When the Republicans take Congress next year, they should get working on an Internet Bill of Rights, and one of its provisions should include jail time for corporate employees who abuse banning and censorship tools to commit acts of political repression.
Fines aren't enough. Mega-wealthy politicized Internet platforms would find ways to pay the fines for their employees. The cost would be acceptable compared to the political advantage gained. Make the censors think long and hard about how they, personally, are in legal jeopardy.
It's very unfortunate that we need an Internet Bill of Rights, but it's painfully clear that we do. It's the least intrusive response to politicized censorship. A company that inserts itself into our elections and manipulates the outcomes is no longer a fully "private" entity.
It's a joke to claim we have a principled national commitment to political liberty and free speech if we're just outsourcing authoritarianism to private entities. We sure as hell aren't going to win the great ideological battle for the 21st Century against tyranny that way.
The tyrants are laughing at us right now, saying we don't seem to have any objection to their censorship regimes and social credit systems as long as a few politically connected billionaires are in charge, rather than government officials - Truth Inc. vs. the Ministry of Truth.
The tyrants argue that having a government ministry in charge of censorship and social credit, instead of a few self-appointed billionaires, would be better - more accountability, more rational, more honest.
Of all the many things we should be privatizing, oppression and censorship were the LAST. Social media giants became giants by pledging their commitment to free speech. We should hold them to those promises. What they're doing now is not just repression, but fraud.
It's funny how all those little "errors" and "mistakes" of censorship and banning skew in one political direction, isn't it? I guarantee that garbage will stop when criminal investigations and jail time are on the table. Nothing else will stop it. /end

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More from @Doc_0

6 Jan
If the 1/6 riots were an act of "terrorism" - using force to achieve political ends - then so were the BLM riots.

The difference is that the latter were successful - and their success was a bloody disaster for Americans, especially black Americans.
The grotesque spectacle Democrats and their media are putting on today is not a condemnation of "terrorism," or "insurrection," or "attacking elections." They aren't planning to say a single damn word about the very recent times THEY did all of those things.
This is all about crass political opportunism, and reinforcing the claim that left-wingers have a monopoly on "righteous" political violence. When lefties use violence on YOU, it's "mostly peaceful" and you should stop whining and walk it off - even when they kill people.
Read 10 tweets
5 Jan
Doing away with public employee unions, including public school teacher unions, should be a top Republican agenda item. Stop being intimidated by the money and political connections of these unions. Take this to the court of public opinion with righteous energy and you'll win.
Public unions of any stripe are absurd and never should have been allowed for a single minute. Every Republican politician knows this, but they rarely take the case to the public, or attempt to translate the very reasonable case against these unions into legislation.
After the mad abuses of the pandemic, how can even the weakest-spined GOP legislator or candidate think the majority of voters isn't ready to hear a strong case for breaking up these unions? It's a gift-wrapped opportunity to take a bold step that would actually change things.
Read 5 tweets
30 Dec 21
Late-stage pandemic response is hindered by how much the earlier stages were governed by panic, politics, and authoritarian urges. We'd be in better shape now if Americans had always been treated like rational adults capable of balancing cost and benefit, risk and reward.
Now, all of a sudden - solely and entirely because blue states where political and media elites live are experiencing huge Covid surges, and the incompetent Biden admin fell down on ordering test kits - we're talking about measuring the cost of restrictions against benefits.
Now that panic measures and authoritarian diktats have failed, and places where "sophisticated" people who "did everything right" are boiling over with new cases, suddenly it's time to ask if those protocols too harsh, if we should be counting hospitalizations instead of cases.
Read 11 tweets
29 Dec 21
It's incredible that anyone still places absolute faith in the American political elite or assumes government "experts" are competent and impartial.

Some people desperately need to believe they're ruled by the best and brightest, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The quality of our political class and bureaucracy declined in tandem with the decline of faith in everything *but* the State. So much of our hunger for meaning, our deep need to *believe*, was redirected to the government, which grew steadily more arrogant and corrupt.
Now we have generations of people who simply cannot handle the idea that the Church of the State and its clergy - politicians, high officials, state-friendly media - are corrupt, incompetent, and unworthy of their trust. They're literally terrified to accept that obvious truth.
Read 16 tweets
21 Dec 21
Biden's handlers said getting the coronavirus under control would be simple. They said the only reason the pandemic was so bad in 2020 was Trump's poor leadership. Biden was going to shut down the virus, not the country.
Biden's record for Year One is in, and it's dismal. He's an utter failure by his own metrics and promises. Biden took many of the same steps as Trump, including a hilariously panicked reprise of the travel bans Biden denounced as mindless xenophobia, but he did everything WORSE.
Biden had the vaccines Trump successfully pushed to develop with astounding speed - and he's WORSE on the coronavirus. And Biden's alternately feeble and domineering "leadership" on the pandemic is tearing the country apart, bringing us to the edge of constitutional crisis.
Read 6 tweets
20 Dec 21
This is about Covid tribalism, the latest scheme to divide Americans into warring camps for the political profit of the Democrat party. They brought us to the brink of civil war by stoking class and racial resentment, and now they want us all to blame each other for Omicron.
The White House statement is a papal bull from the Church of the State, condemning the heretics and teaching the faithful to blame them for unleashing demons upon the flock. And of course it's crude blame-shifting from Biden's utter failure, measured by his own campaign promises.
In the longer term, obedience is a vital resource for statists, and they are using coronavirus panic to cultivate it. They want people to grow accustomed to obeying whimsical, ever-changing orders, to experience physical humiliation (masks for thee, but not for the elite.)
Read 5 tweets

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