Conservatism Is Prohibited

I wrote earlier today about the Democrats’ unprecedented attempts to criminalize disagreement with their policies or criticism of their regime. These are more examples, from today’s news, of the suppression of conservative thought, not necessarily through criminal prosecution.

First, Scott Adams’ “Dilbert” comic strip has lost 77 newspapers, apparently because it ridiculed “woke” doctrine:

The cartoon strip Dilbert has been removed from almost 80 US newspapers after it started poking fun at “wokeness”, according to its author.
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[A]ccording to Adams, its removal from 77 titles owned by Lee Enterprises came after he began mocking “ESG” — environmental, social and governance, or the practice of looking at issues such as diversity and environmentalism when making financial decisions.
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Adams said that “wokeness . . . permeated from ESG” and had provided inspiration for Dilbert strips. One of the cartoon’s latest characters is Dave, who is black but identifies as white.

In a recent strip, a manager explains to Dave how the company can increase its ESG rating. “Dave, I need to boost our company’s ESG rating, so I’m promoting you to be our CTO. I know you identify as white, so that won’t help our ESG scores, but would it be too much trouble to identify as gay?” the boss asks.

“Depends on how hard you want me to sell it,” Dave says. “Just wear better shirts,” the manager replies.

Adams said that some newspapers had had concerns about his cartoons after receiving complaints about the content, but that he was not sure whether that had contributed to their removal. He described the personal financial blow of Dilbert’s removal as “substantial”.

A second case comes from the U.K. and involves PayPal. The Telegraph reports:

[I]n the digital world, life outside the mainstream is becoming harder. All it takes is to tweak a censorship algorithm then: presto! …

It all moved up a gear this week when PayPal closed the accounts of the Free Speech Union and the anti-lockdown Daily Sceptic with no explanation given. The latest victim is the UsForThem campaign, which sought to highlight the impact of school closures during lockdown. They use PayPal to fundraise, but the account has been suspended. Given PayPal’s dominance of the market, it’s quite a problem.

Tech giants are universally hostile to free speech, so shutting down the Free Speech Union–which gets a third of its membership fees through PayPal–is no surprise. The other two are anti-lockdown and anti-school closure organizations. This is a continuation of the tech monopolies’ censorship of any dissent from unprecedented government public health measures as “disinformation” that must be banned. As it turned out, those who spread “disinformation” had a track record at least as good as the international public health establishment.

But now, the lockdowns are over and the kids are back in school. So why are these organizations now being censored? Because they are retrospectively critical of the British government. The current censorship isn’t about public health, it is strictly about regime protection. There is a technical term for a society in which government works through ostensibly private entities to enforce its dictates. It starts with an F.

Finally, Mike Lindell is back in the news. You may remember that the FBI caught Lindell red-handed driving through a Hardee’s and confiscated his cell phone. The warrant supporting that seizure has now emerged. The Epoch Times writes:

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is being investigated by the Justice Department (DOJ) over alleged identity theft and damage to a protected computer relating to an alleged breach of voting machines in Colorado, court documents show.

Of course the “identity theft” and “damage to a protected computer” have to do with Lindell’s role in questioning the integrity of 2020 election results.

Lindell filed a lawsuit earlier this week against the DOJ and the FBI after agents seized his mobile phone while he was at a Hardee’s drive-through in Mankato, Minnesota, earlier this month.
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According to the lawsuit, the search and seizure warrant was issued by Magistrate Judge Tony N. Leung on Sept. 7, 2022.

Tony Leung was an associate in my law firm before he became a magistrate.

The warrant states that Lindell is being probed by the DOJ over alleged identity theft, intentional damage to a protected computer, and conspiracy to commit identity theft or intentionally damage a protected computer.

Mike Lindell is a wealthy man who wasn’t trying to steal someone else’s identity for fraudulent purposes, and he doesn’t go around bashing computers with a baseball bat. This all has to do with his opposition to the regime.

The FBI’s investigation apparently is going after attempts to prove that Arizona’s official returns were incorrect. There is more at the link, but briefly:

It further states that Lindell is among several other individuals, including Mesa County, Colorado, election clerk Tina Peters, who are part of an investigation into the alleged security breach of voting equipment in Mesa County.

Peters was indicted by a grand jury in March, accused of being part of a “deceptive scheme” to breach voting system technology that is used across the country.

Specifically, they accused her of aiding an outsider to copy sensitive data from the county’s elections systems in May 2021.

So if there were irregularities, the regime doesn’t want them to come to light. It appears that Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice is unhappy with Lindell’s questioning of 2020 election results:

His lawsuit against the DOJ and FBI claims that agents questioned him about a number of subjects relating to “Dominion Voting Systems, Tina Peters, Colorado incidents, Doug Frank, information posted on Plaintiff’s media platform, FrankSpeech.com, Dominion’s Trusted Build software update that destroyed election records, his travel on his airplane throughout the Country and to Colorado, and other matters.”

I think Lindell’s theories about Dominion are probably wrong. Dominion has sued him and others, I believe, for vast amounts of money. Those issues presumably will be thrashed out in court. But why does the FBI swing into action to suppress any suggestion that our loosest election ever might not have been on the up-and-up?

Voting machines aside, the United States has perhaps the worst election security of any developed country. Indeed, many underdeveloped countries would be ashamed to conduct elections so loosely, with such meagre protections against fraud. Why are our election practices so lax? It is because one of our parties, the Democrats, fights bitterly against all efforts, no matter how modest, to assure ballot integrity. We can only assume they do this because they think they benefit from voter fraud, and want to see more of it.

Wherever we turn, conservative principles–normal principles–are under vicious attack. We conservatives have nowhere to run. We can only stand and fight for our country.

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