YES: Rein in abusive Big Tech republic.

What, then, should be done? First, the Parler purge should be investigated as an antitrust violation. The Sherman Antitrust Act makes conspiracies in restraint of trade unlawful; Parler has a colorable claim that Apple, Google, and Amazon acted in concert to crush their company.

Antitrust is just the beginning. Conservatives are facing a collective, inescapable, yet private regime of discrimination and censorship. The only institution powerful enough to defeat this cartel is the federal government. If and when Republicans retake power in 2024, the first item on the agenda should be new laws that protect every American’s civil right to speak freely on social media.

And yes, the right of all Americans to speak on social media should be seen as a civil right.

The Fourteenth Amendment made governmental racial discrimination unlawful; that, though, was not enough to make our country’s underlying commitment to racial equality meaningful, so the federal government passed laws prohibiting racial discrimination by private companies.

Similarly, the First Amendment protects against government censorship. But in 2020, most political debate happens on large social-media platforms. Facebook and Twitter are the modern public square. Thus, if our society’s commitment to free speech is to have any meaning, our government must constrain large social-media companies from censoring Americans’ lawful speech.

Poland, appropriately enough, is leading the way. Their Justice Minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, announced last month that the Polish government would enact a law constraining Big Tech from censoring their citizens. Polish users who are victims of censorship can go to a new Polish court, get an injunction forcing the company to restore their account and their content, on penalty of a fine of as much as 1.8 million euros.

We should do the same.

Yes.

OPEN THREAD: Talk among yourselves.

GOT WOKE, GOING BROKE: CNBC’s Jim Cramer Warns Twitter Could Be in Trouble as Stock Plummets: After Trump Ban, They Need a New Draw ‘Very, Very Quickly.’

THAT’S NOT THE WAY TO COMPETE WITH SPACEX: Arianespace seeks greater support from European governments.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS:  True Love Is Dead: Bodybuilder Who Married A Sex Doll Admitted He Cheated On Her While She Was Being Repaired.

BILL BELICHICK REJECTS TRUMP’S PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM: “‘Recently, I was offered the opportunity to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which I was flattered by out of respect for what the honor represents and admiration for prior recipients,’ Belichick said. ‘Subsequently, the tragic events of last week occurred and the decision has been made not to move forward with the award.’ Belichick continued, ‘Above all, I am an American citizen with great reverence for our nation’s values, freedom and democracy.’”

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Gaslighting Last Summer’s Riots and the Law Enforcement Response: The notion that law enforcement routinely and violently cracked down on peaceful demonstrations, or even looting and rioting, is not consistent with the facts.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Horned Capitol insurrectionist starving in jail because he lacks organic food: his mom.

Related: Jacob Chansley, ‘Jake Angeli:’ Five Fast Facts.

DIFFERENT RULES FOR ME AND THEE:

WELL, THAT’S DISAPPOINTING: Even With A Mask, The Best Facial Recognition Algorithms Work Well, Test Shows.

STATE DEPARTMENT WEBSITE FALSELY ANNOUNCES TRUMP’S RESIGNATION.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Evil Fascist Dictator Censored And Voted Out Of Office.

LEFTISTS MUGGED BY REALITY: San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board: Why California recycling is a dumpster fire.

Back in 2012, the California Legislature declared it the policy of the state that by 2020, at least 75% of the state’s waste would be reduced, recycled or composted. It was a bold legislative goal that turns out to have been a waste of the paper it was printed on.

Since the target was set eight years ago, the state’s annual landfill disposal has grown steadily from about 40 million tons a year to nearly 50 million. The recycling, composting and reduction rate, meanwhile, fell from around 50% to 37%, or about half the rate lawmakers set out to achieve.

So notes the Statewide Commission on Recycling Markets and Curbside Recycling, a body of waste and recycling experts, officials and advocates assembled by the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019 to “do what is nearly impossible,” in the commissioners’ words — namely, tell officials how the state can reach its receding goal by recycling and otherwise preventing twice as much of its garbage from ending up in landfills. While the commission’s recently released first report is full of informed advice on how the state might approach that standard, it also serves as dispiriting notice that California, a state that purports to care more than most about recycling and other environmental matters, is producing ever more pounds of irredeemable trash per person.

As the commission’s report also demonstrates, it’s harder to catalog all that’s wrong with recycling in California and the country than to enumerate our dwindling successes.

One of the heaviest blows to the effort in recent years came from China and other Asian nations that stopped accepting discarded plastic and other materials from wealthy countries such as the United States, much of which was unusable garbage falsely counted for domestic purposes as recycled. As of the new year, further such barriers to mixed plastic exports went into effect under an amendment to the Basel Convention, which restricts international waste shipments. That forces officials to contend with more waste that is unrecyclable in general or at least within California’s borders, where state and local regulations can make it difficult to build and even maintain recycling facilities.

The pandemic has further aggravated recyclers’ troubles by reducing the volume of commercial waste, which is generally more profitable to them, while increasing residential waste, which is priced at fixed rates and subject to more contamination that complicates repurposing. The threat of coronavirus outbreaks at recycling facilities, moreover, has kept some shuttered.

At its worst, California’s waste crisis is not just figuratively but literally a dumpster fire. The recycling commission blames improperly discarded lithium-ion batteries and propane containers for a rash of garbage fires such as the one that did millions of dollars of damage to a Peninsula recycling center in 2016, shutting it down for months.

If only someone had warned them that virtue signaling is expensive.

YOU’VE GOT TO FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT TO WATER: Florida’s water brawl with Georgia nears historic SCOTUS hearing.

SEN. MANCHIN NOT ON BOARD WITH IMPEACHMENT.

DON’T GO CRAZY, THEY WANT YOU TO BE CRAZY: Stacy McCain: Staying Sane in a World Gone Mad. Yes, we live in a world where Stacy McCain has to tell us not to be crazy.

YEP: Fascism Comes to the U.S.: Yes, it’s a woke fascism of the Left, but it’s still fascism.

The destruction of the freedom of speech in America today is being carried out by the Leftist establishment that dominates the political sphere, the social media giants, the establishment media, the educational system – virtually everything, really. The Left is using the Capitol riot of January 6 as its Reichstag Fire moment to criminalize, silence, and destroy utterly not just President Trump, but all Americans who still dare to oppose its sinister woke totalitarianism. In doing so, Leftists are revealing themselves, for all their rhetoric about how Trump and his supporters are fascists, to be quintessential fascists themselves. . . .

The social media giants and the Leftist government elites, the swamp that has reasserted its hegemony by installing Old Joe in the White House, are working in lockstep. The government doesn’t own the social media outlets, and it doesn’t have to: whether Big Tech is submitting to overall direction by the state or the state is submitting to overall direction by Big Tech, the outcome is the same: every major force in American society is marching in the same direction, while dissenters are stigmatized, demonized, framed for crimes they didn’t commit, silenced, and isolated.

Thus what we are seeing in the last few days, with the banning of the president of the United States from the main means of communication today, and the unity of purpose between the media, Big Tech, and the Democratic Party in propagating the Big Lie that Trump incited violence and attempted a coup on January 6, is fascism in action. And if the fascists aren’t stopped soon, what we have already seen will be just the beginning.

Government working hand-in-glove with big business to oppress the people.

I SUSPECT IT WILL LAST FOR MANY YEARS: Post-infection coronavirus immunity usually robust after 8 months, study shows. “The human body typically retains a robust immune response to the coronavirus for at least eight months after an infection, and potentially much longer, researchers said in a study published in the journal Science.”

IT WAS NEVER ABOUT SAFETY: Facebook Suspends Ron Paul Following Column Criticizing Big Tech Censorship: By suspending Ron Paul, it becomes clear that ‘safety’ may not be Big Tech’s primary goal.

On Monday, Facebook blocked former presidential candidate Ron Paul from his own page. The move came hours after the longtime congressman and libertarian hero shared an article he wrote criticizing Twitter and Facebook for banning President Donald Trump from their platforms.

“Last week’s massive social media purges – starting with President Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter and other outlets – was shocking and chilling, particularly to those of us who value free expression and the free exchange of ideas,” Paul wrote. “The justifications given for the silencing of wide swaths of public opinion made no sense and the process was anything but transparent. Nowhere in President Trump’s two ‘offending’ Tweets, for example, was a call for violence expressed explicitly or implicitly. It was a classic example of sentence first, verdict later.”

Paul shared the article on Facebook sometime around 10 a.m. EST. Hours later, on Twitter, Paul said he had been blocked by Facebook.

Techno-fascists gonna techno-fascist.

TIME TO JUMP-START THE ECONOMY TO HELP BIDEN: After Forcing Thousands Of Businesses To Shut Down, Cuomo Now Says The ‘Cost’ Of Staying Closed Is ‘Too High.’

ICE CREAM SOCIALISTS: The New Yorker vs ice cream. Helen Rosner searches for a scoop:

Helen Rosner is a New Yorker food writer, by which Cockburn means she is a temporarily frustrated politics writer ghettoized into the coverage of food. Poor Helen was deeply agitated by Wednesday’s kerfuffle at the Capitol, and greatly desired to milk 2021’s Reichstag fire for all it was worth. But how? She could denounce a member of her brunch group as a Nazi, but brunch is now a relic much like the Ottoman Empire. She could start a boycott of some helpless family-owned restaurant, but those have already all failed thanks to people like Rosner demanding people stay home for 10 straight months.

So only one option remained: go pulverize a random ice cream company.

Jeni’s Ice Cream was founded by a fine-arts major who dropped out of Ohio State. Cockburn didn’t need to read anything else about her before concluding that she probably is not a Trumpy kulak. But Rosner apparently knew better. The company’s release of a Joe Biden flavor for inauguration actually concealed a dark underbelly of reaction.

Of course it did — read the whole thing.

WELL, GOOD: CDC: Severe allergic reaction to COVID-19 vaccine ‘exceedingly rare.’

THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Facebook Suspends Ron Paul Following Column Criticizing Big Tech Censorship.

NEW ROLE FOR ANTIFA: BIDEN’S ‘SHOCK TROOPS.’

[Andy] Ngo is a self-made antifa expert and critic who has used his platform on Twitter, with 842,200 followers, and as editor-at-large at the Post Millennial to publicize the violence of the group, including his own beating and death threats from members.

Next month, he is publishing his first book about the group, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy*, which includes excerpts from training books, identifies key leaders, and reveals a plan to recruit members through Major League Soccer fan clubs, including those for the Portland Timbers.

One thing is for sure, he wrote: Antifa is here to stay with a new role highlighted by the book’s publisher, Center Street. “Antifa,” it said in promoting Ngo’s book, “will become even more influential in the Biden era by serving as the far-left’s shock troops to intimidate political opponents, undermine elections, and push for radical, violent revolution.”

To be fair, their forebearers been the shock troops of socialists since the 1920s. And more recently as well:

Related: Riots and Looting: How the Democratic Party and its allies used the threat of violence as a campaign tactic.

* Ngo having committed actual journalism has made the Gray Lady quite cross: NYT journalist calls for censorship of Andy Ngo.

A BAN TOO FAR: Donald Trump’s Twitter account receives a very unexpected defender.

And before any liberals see this and try to raise the tired old objection about how Trump (or anyone else) can simply go elsewhere to make their voice hear, unless you’re completely daft you know that’s dishonest. There is no comparable platform to Twitter in terms of global reach in real-time. When somebody tries to start one (*cough* Parler *cough*) Big Tech rallies their massive muscle to shut them down. And even if they don’t succeed, no other platform in that arena has grown to even a fraction of a percent of the volume the giants have.

So Angela Merkel is pretty much on point here. I rarely get the opportunity to sing her praises, but she was willing to stand up for the value of free speech, even when the speech is coming from someone she clearly despises and has frequently used it to target her. Well done, Madam Chancellor. I am honestly impressed.

You know you’re over your skis when the Germans (Merkel is a graduate of Karl Marx University, to boot) question your censorship.