We Need a Digital Bill of Rights

I’m old enough to remember when the internet held the enormous potential of democratizing free speech on a level unlike anything the world had ever seen. For the first time, you could communicate instantly with anyone around the world. You could exchange and discuss ideas freely.

Then, seeing dollar signs, the corporations moved in. Cutting in line ahead of even government regulators, the corporations grew and grew, essentially unchecked by anyone, until they amassed so much power that they ended up becoming the gatekeepers of the internet. If you wanted your voice heard, or if you wanted to hang out online with your friends, you had no choice but to go through the gatekeepers, who made you click a checkbox saying you had just agreed to their terms of service.

You might as well have signed your soul away to the devil.

Suddenly, you were no longer in control of what you said online. They were. Sure, you could leave if you didn’t like the terms, but where were you going to go? They held all the cards.

And when the government gave them protection from liability from the things you might say on their platforms, they abused the incredibly generous gift they’d been given and censored you anyway. They would point to violations of their TOS, or they’d claim you were spreading “dangerous misinformation,” but in reality they were just controlling their own narratives. In true Kafkaesque fashion, they might not even tell you what you were guilty of doing. And if you appealed, they could just say no, leaving you with no recourse.

And then… and then, they banned the leader of the free world. The president of the United States.

And suddenly, you realized that these tech titans, rich and powerful beyond anyone’s dreams, now held infinite power in their hands. Not even governments could rein them in. They were accountable to no one.

And that’s why we need a Digital Bill of Rights.

The U.S. Constitution includes a Bill of Rights because enough people at the time of the framing wanted explicit guarantees that the people would be free from the kind of oppression the Redcoats had visited on the American colonists before and during the Revolution.

That was almost two and a half centuries ago, when no one could have foreseen that private companies would ever grow large enough to ruin our lives with the click of a button, or powerful enough to silence the president.

So what do we do? We have constitutional protections against government overreach, but very little to protect us from massive tech monopolies with virtually unlimited money and power. (Apple’s market cap alone would make it the eighth largest nation on the planet in terms of GDP.) There is no constitutional amendment protecting you from having your access to credit and banking services shut off. No Digital First Amendment protecting your right to free speech in the Virtual Town Square, nor a Digital Fourth Amendment that would prevent these same tech oligarchs from digging through your personal data and either selling it to advertisers, using it an excuse to cancel you, or blackmailing you with it to ensure you don’t speak up.

Yes, we have antitrust laws, but we don’t appear to have anyone in D.C. with the fortitude to use them to either break up or regulate these monopolies — presumably because the corporations own the politicians or have enough digital dirt on them to keep them quiet. Probably both.

And so we live under the de facto rule of a tiny handful of billionaires controlling what we can say, what we can believe, and whom we can associate with, leaving us powerless to do anything when our banks, credit card companies, email providers, domain registrars, Web servers, and ISPs can simply cut us off on a whim, socially and financially isolating us. The gulags are here, just in a different form from what Solzhenitsyn experienced in his lifetime.

The problem is made worse when all of our institutions of power — media, education, entertainment, business, and government — are controlled by people sympathetic to the tech tyrants. If we’ve seen anything in recent years, it’s that these institutions are perfectly comfortable with promoting cancel culture and a Chinese-style social credit system to monitor and control our behavior. And in a matter of days, we’ll have a presidential administration sympathetic to their cause as well.

The techno-authoritarians have shown us quite clearly that they’re the ones in charge, and they have virtually every institution of power on their side. A sympathetic federal government can’t legally silence you, but it can get our tech overlords to simply do an end-run around the First Amendment on their behalf.

Can you see why it’s well past time to stop saying private companies can do whatever they want? Not only is the premise false — think ADA compliance, health-department codes, child-labor laws, antidiscrimination statues, and so on — but making excuses for their prejudicial behavior only lets them amass more power and control over your life and the lives of everyone else. (Plus, if private companies can do whatever they wanted, then the lockdowns would be over and small businesses everywhere would be back open.) And make no mistake: The power that you might enjoy seeing wielded against your enemy today can very easily be turned around on you tomorrow.

That’s why this fight matters. That’s why you fight to defend the rights even of those you disagree with. Remember, the First Amendment wasn’t written to protect popular speech, uncontroversial ideas, or only the things you agree with. Popular, mainstream ideas don’t need constitutional protection, because no one is attacking them. But what happens when, tomorrow, someone decides your opinion constitutes hate speech and you get canceled? What then? Who or what will protect you?

Woke capitalism is literally calling all the shots now. Government only exists to carry out its edicts and expand its power. And unlike our elected politicians, the people who run these companies answer to no one.

So the question remains: What do we do about it?

We can stop expressing our opinions online so that we don’t get canceled, in which case the tech overlords win anyway. Or we wait on those with the means (paging Elon Musk) to create digital infrastructure systems that are friendly toward free expression. Or we go back to writing letters and using landline phones, and/or learning how to use radio communication like CBs, walkie-talkies, and ham radio. (Of course, ham radio requires licensing, which means the government could even shut you down there.)

In the short term, the most you can do is to minimize or eliminate your use of Big Tech’s products and services. Find a local company or online small business to buy from instead of Amazon or Walmart. Use alt-tech social media like Gab, MeWe, and Minds (and Parler, once it comes back). Shut down your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Use Brave instead of Chrome for your browser. Use DuckDuckGo, Gibiru, SearX, Swisscows, Qwant, StartPage, or some other search engine not named Google. Use Bitchute or Rumble or Odysee instead of YouTube. Ditch Gmail for ProtonMail.

You can even write to your senators and congressman if you want. Encourage them to take up antitrust legislation against the tech behemoths. Tell them to work toward amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to force social media companies to allow all legal speech on their platforms. It’s unlikely that your pleas to D.C. will get anywhere, for the reasons already stated, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

Ultimately, starving these tech behemoths of revenue is the only thing that will get their attention. They respond to money and power. Deprive them of the former, and maybe they’ll eventually lose the latter.

That battle has to begin with us, and the choices we make. Until we get a Digital Bill of Rights — and don’t count on it anytime soon — we have few other options.

This Is What a Witch Hunt Looks Like

In less than a week, we’ve gone from a demonstration that got out of hand at the Capitol to a level of retaliation that would make the Spanish Inquisition proud.

Consider: Trump supporters are kicked off their planes — for singing the national anthem… and simply for voicing their support for the president. In another incident, the pilot threatened to dump everyone off the plane if they didn’t stop chanting “USA.”

Meanwhile, with a heart symbol above a post showing that Parler has fallen from the top of the Apple App Store, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wordlessly expresses his glee that three corporate monopolies — Apple, Google, and Amazon — engaged in anticompetitive collusion to topple the upstart competitor that was attracting conservatives fleeing from Big Tech censorship.

And without a shred of self-awareness of how his own argument could be turned around on him one day, CNN’s Brian Stelter, whose job exists because of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press, writes an article expressing why conservative TV news should be denied the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press.

Of course, he doesn’t state it that way. The piece instead reeks of concern-trolling propaganda:

Somehow, these companies have escaped scrutiny and entirely dodged this conversation. That should not be the case anymore. After Wednesday's incident of domestic terrorism on Capitol Hill, it is time TV carriers face questions for lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories. After all, it was the very lies that Fox, Newsmax, and OAN spread that helped prime President Trump's supporters into not believing the truth: that he lost an honest and fair election.

Translation: These biased media companies made concerned citizens, which we’re going to smear as “domestic terrorists,” question the official narrative on a completely clean election that we will not allow them, or you, or anyone else, to ever question for any reason whatsoever. And they should be silenced for doing so.

There’s more loaded language in there than you could fit in a U-Haul truck. You might as well be reading Pravda.

Then we get to the heart of it:

Tech companies have community guidelines governing the content posted on their platforms. Do cable carriers? If so, what are they? Surely, these companies — many of which boast about their social and civic responsibilities — have limits to the content they disseminate. It's hard, for instance, to imagine they'd carry a fringe and conspiratorial network like InfoWars.

So why do AT&T (which I should note is CNN's parent company), CenturyLink, and Verizon carry OAN? Why do AT&T, CenturyLink, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, and Dish carry Newsmax? And why do they all carry Fox — which is, frankly, at times just as irresponsible and dangerous with its platform as its smaller competitor networks?

And there it is: Why do these companies, which I’m going to name by name so you can target them with your woke wrath, allow these vile news networks to exercise their First Amendment rights on their platforms?

The obvious goal here is to demonize all conservative thought as dangerous far-right polemics, so that all conservative thought can be cleansed from the national conversation — and so that only the enlightened woke far left can fill your head with their propaganda.

We also have to talk about Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed Air Force veteran murdered in cold blood by a Capitol police officer... because she's now being de-personed in all major media. They did this after 9/11, and now they’re doing it to an American citizen. Because when you de-person someone, you make that person into an abstraction that’s simpler to attack. If she were a protestor, you might have some sympathy for the fact that her life was taken. But if she’s an invader, well, what do you do with invaders? You shoot them. Justification by propaganda.

Naturally, you could never imagine the media slandering George Floyd like this.

Related to the Capitol protest, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (because who else?) is demanding that if Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz don’t resign, then the Senate should expel them. If that weren’t enough, Students and alumni of Yale Law School are calling for both men to be disbarred. And for what? For raising an objection on the floor of Congress to the electoral vote count from a handful of states — which is literally all they did, and which was rejected anyway? (And which Democrats have also done in the past?) No, for supposedly fomenting violence and stirring up conspiracy theorists — which they never did.

And then there’s Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser. Mozilla, whose mission statement is literally this…

…is now arguing this:

Does the cognitive dissonance hurt yet, Mozilla?

Over the past year, we’ve seen our world taken over by one hysterical moral panic after another. This overblown reaction to one event, which pales next to an entire summertime of violent leftist mayhem, mirrors the overwrought reaction to a virus with well over a 99% survival rate.

And these moral panics all come from the same source: from a citizenry raised on trigger warnings and safe spaces, who then went on to college and demanded to be protected from opinions different from theirs. Those people now either control all our major institutions or have sympathetic ears within the institutions.

Thus, “Wear your mask and don’t you dare leave your house, you selfish super-spreader” has simply morphed into “Trump is a Nazi, and if you have an opinion different from mine, it needs to be annihilated by any means necessary.”

The mobs today don’t carry pitchforks and torches on their way to the town square to burn the witch, but the impulse is exactly the same.

Sadly, human nature never changes.

The Purge Begins

Like a midnight raid under Stalin to round up ideological dissenters, Big Tech has been silencing conservatives in droves over the past day. I said the Left will treat the Capitol incident like another 9/11, and they’re proving me right even faster than I could have predicted.

Twitter has permanently banned the president of the United States from its service, and user after user is reporting drops in follower numbers by the thousands.

This is an unprecedented ideological purge.

Even Brandon Straka, who leads the Walk Away campaign, had his group vaporized on Facebook. Straka’s page featured testimonials from people who for various reasons were red-pilled out of the Left. Years of stories, and a group of 500,000 people — gone, with the push of a button, along with the personal accounts of the people who ran the group. Ironically, the ban pretty much proves what those in the Walk Away movement were saying all along about the Left.

Of course, this is nothing new. Many who put all their chips on Silicon Valley social media have seen their life’s work disappear in a heartbeat. Stefan Molyneux was one of the more recent ones — 14 years, thousands of videos, and nearly a million subscribers. Poof. Gone in an instant.

And that’s why I’ve been saying for years that it was foolish for anyone to ever rely solely on Facebook, Twitter, and Google for their communication, their livelihood, anything. Because this day was always coming. From the moment Alex Jones was taken down, Big Tech has been casting its net wider and wider. “Oh, it’s just a few fringe lunatics,” we were told back then. And now the president himself has been banned.

“If you don’t like the censorship,” they said, “then go start your own platform.” So John Matze starts Parler — and now Google has banned the Parler app from its app store, with Apple likely to follow. Both of the tech tyrants are essentially demanding that Parler give up its commitment to free speech. Matze has already told them that won’t be happening.

Incredibly, Apple is demanding that Parler be “responsible for all the user generated content” on its platform, when the very purpose of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is to shield platforms from liability for what their users say — which Apple well knows. In fact, Section 230 is precisely what makes any of this out-of-control censorship completely unnecessary. And yet Silicon Valley ramps up its censorship anyway, while demanding that others match their own level of censorship. “Censor, or we’ll censor you,” Apple is essentially saying. Kudos to Matze for saying no.

Imagine if all these tech companies had shown such outrage over the far deadlier summertime riots that they openly defended, and at times even celebrated. That alone reveals their agenda here. This censorship blitz is not about protecting public safety, as most are using as an excuse, but about using a demonstration by supporters of a man they despise to silence them.

In short, this is Trump Derangement Syndrome run amok. And it won’t make things better, because censorship never does.

And now the man who will shortly be president has vowed to pass a law to combat “domestic terrorism” — a law that will unquestionably be abused to silence political dissent. It will be cancel culture on steroids. It will be used to freeze bank accounts, shut off credit cards, even take down websites. And the mainstream press will do its part to propagandize the public into seeing conservatives and free-speech advocates as an enemy to be destroyed. Just look at how conservatism has already been equated with white supremacy if you have any doubts about how this is going to play out. And look no further than how successfully the media has ginned up fear over COVID to bring about mass compliance with draconian government edicts and to demonize anyone who questions the narrative.

That means the alt-tech sites like Parler and Gab are going to face an exceptionally difficult road ahead. Those companies and their users will be characterized as enemies of America, insurrectionists, haters of freedom and democracy — ironically by the very people trying to censor any alternative points of view. The mobs will be out in full force to silence them, once the media assures the public that “the enemy” is no longer somewhere off in the Middle East but right within our own borders.

They’ve already started, with ABC News’ political director actually calling for a “cleansing” of the Trump movement. They want to crush dissent, and they aren’t even hiding it.

So what can any of us do to fight back? Well, the most immediate thing you can do is to stop using the companies doing the censoring. (You'll see that this blog post is mirrored at Substack. I’m trying to do my part.) The next thing is stop giving them cover with the “private companies can do whatever they want” argument. First of all, we know that the people making that argument would be screaming bloody murder if these tech companies were censoring them and the viewpoints they agree with. And most of them would probably also insist that the Christian baker has to bake the cake for the gay couple getting married.

Second, it’s simply a fallacious argument. Every company has to abide by certain regulations. A business owner can’t choose to ignore health codes, labor laws, or ADA compliance. Businesses can’t just decide not to serve people based on the color of their skin.

More to the point: The phone company can't cut your service if you say something it doesn't like on a phone call. Nor can UPS refuse to deliver your package because it doesn’t like the contents of the package or your personal beliefs.

Social media companies should be no different, given the monopoly power they hold over online communications. Social media, after all, is the new public square. These companies ban people like Trump precisely because of how much power they hold over the public discourse.

This is a serious issue with serious consequences. Critics can argue all they want that the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to private companies, but when corporations hold this much power over our lives, and when all their CEOs are in bed with our politicians, then tech censorship simply amounts to an end-run around the First Amendment. Thus, whether you're censored by the government or a monopolistic corporation makes little difference to the person being censored.

Repealing the protections Section 230 provides, as Trump and others have suggested, isn't the answer. If companies suddenly became liable for what their users said, censorship would spiral out of control. It would probably also destroy any upstart company like Parler or Gab that could never afford to defend itself against the inevitable lawsuits.

The only viable solution I see is to compel these companies to allow all legal speech on their platforms, just like phone carriers are compelled to do. In short, regulate these Big Tech companies like utilities.

The only question is whether anyone in D.C. has the guts to make it happen. We need another trust-buster like Teddy Roosevelt. But with an incoming administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress that wants more censorship, not less, we’ve probably missed our window for needed change.

The most we can do is jump ship from the Silicon Valley tech tyrants and hope the defenders of free speech at Parler, Gab, et al., can withstand the coming moral panic that aims to root out any and all dissenters.

Censorship is the tool of cowards, tyrants, and bullies. Big Tech is all three. It’s incumbent on all of us who care about defending the free exchange of ideas to stop supporting them.

You Can't Excuse One Group's Violence and Denounce Another's

I’m reminded today of why I’m always reluctant to side with the political Left.

I’ve expressed my feelings on the situation at the Capitol. I said that Donald Trump should either resign or have the 25th Amendment invoked against him, for the sake of calm, order, and maybe a little bit of healing heading into Inauguration Day. It looks like neither of those things will happen. Nor will impeachment, as the process would take far longer than the 12 days Trump has left in office.

But the Capitol protest itself? Let’s be honest: It pales in comparison with the endless riots over the summer that saw buildings burned down, stores looted, statues toppled, homes vandalized, police stations occupied, courthouses attacked, and people murdered.

While there was limited violence at the Capitol, the worst of it was aimed at the protestors themselves. The only person killed inside the building was an unarmed protestor, by a cop. (Aren’t we all supposed to get angry when cops kill unarmed civilians?)

And so after reporters literally stood in front of flaming buildings over the summer and told us the protests were “mostly peaceful,” they characterize the protest at the Capitol as an out-of-control riot.

Of course, we all know the double standards of the Left by now. We were told we had to understand the social inequalities that prompted the summertime riots, to the point where NPR gave a softball interview with an author to tell us why looting is OK. But a bunch of Trump supporters march around inside the Capitol to air their grievances, and there’s no call whatsoever to understand what prompted their actions. No, they were simply “domestic terrorists,” in the words of the man who will be our president in two weeks. Not to be outdone in the hyperbole department, Chuck Schumer likened the Capitol incident to Pearl Harbor, the Japanese raid that killed over 2,400 Americans.

It would be easy enough to laugh off such insanity if Schumer’s view was a crazy, extreme aberration on the Left. Unfortunately it isn’t, and the crackdowns are already coming, hard and swift. To a significant portion of the Left, the Capitol incident was another 9/11, and the civil libertarians among us remember the irrational, bloodthirsty hysteria that ensued afterward. We’re about to see a repeat of history, just as an administration that was already hostile to conservatives and Trump supporters is about to take office.

Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitch have all either suspended or banned Trump’s accounts, and Shopify has taken down Trump merchandise stores. YouTube will now issue strikes against any channel that questions the legitimacy of the election, and Facebook will ban any videos from protestors at the Capitol and any calls for protests that violate the D.C. curfew. It will also use artificial intelligence to snuff out any comments suggestive of “hate speech,” whatever that is in Facebook’s view.

This is always the Left’s answer to everything. Ban it. Silence it. They will almost certainly use this incident to move us ever closer to a Chinese-style social-credit system, whereby your access to the economy is dictated by your ideological behavior. Comply with the establishment view, and you’re good to go. Step out of line, and you’ll suffer the consequences. PayPal and Patreon already ban people whose views they disagree with. Credit card companies deny services on the same basis. Websites have had their domain registrars pull the plug on them. This from the self-proclaimed “tolerant” “liberals” in our culture. And it’s just going to get worse from here.

Here’s the problem: Censorship doesn’t make things you dislike go away. It generally makes things worse. Why? Because you haven’t addressed the root cause of the behavior you dislike. And if the only thing you do is try to suppress it, all you’re doing is sending the people you don’t like off into the dark shadows, where they get even angrier, plotting and organizing out of sight — radicalizing because of you, the censor. In their minds, you’re just proving true everything they already thought about you. Eventually, what do you think is going to happen? That’s right: They’re going to explode.

Back during all the 9/11 madness, Ron Paul asked the question that few bothered to seriously address: Why were we attacked? What led the instigators to hate us so deeply? For even daring to ask the question, he was vilified as being unpatriotic. George W. Bush famously said we were attacked because the terrorists hated our freedom, which was of course a bullshit answer. But people lapped it up anyway, while people like Ron Paul were attacked for daring to suggest that 9/11 just might have been blowback against our own insane foreign policy.

Fast-forward a few years, and you have a working class in America that saw its manufacturing jobs go overseas. And as the Left gradually won the culture wars, those people and their concerns were ignored. They were laughed at by the coastal elites in their gated communities. They were useless racists and hillbillies. Deplorables, even.

Then Trump comes along, says he hears them, and promises to help them. He defies all odds and gets elected, and the ruling class dutifully spends four years demeaning him, attacking his followers, and claiming with zero evidence that he was a Russian stooge practically installed by Vlad Putin himself.

Trump is a narcissistic buffoon who deserved most of the scorn he received, but that was beside the point. The point was whether, in 2020, he’d be able to receive a fair election outcome. When the results began to look shady, anyone who raised a complaint was “fact-checked” and told to sit down and shut up.

Now, add all that to a nation whose people have lost their livelihoods, told they can’t congregate with friends, told they can’t go to church, told they can’t protest, told that they’re racists, told they have to mask and stay home until told otherwise, told they can’t have weddings and graduations, told to cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas, told they have to let their elderly loved ones die alone, all while the Left cheers on the violence and destruction of American cities, the critical race theorists who want to replace equal protection under the law with upside-down racism, the Taliban-like destruction of statues, and the draconian measures taken against a virus with a 99%-plus survival rate, and guess what? People are going to boil over.

No one wanted to look at the root causes of 9/11, and they don’t bother to look at the root causes of the anger among Trump fans. In both cases, the response was to caricature and vilify. Has anyone on the Left even bothered to ask why the Trump fans were pissed off in the first place? It’s because they’ve seen a slow decline in their quality of life for decades now, because the establishment at turns sneers at them and ignores them, and now because they felt they were robbed.

It wasn’t just some racist temper tantrum. It was an outgrowth of years of frustration, every bit as much as the apologists on the Left say that minority groups were justified in their violent outbursts.

And here’s the thing: You can’t applaud one act of violence and condemn another. You can’t have two sets of justice. This is the whole problem with the critical-theory people who think the answer to past injustice is to create current injustice. That’s a recipe for social disaster.

Trump is not a decent or likable person. But he’s just a symptom of a sick society. He’s an avatar for people calling out for help. People who want to be heard, who want a fair shot at a decent life, who want their freedoms back.

The Right had their scapegoat after 9/11, and now the Left appears to have theirs.

If you think cancel culture and the woke rage mobs were out of control before, just wait. Things are going to get far uglier out there than they are now.

Enough.

I’ve been thinking most of the day about what to say regarding the events at the Capitol. Three things come to mind.

1. Always Question the Narrative

I’ve always been distrustful of “official narratives,” and the narrative coalescing around the events of Jan. 6 is no different.

Whether you like Donald Trump’s supporters or not, you can rely on the overwhelming majority of them to be law-and-order types. The ones who will dutifully do whatever a cop tells them to do. The ones who consistently support the military.

They may be angry about the election, and they may come out to protest within the parameters of what the First Amendment protects.

But that’s as far as most of them will go.

And that’s why I’m not convinced that the people causing mayhem at the Capitol were among his supporters.

“Oh, right, like Antifa would wear MAGA hats and carry around an American flag,” I’ve seen people saying today. Well, what would you expect infiltrators to do? Wear their BLM shirts? No. They’d dress up like Trump supporters to pin the blame on Trump supporters, in the same way the 9/11 hijackers shaved their beards to blend in.

“Then why did a Trumper get shot dead by the police? You can’t have it both ways.” What people seem to have a hard time grasping is that no one is saying the entire group of people was Antifa. What they’re saying is that Antifa could have infiltrated the group of Trump supporters to make them all look bad. This should not be hard to understand.

So is that what happened? I have no idea. I just know that violence isn’t the M.O. of most Trump supporters. I know them. I live around them. The overwhelming majority of them just want to live their lives in peace and be able to exercise their constitutional liberties.

Remember, they weren’t the ones burning down the country this summer. They were the ones asking why law enforcement wasn’t doing anything about it.

I couldn’t help thinking about the aftermath of the Reichstag fire today. When one German Communist set the parliament building on fire, Hitler, as chancellor, used it as an excuse to persuade the president to suspend civil liberties throughout the nation and conduct mass arrests of Communists, including their party delegates. The ensuing vacancies, combined with a relentless propaganda campaign against the Communists and a censorship blitz to ban all publications not sympathetic to the Nazis, allowed the Nazis to consolidate power. The people, manipulated by fear, demonized the Communists and coalesced around the Nazis as their saviors.

So let’s see. A public fear campaign, restrictions on freedoms, and mass censorship. An act of violence committed at the meeting place of the German legislature allows for a propaganda push to demonize a segment of the population.

Sound familiar?

First they came for the Communists…

Look, I don’t say any of this as a Trump fan. This is bigger than Trump. It’s about how one event can and probably will be used to demonize conservatives in America. Things were already going to be bad, but now, between a de facto majority in both chambers of Congress and control of the White House, the Left will use the events at the Capitol to justify a massive crackdown on conservatives in the name of “public safety.”

It doesn’t matter that the Woke Left torched the nation over the summer. They’re allowed to be violent, and even praised for doing it. But when people came out to protest the lockdowns, they were characterized as dangerous right-wing white supremacists even when they didn’t do anything. Now all the Left will have to do is say “remember the Capitol?”

In that regard, whether the events at the Capitol were a false flag operation or not, it really doesn’t matter. The result will be the same.

Online censorship will almost certainly increase dramatically; upstart alt-tech sites that value free speech will probably be targeted now as well, in the name of “rooting out extremists.” I imagine even the mask Nazis will be emboldened. “All those Trumpsters came into the Capitol without a mask. It was a superspreader event. Haven’t you done enough damage? Put your mask on or go to jail.”

They called today’s actions the work of a mob. But when the establishment media finishes adequately propagandizing the public with their smears against the Right, you’ll see what a mob really looks like.

God help us all.

2. It’s Time for Trump to Go

Let me reiterate up front that I didn’t vote for Trump, either in 2016 or 2020. I would have rather seen him win than Biden, but I also couldn’t bring myself to vote for him. I don’t like him and never have.

I think he’s done some good things during his time in office. I think he gave a voice to those who had none and were hurting.

I think the election was rigged to ensure he would lose. (As were the Georgia elections to swing control of the Senate.)

But I also think he doesn’t know when to stand down.

First, he asks Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes for him. Then he rips his own vice president for saying he’s going to follow legal and constitutional procedures in counting the Electoral College votes.

Look, challenging election fraud where you see it is one thing. But expecting others to bend the rules for you makes you no better than they are.

And boy, that taped speech from Trump — in which he simultaneously insists that he was robbed and orders those angry that he was robbed to go home — tells me that he’s in over his head, that he doesn’t want to think about the chaos he’s wrought, and that he’s probably ready to simply walk away from the mess he helped make to move on to his next grift.

I mean, seriously. You first encourage your followers to come to D.C. to protest, and then you tell them to go back home, all while asking them to meekly obey the same police that executed one of your followers in the Capitol building and tear-gassed the rest off the property outside? That’s all you can come up with?

Instead of pulling it down, Twitter and Facebook should have left the speech up, as testament to what kind of man Donald Trump really is.

I really think the best thing Trump can do right now is to resign immediately.

It doesn’t matter if there are only two weeks until Inauguration Day. It would be a healing gesture symbolizing his willingness to step out of the way to bring some calm to the nation. He could spin it as a self-pitying act of martyrdom if he wanted to, sacrificing himself for the good of the nation since he’s being railroaded out of office anyway.

At least then maybe we could see a peaceful transition of power, with Mike Pence, able to talk and act like a rational adult, ceremonially handing over the reins to Joe Biden on the 20th.

Whether Trump really was railroaded out of office, and whether Biden will be a terrible president with terrible policies, is irrelevant at this point. The optics of such a moment would surely be a balm for a lot of Americans, and it may help put Republicans and Democrats on less combative ground with each other as we head into a new administration, especially after the events at the Capitol.

Most importantly, it would be a deeply symbolic way of showing that America has put the narcissistic shitshow of the Trump years behind it, burying it once and for all.

Unfortunately for us all, Trump lacks the selflessness that such a gesture would require.

I can’t see Mike Pence invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office, either. So I suppose all we can do is hope things don’t boil over before Inauguration Day — or get even worse afterward.

3. Rest in Peace, Ashli Babbitt

Nothing that the Trump supporter and Air Force veteran did today warranted the taking of her life. This is what all governments will do to you if you challenge their power and authority over you. It doesn’t matter what “side” you support. Government is force, brutality, and power. It knows nothing else.

A Cheap C-19 Treatment? A Win for Assange? Don't Celebrate Just Yet.

Inexpensive Generic Treatments Bad. Big Pharma Vaccines Good.

You may have heard the news going around that an inexpensive anti-parasitic drug called ivermectin might hold promise in treating sick COVID patients.

Initial studies suggest that not only does the drug reduce the time needed for patients to clear the virus, but it also may reduce the death rate.

“In leaked slides published ahead of the study's release next month, the scientists behind the research combined results from 11 trials of the drug involving more than 1,400 patients,” the Daily Mail reports. “This revealed only eight Covid-19 patients out of 573 who received the drug died, compared to the 44 out of the 510 who received a placebo.”

Scientists believe ivermectin works against COVID by essentially paralyzing the virus. In addition to treating parasitic infections when taken as a pill, ivermectin is also used topically to treat eczema and as a liquid to kill head lice. It was developed in the 1970s.

But we’ve been down this road, haven’t we? When doctors stepped forward to report their success in treating COVID patients with a drug cocktail that included hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug developed in the 1950s, the mainstream media melted down, framing it as some kind of dangerous, untested fringe drug with severe side effects. If ivermectin shows similar promise in treating COVID, expect the same kind of media hysteria.

You know why they do this, don’t you? It’s not because the drugs are actually dangerous. They’ve both been around for decades. And all drugs have side effects, so that’s not it, either. No, the answer lies in who pays the bills of those doing the demonizing. Turn on your TV and see just how many pharma ads there are, paying for the same TV programs that want you to think that decades-old generic drugs are too dangerous for you to even consider taking. The talking heads want you to think that the only “cure” can come from experimental new vaccines, developed by the same mutlibillion-dollar pharma companies whose incessant ads keep them on the air.

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

A Pyrrhic Victory for Assange

Julian Assange won’t be extradited to the United States to stand trial — for now. Although the ruling is a victory for journalistic freedom, I’m reluctant to be too excited about it — because the judge gave the right ruling for the wrong reasons.

Crucially, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser didn’t reject the U.S. Justice Department’s rationale for the extradition. She only said that Assange was at risk of suicide if handed over the U.S. custody. Assange’s mental health has reportedly been hanging by a thread as he rots in Belmarsh Prison, where he’s kept in isolation 23 hours a day. He’s being held without charge, having already served a 50-week sentence for jumping bail when he fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London for asylum in 2012.

The United States wants Assange to stand trial for espionage. As the head of WikiLeaks, his organization released a trove of classified documents exposing U.S. abuses of power and war crimes. Arguably the most shocking revelation was the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, which shows the view from an Apache military helicopter as its occupant capriciously mows down 11 civilians and two journalists on the streets of Baghdad.

I mention all this because it puts the lie to the U.S. Justice Department’s claim that it wants to prosecute Assange for putting American lives in danger. Assange only released the information that was given to WikiLeaks. He did what any investigative journalist does when exposing corruption and other wrongdoing. To prosecute Assange, therefore, would be to prosecute journalists for doing what journalists do, placing freedom of the press on a very slippery slope.

That means Assange is essentially being prosecuted for embarrassing the United States. It’s an act of retaliation against a truth-teller. It’s an attempt to shoot the messenger. And it’s the same impulse that people in power are using even now to squelch discussion about the virus and the election. The truth is their enemy, and from the time of Christ on down, this is how those in power respond to those who would expose them. Their guilt compels them to silence the truth-tellers by any means necessary.

There may be some glimmer of hope for Assange, as Mexico’s president has offered him asylum. But even then, there would be no guarantee that someone wouldn’t find a way to strong-arm Mexico into handing him over to U.S. authorities. After all, Assange was supposed to be safe in the Ecuadorian embassy. And he was for seven years — until a new president in Ecuador bowed to pressure from the U.S., UK, and Spanish governments and let the London police raid the embassy and drag Assange out.

And so now Assange sits in prison, still awaiting his fate. The U.S. is likely to appeal the extradition denial, so this fight far from over. If the U.S. prevails and gets its way, Assange could face a 175-year sentence, guaranteeing that he would never again be a free man.

And that’s why I can’t get too excited about this ruling. In essence, the judge only ruled that she won’t extradite Assange because if he kills himself, it would deny the U.S. government the right to kill him in slow motion behind bars.

The Criminalization of Being Human

We're living in a dystopian nightmare.

• In Canada, police drag people out of a private residence after a neighbor snitched that there were six people indoors. (Video here.)
• In California, a “Superspreader Task Force” conducts raids to detain over 900 and fine and arrest 100 more, for the crime of celebrating on New Year's Eve. L.A. county sheriff: “I have made it clear that we will seek out and take law enforcement action against all ‘Super-Spreader’ events occurring anywhere within Los Angeles County.”
• In Germany, over 100 people are cited for singing in church.
• In England, people are arrested for hugging.
• In New York state, a bill would allow for detainment of people "who may be a danger to public health."

They’re criminalizing human contact. Hell, they’re criminalizing being human.

All this, remember, over a virus with a 99%-plus survival rate.

And this is what the tyrants in power do to us while they continue to ignore their own rules.

~ Teachers' union leader: “It's too dangerous to reopen schools.”
~ Same teachers' union leader: Vacations in Puerto Rico.

~ Canadian minister: “Sacrifice your Christmas.”
~ Same Canadian minister: spends Christmas in the Caribbean.

~ Bill DeBlasio: locks down NYC and cancels Times Square celebrations.
~ Also Bill DeBlasio: dances with his wife in empty Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

I think that one gets me the most. Can DeBlasio really lack that much self-awareness? Or does he just not care? And if he was there, where were the mobs surrounding him, taking over the square, taking their lives and their freedom of movement back? But no, a whole city of sheep obediently stayed at home like they were told, while their own mayor spit in their faces.

Meanwhile, in London, no one could come out to see the New Year’s Eve fireworks, while the city used the tax revenue of the same citizens it put under house arrest to create a politicized light show, cramming a giant BLM fist down everyone’s throats.

You’re a prisoner in your own home, and we’ll remind you who has the real power when you look to the skies from your windows. We can march in the streets. We can riot, loot, burn, maim, and murder. But you? You stay right where you are until we tell you that you can come out.

As we get back down to business following the celebrations, Nancy Pelosi has decided that the words “mother,” “father,” “daughter” and “son” are too offensive to be uttered any longer. So they’ll be banned in the House rules and replaced with generic words like “parent” and “child.”

But apparently, the terms “man” and “woman” are still acceptable, since a Missouri congressman led the House in prayer and closed by stating “Amen and a-women.” Never mind that “amen” isn’t a gendered word. It looks and sounds like one, so of course the brain-dead Woke have to treat it as so.

The woke gender insanity marches on, as actress Busy Philipps informs us that her 12-year-old daughter is gay and prefers to be called “they.” A 12-year-old child. I’m sure no one put those thoughts in her head. Hell, when I was 12, my biggest concern was whether I could get my homework done in time to ride my bike and play video games.

There’s your world as we venture in 2021. Enjoy it, because it’s going to get a whole lot worse.