report.

     Two hours before Robert Bowers, 46, allegedly burst into the Tree of Life Synagogue and opened fire during a Shabbat service, he posted on the chat site Gab.com about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the New York Times reported.

     People like Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton – the lowest and most vicious dregs of humanity – can say anything they like at Facebook and Twitter, including a huge amount of anti-Semitic vitriol...with no consequences. But for Gab.com to allow an anti-Semite to express himself is unacceptable? Gab.com is somehow responsible for what this maniac did in the flesh?

     I hardly need to draw my intelligent Gentle Readers a cartoon.

---

     The Left has figured it out: If we can keep Americans in the Right from finding and communicating with one another, we can keep them feeling isolated and helpless. They’re doing everything they can to bring that about. The elimination of relatively young, relatively small social-medium Gab.com indicates that the Left has resolved that its silence-and-isolate strategy shall be seamless.

     Does that put you in mind of anything else. Gentle Reader? Perhaps a passage from a famous novel?

     “Yes, I suppose I should explain,” said Dr. Ferris, “that we wish to get your signature early in the day in order to announce the fact on a national news broadcast. Although the gift program has gone through quite smoothly, there are still a few stubborn individualists left, who have failed to sign—small fry, really, whose patents are of no crucial value, but we cannot let them remain unbound; as a matter of principle, you understand. They are, we believe, waiting to follow your lead. You have a great popular following, Mr. Rearden, much greater than you suspected or knew how to use. Therefore, the announcement that you have signed will remove the last hopes of resistance and, by midnight, will bring in the last signatures, thus completing the program on schedule.” [Emphasis added by FWP]

     There are still people who laugh at Rand’s nightmare vision. There are still people who say, to themselves if not to others, “Oh, it will never get as bad as that!” or “Well, freedom of speech is all very well in theory, but you have to draw the line somewhere.”

     Some years ago, Jonah Goldberg, whom I once respected, wrote that everyone is in favor of censorship; we just want to censor different things. Perhaps he’s reconsidered. As I disagreed with him then just as now, I don’t have to.

---

     Allow me to reprise a snippet from another visionary, the late Dr. Clarence Carson:

     [W]e are told that there is no need to fear the concentration of power in government so long as that power is checked by the electoral process. We are urged to believe that so long as we can express our disagreement in words, we have our full rights to disagree. Now both freedom of speech and the electoral process are important to liberty, but alone they are only the desiccated remains of liberty. However vigorously we may argue against foreign aid, our substance is still drained away in never-to-be-repaid loans. Quite often, there is not even a candidate to vote for who holds views remotely like my own. To vent one's spleen against the graduated income tax may be healthy for the psyche, but one must still yield up his freedom of choice as to how his money will be spent when he pays it to the government. The voice of electors in government is not even proportioned to the tax contribution of individuals; thus, those who contribute more lose rather than gain by the "democratic process." A majority of voters may decide that property cannot be used in such and such ways, but the liberty of the individual is diminished just as much as in that regard as if a dictator had decreed it. Those who believe in the redistribution of wealth should be free to redistribute their own, but they are undoubtedly limiting the freedom of others when they vote to redistribute theirs.

     Effective disagreement means not doing what one does not want to do as well as saying what he wants to say. What is from one angle the welfare state is from another the compulsory state. Let me submit a bill of particulars. Children are forced to go to school. Americans are forced to pay taxes to support foreign aid, forced to support the Peace Corps, forced to make loans to the United Nations, forced to contribute to the building of hospitals, forced to serve in the armed forces. Employers are forced to submit to arbitration with labor leaders. Laborers are forced to accept the majority decision. Employers are forced to pay minimum wages, or go out of business. But it is not even certain that they will be permitted by the courts to go out of business. Railroads are forced to charge established rates and to continue services which may have become uneconomical. Many Americans are forced to pay Social Security. Farmers are forced to operate according to the restrictions voted by a majority of those involved. The list could be extended, but surely the point has been made.

     Dr. Carson was quite as incisive as Rand. Yet he might not have anticipated that once freedom of speech became dangerous to the Left, it would strive to eliminate that vestige of American liberty just as it had striven to eliminate all the previous ones. Note also how Leftists have striven to corrupt the electoral system. They can’t abide that any longer, either; after all, it rejected their anointed candidate in favor of a real estate magnate from Queens!

     There’s a moral here, and it shouldn’t take a lot of skull sweat to divine it.

---

     We are at the edge of the abyss. We are quite literally fighting to remain even slightly free. And we are losing.

     We can afford no more prissy reservations about tactics. If we insist on keeping to Marquess of Queensberry rules while the Left batters us with bats and stomps our fallen bodies with spiked boots, we might as well surrender now.

     I trust that no more need be said.

     UPDATE: Read this if you have any remaining doubts.

Quickies: From The Left Wing Giveaways Dept.

     It’s been said, with much justice, that whatever the Left is currently accusing its adversaries of is exactly what the Left has been doing. In consequence, the Left’s reaction to being caught at this is often hilarious beyond words. We have a fresh example today:

     State University of New York at Oswego administrator has reprimanded a conservative student for delivering an “uncomfortable” speech during an “Open Mic” event last month.

     According to an email obtained by Campus Reform, the school’s Alcohol and Other Drug Program Coordinator, Trisha DeWolf, contacted student Nicole Miller on May 2, stressing that some Open Mic attendees were disturbed by her presentation criticizing liberal intolerance on campus.

     “It was brought to my attention that students were uncomfortable with the letter that Nicole read during open mic last week,” the official wrote in the email. “While I am in support of your freedom of speech, I was implored to reach out you both by more than one student.”

     “Anytime I receive a complaint I have to follow up,” she continued. “The unwritten policy has always been after one complaint, you receive a verbal warning and any complaint after than may result in being asked to not perform at open mic. I’ve already had to utilize this unwritten rule once this semester.”

     The letter, which Miller read during the event at the school’s Lifestyle Center, describes the experience of a “conservative woman” on a “liberal campus” and criticises liberal students for their treatment of Republican classmates.

     “How dare you accuse us of cruelty and intolerance! We’ll punish you for that!” Shades of Islamic peacefulness, eh, Gentle Reader? Miss Miller showed exemplary restraint in her response to the would-be campus speech commissar:

     Miller responded to DeWolf’s email by defending her speech and stressing that she has a right to express her own opinion about the political climate on campus.

     “I’m not going to apologize for standing up for what I believe in,” she wrote. “I’m ashamed that it’s come to this, but I’m not ashamed for standing up for my views.”

     Miss Miller is considerably braver than most college students who share her views. Hers is an important marker in the battle for freedom of expression. Please give this episode as much publicity as you can manage.

Censorship Via Corporate Action

Censorship is not permitted by government, under the Constitution.

However, Leftists have gotten around that little problem by targeting the Social Media Giants for cooperation with their aim of shutting up opposition. David Horowitz's Front Page has a post detailing the ways that Leftists are seeking that aim.

Facebook has been a particularly heavy-handed suppressor of Free Speech. The site has used both algorithms and people to weed out what it terms "hate speech". The result:

The company says it now ­deletes about 288,000 hate-speech posts a month.

But activists say that Facebook’s censorship standards are so unclear and biased that it is impossible to know what one can or cannot say.

One of the people that is concerned about FB censorship is Susan Benesch.

“Facebook is regulating more human speech than any government does now or ever has,” said Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project, a nonprofit group that researches the intersection of harmful online content and free speech. “They are like a de facto body of law, yet that law is a secret.”

So, is the answer to empower this project?

No. Their logo tells their viewpoint.

In their little world, speech is as potentially violent as a bomb. In their words:

Dangerous Speech is any form of expression (speech, text, or images) that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or participate in violence against members of another group

 Their Guidelines for determining whether speech is dangerous are available here. I strongly suggest that you read it. It is chilling, as it gently, kindly, oh-so-reasonably lays out a case for destroying the most important of the American Rights.

Here is the profile information for Susan Benesch, the director of that project.