Well, the debate will be in the can. Trump was typically inarticulate. My complaint about him since 2015. Willy Brown’s former main squeeze spent the entire night lying and projecting without a peep from moderators. To her credit, there was no cackling, and her 5 days of coaching and two-a-day mock debates paid off. But the country, as with every “debate” we’ve seen since Nixon/Kennedy, learned nothing true or genuine.
Ron and I will be back on Friday with our comments.
Some quick hits
As of today, I think we can stop saying illegals are all the salt of the earth and don’t have a negative impact on our society, especially the Haitians and Venezuelans. We’ve let more than ten million into the country unchecked. We have no clue where most of them are and the people who did that to you are now saying we have a housing crisis and they’re going to fix it. You can’t make this shit up.
Ukraine is sending drone (the kind that explode) right into Moscow. This bloody circus will end soon, or it will widen and intensify significantly. There are no other possibilities. Iran is sending in more weapons. That tells you how under-powered Russia really is.
A hurricane is gearing up to hit the gulf coast. Stand by for much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the Green Scam folks.
The Main Event: More input from Ayn Rand.
I’m enjoying Ayn Rand’s compilation of LA Times columns. It’s like a time capsule. It reminds us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. In every article we find a treatment of issues we still wrestle with today. That demonstrates a timelessness most writers would envy.
It’s not ALL the same. In her time most teenagers were far more intelligent, with fewer resources to be so, than their 2024 counterparts. Compared to society in the 1960’s we truly ARE the idiocrasy.
I get a real kick out of how Ayn Rand portrays the Lefties she antagonized (no, that’s not a bad thing). She calls them parlor pinks. These were the suburban, middle- and upper-class bimbos who knew nothing of the world other than that sophisticated people smoked cigarettes and tried to talk like the TV. Few understood then, as now, what the free market is or how you damage your life when you denigrate it to look “smart” at cocktail parties. They don’t smoke as much today.
The childish ignorance of this cadre is laughably exposed in Rand’s sendup of a “free speech” issue. This article demonstrates the same principles you’ll find here, at the P4B. But the specific issue she is arguing is slightly different than the one we face today.
She starts by correctly spanking ABC News and Howard K. Smith for bringing in Alger Hiss, a convicted perjurer and Soviet spy (yes, he was, see the Verona Files). He was taken down by a young Richard Nixon in 1950. In 1962, the network brought him in to comment on Nixon as the former VP. This brought a landslide of criticism from the public and caused some companies to pull their advertising from the network. Reasonable.
Fast forward to today. Now, we have Bill Ayers, a late 60’s domestic terrorist, who is the toast of the upper crust Lefties of our day and sought out for his expertise in politics (!). We also have James Comey and BJ Bill’s wife teaching college courses in good governance. The irony is so thick you can grease your wheel bearings with it.
When ads were pulled in ’62, the reaction from the network and the parlor pinks was to accuse the sponsors of censorship. Half of you just chuckled when you read that because you see the utter stupidity of the accusation. Some of you are shaking your heads saying, but wait, isn’t that censorship? The answer is no.
It was a pity that some in 1960’s, and more’s the pity today, that MOST PEOPLE don’t understand the difference between censoring speech and not actively supporting speech you find repugnant with YOUR OWN MONEY. Censorship is something only a governing body can impose and is utterly unconstitutional in the civilized world. Our membership in that world is about to lapse. But NO company or individual is bound by any stretch of law or ethics to spend their money on messaging they find ridiculous or destructive. In Smith’s case at ABC the interview was both at inception.
But back then, even your average teenager could discern the difference. Only emotional Lefties, looking to shoehorn their backward beliefs into every issue, claimed that pulling sponsorship from a network was censorship.
Back to 2024.
Our fight against real censorship is far more difficult. We are silenced by forces that have the power of the government front and center in the effort. We have massive social networks, founded on the very promise of free speech for all. Come to Facebook, come to Twitter and speak your mind. Search to your heart’s delight on Google. These networks are now monopolistic thanks to help from the government.1
We have the bureaucrats atop the FBI, CIA, NSA and IRS brazenly going directly to the social networks and TELLING them to take down content that threatens their status as the permanent governing class. It’s been happening for a decade. On two occasions they first denied doing it, then said they did it but stopped, then went about doing it some more.
Under orders from B. Hussein (peace be upon him), Joe Biden’s people started a thought police agency (the Disinformation Bureau). When the public flipped out over it, they quickly said they had disbanded it. But the very same people, from that day to this, work closely with crony social networks to suppress speech they don’t like.
Admittedly, they don’t need as much active cajoling of Zuck, et al, to get satisfaction. They’ve gotten the cronies to change the algorithm so that phrases, or even images are downlisted, or flagged or yanked outright. The big, bad, offensive post right now contains symbols like the American flag or a bald eagle. I received a post with an image containing both. FACEBOOK covered it with a warning banner saying the content contained a violent image. AN EAGLE AND A GODDAMN FLAG! Rainbow flag? Sure! PLO or HAMAS flag? You bet! But our national ensign is a violent image. We are a nation of brain damaged 12-year-olds!
But I digress.
We all know the government can’t censor. But I have heard remarkably stupid people, or people just shilling for the governing class, say that this is not censorship because social networks and search engines are private companies and can do whatever they want with their companies. BUT, unlike the 1960’s issue we discussed above, this is not a case of private companies simply making decisions in a vacuum. This the government suborning crony companies to censor on the government’s behalf. You can’t do that either. You can’t contract out censorship.
Add to that the point I’ve made several times on this Substack. We now have the UN, through UNESCO and the Davos/WEF cult getting into the action and pressuring (paying $$ millions) social networks to throttle speech of private American citizens.
It was just last year that Kammy made this speech about “hate speech”. This “lawyer” obviously spent too much time bouncing on Willy when she should have been studying the constitution.
And left to their own devices, these companies wouldn’t spend the money or endure the hassle of throttling this post and not that one. That’s difficult. In their best form they would simply watch for violence2 and report it to authorities, local to the user in question.
So yes, today we DO have Orwellian censorship. In 1962, denying YOUR money or your stockholders’ money from the support of a stupid message is not censorship. In 2024, having the ruling Cabal stroking social media and the MSM under the table to squash messaging makes the ruling Cabal criminals against the people of these United States.
Cheers everybody.
Footnotes below links
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Right now, people are thinking of the choreographed “hearing” before congress where politicians from both sides wagged their fingers at Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Pichai over content issues NONE of the politicians understood. Then they all lined up to get pictures and ask for money from these same people. All the Dems and some Rinos got exactly that along with artificially enhanced searchability and post support.
Calling bearded lady circus freaks “gender benders” is not violence. You can’t even call it hate speech without the ability to read every mind on the internet. News flash. You can’t.
The Debate, A Few Headlines, and Censorship