SPUN UP AND READY TO GO: A USMC MV-22 Osprey prepares for a Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel (TRAP) exercise at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California.
Archive for 2021
January 13, 2021
VENN DIAGRAM OF FREEDOM’S THREATS: Kim Jong Un-Reliable North Korea Intersects Amazon Servers
“As public boasts go, it’s quite a strange thing. I mean, you can imagine a proud parent announcing that their fourteen-year-old had passed a chemistry exam or reached piano grade three or something. But wanting to announce that your fourteen-year-old has internalised pretentious disdain for white people, and white men in particular, seems… obnoxiously unhinged. That this is apparently something statusful, a basis for applause, or at least in-group belonging, does not make it seem less so.”
And it’s EU-approved, after all, with that august bureaucracy having reduced WWII to “The European Civil War” by 2012: Was It Over When the Germans Bombed Pearl Harbor During the ‘European Civil War?’
SAVE THE CONSTITUTION FROM BIG TECH:
Conventional wisdom holds that technology companies are free to regulate content because they are private, and the First Amendment protects only against government censorship. That view is wrong: Google, Facebook and Twitter should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines. Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats, Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.
It is “axiomatic,” the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” That’s what Congress did by enacting Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which not only permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech but immunizes them from liability if they do so.
The justices have long held that the provision of such immunity can turn private action into state action. In Railway Employees’ Department v. Hanson (1956), they found state action in private union-employer closed-shop agreements—which force all employees to join the union—because Congress had passed a statute immunizing such agreements from liability under state law. In Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association(1989), the court again found state action in private-party conduct—drug tests for company employees—because federal regulations immunized railroads from liability if they conducted those tests. In both cases, as with Section 230, the federal government didn’t mandate anything; it merely pre-empted state law, protecting certain private parties from lawsuits if they engaged in the conduct Congress was promoting.
Section 230 is the carrot, and there’s also a stick: Congressional Democrats have repeatedly made explicit threats to social-media giants if they failed to censor speech those lawmakers disfavored. In April 2019, Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond warned Facebook and Google that they had “better” restrict what he and his colleagues saw as harmful content or face regulation: “We’re going to make it swift, we’re going to make it strong, and we’re going to hold them very accountable.” New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler added: “Let’s see what happens by just pressuring them.”
Such threats have worked. In September 2019, the day before another congressional grilling was to begin, Facebook announced important new restrictions on “hate speech.” It’s no accident that big tech took its most aggressive steps against Mr. Trump just as Democrats were poised to take control of the White House and Senate. Prominent Democrats promptly voiced approval of big tech’s actions, which Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal expressly attributed to “a shift in the political winds.”
For more than half a century courts have held that governmental threats can turn private conduct into state action. In Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963), the Supreme Court found a First Amendment violation when a private bookseller stopped selling works state officials deemed “objectionable” after they sent him a veiled threat of prosecution. In Carlin Communications v. Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph Co. (1987), the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found state action when an official induced a telephone company to stop carrying offensive content, again by threat of prosecution.
As the Second Circuit held in Hammerhead Enterprises v. Brezenoff (1983), the test is whether “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.” Mr. Richmond’s comments, along with many others, easily meet that test. Notably, the Ninth Circuit held it didn’t matter whether the threats were the “real motivating force” behind the private party’s conduct; state action exists even if he “would have acted as he did independently.”
Either Section 230 or congressional pressure alone might be sufficient to create state action. The combination surely is. Suppose a Republican Congress enacted a statute giving legal immunity to any private party that obstructs access to abortion clinics. Suppose further that Republican congressmen explicitly threatened private companies with punitive laws if they fail to act against abortion clinics. If those companies did as Congress demands, then got an attaboy from lawmakers, progressives would see the constitutional problem.
Sure, but that’s different because reasons.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Glenn Greenwald Blasts US Liberals for ‘Political Authoritarianism.’
Insanity Wrap needs to know: Why can’t we get more than two lefty journalists with integrity?
Answer: Seriously, are Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi all we’ll ever get?
Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.
- A sad denouement to an accomplished administration
- Tech sites take the blue pill
- Dunkirk was “just a bunch of white boys waiting for boats”
Bonus Sanity: Chicago tells teachers to show up for work or don’t get paid.
And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
GOYA’S DECEMBER EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: AOC: Country will heal with the ‘actual liberation of southern states’ from GOP control. “‘southern states are not red states, they are suppressed states. Which means the only way that our country’s going to heal is through the actual liberation of southern states,’ Ocasio-Cortez explained to her 8.3 million Instagram followers, ‘the actual liberation of the poor, the actual liberation of working people from economic, social, and racial oppression. That’s the only way.’”
Related: AOC: ‘We came close to half of the House nearly dying’ during riots.
Flashback: Ocasio-Cortez, youth protesters storm Pelosi office to push for climate plan. “More than 200 youth activists, flanked by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, flooded House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office this morning urging Democrats to act more decisively on climate change.”
JUST A LITTLE TOO MUCH ON THE NOSE TO BE FUNNY. Seen around the internet – it’s real, from a workplace mental health organization. I checked, because it was so on the nose that I thought it might be a clever fake. Save it before it’s inevitably purged, or definitions conveniently change.
THOMAS SOWELL: “It is amazing how many people seem to have discovered last Wednesday that riots are wrong — when many of those same people apparently had not noticed that when riots went on, for weeks or even months, in various cities across the country last year.”
WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? Broward College promotes ‘teaching Black Lives Matter,’ disparages ‘All Lives Matter.’
SOHRAB AMARI: The GOP-corporate divorce is a blessing for the party’s future.
November’s election revealed that the class realignment of our two parties is solidifying. Democrats have increasingly emerged as the party of upscale suburbs, of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and Wall Street, of the owners of capital and the professionals who service them. The GOP, meanwhile, is trending toward a multiracial working-class party, preferred by those who generally make their living by toil. . . .
The corporate backlash will no doubt scare some Republican faux-populists into dropping even their rhetorical gestures toward the working class. The old guard awaits the wayward prodigal, to return to the comfortable fold of marginal tax cuts and useless foreign wars. Picture Paul Ryan’s wingtips stamped on the face of the American right — forever.
But that would be a monumental mistake, because as 2016 showed and 2020 confirmed, the votes simply aren’t there for that. The old agenda threatened to turn the GOP into a regional rump party (see 2008 and 2012). By contrast, the Trump GOP, warts and all, expanded its appeal to Hispanics and young black men in 2020 while consolidating the white working class.
Today’s Democrats sure don’t represent this multiracial working class. The party and its Big Tech and Big Media allies deliver mostly for the HR department — a k a you’re fired for saying the wrong thing. Mass student-loan forgiveness would end up transferring wealth from everyone else to the cognitive elite. Amazon’s Democratic-approved wokery masks appalling working conditions and union-busting.
Indeed.
NO BAILOUTS FOR THE RICH: Thirty Wealthy Colleges And Universities Are Targeted In Covid Relief Act. “After President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos criticized giving private colleges and universities with large endowments help in the CARES Act, wealthier institutions like Harvard, Yale and Stanford Universities had their share of the money in the latest coronavirus relief package cut in half. Under a little-noticed provision in the bill passed two weeks ago [The Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2021], private higher education institutions that were required by a 2017 law to pay a 1.4 percent excise tax on net investment income not only had their aid slashed, they were barred from using the money they will get to defray their financial losses from the pandemic. The relief bill allows them only to use the aid on emergency grants to students or to pay for personal protective equipment and other health and safety costs associated with the coronavirus. Higher education received about $23 billion in the legislation.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Squish Republican Turncoats Are More Vile Than Democrats. “They’re pathetic emotional midgets who are desperate for attention. If they became full time Democrats, they’d just be one in a big crowd. If they remain Republican, they’ve got an easy, albeit brief, attention fix. Whenever their fellow Republicans need them, all they have to do is slip a shiv in their backs and they get a pure hit of New York Times love for a few days.”
FROM THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: Message to the Joint Force.
Related: QAnon Woke Up The Real Deep State.
IT WAS A BRIGHT COLD DAY IN JANUARY, THE CLOCKS WERE STRIKING 13, AND EVERYTHING CAME FULL CIRCLE:
—The Daily Wire, yesterday.
Chaser: ‘1984’ Tops Amazon Bestseller List After Trump Aide’s ‘Alternative Facts.’
—NPR, January 25th, 2017.
I wonder if the folks who read the book in 2017 caught all those references to Ingsoc?
PAUL BEDARD: Exclusive: 60% call impeachment a ‘waste of time,’ Big Tech backlash for censoring Trump. “70% believe that technology firms, including Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple, are too powerful and need to be regulated.”
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: CCP Virus Outbreaks Spread Across North China, as Cities Prepare Emergency Isolation Units. “Despite enacting stringent lockdown measures, Chinese authorities are struggling to contain CCP virus outbreaks throughout northern China. Hebei Province is the hardest-hit, with two cities, Shijiazhuang and Xingtai, seeing the biggest surges in new infections. Authorities have publicized little information despite imposing restrictions on people’s movements and requiring mass testing for COVID-19.”
THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Google suspends President Trump’s YouTube channel, disables comments.
Was this on the advice of Borat? Celebrities Back Sacha Baron Cohen’s Call For YouTube To Ban Trump.
Related: Here’s the List of Powerful Companies Cutting Off Trump and His Supporters After Capitol Siege.
More: The Big Tech backfire. How does forcing Trump supporters into seedier corners of the web help unite the country?
JOIN US: On Friday, the Pacific Legal Foundation is sponsoring a webinar entitled, “Was 2020 a Turning Point for Identity Politics?” It will feature Anastasia Boden, Wen Fa, Glenn Loury, and me.