Search Results for: shapes of things
January 20, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Has FBI Director Christopher Wray said word one about the supervisory role played by the FBI with Twitter under the old regime? Not to my knowledge. We have sought to highlight it in our Notes on the Twitter Files. Speaking at the annual World Economic Forum jamboree in Davos yesterday, Wray seemed to allude to the FBI’s supervision of Big Tech: I think the sophistication of the private sector is
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November 1, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I started this series to document our movement toward the world of 1984. Big Tech has featured prominently in it. In Department of Homeland Security documents reviewed by the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang, we see the Biden administration going full Big Brother. Their story reporting on the DHS documents — some leaked, some obtained via Missouri v. Biden, some public — is “Truth Cops.” DHS has gone into
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September 18, 2022 — Scott Johnson
It is past time to resume my “Shapes of things” series on our Orwellian present. This is approximately the thirty-third installment, but the first since January 1 of this year. I have fallen down on the job. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs convened on Wednesday to hear from current and former social media executives. The hearing was called to address the impact of social media on
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January 1, 2022 — Scott Johnson
New York Post columnist Miranda Devine has committed the story of the laptop from hell to book form. Published on November 30, the book is Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide. The story is familiar to Power Line readers, yet in Devine’s telling it comes infuriatingly to life — an almost unbelievable story of censorship and suppression in the land
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July 16, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The sickening Jen Psaki announced yesterday that the Biden administration is advising Facebook on “misinformation” in posts bearing on Covid vaccines. In collaboration with the administration Facebook is expected to follow up in the appropriate fashion. Psaki treats it as another day at the office, but this manifestation of the censorship imperative that Facebook has taken up is of course deeply alarming. Let it be duly noted. There are of
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April 9, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Our friend Roger Kimball wears hats including that of the publisher of Encounter Books. Roger writes us with this public service announcement: Amazon made headlines in February when they got into the censorship business. Without notice or warning, they summarily delisted Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, a thoughtful, deeply researched, and humane study that I published at Encounter Books some three years ago. But
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April 6, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Our friend John Eastman is the former law clerk to Clarence Thomas and former Chapman University law professor. John was in the news this past January in connection with election related advice he rendered in the Oval Office to President Trump and Vice President Pence. John recently sat for an interview on issues of election fraud with Spectator Washington editor Amber Athey. The Spectator’s pseudonymous Cockburn now reports that YouTube
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March 22, 2021 — Scott Johnson
In parts 18, 20, and 27 of this series we noted Amazon’s suppression of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement, by Ryan Anderson. Anderson is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the founding editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. Anderson’s book was published by Encounter Books under the leadership of publisher Roger Kimball. Roger took up
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March 14, 2021 — Scott Johnson
In earlier installments of this series we noted Amazon’s suppression of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement, by Ryan Anderson. Anderson is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the founding editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. Anderson’s book was published by Encounter Books under the leadership of publisher Roger Kimball. Roger now takes up the story
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March 4, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Under the RealClear banner Christian Toto has an excellent account of conservative humorists laboring under the arbitrary application of “community standards” by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media giants: “So This Conservative Comic Goes on Social Media and….” Christian covers show business at Hollywood in Toto and does an excellent job in the RealClear column that belongs in this series.
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March 3, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The New York Times is a sick institution, but it is representative in a way that signifies. It is in the grip of the cultural totalitarian madness that has become something like regular order in the schools, the press, Big Tech and corporate titans, the world of the prestige nonprofits, and other precincts where the sick left holds sway. I would like to say other precincts where reality is optional,
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March 2, 2021 — Scott Johnson
On Sunday, with CPAC’s permission, Minnesota’s scrappy Alpha News posted the video of President Trump’s CPAC speech on the Alpha News YouTube channel. (I am a member of the Alpha News board.) YouTube removed the video and called strike one on Alpha News for posting it. Below is a screenshot of the notice from YouTube. Alpha News filed this appeal with the powers that be at YouTube: President Trump’s speech
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February 26, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Michael Powell’s New York Times story on the Smith College nightmare provides a useful summary of the events. Powell’s story also links to the 35-page report commissioned by the college. The madness at the heart of the story has engulfed our country and our culture, as we saw in the riots of this past summer. Tucker Carlson reviewed the Smith College story in a 12-minute segment of his FOX News
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February 25, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Amazon isn’t talking about its suppression of Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally, but it has referred an inquiring reporter to its new hate speech policy. So Daniel Payne reports at Just the News. I infer that Amazon isn’t talking, however, because there is nothing that can reasonably described as hate speech in Anderson’s book. Anderson himself comments in his First Things essay “When Amazon erased my book.” The Washington
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February 24, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Hoover Institution fellows Scott Atlas, Niall Ferguson, and Victor Davis Hanson were the subject of diatribes in a recent meeting of the Stanford Faculty Senate. The four professors who disparaged them (Joshua Landy, Stephen Monismith, David Palumbo-Liu and David Spiegel) “then subsequently published a farrago of falsehoods directed against various fellows of the Hoover Institution.” To wit: Their complaint was, first, that the Hoover fellows’ views were unapologetically conservative and,
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February 23, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday we noted in part 18 that Amazon had silently removed Ryan Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally. Steve has related observations in the adjacent post. Anderson’s book fails to conform to the woke party line now enforced by Big Tech. What does Amazon have to say about what it has done? I thought readers might be interested to know that Amazon isn’t talking — isn’t talking so far, anyway
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February 23, 2021 — Scott Johnson
“Death to me!” is the title of the best column I have read on the sordid ritual of public confessions following the “woke” party line. By David Mikics, the column draws on the history of false confessions by Communists caught up in the purges of the Soviet Union’s Stalin era. It is a history with which every literate American should be familiar, but it appears to be as obscure in
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