President Joe Biden supports efforts to crack down on “misinformation” on Big Tech platforms, the White House said.
“The president’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19, vaccinations, and elections. And we’ve seen that over the past several months, broadly speaking. I’m not placing any blame on any individual or group; we’ve seen it from a number of sources,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in Washington……..
The recent decision by the Oversight Board to uphold Facebook’s decision to indefinitely suspend President Trump reignited calls for antitrust laws against Big Tech companies. But Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who is leading a team that could reshape the country’s antitrust laws, says the ban was not punishment enough.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Klobuchar called her political opponent the “ultimate conveyor of misinformation,” adding he should be permanently banned from social media platforms…….
BLUF: Compared to nearly the entire rest of the world, people in the United States have retained the ability to choose to be legally armed or unarmed. Most people in the USA want to keep the option. Nearly all the rest of the world does not have it.
U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- People in the gun culture often express amazement about people who want them disarmed. They ascribe the desire to hostility and malice. It may be true for a minority of those who actively wish for a disarmed population. A significant number, likely a majority, have made a voluntary decision to be unarmed.
It is important to know your opponent and to understand their motives.
Three years ago, this correspondent wrote an essay on how to understand people who want a disarmed population. It was popular but did not appear on AmmoLand News at that time.
I have updated the essay for current conditions.
There Is An Easy Way To Understand People Who Wish You To Be Unarmed.
It takes a little discipline. You may have a little mental discomfort, but it is not particularly difficult. For the ability to understand the other side, assume you have deliberately chosen to be unarmed.
Choosing to be armed is more difficult. It requires action. It requires training. It requires an investment in money and time. You think about unpleasant realities and plan for unpleasant possibilities. You devote time and money to be armed. A higher level of responsibility is required.
Once you internalize the decision to be unarmed, arguments on the other side become understandable. The voluntarily unarmed people we are attempting to understand are those who have moved from the decision to be unarmed, to the policy statement “guns are bad”.
Guns are Bad
Armed people have a power advantage over unarmed people. People do not want others to have a power advantage over them. It makes them uncomfortable. To prevent this, the voluntarily unarmed often want everyone else to be unarmed.
Saul Cornell has always been a elitist political hack when it comes to gun control.
Preamble he says?
He’s trying to make people believe ‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state’ somehow overrides ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed‘ and thus only the military & the national guard – the elistist/anti-civil rights, wanna-be gun controller’s current definition of ‘militia’ – have a right to have guns.
Of course common English sentence diagraming, taught in grade school, confirms he’s lying.
But – again – Preamble he says?
Well, I’ve got one for him. One that I think he believes he can evade through general ignorance due to the lack of civics education:
“THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its (the Constitution’s) powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.”
Bold & parenthesis are mine.
That preamble clearly states that the amendments are to declare certain things that are restricted from the government exerting its powers on them. The Bill of Rights is a list of restrictions on government, not the people, and Mr Saul Cornell knows this.
In another of Heller’s odd intellectual moves, Scalia read the Second Amendment backwards, and in the process effectively erased the text’s preamble. To justify this unusual reading strategy, an interpretive approach that Stevens reminded his colleagues on the bench had never been done in the court’s history, Scalia cited legal treatises written decades after the adoption of the Second Amendment. Once again, to obtain his preferred result Scalia rummaged among sources written a half a century after the adoption of the Second Amendment to find evidence of the text’s original meaning.
Such a move only makes sense if one believes that nothing significant happened in American legal history between the adoption of the Second Amendment and the Civil War, a view most historians would find bizarre and erroneous. Curiously, Justice Scalia did not turn to a legal source more readily available that was written at the same time as the Second Amendment. John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and co-author of The Federalist, had ruled on this issue in 1790s.
Jay wrote: “A preamble cannot annul enacting clauses; but when it evinces the intention of the legislature and the design of the act, it enables us, in cases of two constructions, to adopt the one most consonant to their intention and design.”
PHILADELPHIA, April 29, 2021 — After more than a year in limbo, the University of Pennsylvania’s Hunting, Archery, and Shooting Club is officially a recognized student group.
Under pressure from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and with help from FIRE Legal Network attorney Patricia Hamill, the university relented this week and processed the group’s registration.
On March 17, FIRE called on Penn to stop engaging in viewpoint discrimination and promptly recognize the club.
“We are pleased that Penn finally hit the mark,” said FIRE Senior Program Officer Zach Greenberg. “However, the approval is long overdue. It should not take a year for a university to make good on its promises to uphold students’ rights.”
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is telling California that it can’t enforce coronavirus-related restrictions that have limited home-based religious worship including Bible studies and prayer meetings.
The order from the court late Friday is the latest in a recent string of cases in which the high court has barred officials from enforcing some coronavirus-related restrictions applying to religious gatherings.
Five conservative justices agreed that California restrictions that apply to in-home religious gatherings should be lifted for now, while the court’s three liberals and Chief Justice John Roberts would not have done so.
On April 1st, a federal judge in Arizona sided with NRA-ILA and Safari Club International and held that hunters’ use of traditional ammo does not violate federal environmental law.
The case dates back to 2012, when a group sued the U.S. Forest Service. The group alleged that by allowing hunters to hunt with traditional lead ammo in the 1.6-million-acre Kaibab National Forest—which is authorized by Arizona state law—the Forest Service was violating the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. That Act was originally passed in 1976, to address the increasing amount of municipal and industrial waste that was being disposed of at the time. But over time, it has been used to attack gun owners and shooting ranges.
On April 1st, the judge held that the Forest Service is not disposing any waste by allowing hunters to hunt in accordance with state laws. But the case had even bigger implications. The Plaintiff was asking the court to order the Forest Service regulate hunting. But the states own the wildlife, even while it is on federal lands. “Each national forest,” the judge said, “is required to cooperate with state wildlife agencies to allow hunting in ‘accordance with the requirements of State laws.”’ A ruling to the contrary would have given the federal government the authority to enter a field of regulation that belongs to the states on lands where hunting takes place. Those implications would be huge because 640-million acres (about twenty-eight percent of the country) is owned and managed by the federal government. Thankfully, the judge sided with NRA-ILA and Safari Club.
NRA-ILA will continue to protect the rights of hunters everywhere to use commonly owned and affordable ammunition to hunt and enjoy public lands.
The case is called Center for Biological Diversity v. United States Forest Service. The National Shooting Sports Foundation also intervened as a defendant in the case.
with apologies to the Bard.
“Sounds? Nay, it is. I know not ‘sounds’. ”
Even as the nation begins to round the corner on the coronavirus pandemic, Joe Biden and his Democratic buddies don’t want what’s left of the crisis to go to waste. Enter his “vaccine passports.”
Biden’s White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki says any vaccine passports will be outsourced to Big Tech, but Acting Medicare and Medicaid Services chief, Andy Slavitt, says, “This is going to hit all parts of society, and so naturally, the government is involved.”
Outsourcing Vaccine Passport to Big Tech
The passport sounds like the continuation of ObamaCare, but hitting “all parts of society” to achieve compliance. As I reported in PJ Media, the current goal is to have everyone get a COVID shot, but one could imagine the “existential threat” of global warming or any other scheme Democrats come up with to curb your use of energy or affect the kind of car you drive, for example. If you’re lugging around too many pounds, one could imagine giving brownie points for eating well, which conversely means you’d get docked for eating French fries.
[P]roof of vaccination “may be a critical driver for restoring baseline population health and promoting safe return to social, commercial, and leisure activities.” There is also some focus-group evidence that vaccine passports could help convince Americans who do not want to get inoculated to sign up for a shot. [emphasis added]
As I wrote at PJ Media, liberal author and feminist Naomi Wolf notes that the government and its buddies in Big Tech could put anything on the existing platform in the future and it would be the “end of human liberty in the West.” Not to mention destroying constitutional protections and breaking several laws.
A government interagency committee has been convened to consider how Big Tech might implement vaccine passports to determine if you may travel or go to large events.
Somewhere left behind is the question of constitutionality or ethics.
Over 5,000 foreigners were tracked during visits to mainland China between 2017 to 2018, according to the latest data leak from a Chinese institution. Some individuals on the list say they were only in China for a day or were transiting through Shanghai.
One cybersecurity expert says the latest data leak is unique in its increased sophistication, including the use of facial recognition and the collection of passport IDs.
The information was compiled by the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, a local level branch of Beijing’s main surveillance body, the Ministry of Public Security.
The data leak contains over 1.1 million surveillance records and includes information on 25,000 “persons of interest” in China, and 5,000 foreigners, including government officials and employees of Mitsubishi and U.S. manufacturing giant 3M.
Gun control activists are growing increasingly frustrated with the fact that even with Democrats in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, their agenda is still in doubt on Capitol Hill. A new piece at POLITICO highlights the palpable sense of desperation starting to emanate from anti-gun organizations like Everytown for Gun Safety and its affiliate Moms Demand Action, where activists know that their window of opportunity to put new restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms is closing. The razor-thin Democratic majority in the House and Senate could very well disappear after the 2022 midterms, and activists
For the gun reform movement — a centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s agenda for at least a quarter century — the question this week has become, if not now, when?
… It’s a pivotal moment for gun politics. The history of midterm elections suggests Democrats are at risk of losing the House next year, shrinking their window for legislative victories.
“The time is definitely now,” said Peter Ambler, executive director of the gun-control group Giffords. “We can’t wait.”
There’s a muddled message coming from the anti-gun advocates. On the one hand, they say that now is the time, knowing that they’re likely to lose ground in next year’s elections, but they’re still trying to spin their movement as one that’s growing in popularity across the country.
Tom Sullivan, a Colorado state lawmaker who sought elected office after his son, Alex, was killed in the Aurora theater shooting in 2012, said the climate surrounding gun legislation has “obviously” shifted — as evidenced by his own election and those of other survivors of victims of gun violence, including Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia, whose teenage son was shot to death in 2012. Gun control was a winning issue for Democrats in some congressional swing districts nationally in the midterm elections in 2018.
“We can run on this issue, and we can win elections on this issue,” Sullivan said. “Quite obviously, the tone has changed.”
Sullivan’s comments ignore the fact that, despite spending tens of millions of dollars in states like Iowa, Minnesota, and Texas in an attempt to flip state legislatures into anti-gun majorities, the 2020 elections actually resulted in Republican gains at the state level. Republicans in Iowa just sent a Constitutional Carry bill to the desk of Gov. Kim Reynolds, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has called for (and is likely to receive) a Second Amendment Sanctuary measure from lawmakers in Austin.
At the federal level, Democrats and gun control activists lost ground in the House, and were it not for the absolute sh*tshow in the Georgia Senate runoffs, Republicans would still be in control of the U.S. Senate. The gun control movement didn’t receive a mandate in the 2020 elections, but they have to act like they did because they know that they’re likely to be in an even worse position after the midterms.
In that sense, the gun control groups are right that this is the best position for the movement in decades, but that doesn’t mean that they’re still in a great position to get what they want. As long as it still takes 60 votes to pass most legislation through the Senate, the prospects for new gun control laws is murky at best. That’s why you’ll be seeing more calls from gun control groups to nuke the filibuster in the coming days and weeks.
The gun control debate has put more pressure on Democrats to abandon the legislative filibuster in the Senate, broadening the range of constituencies lobbying for the change. Lonnie Phillips, whose daughter was killed in Aurora and who now advocates on behalf of survivors of gun violence, said, “The best thing that can happen right now — the one thing I would give everything up for — is get rid of the filibuster so we can pass some laws.”
If the filibuster goes away, the least of our worries will be the passage of gun control bills like H.R. 8 and H.R. 1446. At that point, Democrats would try to ram through Biden’s gun ban and a host of new infringements on our Second Amendment rights, while also passing legislation like H.R. 1 that’s designed to ensure a permanent Democratic majority in Congress. One party rule is completely antithetical to the very idea of the United States, and it would be nothing less than a legislative coup. I’m not worried about my Second Amendment rights if the filibuster were to disappear. I’m worried about the future of the nation itself.
When Columbia law professor Timothy Wu was appointed by Joe Biden to the National Economic Council a few weeks back, the press hailed it as great news for progressives. The author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Ageis known as a staunch advocate of antitrust enforcement, and Biden’s choice of him, along with the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, was widely seen as a signal that the new administration was assembling what Wired called an “antitrust all-star team.”
Wu’s appointment may presage tougher enforcement of tech firms. However, he has other passions that got less ink. Specifically, Wu — who introduced the concept of “net neutrality” and once explained it to Stephen Colbert on a roller coaster — is among the intellectual leaders of a growing movement in Democratic circles to scale back the First Amendment. He wrote an influential September, 2017 article called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” that argues traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era. He outlined the same ideas in a 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival speech:
Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview, is confusing. He calls himself a “devotee” of the great Louis Brandeis, speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First Amendment protections that “these old opinions are so great, it’s like watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.”
If you hear a “but…” coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:
— The framers wrote the Bill of Rights in an atmosphere where speech was expensive and rare. The Internet made speech cheap, and human attentionrare. Speech-hostile societies like Russia and China have already shown how to capitalize on this “cheap speech” era, eschewing censorship and bans in favor of “flooding” the Internet with pro-government propaganda.
— As a result, those who place faith in the First Amendment to solve speech dilemmas should “admit defeat” and imagine new solutions for repelling foreign propaganda, fake news, and other problems. “In some cases,” Wu writes, “this could mean that the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new techniques of speech control.” What might that look like? He writes, without irony: “I think the elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s.”
— More ominously, Wu suggests that in modern times, the government may be more of a bystander to a problem in which private platforms play the largest roles. Therefore, a potential solution (emphasis mine) “boils down to asking whether these platforms should adopt (or be forced to adopt) norms and policies traditionally associated with twentieth-century journalism.”
That last line is what should make speech advocates worry.
When the name of your bill directly contradicts the wording of the constitution you’ve probably made a mistake somewhere.
Let’s use this same description for any other bill dealing with any right, especially an enumerated right.
“To regulate raids, to ensure that the right against unreasonable search and seizure is not unlimited, and for other purposes.”
“To regulate detentions, to ensure the right against cruel and unusual punishment is not unlimited, and for other purposes.”
Plug in any other right and it sounds insane but there are people that view the description of this bill as a positive. That should be hair raising to anyone that knows history and appreciates their rights.
In the Declaration of Independence, it is written that it is a self evident truth that the creator endowed mankind with – among others – the right to life. Abortion can be argued therefore as a secular civil rights, as well as a religious issue, and as I believe that life begins at conception, that life has human rights that mere inconvenience can not supersede.
Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson (R-AR) signed a bill restricting abortions, SB6, into law on Tuesday. The law prohibits women from obtaining abortions in Arkansas, with one exception for the life of the mother.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Tuesday signed into law legislation banning nearly all abortions in the state
Exceptions for rape or incest are not written into the bill, which Hutchinson said that he would have preferred in the final version of the legislation. He hopes the law will compel the Supreme Court to review the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion on the federal level.
“SB6 is a pro-life bill that prohibits abortion in all cases except to save the life of the mother in a medical emergency.It does not include exceptions for rape and incest,” Hutchinson said on Tuesday “I will sign SB6 because of overwhelming legislative support and my sincere and long-held pro-life convictions. SB6 is in contradiction of binding precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court, but it is the intent of the legislation to set the stage for the Supreme Court overturning current case law. I would have preferred the legislation to include the exceptions for rape and incest, which has been my consistent view, and such exceptions would increase the chances for a review by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
The new law will go into effect by the upcoming summer, upon the legislature adjourning. Other states have implemented similar abortion restrictions in hopes of the Supreme Court taking up an abortion case and reconsidering the landmark Roe decision.
President Biden’s nominee to serve as United States Secretary of the Interior, U.S. Representative Deb Haaland (D-NM), is yet another cog Biden hopes to fit into his administration’s anti-gun machine. Perhaps it would be more newsworthy if we only reported on Biden nominees that don’t support gutting the Second Amendment, but then we might have nothing to say.
Isn’t it interesting how no 2nd amendment advocate claims this about the 1st amendment?
BLUF:
The Second Amendment is not in conflict with the First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, or any of our other rights protected by the Constitution, and our rights don’t have to be exercised one at a time. We don’t give up our Fourth Amendment rights when we peaceably assemble, so why should we lose our Second Amendment rights when we gather in support or opposition to a piece of legislation or governmental action?
Well, the obvious answer is that we shouldn’t have to give up our Second Amendment rights in order to exercise our right of free speech, public assembly, and private worship. Unfortunately, that’s the world that gun control activists want, and it’s one reason why you’re seeing the rise of Second Amendment sanctuaries around the country; a grassroots response to the creeping authoritarianism of gun control.
The Second Amendment has long been treated as a second-class right by gun control activists and even some unarmed Americans who simply aren’t as concerned about protecting a right that they’re not currently exercising. Unfortunately for those opposed to the right to keep and bear arms, 2020 was a banner year for new gun owners with an estimated 8.5-million Americans purchasing a firearm for the very first time.
As you can imagine, gun control activists are not happy about these developments, and their opposition to exercise of our Second Amendment rights is leading some down a dangerous road; arguing that we must restrict the right to keep and bear arms in order to protect other civil rights.
Law professors Joseph Blocher of Duke and Reva Seigel of Yale make that case in a new piece at The Atlantic, proclaiming that we need more gun control laws to protect “citizens’ equal freedoms to speak, assemble, worship, and vote without fear.”
Congressional Democrats are demanding to know what communications giants such as Comcast and AT&T are going to do about “the spread of dangerous misinformation.” How quickly this country is descending into an authoritarian regime where the government controls speech and the flow of information.
Ahead of a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing Wednesday, California Democratic Reps. Anna G. Eshoo and Jerry McNerney wrote a letter to Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox, Altice, Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Hulu. According to the New York Times, which says it has reviewed the correspondence, the pair is not pleased that “the cable, satellite and over-the-top companies that disseminate these media outlets” – likely referring to Fox News, One America News Network, and Newsmax – “have done nothing in response to the misinformation aired by these outlets.”
The hearing was called to focus on “disinformation and extremism in the media.” In practice it’s a stage for peacock strutting, spin, and projection (a diversionary tactic Democrats are well-practiced in) with the ultimate goal of gaining full control of the flow of information.
The Democrats telegraphed their intentions when Eshoo and McNerney assumed the role of prosecutors to ask the companies what steps they took “prior to, on and following the Nov. 3, 2020, elections and the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks to monitor, respond to and reduce the spread of disinformation, including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels your company disseminates to millions of Americans?”
Eshoo and McNerney further exposed their repressive intentions when they asked the companies if they are “planning to continue carrying Fox News, OANN and Newsmax” on their platforms “both now and beyond the renewal date?” and “if so, why?”
Is this not chilling? The Democrats care nothing about misinformation and disinformation, nor freedom of speech. Their objective is to use the Jan. 6 Capitol trespass-and-vandalize ruckus, as well as legitimate questions about the 2020 election, to shut down the speech of their political opponents. They lust for raw political and social power, to rule, not govern under constitutional limits, forever. It is that simple.
As President Joe Biden set a new record for executive orders in his first few days in office, and as former CIA Director John Brennan compared libertarians to ISIS-style “insurgencies,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a domestic terrorism bulletin warning about “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority.”
It stands to reason that federal law-enforcement agencies may be on edge after the breach of the Capitol on January 6, but Biden’s inauguration went off without a hitch. Threats may indeed exist, but the DHS domestic terrorism bulletin is chilling, considering recent moves that suggest Democrats are planning a new domestic “War on Terror” targeting conservatives.
Gov. Abbott says during keynote that he wants to make Texas a ‘Second Amendment Sanctuary State’ Abbott said he wants to ensure that no government officials can take Texan’s guns
