A few points to highlight about the above-linked video report we just published on the attempts by Sen. Warren & Adam Schiff to demand Amazon suppress certain books.
First, this is part of a year-long campaign by Dems to use their majority power in DC to mandate censorship.
There are so many reasons why this attempt by the Democratic Party to commandeer Big Tech censorship power for themselves is so dangerous.
Perhaps the gravest is that this is all about imposing a framework where dissent from or questioning of decrees from authorities is banned.
In the video, I revisit the destruction of Parler - it became *the most-downloaded app*, when leading Dems demanded Apple, Google and Amazon destroy it, and they obeyed.
A key Dem with amazing candor said why: Big Tech now knows Dems rule DC & thus must comply with their orders.
That Democrats should use their political domination of the US Government to censor the internet is now a widespread view of most Democrats, as is the view that tech monopolies should do so. Polling data makes clear: internet censorship is extremely popular among Democrats.
The most bizarre part is that liberals, to justify censorship, haul out the classic libertarian view that private companies can do whatever they want.
But that's false: the law is clear: the First Amendment is violated when the state pressures private actors to censor for them.
Many liberals dismiss *state censorship* as just Culture War trivialities -- as if a free internet is like bickering over pronouns.
It's especially bizarre that people who spent 5 years shrieking about fascism are so cavalier about this union of state & corporate power.
The full video report is here. The internet was heralded in the 1990s as an unprecedented tool of liberation from centralized control. The Snowden reporting was about defending internet freedom. It's now becoming the greatest tool of coercion and control:
During the Dem primary campaign, one of RFK Jr.'s core issues was free speech and opposing censorship. Then he became known for wanting to combat chronic disease.
So what does he use his first month for? Threatening universities which allow protests against Israel on campus:
Note: you're free to protest the US on campus. You can protest any country or group: just not Israel.
And of course this censorship - like all censorship - is justified the name of stopping hate speech and keeping one group "safe": as if they're being relentlessly attacked.
Every government in the world -- including the most repressive and tyrannical -- "protects free speech" for the views they like.
It's the views they most hate that are targeted. And the most sacred issue for many in the Trump Admin is Israel: that is what's therefore shielded.
There's nothing stopping Germany or the EU from funding war in Ukraine until the end of eternity if they wish, or sending their citizens to Ukraine to fight Russia.
But the German Greens -- the worst of the worst -- are emblematic of European liberals: all posturing, no action.
British pundits prance around as if they're Churchill, and Macron walks around like he's a tough guy, and German Greens and other vague Berlin liberals posture as if they're the paragon of compassion: all while they rely on the US to finance wars, fight and protect them.
Zelensky begged and begged Westerners to get off line and stop tweeting with their blue-yellow emojis and instead go to Ukraine to help them fight the Russian Army, knowing he couldn't win without non-Ukrainians volunteering to fight. Very, very few did.
For a long-time, harsh critiques of US foreign policy and interventionism were found on the populist right. Listen to Pat Buchanan (who worked for Nixon and Reagan) as well as Ron Paul on US policy toward Israel. Very, very few Dems now speak this way:
In February 2021 -- more than a year before Russian troops entered Ukraine en masse -- the inspiring democrat, President Zelensky, banned 3 popular opposition TV networks by accusing them of spreading Russian disinformation.
It'd be as if Biden banned Fox or Trump banned CNN:🇺🇦
In 2014 -- after Victoria Nuland, @ChrisMurphyCT, John McCain etc. used NED to fund protests in Kiev to remove the democratically elected leader and replace him with an unelected pro-US puppet -- Kiev began bombing ethnic Russian civilians in Donbas:
@ChrisMurphyCT It's bizarre to watch history re-written in real time to serve war propaganda: how Azov Battalion was described as neo-Nazi by western elites, only to be turned into heroic warriors the minute we armed them.
EXCLUSIVE: Trump's media company and Rumble jointly sue Brazilian Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes in a U.S. federal court in Florida, arguing that his most recent censorship orders require a global ban, thus violating US sovereignty and US law:
This comes in the wake of yesterday's indictment of former President Jair Bolsonaro, accusing him of plotting a violent coup (that never happened) against Lula and Moraes.
That indictment follows polls showing a collapse in Lula's popularity, with only Bolsonaro beating him.
A residual guardian of GOP establishment foreign policy - @RichLowry - urges rejection of Tulsi by denouncing her support for Snowden.
To do so, Lowrey falsely claims Snowden "handed [NSA docs] over to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks."
Snowden never gave a single doc to WikiLeaks.
This isn't a small error, nor is it an excusable one. Anyone who knows even the most basic facts of the Snowden story -- which should be a requirement for opining so didactically about it -- knows he only gave docs to the Guardian (through me) and WPost (through Laura Poitras).
Lowry also repeats the standard establishment smear against Snowden -- totally false -- that he "defected to Russia."
Even if he had, it'd be understandable - Obama DOJ tried to imprison him for life -- but Ben Rhodes admitted Snowden tried to leave Russia and they trapped him.