With the restoration of free speech protections on Twitter, panic has grown on the left that its control over social media could come to an end. Now, some of the greatest advocates of censorship in Congress are specifically warning Facebook not to follow Twitter in restoring free speech to its platform.
In a chilling letter from Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), André Carson (D-Ind.), Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Facebook was given a not-so-subtle threat that reducing its infamous censorship system will invite congressional action. The letter to Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, is written on congressional stationery “as part of our ongoing oversight efforts.”
With House Republicans pledging to investigate social media censorship when they take control in January, these four Democratic members are trying to force Facebook to “recommit” to censoring opposing views and to make election censorship policies permanent. Otherwise, they suggest, they may be forced to exercise oversight into any move by Facebook to “alter or rollback certain misinformation policies.”
In addition to demanding that Facebook preserve its bans on figures like former president Donald Trump, they want Facebook to expand its censorship overall because “unlike other major social media platforms, Meta’s policies do not prohibit posts that make unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud.”
Clegg is given Schiff’s telephone number to discuss Facebook’s compliance — an ironic contact point for a letter on censoring “disinformation.” After all, Schiff was one of the members of Congress who, before the 2020 presidential election, pushed the false claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, and he has been criticized for pushing false narratives on Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election. (Schiff has previously pressured social media companies to expand the censorship of opposing views).
The letter to Clegg is reminiscent of another letter sent by several congressional Democrats to cable-TV carriers last year, demanding to know why they continue to carry Fox News. (For full disclosure, I appear as a legal analyst on Fox News.) As I later discussed in congressional testimony, it was an open effort by those Democrats to censor opposing views by proxy or by surrogate.
This is not the first time that some members of Congress have not-so-subtly warned social media companies to expand the censorship of political and scientific views which they consider to be wrong.
In a November 2020 Senate hearing, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story. But Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., warned that he and his Senate colleagues would not tolerate any “backsliding or retrenching” by “failing to take action against dangerous disinformation.”
Others, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have called on social media companies to use enlightened algorithms to “protect” people from their own “bad” choices. After all, as President Joe Biden asked, without censorship and wise editors, “How do people know the truth?”
Now, Democrats fear Facebook and other social media companies might “backslide” into free speech as Facebook, among others, is faced with declining revenues and ordering layoffs. Tellingly, these congressional Democrats specifically want assurances that those layoffs will not reduce the staff dedicated to censoring social media.
It is not hard to see the cause for alarm. This hold-the-line warning is meant to stop a cascading failure in the once insurmountable wall of social-media censorship. If Facebook were to restore free-speech protections, the control over social media could evaporate.
Despite an effort by the left to boycott Twitter and cut off advertising revenues, users are signing up in record numbers, according to Twitter owner Elon Musk, and a recent poll shows a majority of Americans “support Elon Musk’s ongoing efforts to change Twitter to a more free and transparent platform.”
The pressure on Facebook is ironic, given the company’s previous effort to get the public to accept — even welcome — censorship. The company ran a creepy ad campaign about how young people should accept censorship (or “content modification,” in today’s Orwellian parlance) as part of their evolution with technology. It did not work; most people are not eager to buy into censorship. Instead, many of them apparently are buying into Twitter.
The public response has led censorship advocates to look abroad for allies. Figures like Hillary Clinton have called upon European countries to force the censorship of American citizens.
Censorship comes at a cost not only to free speech but, clearly, to these companies. Nevertheless, some members of Congress are demanding that Facebook and other companies offer the “last full measure of devotion” to the cause of censorship. Despite the clear preference of the public for more free speech, Facebook is being asked to turn its back on them (and its shareholders) and continue to exclude dissenting views on issues ranging from COVID to climate change.
These members know that censorship only works if there are no alternatives. The problem is that there are alternatives. Fox News reportedly has more Democrats watching it than left-leaning rival CNN, which now faces its own massive cuts and plummeting ratings.
For whatever reason, these companies face declining interest in what they offer. Yet, some Democrats are pushing them to double-down on the same course of effectively writing off half of the electorate and the audience market.
This type of pressure worked in the past because individual executives are loathe to be tagged personally in these campaigns. However, their companies are paying the price in carrying out these directives from Congress.
In the past, many companies willingly — if not eagerly, in the case of pre-Musk Twitter — carried out censorship as surrogates, as the internal Twitter documents released by Musk have indicated. Some public officials knew they could circumvent the First Amendment by getting these companies to block opposing views by proxy. However, the public and the marketplace may succeed where the Constitution could not — and that’s precisely what these officials fear, as they see the control of social media erode heading toward the 2024 election.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once famously told his company to “Move fast and break things.” When it comes to censorship, however, these members of Congress are warning “Not so fast!” if Facebook is considering a break in favor of free speech.
Adam Schiff and his kind are the type of people occupying leadership roles in government and yet they are clueless on how to solve problems. He is like a creepy old man yelling at and harassing kids to get off his lawn.
I trust him and others like him as far as I can throw an elephant by its tail.
Today’s left thinks free speech is just a political posture. They use sophistry to get us to no longer trust in the ideal of liberty. (See: Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and it’s a Good Thing Too.) They throw magic dust on the fire in hopes we will breathe the smoke and, becoming stupefied, agree with them (See: C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair). We must answer like Puddleglum: “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things . . . Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.”
This is the consequences of an increasingly marxist education.
Once upon a time – the left was the advocates for free speech.
These people seem never to have heard of the MacCarthy era, HUAC,
or the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio, or the blacklists,
or Russian show trials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement
Why don’t you file a FOIA request for “What will happen if Facebook doesn’t?”
Anonymous: I’m not sure why you keep relying on the absence of “coercion.” I thought the issue was whether government is engaging in political viewpoint discrimination through the use of “proxies” (as the professor describes). l’m looking for collusive communications, not coercive ones.
(In fact, the more I think of it, -and knowing how involved in this that Adam Schiff is, I wonder if this “warning” letter was not crafted as a preemptive strike to repel any perception of collusive intent.
Instead, the warning letter may be intended as specious indicia to create the perception that the two (government and SM) are at odds and that the government’s concern is reasonable/honorable/legal.
Then there’s that.
It’s not dissimilar to Susan Rice leaving an exculpatory e-mail to herself at the very last minute of the Obama administration.
“The president stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective,” she wrote.
John “Dudley Do-Wrong” Durham where are you?
George: Good point I forgot about (re: RIce).
The message is collude, or you will be coerced.
AGAIN Government is FORCE.
Government does not ask.
If government says please – it is a demand.
This is part of why we have constitutional chains on government power.
Professor Turley, Please let us know whether you believe the congressional letter that you linked to is a violation of the first amendment. See the debate and discussion below. Thanks.
Jonathan: It’s funny–almost hilarious–that you would start your column with the statement about the “restoration of free speech protections on Twitter”. It’s a admission that in recent days Musk has shown his true colors. Despite your claims to the contrary Musk is only interested in his “free speech” or that of those he agrees with. His banning of at least 10 journalists and then having to backpedal within 24 hours is pretty conclusive evidence. But then Musk takes other steps to curtail free expression. Yesterday, Twitter Support said to users they are banned if they link to Facebook, Instagram, Mastadon or other media platforms. Some Twitter users are including links to their new Mastadon profile and encouraging followers them there. That’s now a no, no. It will get you banned on Twitter.
So what Musk gives back with one hand to a few journalists he is using the other hand to double down on his curtailment of free expression. Journalists and others have found out what happens when you cross swords with Musk. All this tumult at Twitter because “Freddie Kruegerrand” Musk can’t control his emotions. And what’s worse is you keep peddling the myth that Musk is a big proponent of “free speech”. He isn’t and never has been.
Explain how Musk letting hostile “journalists” back on twitter is the same as Schiff et al threatening Congressional “oversight” over Facebook if they keep people off their website.
Offer us hard evidence that Musk “isn’t and never has been” a proponent of Free Speech.
ok schift, you go your two cents
There is no doubt that speech on twitter is much freer than it was.
No one expected Musk to make Twitter into Gab.
Besides being unconstitutional, doesn’t any effort by Schiff, Whitehouse, et al. to hold onto their censorship regime seem a bit desperate at this point? Two recent events may have given the PTSD: (1) GOP wins the House and will surely launch investigations into the collusion between social media and the feds to censor inconvenient viewpoints, and (2) Musk buys Twitter and dismantles the left-wing censorship machine it previously ran. The next two years should be like the free-wheeling Wild West . . . I’ve got the popcorn cooking!
The Socialists are metaphorically threatening to take a bite out of one another. Is this a French Revolution inside the Democrat/Socialist/Fascist Camp?
Sonne bien pour moi!
Bon appetit!
Oh, and they are distinctly not socialists.
They are absolute, unmitigated communists.
___________________________________
“The goal of Socialism is Communism.”
– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
I believe Marx used the words Socialism and Communism interchangeably.
There is such a thing as Leninism which we face with the leftists of today (Leninists/Stalinists).
They minimize of fear.
It all ends in communism.
Why mitigate for them?
It depends on one’s perspective. If one accepts they are the same, then when people mention socialism, they will think communism and maybe be afraid. That is why I use the term Stalinist, because people think of death.
We have been inundated with communists/socialists especially after WW2. They have existed at the highest levels of our government. What we are dealing with is fascist ideologies of all types vs the individualism we promoted in this country. We are losing our individualism and becoming slaves of the state.
Lincoln was “more or less” a socialist-cum-communist.
Please find herein, Lincoln’s Assistant Secretary of War’s words:
___________________________________________________
“…THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A SOCIAL WORLD.”
– KARL MARX TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN
___________
“These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.”
– Abraham Lincoln, from his first speech as an Illinois state legislator, 1837
__________________________________________________________
“Everyone now is more or less a Socialist.”
– Charles Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune, and Lincoln’s assistant secretary of war, 1848
______________________________________________________________________________________
“The goal of Socialism is Communism.”
– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
__________________
“The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”
– Karl Marx and the First International Workingmen’s Association to Lincoln, 1864
___________________________________________________________________
“ON DECEMBER 3, 1861, a former one-term congressman, who had spent most of the past dozen years studying dissident economic theories, mounting challenges to the existing political order and proposing ever more radical responses to the American crisis, delivered his first State of the Union address as the sixteenth president of the United States.
“Long before 1848, German radicals had begun to arrive in Illinois, where they quickly entered into the legal and political circles in which Lincoln traveled. One of them, Gustav Korner, was a student revolutionary at the University of Munich who had been imprisoned by German authorities in the early 1830s for organizing illegal demonstrations. After his release, Korner returned to his hometown of Frankfurt am Main where, according to historian Raymond Lohne, “he was one of about fifty conspirators involved in an attack upon the two main city guardhouses and the arsenal at the police facility and jail. This admixture of students and soldiers had planned to seize cannon, muskets, and ammunition; free political prisoners accused of breaking press-censorship laws, and begin ringing the great Sturmglocke (storm bell) of the Dom, the signal for the people to come in from the countryside. At that point, the democratic revolution would be announced…. Unfortunately, they were walking into a trap…. Betrayed by both a spy in their midst, and the reluctance of the common people to rise, nine students were killed, twenty-four were seriously wounded, and by August 3, 1833, Gustav Körner found himself riding into downtown Belleville, Illinois.”
“Within a decade, Korner would pass the Illinois bar, win election to the legislature and be appointed to the state Supreme Court. Korner and Lincoln formed an alliance that would become so close that the student revolutionary from Frankfurt would eventually be one of seven personal delegates-at-large named by Lincoln to serve at the critical Republican State Convention in May 1860, which propelled the Springfield lawyer into that year’s presidential race. Through Korner, Lincoln met and befriended many of the German radicals who, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, fled to Illinois and neighboring Wisconsin. Along with Korner on Lincoln’s list of personal delegates-at-large to the 1860 convention was Friedrich Karl Franz Hecker, a lawyer from Mannheim who had served as a liberal legislator in the lower chamber of the Baden State Assembly before leading an April 1848 uprising in the region—an uprising cheered on by the newspaper Marx briefly edited during that turbulent period, Neue Rheinische Zeitung—Organ der Demokratie.
“Even as they agreed on homesteading, Greeley and Lincoln wrangled over the timing and scope of an emancipation proclamation. The editor joined Frederick Douglass in demanding that the president take steps to make the Civil War not merely a struggle to preserve the Union, but “an Abolition war.” Even as Greeley and Lincoln exchanged sometimes pointed letters, the Tribune’s longtime managing editor Charles Dana was now working for Lincoln. Officially assigned to the War Department — where he would eventually serve as assistant secretary — Dana’s real role was as an aide and adviser to the president on questions of what the former newspaperman described as the “judicious, humane, and wise uses of executive authority.” That Lincoln spent much of his presidency reading dispatches from and welcoming the counsel of Marx’s longtime editor—like the fact that he awarded military commissions to the numerous comrades of the author of The Communist Manifesto who had come to the United States as political refugees following the failed European revolutions of 1848—is a shard of history rarely seen in the hagiographic accounts that produce a sanitized version of the sixteenth president’s story. In the years following Lincoln’s death, his law partner and political comrade, William Herndon, complained that Lincoln’s official biographers were already attempting “to make the story with the classes as against the masses,” an approach that he suggested “will result in delineating the real Lincoln about as well as does a wax figure in the museum.”
– ISR International Socialist Review
George, when you are through with your anecdotal evidence that Lincoln was a socialist, please provide some facts.
“It is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good.” ___Abraham Lincoln
Adam Schiff is a well-known purveyor of Russian disinformation.
*Of course, Russia claims it’s just disinformation.
The air will come out of the Democrat censorship balloon if Joe Manchin joins Kyrsten Sinema as an Independent in the Senate. They pretend to own Congress but have only a piece of it and that they’re barely clinging to. Facebook would do well to tell Schiff and Whitehouse to go pound sand.
There were already 2 Independent Senators (Sanders and King) who caucus with the Democrats. Sinema is the third. Unless Manchin chose to caucus with the Republicans, being an Independent instead of a Democrat has little impact on the running of the Senate.
I’ve decided to be an independent democrat?
No, an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats, just like Sanders and King already do.
It is of great consequence regarding votes.
Sienema is not a republican by any means. But her voting is also not that of a democrat.
The same is true of Manchin.
There are other political differences. Sienema is in serious trouble in AZ in 2024.
While she MIGHT have enough support to win a general election. She can not win either a democrat or republican primary.
Manchin is not going to be successfully primarried.
Nearly 80 years ago the Supreme Court held:
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). The issue at hand was that the schools were forcing students to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. But the prohibition on government officials — such as these members of Congress — deciding what is “orthodox in politics” and “matters of opinion” applies much more broadly.
You’re engaged in copyright infringement and should expect your comment to be deleted. A link and short quote or summary are all that fair use allow.
I am skeptical that the letter violates the first amendment since the amendment says “Congress shall make no law” (not a letter by 4 members) and the letter uses phrases like we “urge” (twice), “believe” and “request answers to our questions”.
The “Congress shall make no law” has never been interpreted literally by the Supreme Court. Any governmental action suppressing speech — whether by Congress or the executive branch — violates the First Amendment. (Same with state-level government entities, which are obviously not Congress, since the First Amendment applies to the states through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.) The First Amendment also restricts anyone acting as an agent of the government from suppressing free expression, which the social media companies would be doing if acting at the behest of individual members of Congress.
It simply isn’t true that “Any governmental action suppressing speech — whether by Congress or the executive branch — violates the First Amendment.” A simple counterexample are the totally constitutional perjury laws that suppress false testimony.
Anonymous: good point. I was primarily addressing Concerned Citizen’s suggested limitation to Congress, but in fact there are several ways that speech can be constitutionally curtailed, such as laws against perjury (as you point out), state laws recognizing a cause of action for defamation, the Copyright Act, and laws against terroristic threats. However, those are exceptions to the general rule against speech suppression, and anything outside those exceptions is off limits to the government. Applying pressure to a private corporation to engage in viewpoint censorship does not fall into any of the exceptions.
Re: “applying pressure,” it’s totally legal for the government to make requests, as long as it’s up to the company to determine which requests to act on. SCOTUS only bans government *coercion*.
“In response to the “Twitter Files,” a spokesperson for the FBI told Fox News Digital, ‘The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.'”
Anonymous: engage in a little critical thinking here. Of course the FBI claims innocence, of course the members of Congress will say they are only “making requests.” But guilty parties generally deny guilt, so you have to look a little further. The letter authors are clearly putting pressure on Meta, not just “making requests.” You should read the letter. They tell Meta what Meta “must” do to satisfy the government, and require Meta to answer six bullet-pointed questions. That’s coercion, and that’s unconstitutional. Maybe you agree with the members’ politics, but to see if it is coercion you have to imagine it was coming from the other side and “requesting” that Meta censor your side. How would you interpret a letter like that coming from right-wing members of Congress telling Meta to censor liberal expressions on their platform? The tone of the letter is clearly threatening, and in any event no member of the federal government has any business even requesting censorship of opposing views.
As for the FBI, do you really trust them so much as to accept anything they say as gospel truth? Do you trust the CIA that much? I sure don’t. One person who saw all the Twitter files first hand was liberal journalist and Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi. He described it as a master-servant relationship with FBI in the role of mater and Twitter in the role of servant. So please spare me the credulity concerning what a “spokesman for the FBI” said as if that settles the matter.
Old man, you are right. And in any court it would be a question of fact whether the context in which these “requests” were made tipped them over into coercion.
I can see it now, the FBI, DHS, EPA, CDC, and of course the IRS comes to social media and says we are not engaging in coercion, but we think you should push all the folk to vote a certain way.
That would pass anonymous’s test of legality. There is a lack of critical thinking skills in what anonymous has to say.
I did read the letter, and Meta makes its own decisions. These requests simply do not rise to the legal level of coercion.
“The tone of the letter is clearly threatening”
What’s the threat? I don’t see one. You do, so spell it out: what is Meta being threatened with?
“no member of the federal government has any business even requesting censorship of opposing views”
Nope. The federal government is free to make requests. Keep in mind that Taibbi also said “10.Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored.” Are you now going to say that the Trump WH also made illegal threats?
AFAIK, both sides made legal requests.
Ridiculous. You are referring to the Common Law, which predates the Constitution. There ARE no “constitutional perjury laws.” There’s also the “Pentagon Papers” case that held that the federal government cannot engage in “prior restraint”. Yes, Facebook isn’t formally “the Press” , but attempting to force SECRET censorship on a private company is outside the powers of the government. What “oversight” powers does the Congress have regarding Facebook’s publications.
All laws are either constitutional or unconstitutional. Perjury is not protected by the First Amendment. Perjury laws are constitutional.
What “force” are you referring to?
Anonymous: “It simply isn’t true that ‘Any governmental action suppressing speech — whether by Congress or the executive branch — violates the First Amendment.’ A simple counterexample are the totally constitutional perjury laws that suppress false testimony”
First, perjury pertains to deliberate misstatements of fact under oath. Political speech is about nonviolent political opinions not under oath. Apples and oranges.
Second, these members of Congress are trying to influence powerful social media to collude with them in suppressing nonviolent political speech. Congress does not have to pass a law nor expressly threaten someone to violate the 1st Amendment. If social media censor nonviolent political speech on behalf of any government officials, that is a violation of the 1st Amendment by custom, tradition, and law.
And before your use the “social media are private companies” argument, that argument does not apply to Facebook. Social media operating under Section 230 (like Facebook) are considered platforms. Any censoring of nonviolent political speech for political reasons makes them content providers, not platforms; thus, they would be in violation of Section 230. Logically, that implies the 1st Amendment applies to any social media operating under Section 230.
You may believe that, but no court has agreed with you.
Has any court not agreed with Diogenes? The distinction between content providers and platforms seems clear. Will you be taking issue with that concept?
The singular American failure has been and continues to be the Supreme Court – From its failure to conduct Judicial Review and decide that secession was and is not prohibited by the Constitution and is entirely constitutional as it is all around the world, to Roberts’ actionable and egregiously arbitrary commingling of the definitions of the words “state” and “federal” with reference to the “exchanges” in Obamacare.
______________________________________________
“…courts…must…declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void.”
“…men…do…what their powers do not authorize, [and] what they forbid.”
“[A] limited Constitution … can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing … To deny this would be to affirm … that men acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.”
– Alexander Hamilton
Is there something ridiculous about these Members of Congress demanding that these social media businesses agree to a conspiracy to do the dirty work for these people? Do these people possess the ability to read, specifically as it applies to the United States Constitution? Do they not know that censorship by proxy is just as bad as censorship by government?
The leftist on this blog think it’s alright for Adam Schiff to threaten Facebook. It’s all about reaching their altruistic goals through whatever means necessary. A shakedown is just part of the plan. An applicable comparison would be people defending Al Capone because he gave money to an orphanage. Some say it was a veiled threat. I disagree. There is nothing veiled about it. It least Capone tried to operate in the shadows. Adam Schiff is the Capo of the Democratic party. There are some here who are willing to bow down and kiss his ring to get their daily crumbs. No need to name names.
The letter doesn’t contain any threats.
When the FBI writes to you, it is saying “you are noticed” it is a warning. Especially todays FBI.
What they’re saying is “we notice you”!
The price of censorship is not just a loss of subcsribers or viewers. The wide circulation of information and opinions about reality is necessary to deal with that reality. If we stumble into nuclear war because of unexamined, reckless actions by Biden, e.g., by introducing Amerian “advisors” into military conflict with Russia, even the censors will end up being burned to a crisp.
That’s a great point. With the censorship of opposing views on the appropriate public response to Covid, the censors and censored alike are living with the fallout from the most wrongheaded public policy response to a pandemic in recorded history.
The masking of children and school closures led to spiked rates of mental illness, domestic violence, drug abuse, premature brain aging in adolescents, and academic deficiency. The lockdowns led to business closures and life savings wipeouts resulting in mass business failures and stimulus money, in turn leading to the highest inflation in 40 years; the hysteria led to countless families losing loved ones in nursing homes and not being able to be at their bedside in their last hours. Everyone must deal with these adverse effects, including the censors and the parties guilty of purveying the wrongheaded response such as Anthony Fauci and Democrat governors (e.g., Whitmer in Michigan, Wolf in Pennsylvania, Newsom in California, and so on).
In a world of free speech much of that harm could have been predicted, the ill-advised measures would likely have been curtailed, and the harm mitigated.
Chilling indeed. It seems the Founding Fathers adopted the First Amendment to protect America from dirty rotten scoundrels like Messrs. Schiff and Whitehouse.
Now you know why the Founders restricted the vote.
Now you know why the Founders provided the power to States to “entitle” or deny voters.
Now you know why turnout was 11.6% in 1788 and general vote criteria were male, European, 21, 50 lbs. Sterling/50 acres.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
“[We gave you] a [restricted-vote] republic, if you can keep it.”
– Ben Franklin
___________
More voters means communism.
Democracy was the restricted-vote-republic version since inception in Greece and perpetuation in Rome and America.
Now you know why the communists acted through their “Reconstruction Amendments,” etc., to end vote restrictions by States and impose one man, one vote elections.
More voters means more poor voters – an immutable majority of poor voters.
Poor voters always vote to take “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Actual, conservative, constitutional Americans will never win an election again without reimplementation of the innate constitutional vote restrictions of “original intent.”
A democracy without vote restrictions is an asylum run by lunatics.
_____________________________________________________
“So, the lunatics have taken charge of the asylum.”
– Richard A. Rowland, The Formation of United Artists Studio, 1925, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether,” 1845.
George, you’re a classist, racist, and misogynist who only wants landed white males to be able to vote — not people who don’t own property, not women, not people of color.
And your point, comradette, is, I mean other than your all-consuming desire to forcibly impose communism and your contrived, artificial, personal success on free America?
Freedom can be a problem for some, especially illegal aliens who demand “free stuff” from other people’s money and “to each according to his (was Marx a misogynist) needs,” right?
Oh, I see, I am just exactly and precisely what the American Founders and Framers were in 1789 when they built and established the United States of America, according to your bizarre diatribe.
I appreciate the oblique compliment but I am distinctly not a State; I have no power to establish vote criteria and I never have.
That you are adversarial to the American thesis, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the American Founders is duly noted, comrade.
Apropos of nothing, I see no prohibition in the Constitution against holding any of the opinions and perspectives you appear to have referenced.
As a matter of fact, inherent in the freedom of speech are the freedoms of cognition, differentiation, distinction, discrimination, thought, opinion, etc.
Incidentally, why are you so afraid of publishing at least a pen name?
Do you not have the courage of your communist convictions?
I already made my point Georgie. Are you not literate enough to understand it?
If we can’t be Americans in America, can we at least get rid of wholly unconstitutional matriculation affirmative action, grade-inflation affirmative action, employment affirmative action, quotas, welfare, food stamps, minimum wage, rent control, social services, forced busing, public housing, utility subsidies, WIC, SNAP, TANF, HAMP, HARP, TARP, HHS, HUD, EPA, Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Labor, Energy, Obamacare, Social Security, Social Security Disability, Social Security Supplemental Income, Medicare, Medicaid, “Fair Housing” laws, “Non-Discrimination” laws, etc.
Because the political “oil and water” do not mix, communists imposed the unconstitutional political emulsifiers published above in order to force it.
Nicholas Grossman (International Relations professor at the U of IL): “Why would FBI be flagging social media posts that tell people the wrong day to vote, you ask? Probably because it’s illegal under federal law to impede voting by spreading false info about dates of federal elections, and enforcing federal law is FBI’s job. https://www.justice.gov/usao-nh/page/file/1328371/download “
Why did Margaret Sanger propose exterminating the black population some may ask. It was believed by Sanger’s organization that blacks giving birth to more blacks made it difficult for Whites like Sanger to control blacks. She used religious ministers to quiet the uppity blacks
“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
– Margaret Sanger
Marxist Margaret Sanger would be proud of Adam Schiff, another Marxist. Time will tell when Schiff supports Sangers eugenics of those he considers “lesser than”
“Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying … demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism … [Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste.”
– Margaret Sanger in “The Pivot of Civilization”
““We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the N**** population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
~ Letter from Margaret Sanger to Dr. C.J. Gamble, December 10th, 1939
All I want Musk to do is just let everybody who post be treated fairly. If he does that I think he will have a very active site.