BUT THERE’S NO BIAS IN SILICON VALLEY: Facebook ‘permanently’ locks account of conservative children’s book publisher.

Facebook has “permanently disabled” the ads account of a conservative children’s book publisher, claiming that Heroes of Liberty – which has published books about Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, former President Ronald Reagan and author Thomas Sowell – violated the company’s rules against “Low Quality or Disruptive Content.” Facebook originally locked the ads account on Dec. 23, and after Heroes of Liberty appealed the ruling, the company permanently disabled the account.

“The question is: is a children’s biography of Ronald Reagan no longer permissible on Facebook? We don’t know. But apparently promoting one may well kill a business,” Heroes of Liberty editor and board member Bethany Mandel told FOX Business on Sunday.

“We began investing in Facebook four months before we launched our first book,” she added. “We invested most of our marketing budget on the platform, and now our budget (the money we’ve already spent), as well as our assets and data are gone. Marketing-wise we are back in square one, financially it’s even more challenging.”

Mandel confirmed that the ads account remained disabled. She hesitated to describe the move as an example of anti-conservative bias on the part of Facebook.

“We are not in politics, we are in the business of creating beautiful stories about great people that will entertain children and give them life lessons,” she said. “To cancel children’s books because they celebrate American values that 90% of Americans believe in isn’t even anti-conservative bias, it’s anti-American. Pure madness.”

“This ad account, its ads and some of its advertising assets are disabled because it didn’t comply with our policy on Low Quality or Disruptive Content,” Facebook said in a message disabling the account on Dec. 23.

Earlier:

● Glenn Greenwald: Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment.

● Revealed: Facebook’s Secret Blacklist of ‘Dangerous Individuals and Organizations.’

● The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen, It Was Bought By Mark Zuckerberg.

● “What Is To Be Done About Facebook?”

● Washington Post Wants Facebook to Shut Down PJ Media and Others for ‘Climate Denial.’

As William F. Buckley famously said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

FLASHBACK: The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns.

#RESIST: A reader sends this: “FWIW, from deep-blue Connecticut.”

RULE OF LAW IN HONG KONG: THERE ISN’T ANY. Remember that much of our political class sees this as a model for the United States.

Compare to the prosecution’s behavior with the January 6 protesters, or for that matter the Kyle Rittenhouse case.

Related: “[T]o argue, as Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi do, that Trump didn’t have a right to contest the election is to replace the rule of law with the rule of intimidation.”

They know this, they’re okay with it, and that’s precisely why they’re doing it. The rule of law limits the establishment’s power. The rule of intimidation, for now at least, expands it.

LOTS AND LOTS: How many Omicron hospitalizations are “incidental”?

THE PRECISION IS IMPRESSIVE, THE INTEL EVEN MORE SO: Satellite Imagery of Syrian Port After Alleged Israeli Strike Shows ‘Astonishingly Precise’ Attack.

ANOTHER ONE? Fauci Made a Terrible COVID Prediction Last Year.

PRIORITIES: The Fat Nag brings a tale for 2021, and hope for 2022. “Mayor Lightfoot introduced an ordinance to the City Council that would ban Chicago restaurants from automatically offering pop or other sugared drinks to kids.”

Meanwhile: Chicago Once Again Scores Most Homicides of Any City in America… More Than Most States!

ONCE A TRUISM, NOW A BOLD STATEMENT: ‘Men are different from women’: USA Swimming official resigns over transgender victories.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: The Daily Gouge Thom McKee’s conclusion to a bracing assessment of how the U.S. government’s response to Covid has been flawed from the beginning ends on a slightly upbeat note:

“After two years of this exhausting disaster, it does finally seem as if the light is appearing through the dark fog. We are slouching our way to endemicity. Over time, too, the wisdom and reasonableness of the Great Barrington Declaration will be widely granted. Not yet but in time.

“It’s too bad that we aren’t hearing apologies. We aren’t hearing people admit that they were wrong. We are seeing none of these experts who said they would give us a Covid-free world if we just let them control our lives and take our liberties. I do think such apologies right now would take the country and the world a long way down the path to healing.

“What we have instead is a traumatized people who wonder what the heck hit them for the last two years. It’s bad enough to deal with a nasty virus. It’s far worse to deal with the sudden end of the stream of life as we know it and then have nothing to show for it.

“Trust is gone and will stay that way for a very long time. The longer the experts who did this to the world refuse to acknowledge and admit their failure, the longer the healing will take.”

Well worth reading McKee’s analysis from start to finish.

CHANGE: ‘New York Is Not Closed’: New Mayor Eric Adams Pushes Back Against COVID, Crime on First Day.

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER: Debate tournament banned White students from competing.

HMM: Manchin returns to Build Back Better negotiations with demands. “Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is open to reengaging on the climate and child care provisions in President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda if the White House removes the enhanced child tax credit from the $1.75 trillion package — or dramatically lowers the income caps for eligible families, people familiar with the matter tell Axios.”

It’s not quite dead yet.

THE FRUITS OF FEARMONGERING: Panicky Would-Be COVID Victims Line Up for Hours to Find Out if They’re Sick.

WHILE THE NYT EDITORS BLEAT ABOUT DECENCY, DEMOCRACY, AND JANUARY 6, REMEMBER THAT THEY LIED ABOUT A MAN’S DEATH SO AS TO SPREAD POLITICAL HATE ACROSS THE NATION: Will the Times apologize for lying about Officer Sicknick’s death?

An unruly crowd entered the US Capitol on Jan. 6, while then-President Donald Trump addressed a rally several blocks away. One member of that crowd, Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed woman and a veteran, was shot by the Capitol Police. The next day, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died in the hospital.

On Jan. 8, The New York Times reported that Officer Sicknick had died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher by violent Trump supporters. This story was quickly repeated by numerous other media outlets. Millions believed it.

The story was false.

Sicknick died of two strokes, which occurred many hours after the invasion of the Capitol. The blue-check-media fallback was that bear spray used by the Capitol invaders had caused the officer’s strokes.

That also turned out to be false. After a curiously long delay, the DC medical examiner’s office released its report this week, and it concludes that Sicknick suffered no injuries, internal or external. He didn’t have a reaction to bear spray, the chief medical examiner reported.

So the single most important “fact” about the events of Jan. 6 was false. That leaves some questions.

First, who were the Gray Lady’s sources? The Times story quoted two anonymous “law-enforcement officials,” but anyone associated with the Capitol Police, or any investigation, should have known that Sicknick wasn’t struck in the head with a fire extinguisher. Having been misled by its sources, will the Times tell us who they were?

Will the Times apologize for its error? It could have independently confirmed its claims by checking with Sicknick’s family or with the hospital. Or the paper could simply have waited until it had definitive confirmation of the facts and refrained from reporting a falsehood in the meanwhile.

As leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald notes, the Times didn’t check the facts because the paper needed the story to be true.

And it still hasn’t apologized. They actively encourage and excuse violence from the left, while manufacturing lies about violence from the right — remember when the NYT blamed Sarah Palin for Gabby Giffords’ shooting? They’re despicable, awful people and have no standing to talk about decency or democracy.

THEY’RE CERTAINLY COOPERATING BY BEING HIGHLY MOCKABLE: Mark Judge: Fight the American Stasi With Mockery.

Related: How to beat the woke: Never apologize, rally friends and punch back harder.

THEY NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER LEARN:We have a powerful weapon to fight inflation: price controls. It’s time we consider it.

Maybe Joe Biden could combine the worst economic policies of Carter and Nixon.

AMERICA’S POLITICAL CLASS OPENLY DESIRES THE SAME THING HERE: Beijing nails coffin shut on dissent in Hong Kong.

WHAT THE RICH DO WHEN CRIME THREATENS: “I’m shocked. You mean they want BLM to destroy your city but not their own? In other news, they are demanding the police do something about it. . . . Anyway, the rich folks know the police can’t be there all of the time. They want shotguns. They want Gucci protection. They want up-armored cars. They want drones. If you demand the same thing, 44% of them will tell you to pound sand.”

THE EMORY LAW JOURNAL FINDS MY DISTINGUISHED COLLEAGUE’S WORDS “HURTFUL AND UNNECESSARILY DIVISIVE”: Being a conservative can make it a little harder to get one’s articles published in a traditional law review. And if one is writing about race or sex, it can be quite a bit harder. (I don’t even try; I go straight for one of the four specialty law reviews that were founded in part for the purpose of ensuring that articles by conservative scholars get published.)

I was therefore pleased to learn that my colleague Larry Alexander—one of the University of San Diego’s Warren Distinguished Professors of Law—had been invited to write for the Emory Law Journal and that Larry had chosen to write on a race-related theme.

But it was not to be. After offering to publish Larry’s essay (which was for a Festschrift for Professor Michael Perry) and then trying to edit away the meat of his argument, the ELJ has now withdrawn its acceptance. Editor-in-Chief Danielle Kerker sent an ultimatum to Larry: Either “greatly revise” the essay or the ELJ will have to “withdraw[] our publication offer.” Larry understood how destructive to academic values it would be to cower under such pressure. He declined to revise the article.  Good for him.

Kerker wrote that the ELJ Executive Board had “unanimously stated they do not feel comfortable publishing this piece as written.”   “We take issue with your conversation on systemic racism, finding your words hurtful and unnecessarily divisive.” “Additionally,” she wrote, “there are various instances of insensitive language use throughout the essay (e.g. widespread use of the objectifying term ‘blacks’ and ‘the blacks’ . . .) . . . .”

(If the term “black” in reference to African Americans is “objectifying,” a lot more than just Larry’s essay will need to be canceled. As for “the blacks,” I have been told that some consider this to be a rude way to refer collectively to the members of a race. But, even assuming that it would be rude, Larry wasn’t using the term that way. He was using it to refer to the particular blacks in one of his hypotheticals. The “the” was intended to make that clear.

(more…)

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Go Home 2022, You’re Already Drunk. “Just to reassure you that some things are still normal, leftists are still going out of their way to prove how depraved and awful they are.”

THE WAY THIS ADMINISTRATION IS GOING, HOW LONG UNTIL PEOPLE LOOK ON JANUARY 6 AS A LOST OPPORTUNITY RATHER THAN AN INSURRECTION? New polling on January 6 is a MAJOR BUZZKILL to Brian Stelter and many other journos.

Plus: “The criticism would resonate more with the public if the press had condemned all forms of political violence, left and right, instead of condoning & cheering on deadly riots all summer.” (Bumped).

YOU CAN RUIN A CITY, OR A NATION, SURPRISINGLY QUICKLY WITH BAD LEADERSHIP: Good riddance to NYC’s worst mayor ever – Bill de Blasio.

Worst mayor ever . . . so far.

MATT TAIBBI: The Democrats’ Education Lunacies Will Bring Back Trump.

On the full Meet the Press Sunday, [Chuck] Todd in an ostensibly unrelated segment interviewed 1619 Project author and New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones about Republican efforts in some states to ban teaching of her work. He detoured to ask about the Virginia governor’s race, which seemingly was decided on the question, “How influential should parents be about curriculum?” Given that Democrats lost Virginia after candidate Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” Todd asked her, “How do we do this?”

Hannah-Jones’s first answer was to chide Todd for not remembering that Virginia was lost not because of whatever unimportant thing he’d just said, but because of a “right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents to fight against their children being indoctrinated.” This was standard pundit fare that for the millionth time showed a national media figure ignoring, say, the objections of Asian immigrant parents to Virginia policies, but whatever: her next response was more notable. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” Hannah-Jones said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science.”

Thank you, Chuck, for handing Hannah-Jones all the rope she’ll need to hang a few more Congressional Dems.

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: NY Times: Pre-natal tests for genetic disorders are inaccurate about 85% of the time.