The narrative only flows one way. You would think if they were going to do a decent job, they might extend misinformation to both sides of the narrative. Occasionally you know say that it's crazy talk to wear five masks on your face, or to wash your hands until the are red and raw looking.
I like the people that in amidst the debate on masks they ask the question "masks for what purpose?" as if we have been arguing against masking while painting a car, or doing metal/wood work, or while using a leaf blower. They want you to burn calories on the boilerplate issues. I suppose we could do the same to them and gum up their push to have masking back in doctor's offices.
Does anyone know if anyone is keeping all the receipts anywhere securely in some repository that's beyond the reach of "confiscation" by the powers that be? That seems like a project that should be happening. This time capsule of corruption needs to be preserved for all time, publicly.
Also, Commander, I emailed you regarding a collab.
It's a clear-cut case of incitement to propaganda, which is, unfortunately, not illegal. We're going to need a bunch of new laws to prevent this happening again. Unfortunately, they won't work. Our main problem is an ignorant, gullible population who are easily manipulated. Until we fix the failed education system, this is our future.
Learning is harder than many people want to to endure. We cultivate ignorance by actively supporting slackers. Eliminate welfare and they'll become much more interested in learning.
Apparently we who have found these SubStacks are active and hopefully spreading the truth. It did get me kicked from NextDoor forever. They are ardently defending the Trusted News Initiative from which all this censorship is promoted. All per planning in Event 201.
Twitter readers suffered incalculable loss when I got death penalty after posting DEATHVAX videos and harsh comments about Cuomo, Biden. Not to be arrogant or anything
Is it interesting that the CDC wrote the rumor was in regards to male infertility but the examples have as much or more to do with women’s periods? The effect there has been well-proven by now and probably was at the time of that release. I haven’t seen anything as conclusive on the male end… so phrasing it that way seems like a form of plausible deniability. Or am I reading too much in here? It’s obviously disturbing, even if the CDC was 100% correct which they absolutely aren’t.
Both issues were mentioned almost immediately, but quickly hushed up until they couldn't be any longer. The Israeli study I linked to is the best (AFAIK) study done on the male end.
Oops, yeah, I didn’t follow that link. Hadn’t seen that study before, looks relatively recent. Just too many deceptions and omissions to keep up with! I just know the issues with menstrual cycles has broken into the mainstream at this point (but don’t worry, it’s fine, a disease that has a greater than 99.9% survival rate is the bigger concern so get the vaccine that has no tangible impact on preventing said disease!)
You might not be wrong, though. As you point out, the female fertility concerns are way more obvious, so if they focus on the male, which is less obvious/proven, they can keep spinning the "it's all made up by crazy people" narrative.
YHGTBFKM!!!!!! I just made that up, but this puts me right down another sinister rabbit hole….Holy Shit, this is so very wrong. And back to Question#1… why? What is it they are not telling us??
I closed my facebook account in Nov 2020. I HARDLY EVER hear about anything going on, events in my city, local politician platforms, etc. I have to visit .coms to try to find out any info. People and entities have to drop Twit and Fakebook 'cause a lot of us aren't there!
Looks like Facebook et al have turned into "state actors": "Every piece of this reasoning applies to Section 230. In both cases, the government did far more “than adopt a passive position toward the underlying conduct.” Just as Subpart D immunized from state law liability railroads that administered specified tests, Section 230 immunizes from state law liability platforms that censor “lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable” material. Just as railway workers were not free to decline to submit to the tests, so too Facebook and YouTube users cannot decline to submit to censorship; in both cases, individuals who refuse to comply can be excluded from service. And just as the government in Skinner had made plain its “strong preference” for the testing, Section 230 and its legislative history make plain the government’s strong preference for the removal of “offensive” content.
Skinner is, therefore, a strikingly close precedent. Yet it appears that not a single court has addressed the implications of Skinner for Section 230.
Perhaps distinctions can be found between Skinner’s Subpart D and the CDA’s Section 230. Someone might say, for example, that Section 230 immunizes not only blocking third-party content but also leaving it up (although functionally the situation in Skinner was probably no different). Or that for many or most internet platforms, filtering out offensive content is something they actively want to do (although railroads that administered the Subpart D tests would presumably have wanted to as well). Another arguable distinction might be that, in Skinner, Congress had expressed an interest in the railroads’ sharing their drug test results with federal authorities. (Note, however, that we don’t know the extent to which the federal government has requested or even required Google and Facebook to reveal information about users attempting to post objectionable content. In the case of attempts to post criminal or extremist content, it is quite possible, perhaps even likely, that the government has expressed at least as much of an interest in information-sharing as it had in Skinner.) Or maybe it will be said that the implications of applying Skinner to Section 230 are simply so extreme—potentially reaching every website that blocks offensive third-party content—that Skinner just can’t be a good precedent for the internet.
But Skinner is not the only important precedent. Another line of cases provides powerful additional support for a finding of state action here, although the reach of these cases would be much more limited—applying not to every website but only to the mega-platforms like Facebook and Google.
Case law going back to the Supreme Court’s Bantam Books prior restraint decision of 1963 establishes that informal governmental pressure and threats can turn private-party conduct into state action. (In Bantam Books, a private bookseller had stopped selling certain books after receiving a letter from state commissioners listing those books as objectionable and suggesting that the bookseller might be referred to local prosecutors if he continued selling them. The court found “state action.”) While governmental actors are free to denounce private parties for failing to restrain others’ speech, the line is crossed, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and other courts have put it, when “comments of a government official can reasonably be interpreted as intimating that some form of punishment or adverse regulatory action will follow the failure to accede to the official’s request.”
For years, members of Congress have been pressuring Facebook and Google to block (or block more) hate speech, extremist content, false news, white supremacism and so on, threatening these companies with death-sentence regulatory measures, including an anti-trust break-up and public-utility-style regulation. These threats have not exactly been veiled. “Figure it out,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond in April 2019, to representatives of Facebook and Google at a hearing on the platforms’ hate speech policies. “Because you don’t want us to figure it out for you.” The threats have apparently been quite effective. Just last month, one day before another round of hearings was to begin, Facebook announced a series of new, more aggressive measures to block hateful and extremist content.
A number of cases indicate that this pressure campaign might on its own be sufficient to turn Facebook and Google into state actors, entirely apart from Section 230. One of these cases, called Writers Guild, is especially analogous. In 1974, the big (pre-cable) television networks adopted the Family Viewing Policy, barring content “inappropriate for viewing by a general family audience” during the first hour of prime time and the hour immediately preceding. Plaintiffs in Writers Guild sued the networks as well as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), challenging the Family Viewing Policy on First Amendment grounds. Defendants responded that the policy, having been voluntarily adopted by private parties, was exempt from constitutional scrutiny.
In a lengthy, closely reasoned opinion, after a weeks-long trial, the district court rejected this argument. The court found that the Family Viewing Policy had been adopted due to “pressure” from the FCC, which was itself responding to pressure from congressional committees. The FCC had not mandated the Family Viewing Policy, but its chairman had “threatened the industry with regulatory action” and “with actions that would impose severe economic risks and burdens” on the networks if they did not move to block excessive “sex and violence” from prime-time programming. As a result, the court concluded, the state action requirement was satisfied.
Writers Guild is hardly controlling. Not only is it a mere district court opinion about a different medium in a different era, but that opinion was later vacated on jurisdictional grounds. Nevertheless, the case is an important example. It shows that the question of whether, or how greatly, governmental pressure has influenced Google’s or Facebook’s content-based censorship policies is ultimately a triable question of fact—with the state action determination hanging in the balance.
The bottom line, however, is this: When governmental pressure is combined with a statutory provision like Section 230, the result must be state action. Immunity plus pressure has to trigger the Constitution’s restraints.
Consider the hypotheticals given above but now add to them a campaign by governmental actors to pressure private parties into performing the conduct the government wants. Imagine a state not only immunizing from liability private parties who barricade abortion clinics but also threatening private parties with adverse legal consequences if they fail to do so. When these parties—freed from the fear of liability if they do barricade, and threatened with adverse legal action if they don’t—begin taking the very action that the legislature wants them to take, I don’t think a no-state-action argument could be made with a straight face." https://www.lawfareblog.com/are-facebook-and-google-state-actors
Begs the question... how long has this been going on and what topics? Seems to me Facebook became 100% a deep state puppet after Trump accidentally won in 2016.
Starve the beast people, stop using this stuff. It's not that hard - Brave and Brave search for browser, private and encrypted email service, no Google products of any kind, no Amazon and no social media. I've been living this way for years and my sanity is intact.
I had thought Berenson would get discovery but that remains to be seen. I think the efforts of several states demanding discovery will show violations of the 1st by proxy. "Private companies can do as they wish" except when they are agents for the government.
Thank you -- This article is a keeper! I like the last sentence a lot: "Are you prepared to allow the government to throw you in front of the train to save someone else? If not, then demand that the government stop doing it to somebody else!"
The narrative only flows one way. You would think if they were going to do a decent job, they might extend misinformation to both sides of the narrative. Occasionally you know say that it's crazy talk to wear five masks on your face, or to wash your hands until the are red and raw looking.
The proper number of masks is zero
I like the people that in amidst the debate on masks they ask the question "masks for what purpose?" as if we have been arguing against masking while painting a car, or doing metal/wood work, or while using a leaf blower. They want you to burn calories on the boilerplate issues. I suppose we could do the same to them and gum up their push to have masking back in doctor's offices.
Is it getting hot in here? Ribbit, ribbit 🐸
They will try to say that these were just "suggestions," not actual coordination. We'll see how far they get.
Fake book gives CDC buka amounts of money to spread their cvd message is only part. Who can forget the social media barbies, the “influencer”
Does anyone know if anyone is keeping all the receipts anywhere securely in some repository that's beyond the reach of "confiscation" by the powers that be? That seems like a project that should be happening. This time capsule of corruption needs to be preserved for all time, publicly.
Also, Commander, I emailed you regarding a collab.
It's a clear-cut case of incitement to propaganda, which is, unfortunately, not illegal. We're going to need a bunch of new laws to prevent this happening again. Unfortunately, they won't work. Our main problem is an ignorant, gullible population who are easily manipulated. Until we fix the failed education system, this is our future.
Not sure education will help...cattle prod to wake up the Netflix bingers maybe?
Learning is harder than many people want to to endure. We cultivate ignorance by actively supporting slackers. Eliminate welfare and they'll become much more interested in learning.
Apparently we who have found these SubStacks are active and hopefully spreading the truth. It did get me kicked from NextDoor forever. They are ardently defending the Trusted News Initiative from which all this censorship is promoted. All per planning in Event 201.
Twitter readers suffered incalculable loss when I got death penalty after posting DEATHVAX videos and harsh comments about Cuomo, Biden. Not to be arrogant or anything
Brag away! Getting kicked off Twitter in 2020-2022 was the ultimate badge of honor and sign that you had a worthwhile account to follow 👏👏👏
I'm pretty bad on some!
But I was fighting deathvax and evil. But a little rudely
And the curtain is pulled back a bit more...wonder what we'll see when it is yanked down completely and all the stage is revealed?!?
If Frank was right, we'll see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
Is it interesting that the CDC wrote the rumor was in regards to male infertility but the examples have as much or more to do with women’s periods? The effect there has been well-proven by now and probably was at the time of that release. I haven’t seen anything as conclusive on the male end… so phrasing it that way seems like a form of plausible deniability. Or am I reading too much in here? It’s obviously disturbing, even if the CDC was 100% correct which they absolutely aren’t.
Both issues were mentioned almost immediately, but quickly hushed up until they couldn't be any longer. The Israeli study I linked to is the best (AFAIK) study done on the male end.
Oops, yeah, I didn’t follow that link. Hadn’t seen that study before, looks relatively recent. Just too many deceptions and omissions to keep up with! I just know the issues with menstrual cycles has broken into the mainstream at this point (but don’t worry, it’s fine, a disease that has a greater than 99.9% survival rate is the bigger concern so get the vaccine that has no tangible impact on preventing said disease!)
You might not be wrong, though. As you point out, the female fertility concerns are way more obvious, so if they focus on the male, which is less obvious/proven, they can keep spinning the "it's all made up by crazy people" narrative.
YHGTBFKM!!!!!! I just made that up, but this puts me right down another sinister rabbit hole….Holy Shit, this is so very wrong. And back to Question#1… why? What is it they are not telling us??
I closed my facebook account in Nov 2020. I HARDLY EVER hear about anything going on, events in my city, local politician platforms, etc. I have to visit .coms to try to find out any info. People and entities have to drop Twit and Fakebook 'cause a lot of us aren't there!
Looks like Facebook et al have turned into "state actors": "Every piece of this reasoning applies to Section 230. In both cases, the government did far more “than adopt a passive position toward the underlying conduct.” Just as Subpart D immunized from state law liability railroads that administered specified tests, Section 230 immunizes from state law liability platforms that censor “lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable” material. Just as railway workers were not free to decline to submit to the tests, so too Facebook and YouTube users cannot decline to submit to censorship; in both cases, individuals who refuse to comply can be excluded from service. And just as the government in Skinner had made plain its “strong preference” for the testing, Section 230 and its legislative history make plain the government’s strong preference for the removal of “offensive” content.
Skinner is, therefore, a strikingly close precedent. Yet it appears that not a single court has addressed the implications of Skinner for Section 230.
Perhaps distinctions can be found between Skinner’s Subpart D and the CDA’s Section 230. Someone might say, for example, that Section 230 immunizes not only blocking third-party content but also leaving it up (although functionally the situation in Skinner was probably no different). Or that for many or most internet platforms, filtering out offensive content is something they actively want to do (although railroads that administered the Subpart D tests would presumably have wanted to as well). Another arguable distinction might be that, in Skinner, Congress had expressed an interest in the railroads’ sharing their drug test results with federal authorities. (Note, however, that we don’t know the extent to which the federal government has requested or even required Google and Facebook to reveal information about users attempting to post objectionable content. In the case of attempts to post criminal or extremist content, it is quite possible, perhaps even likely, that the government has expressed at least as much of an interest in information-sharing as it had in Skinner.) Or maybe it will be said that the implications of applying Skinner to Section 230 are simply so extreme—potentially reaching every website that blocks offensive third-party content—that Skinner just can’t be a good precedent for the internet.
But Skinner is not the only important precedent. Another line of cases provides powerful additional support for a finding of state action here, although the reach of these cases would be much more limited—applying not to every website but only to the mega-platforms like Facebook and Google.
Case law going back to the Supreme Court’s Bantam Books prior restraint decision of 1963 establishes that informal governmental pressure and threats can turn private-party conduct into state action. (In Bantam Books, a private bookseller had stopped selling certain books after receiving a letter from state commissioners listing those books as objectionable and suggesting that the bookseller might be referred to local prosecutors if he continued selling them. The court found “state action.”) While governmental actors are free to denounce private parties for failing to restrain others’ speech, the line is crossed, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and other courts have put it, when “comments of a government official can reasonably be interpreted as intimating that some form of punishment or adverse regulatory action will follow the failure to accede to the official’s request.”
For years, members of Congress have been pressuring Facebook and Google to block (or block more) hate speech, extremist content, false news, white supremacism and so on, threatening these companies with death-sentence regulatory measures, including an anti-trust break-up and public-utility-style regulation. These threats have not exactly been veiled. “Figure it out,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond in April 2019, to representatives of Facebook and Google at a hearing on the platforms’ hate speech policies. “Because you don’t want us to figure it out for you.” The threats have apparently been quite effective. Just last month, one day before another round of hearings was to begin, Facebook announced a series of new, more aggressive measures to block hateful and extremist content.
A number of cases indicate that this pressure campaign might on its own be sufficient to turn Facebook and Google into state actors, entirely apart from Section 230. One of these cases, called Writers Guild, is especially analogous. In 1974, the big (pre-cable) television networks adopted the Family Viewing Policy, barring content “inappropriate for viewing by a general family audience” during the first hour of prime time and the hour immediately preceding. Plaintiffs in Writers Guild sued the networks as well as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), challenging the Family Viewing Policy on First Amendment grounds. Defendants responded that the policy, having been voluntarily adopted by private parties, was exempt from constitutional scrutiny.
In a lengthy, closely reasoned opinion, after a weeks-long trial, the district court rejected this argument. The court found that the Family Viewing Policy had been adopted due to “pressure” from the FCC, which was itself responding to pressure from congressional committees. The FCC had not mandated the Family Viewing Policy, but its chairman had “threatened the industry with regulatory action” and “with actions that would impose severe economic risks and burdens” on the networks if they did not move to block excessive “sex and violence” from prime-time programming. As a result, the court concluded, the state action requirement was satisfied.
Writers Guild is hardly controlling. Not only is it a mere district court opinion about a different medium in a different era, but that opinion was later vacated on jurisdictional grounds. Nevertheless, the case is an important example. It shows that the question of whether, or how greatly, governmental pressure has influenced Google’s or Facebook’s content-based censorship policies is ultimately a triable question of fact—with the state action determination hanging in the balance.
The bottom line, however, is this: When governmental pressure is combined with a statutory provision like Section 230, the result must be state action. Immunity plus pressure has to trigger the Constitution’s restraints.
Consider the hypotheticals given above but now add to them a campaign by governmental actors to pressure private parties into performing the conduct the government wants. Imagine a state not only immunizing from liability private parties who barricade abortion clinics but also threatening private parties with adverse legal consequences if they fail to do so. When these parties—freed from the fear of liability if they do barricade, and threatened with adverse legal action if they don’t—begin taking the very action that the legislature wants them to take, I don’t think a no-state-action argument could be made with a straight face." https://www.lawfareblog.com/are-facebook-and-google-state-actors
Excellent analysis, as always. Why we tolerate these assaults on freedom for purported safety boggles my mind.
And this isn't even getting into the funding of these companies -- which the government is neck-deep in, as well.
Goebbels is blushing.
Begs the question... how long has this been going on and what topics? Seems to me Facebook became 100% a deep state puppet after Trump accidentally won in 2016.
Starve the beast people, stop using this stuff. It's not that hard - Brave and Brave search for browser, private and encrypted email service, no Google products of any kind, no Amazon and no social media. I've been living this way for years and my sanity is intact.
We've seen dribs and drabs coming out in court cases for a couple years, but a few of these are incredibly damning.
I had thought Berenson would get discovery but that remains to be seen. I think the efforts of several states demanding discovery will show violations of the 1st by proxy. "Private companies can do as they wish" except when they are agents for the government.
I can already hear my jabbed friends saying, "But it was all for the greater good." Grrrrr! They won't believe any of this unless they hear it on CNN.
I found https://theideasinstitute.org/2022/02/04/bystander-at-the-switch-the-moral-case-against-mandatory-public-health-measures/ quite helpful in framing the issue.
Thank you -- This article is a keeper! I like the last sentence a lot: "Are you prepared to allow the government to throw you in front of the train to save someone else? If not, then demand that the government stop doing it to somebody else!"
Oh, GOD!!……..is someone going to cart us off and throw us all in the hoosgow……….I can’t go……..I need cross ventilation……..OMG, OMG……
The Bolsheviks must be stopped!