Scratch a Lib. Find a Tyrant
"Irresponsible content" — this is just pure Orwell. They want to silence you if you disagree with them at all. It's that simple. https://t.co/npAH0925D7
— John Cooper (@thejcoop) July 20, 2021
Category: Scratch a Lib-Find a Tyrant
Jefferson County parks & rec district to take up concealed carry ban as gun rights fight goes local.
LITTLETON — A large special district in Jefferson County may be among the first entities in Colorado to test the limits of a new law allowing local governments to enact gun control laws within their jurisdiction.
The ink from Gov. Jared Polis’ pen on a new bill allowing the Foothills Parks and Recreation District (FPRD) to ban all firearms, including concealed carry by lawfully permitted citizens, from its facilities had only been dry for three days when FRPD staff brought up the idea at its board of directors meeting on June 22.
According to those at the meeting, it appeared at first that the board was ready to vote on the ban that night, until it was suggested that they wait for public comment at the next meeting, which is scheduled for 6 p.m. on July 27.
FPRD Executive Director Ronald Hopp confirmed to Complete Colorado that the board has asked its staff to bring forward a concealed carry ban to a future meeting, but was not sure when that would be.
“It hasn’t been confirmed that it will be at the July meeting or not, but at a future meeting the board has asked to add an agenda item to consider adding a concealed carry ban to our existing policy which bans open carry from our parks, trails and facilities,” Hopp said. “Given the new legislation that was approved by the governor and the legislature … they asked to have an agenda item to consider adding concealed carry to that prohibition.”
The Rise Of a Secret Unaccountable Police Force in America
Our founders knew that concentrating too much power in any one federal agency – especially a law enforcement agency – could lead to a tyrannical police state. It was one of their greatest fears. After all, they knew a thing or two about tyranny, and it was something they wanted to avoid at all costs.
As a result, today’s federal law enforcement agencies have very limited authority and very specific missions: Border Patrol patrols the borders, of course; DEA investigates narcotics; and the ATF enforces archaic alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and explosives laws. The FBI has by far the broadest powers, but it too is constrained by a very specific set of rules and guidelines from the U.S. Attorney General – a process called predication. Contrary to what’s depicted on television, before FBI special agents can swoop in and take over a case, they must first have a federal predicate – they must believe that a federal crime or national security threat exists before they can investigate.
All of these federal agencies are transparent and accountable to the public, although some more so than others. They’re all subject to the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which was signed into law in 1966, and they routinely publish annual reports as well as internal investigations by their inspectors general.
All federal law enforcement agencies keep the public informed of their activities – all except one.
If you want to create a secret police force, the U.S. Capitol Police would be a good choice, since they’re already halfway there. The agency has scant oversight. It’s shrouded in secrecy and refuses to change.
The United States Capitol Police (USCP) is part of the legislative branch, which is exempt from FOIA requirements. Because they report to Congress, the USCP believes they too are exempt from FOIA. I should point out by way of comparison that even the CIA is subject to FOIA. Additionally, the USCP publishes no annual reports, and even the findings of its own inspector general are kept secret and not made public.
The mission of the USCP is to “Protect the Congress – its members, employees, visitors, and facilities – so it can fulfill its constitutional and legislative responsibilities in a safe, secure and open environment,” so you would think that the agency would focus its enforcement efforts in Washington, D.C., but that is no longer the case.
Congress is now seeking to nationalize the USCP by creating “field offices” in different states. Two field offices are planned for now, but more are coming.
“The new USCP field offices will be in the Tampa and San Francisco areas. At this time, Florida and California are where the majority of our potential threats are,” the agency announced in an email last week.
These new field offices will be used to “investigate threats” made against members of Congress, Acting USCP Chief Yogananda Pittman announced last week.
Clearly, Pittman and the agency she heads are reeling from the events of Jan. 6th 2021. In her press release titled: “After the Attack: The Future of the U.S. Capitol Police,” Pittman spells out some of the changes that have already taken place. While the chief announced the acquisition of two new “wellness support dogs” – Lila and Filip – a “pivot towards an intelligence-based protective agency,” the purchase of new riot helmets, shields, and less-than-lethal munitions. Note that she did not identify the types of threats her officers will investigate in their newly created regional offices.
The one thing that is clear, given the USCP’s penchant for secrecy, the public will never know what they’re up to.
The DNC Wants Phone Companies To Police Text Messages For Vaccine Misinformation
Hey liberals,
Tell me, who are the authoritarian tyrants again ?— USA Strong (@Usastrong6) July 12, 2021
The Amazon driver’s attack on an older woman is an important warning
On Friday, a very disturbing video emerged and instantly went viral. It showed a young Amazon driver viciously punch an older woman who had been unhappy with a slow delivery. While the video is shocking on its own, it’s also a loudly clanging warning about the dangers of Critical Race Theory (“CRT”), especially when allied with other leftist doctrines commonly taught to the young, including the claim that words are violence. As CRT expands throughout America, expect more attacks like this one.
You can see the whole episode in this video. Please note that the older woman had finished speaking and was walking away from the driver, Itzel Ramirez, when Ramirez suddenly went berserk – and, as the tweet notes, Ramirez still claimed self-defense:
SHOCKING VIDEO shows an Amazon Driver giving a 67 year old Castro Valley woman a beat down after words were exchanged. 21 year old woman arrested by Alco Sherrif…who says suspect claims self defense. @kron4news pic.twitter.com/umTVNityDi
— Maureen Kelly (@KRON4MKelly) June 4, 2021
Here are a few more facts:
Doug Smith, the owner of the apartment complex, told NBC Bay Area that the resident asked Ramirez about the package after she received an alert that it had arrived. Ramirez reportedly told her to be patient. After 15 minutes went by, Ramirez was approached by the resident again.
According to the sheriff’s office, Ramirez said something about “white privilege” and the resident in return called her a “[expletive].” Deputies say Ramirez then hit the older woman 10 times in the face. The woman sustained injuries to her face and head and likely suffered a broken nose, officials said.
In fact, the older woman did not call Ramirez a “bitch.” According to the sheriff, it was a bit less direct than that. She merely said that Ramirez was “acting like a bitch.”
So, what we’ve got is a situation in which a woman waited 15 minutes for her package and, apparently, complained. Ramirez’s response came straight out of CRT. Rather than apologizing for the delay, she accused the woman of having White privilege. That’s the moment at which Ramirez showed that she viewed herself as a victim of a predatory and evil person.
The next thing that happened is that the woman, having been accused of something patently ridiculous, muttered that Ramirez was “acting like a bitch.” Again, pay attention to the fact that we see that the woman has already turned away when she says this and has quickly put distance between herself and Ramirez. Yet Ramirez claimed “self defense.”
Ramirez’s claim is not as ridiculous as it sounds. Young people today are repeatedly told that, if they’re a member of a victim class – and Ramirez has already established that she believes this – words from the victimizer are violence. They’re not justifications for violence. They’re not things that hurt your feelings. They are violence. They are equal in weight and pain to a physical attack. The days of “sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me” are gone.
If you’ve been attacked physically, you are reasonable to respond in kind. And that’s what Ramirez did.
Ramirez is being held on $100,000 bail and will be charged with elder abuse and battery. That’s as it should be because she is ultimately responsible for her conduct. But let’s be honest here: Ramirez did what she did because our culture has taught her to view herself as a threatened victim and to believe anything a White person says or does is violence.
Given that Ramirez is part of a generation trained to think this way, you can expect that there will be other, similar attacks. This is where CRT inevitably leads, and societal degradation will happen fast. Just think of the speed with which Hitler perverted German culture. He assumed power in 1933 with less than 30% of the popular vote, at which time he ended all future fair elections. Within two years, his Brownshirts and Hitler Youth were routinely attacking Jews. (My Dad escaped from Berlin in 1935 after a brutal beating from some Hitler Youths.)
CRT needs to stop yesterday. Otherwise, culturally, we’re heading into a dark alley from which there is no escape.
leftist tyrants gotta tyrant.
Biden Supports Suppressing Online “Misinformation” Press Secretary Says
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……..
Senator Klobuchar Says Facebook’s Trump Ban Doesn’t Go Far Enough
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…….
I like “What about ‘shall not be infringed.’ do you not understand?”
If they come back with ‘well regulated’, ask them who has the right (the people) and what should be ‘well-regulated’ (Militia).
Eight Lovely AR-15 Facts (#7 Is the Best) You Need to Argue With a Lib
Show progressives your AR-15 and it’s like flashing a crucifix at a vampire. They recoil, hiss, and occasionally soil themselves. They will tell you all day that ARs are the devil’s kazoo. A weapon of war that has no place in your gun safe.
You can’t have real AR-15 conversations with liberal komrades. It’s like discussing an iPhone with the Amish. They know too little about the weapon to discuss it responsibly. They just know what Don Lemon tells them. The weapon has an evil mind of its own. More importantly, YOU don’t need one.
Liberal Fact-O-Rama: If you gaze into a mirror and say ”Bloody AR” 10 times, a redneck will shoot up a Denny’s.
If you find yourself in an online blowout with a Facebook Trotskyite about “America’s Rifle,” you’ll need to know a few things to shut him down. Here are some AR fun-fill facts in convenient (.223) bullet format;
- The AR stands for Armalite Rifle (not assault rifle) because the gun was developed by a company called “Armalite.”
- It is not an “assault rifle.”
- It’s not a machine gun either. It’s semi-automatic. One trigger squeeze gets you one commie stopper.
- They are not used in a majority of mass shootings.
- The Assault Weapons ban of 1994 didn’t keep ONE rifle from being made. It just called for certain gun modifications, like no lug for a bayonet (you know, to curb all the mass bayonet murders), no high-cap mags, flash suppressors, collapsible stocks, and no pistol grips.
- Big, scary AR-15s actually come in many pretty colors. Great Lakes Fire Arms makes one in black cherry. You can find them in camo pink.
- More people are murdered every year by edged weapons (knives, swords, Ginsus, etc.) than by ALL rifles combined (ARs, hunting, Civil War reenactors, etc.).
- More people are murdered every year by feet and fists (Kung Fu, Krav Maga, punches) than by ALL rifles combined.
What IS an assault rifle?
An assault rifle is a gun that fires in automatic mode (machine gun) and semi-automatic. Today’s assault rifles may also have a “burst” mode, which fires three rounds with every trigger pull.
Germany created the first assault rifle during WWII, the “Sturmgewehr 44” or StG 44. Brad Pitt uses one in the movie “Fury.” You can buy an StG 44 knock-off in 22LR (semi-auto only).
Your AR-15 is NOT an assault rifle, nor is it a “weapon of war.” Even if it was, you can’t find ammo these days. Without ammo, your rifle is just a club.
I should have stated this first, but when it comes to the AR-15 nothing you say will change the minds of bolshevik-Amerikans. Don’t waste your time. They will never agree the that Constitution allows you to have one. You’re better off going to the range with your weapon and posting some photos. They’ll see the pics and go nuts. You get some gun practice AND the thrill of triggering a lib. Bonus points if they get so mad they call you a racist, redneck Trump-loving yahoo.
Lefties ARE correct when they say that “No one hunts with an AR-15!” This is true. Few people hunt with them. The AR-15 is for defending the republic against commie pinkos, both foreign and domestic.
Yeah, this is ‘just an idea’
Antifa Assaults Small Child, Seattle Police During May Day Riot
Police in Seattle declared an Antifa May Day protest to be a riot after marchers reportedly assaulted cops and a small child. The rioters continued, marching into the streets committing crimes.
Antifa began a May Day demonstration in Cal Anderson Park in Seattle on Saturday evening, according to a tweet from the Seattle Police Department. The protest became violent as Antifa began throwing flares, bottles, eggs, paint, and a bag filled with an unidentified liquid.
Tyranny is the inevitable consequence of liberalism
The past, we’re so often told, is a dystopia — a cauldron of backwardness and bigotry
Are citizens of liberal societies permitted to question liberalism? In theory, the answer is yes, given liberalism’s commitment to ‘free thought’ and ‘the marketplace of ideas’. Such tolerance is rarely in evidence in practice, however — a reality illustrated in hilarious fashion by a writer for a Washington magazine who recently decried ‘cancel culture’ even as he insisted that: ‘It’s absolutely necessary to de-platform public intellectuals who object to liberal democracy.’
To the liberal mind, to question liberalism risks opening portals to the past, a place populated by tyrannical kings, Catholic inquisitors, Spanish conquistadores, religious warriors, zealous apparatchiks, ‘collectivists’, fascists and sundry other ghastlies. Over the past few years, as voters registered discontent with the global liberal consensus, an entire cottage industry of books, essays and charities has sprung up to warn against revivifying the past.
The past, we’re so often told, is a dystopia — a cauldron of backwardness and bigotry. One that must be repressed at all costs.
Liberals disagree over where exactly lies the line dividing the enlightened time and the dark time. ‘Classical’ liberals tend to mark 1789, whereas ‘progressive’ liberals — noting that much of reality since that watershed year has failed to conform to their own liberal ideal — are uncomfortable with anything not from the present or the future. Hence they now issue fatwas against even the avatars of liberalism’s own recent past (Cher, Dr Seuss, J.K. Rowling, etc).
BLUF:
Newsflash for Joe Biden:
You don’t decide whether or not Americans celebrate Independence Day.
Joe Biden Thinks He Decides Whether We Can Celebrate Independence Day With Family and Friends
“To celebrate our independence from this virus on July 4th with family and friends in small groups, we still have more to do in the months of May and June.”
In March, Joe Biden told America that if we all behave and wear masks, maybe we would be allowed to gather in small groups on the fourth of July.
Now he is warning that we might not have behaved well enough to celebrate our freedom.
Remember when Democrats and the media called Trump a fascist? Good times.
Steven Nelson writes at the New York Post:
Biden warns if Americans don’t get COVID jabs they might have to cancel July 4
President Biden on Wednesday warned Americans they may have to cancel “small” outdoor gatherings on the Fourth of July if there’s a slowdown of COVID-19 vaccinations.
While these always deserve careful attention, overreaching bills like this are usually nothing more than a combination of political grandstanding and attempts to move the ‘Overton window’ to make less draconian bills appear more palatable.
Below The Radar – Handgun Purchaser Licensing Act of 2021
United States – -(AmmoLand.com)- Bad ideas are hard to kill, especially in Congress. One of the worst has been this notion of licensing gun owners at the federal level. This was something anti-Second Amendment extremists have wanted since 1968 – and you can read how angry Lyndon Baines Johnson was that such provisions were not in the Gun Control Act of 1968.
So, for over five decades, Second Amendment supporters have thwarted this goal of our enemies (and people who wish to inflict injustice on us are rightly described as enemies), who think that treating law-abiding gun owners like criminals is the answer to the misuse of firearms. We know it isn’t, as the Brevard County Sheriff lays out. But that hasn’t stopped anti-Second Amendment extremists from trying.
While Sheila Jackson Lee drew a lot of attention with HR 127, the Sabika Sheikh Firearm Licensing and Registration Act, a number of other licensing schemes have shown up in past Congresses, and they will likely show up in the current Congress, and in Congresses in the future.
One of those bad ideas that keep turning up is the Handgun Purchaser Licensing Act of 2021, known as S 770. We covered a similar version that was introduced in 2019 by Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representative Jamie Raskin. Van Hollen is again the Senate sponsor of this assault on the dignity and reputation of those who wish to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
Van Hollen, of course, doesn’t even tell states to impose it. He instead tries to bribe them with federal grants. It’s yet another insult from these Bloomberg stooges who seem eager to cast blame for high rates of violent crime on everyone but those who are really responsible.
Here’s the truth: Less than a fifth of the states in the Union require any form of licensing scheme. If anything, the overwhelming consensus (at least, what seems to be the consensus) among the states is that there is no need to license firearms owners at all. States like New Jersey, Illinois, and Massachusetts are the real outliers when it comes to firearms ownership. Those schemes don’t stop firearms from getting into the hands of bad guys.
In addition, what was noted on the web pages of Ammoland back then still applies. This legislative proposal is pretty much asking to create tragedies like the one involving Carol Bowne. Anti-Second Amendment extremists often claim they are trying to save lives, but it was an onerous law they want to extend nationwide that cost one woman her life at the hands of her abusive ex.
Second Amendment supporters should contact their Representative and Senators and politely urge them to oppose S 770, and instead seek to override state waiting periods and licensing schemes. They also should support the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action and Political Victory Fund to ensure that the current anti-Second Amendment regimes in the House, Senate, and White House are defeated at the ballot box as soon as possible.
It was the 1970s. Dry cleaning bags lurked quietly behind couches waiting patiently for the opportunity to pounce on the hapless child who dropped a Lego nearby. Unguarded five-gallon buckets stood brazenly in the middle of basement floors hoping to entice their next drowning victim. Discarded refrigerators prowled the land looking for unsuspecting eight-year-olds to gobble up. GI Joes and Barbies, with the help of their little owners, were making out everywhere.
It is the 2020s. Entire schools ban peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because maybe one kid might have an allergy. Parents get visits from county protective services for letting their children play unsupervised in the park across the street. Jungle gyms are an endangered species. And third-graders are taught to not impose cisnormative constructs, let alone behaviors, on anyone or anything.
The odd thing is that the events described in the first paragraph (except the GI Joe one) were not actually happening on any grand scale. The sad thing is that the events in the second paragraph are.
There has to be a middle ground.
The Appeal of the New Totalitarians.
I am not a follower or a fan of baseball. But I understand that it is, or has been, an important national pastime, beloved by many, not least, as Andrew McCarthy observes in a recent column, because it offered its acolytes a respite or oasis from politics, an arena where our differences of opinion could be redeemed or at least temporarily forgotten in the benign if intense partisanship of fandom.
It is for this reason that, impervious though I am to the charms of the sport, I regard with disdain the decision on the part of the woke commissars who run Major League Baseball to abandon Atlanta, Georgia. The reason they gave was that Georgia had passed new voter rights legislation requiring, among other things, that voters present valid identification in order to be eligible to vote. They called that a violation of “fair access to voting” when in fact it is legislation, very similar to that in effect in many other states, whose chief effect will be to make elections fairer. You need an ID to board a plane, check into a hotel, enter most urban businesses, but not to vote?
I see that Delta Airlines has also joined the woke brigade by taking a public stand against the Georgia legislation. How will the airline respond if you refuse to show a valid identification before boarding? (After Delta finished with its woke high horse, American Airlines borrowed it to present its own little exhibition of politically correct grandstanding with respect to similar legislation in Texas.)
This is all just business as usual in what more and more seems like the twilight of the republic. The cultural critic Stephen Soukup has anatomized the phenomenon in a new book that we just published at Encounter called The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business.
Rahm Emanuel: Hey, Let’s Strip Gun Owners of Due-Process Rights
The former Chicago mayor’s big idea is not new — and not constitutional, either.
In another case of poll-driven confirmation bias, Democrats have overestimated the popularity of their gun-control efforts as another House bill is reportedly “dead on arrival” in the Senate.
Alas, the bill didn’t stall because of the infamous filibuster — though demanding a 60-vote threshold for legislation predominately aimed at red states shut out of the lawmaking process would be entirely legitimate — but because moderate Democrats like Joe Manchin and Jon Tester would likely have a difficult time supporting the House efforts. Manchin, who wrote a more modest “universal background check bill” a few years ago, represents a state where an estimated 54 percent of households have guns. In Montana, the number is over 52 percent.
But Democrat Rahm Emanuel has an idea. The only way his party can pass gun-control legislation, he argued on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, is by focusing less on firearms and more on people. He reasons Democrats should compromise with Republicans by focusing on “criminals,” “mental health,” and the No-Fly List.
Schumer wants to deem all gun parts as ‘ghost guns’ “any part as a firearm”
It’s always ‘a good first step’ with them and why they call themselves “progressive” because the word implies that they’ll never stop but keep progressing onwards (to their Marxist/Commie warped idea of ‘utopia’).
As for me, I call them ‘enemies domestic’
Chris Murphy Outlines Other Gun Laws Democrats Can Pursue Once Universal Background Checks Secured
During the March 28, 2021, airing of NBC’s Meet the Press, Sen. Chris Murphy (D) outlined additional gun control that could be considered once universal background checks are in place.
His comments came after host Chuck Todd asked if it is a “political impossibility” to secure regulation of certain categories of firearms at this time.
Murphy responded, “I think right now, our best chance to get something passed is universal background checks. And I think that the theory of the case is once we can convince Republicans that the sky doesn’t fall for you politically when you support a reasonable expansion of something like background checks, you can move on to other interventions.”
Murphy then described what some of the “other interventions” might entail, lauding the gun owner permitting system in Connecticut as well as the broadening of factors that will land an individual on the prohibited purchasers’ list.
Eight days after the October 1, 2017, Las Vegas attack, Murphy pushed universal background check legislation, referring to it as the “North Star” for Democrats, regarding gun control.
Ironically, the Las Vegas attacker passed background checks for firearms, so universal background checks would have done nothing to hinder, much less prevent, that attack.
Equally ironic, the March 22, 2021, Boulder, Colorado, attacker acquired his gun via a background check as well.
Moreover, Colorado already has universal background checks. Breitbart News noted Colorado adopted the universal checks in 2013.
If you aren’t on a watch list by now, you haven’t been working hard enough.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is now getting ready to hire public companies, individual contractors outside government, to scour public data and social media in order to provide information for the new “domestic terror watch lists.” From the description it appears DHS is going to pay “big tech” (Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, SnapChat, Twitter, etc.), via contracts, to hire and organize internal monitoring teams to assist the government by sending information on citizens they deem “dangerous.”
Gee, what could possibly go wrong with this?…
NBC is reporting on these new developments as the U.S. intelligence apparatus is preparing to go live with the assembly of lists of Americans who “could be” potential threats to the government; and need to be watched.
However, even NBC is beginning to realize the consequences: “DHS planning to expand relationships with companies that scour public data for intelligence and to better harness the vast trove of data it already collects on Americans. The department is also contemplating changes to its terrorist watch listing process.”
Here’s the article:
WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security, created after the 9/11 attacks to protect the country from international terrorism, is moving toward a sweeping set of policy changes aimed at detecting and stopping what intelligence officials say is now a top threat to the homeland: domestic violent extremism.
Two senior Biden administration officials told NBC News that DHS, whose intelligence division did not publish a warning of potential violence before the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, is seeking to improve its ability to collect and analyze data about domestic terrorism — including the sorts of public social media posts that threatened a potential attack on the Capitol, but were not deemed “actionable” by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
DHS is planning to expand its relationships with companies that scour public data for intelligence, one of the senior officials said, and also to better harness the vast trove of data it already collects on Americans, including travel and commercial data through Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service and other DHS components. (read more)
Expand your thinking to what was initiated with the COVID model for “contact tracing” and you can quickly see how physical proximity to a rogue dissident, a person with wrong thoughts – aka a domestic extremist, can result in you being labeled along with that dissident…. and you are on the list. Then overlay the efforts of Big Tech to assist the administrative state with an electronic trail of your habits, contacts, phone calls, text messages and internet patterns…. and you are on the list.
Remind yourself what FBI “contractors’ with access to the NSA database already did in their quest for political opposition research and surveillance {Go Deep}. Then overlay all of the above and you get an alarming picture that is not something to dispatch.
So 3 television networks, a couple of national news magazines, and a handful of newspapers per big city? amirite?
A Biden Appointee’s Troubling Views On The First Amendment.
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 Age is 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.”
“Big Tech critic Tim Wu joins Biden administration to work on competition policy,” boomed CNBC, while Marketwatch added, “Anti-Big Tech crusader reportedly poised to join Biden White House.” Chicago law professor Eric Posner’s piece for Project Syndicate was titled “Antitrust is Back in America.” Posner noted Wu’s appointment comes as Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced regulatory legislation that ostensibly targets companies like Facebook and Google, which a House committee last year concluded have accrued “monopoly power.”
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 attention rare. 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.
‘A Sobering Impact’: Bill De Blasio Wants NYPD Knocking On Doors To Root Out Hateful Behavior
Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday he would like to see the New York Police Department knocking on doors in an effort to educate people against hateful conduct.
In response to concerns about anti-Asian sentiment, de Blasio encouraged New Yorkers to report any behavior they saw as anti-Asian or hateful or racist in any way. He went on to suggest that, even if such behavior was not necessarily criminal, a visit from the NYPD or another city agency might have a “sobering impact” on people and cause them to reconsider such behavior in the future.
You are not the boss of any American.
Fauci Warns States to Keep Restrictions or July 4th Could Be Cancelled.
On Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that the Biden Administration’s prediction that coronavirus vaccines can lead to relative normalcy by July Fourth is “quite reasonable” —assuming states don’t pull back public safety measures, Politico reported.
“If you wait just a bit longer to give the vaccine program the chance to increase the protection in the community, then it makes pulling back much less risky,” said Fauci, on “Fox News Sunday.” “But if you do it prematurely there really is a danger of triggering another surge.”