Free Speech
March 8, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The Biden administration is taking a whole-of-government approach to torturing new Twitter under Elon Musk into silence. Those damn Twitter Files have gotten under someone’s skin and the FTC is on the case, demanding that Twitter “identify all journalists” who have had a look. That should get someone’s attention. The FTC demand is part of a broader investigation on which the Wall Street Journal reports here (“The FTC is also
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February 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I nominate Jonathan Turley for the column of the day in today’s New York Post. Professor Turley documents the confederacy of louts denouncing the Covid lab-leak hypothesis as, well, you know what. This is how he puts it (slightly edited) in what I nominate for quote of the day: For years, the media and government allied to treat anyone raising a lab theory as one of three possibilities: conspiracy theorist
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February 15, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The liberals’ crusade against free speech consists largely of trying to except “hate speech” from First Amendment protection, followed by characterizing pretty much anything they don’t like as “hate speech.” This effort has made considerable headway in the thinking of ill-educated people, especially recent college graduates. But it has encountered a stone wall in the courts. The most recent instance is yesterday’s decision by Judge Andrew Carter of the Southern
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February 8, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Tomorrow the House of Representatives’ Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government will hold its first hearing, chaired by Jim Jordan. The existence of this committee illustrates the vital difference between a narrow minority and a narrow majority. Under Democratic rule, “weaponization” of federal agencies was applauded, not investigated. The committee’s name refers in part to the Democrats’ deployment of the FBI and CIA as partisan agents. Donald
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January 28, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Several years ago, I saw a cartoon that went something like this: a liberal college administrator tells a conservative speaker that his event is being canceled because there have been threats of violence. The conservative asks, who are the threats coming from? and the liberal administrator answers, “Us.” This is, in fact, one of the Left’s favorite ploys to shut down conservative speech. It happened at Florida’s New College last
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January 19, 2023 — John Hinderaker
But some people think they actually do. Check out John Kerry, a man of limited intelligence but infinite self-regard, on his status as a master of the universe, along with the others at Davos: John Kerry to the elites gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos: "It's pretty extraordinary that we, a select group of human beings…are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk
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January 17, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee has introduced legislation that would make advocates of “white supremacy” guilty of conspiracy if someone commits a “hate crime” that supposedly is inspired by them. The legislation, H.R.61 “Leading Against White Supremacy Act of 2023,” introduced last Monday by Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, seeks to “prevent and prosecute white supremacy inspired hate crime and conspiracy to commit white supremacy inspired hate crime.” The
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December 29, 2022 — John Hinderaker
We have just lived through a respiratory virus epidemic and many are wondering, Why did our government and the social media platforms block any intelligent discussion of the virus that was making its way around the globe? In an ideal world, doctors would communicate freely about treatments for a new disease that they have tried, and how, and under what circumstances, those treatments have succeeded or failed. This is called
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December 14, 2022 — John Hinderaker
We know now that tech companies cooperated with government officials to suppress Americans’ freedom of speech. Was that legal? Of course! say liberals: the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies. (This is the first and only time when liberals accord such unfettered discretion to private industry.) But is that really the end of the story? In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, law professor Philip Hamburger took up the question. He
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December 14, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I have been keeping up in my own way with the Twitter Files documented in threads posted by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger on Twitter. I posted previous installments here (December 6) and here (December 11). On Monday Weiss posted part 5 (“The removal of Trump from Twitter”) — a 30-tweet thread. Please forgive the repetition involved in my observations. These are my comments on part 5: •
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December 13, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Liberals are aghast at Elon Musk’s movement to free Twitter: how can we get along without censorship? People might say bad things about Saint Fauci! But Americans are squarely in Musk’s corner. Rasmussen finds an extraordinary level of concern about censorship on social media sites. Almost everyone believes that political censorship is going on: The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 77% of Likely U.S. voters
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December 1, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, creation of a new regime favoring free speech, and promise to account for the platform’s past censorship must be one of the most important stories in the country. The Biden administration has now announced that it is keeping an “eye on Twitter” in the wake of Musk’s purchase. They yearn for the old days when stories unfavorable to Biden were mercilessly barred from the platform.
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November 28, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The big stories of the past few days share a theme in common: • Protests of China’s insane Covid regime have broken out around China. I followed them on Twitter over the weekend (as in the tweet below, for example). People of Beijing are protesting near Sitong Bridge, shouting: “We want freedom, we want freedom!” pic.twitter.com/O12i58jVjr — Xiyue Wang (@XiyueWang9) November 28, 2022 • However, traditional news outlets with reporters
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November 21, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The bien pensants (hereinafter “bp“) are afflicted with heartburn resulting from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. The heartburn is thus a good sign. Ditto with what seems to me wishful thinking regarding Twitter’s impending demise. One can’t miss the intense desire among the bp for Musk to fail. I hope he makes a go of it. The bp devoutly resist a social media platform whose limits they don’t control. I
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November 4, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Elon Musk is said to be laying off half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees. This doesn’t come as a surprise: Twitter’s head count seems absurdly high, and expenses will need to be cut to have any hope of generating a profit commensurate with Musk’s purchase price. But Elon says there is more to it than that. He says Twitter’s revenue has dropped dramatically because leftists have pressured companies not to advertise
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October 19, 2022 — John Hinderaker
It is easy for Americans to forget how rare, and how precious, our guarantee of free speech is. Even the United Kingdom, the country from which we inherited most of our historic freedoms, does not recognize anything like our First Amendment. This fact was brought home by the recent declaration of a “safe zone” in Bournemouth, England. Rod Dreher has the story. It has to do with the sacrament of
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October 8, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday, Florida’s Surgeon General issued a new guidance regarding mRNA vaccines: he said that young men between the ages of 18 and 39 should not be given such vaccines for covid: This analysis found that there is an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination. With a high level of global immunity to COVID-19, the benefit of
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