Category: Guest Post

Americans Paid To Create The Internet; They Demand Freedom of Speech On It

This article is written by Pam Geller at the Geller Report.

By Pamela Geller – on January 11, 2021

Quick note: Tech giants are snuffing us out. You know this. Facebook, Twitter, Google et al have shadowbanned, suspended and in some cases deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. Subscribe to Geller Report — it’s free and it’s critical NOW more than ever. 

2016: “The freedom of speech is under strenuous attack. This is not just about me. If I am silenced, a dangerous precedent will be set that people can be denied access to the means of communications if their views aren’t acceptable to the elites. This would mean the end of a free society in the U.S. Every American should care about this. There is nowhere to flee, nowhere else to go.”

The great Democrat-totalitarian dream is a gated worldwide web completely under their control.

Daniel Greenfield: The internet is our economy and our marketplace of ideas. And it is under the control of a handful of individuals and companies who, beyond becoming fabulously wealthy, believe that they are socially obligated to uphold their own political and cultural norms by banishing those voices they disagree with and promoting those voices they agree with. No railroad or oil baron ever had the power to shape political discourse that the bosses of Google, Facebook, Amazon and other FAANGS (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet) do today.

[…]

Big tech has already decided what it’s going to do about us. The question is what are we going to do about it? If we want a free and open Internet, we have to fight for policies that will bring one about. That means championing the breakup of big tech monopolies and cutting off the government contracts that enrich them at the political level. But it also means changing how we use the internet.

That’s easier said than done. It requires a change of perspective.

Big tech and big government both promise convenience in a single package. They both offer lots of things for free as long as you don’t contemplate how you’re paying for all those freebies. Why not get free health and education from the same government? Why not get your phone, your search engine and all your news from Google? And your entertainment and retail orders from Amazon?

WAIT, NOT SO FAST.

Why Freedom of Speech Should Apply to Google, Facebook and the Internet

Americans paid to create the internet; they deserve Freedom of Speech on it.

By Daniel Greenfield, May 14, 2019:

The driving force behind the censorship of conservatives isn’t a handful of tech tycoons. It’s elected officials. Senator Kamala Harris offered an example of that in a recent speech where she declared that she would “hold social media platforms accountable” if they contained “hate” or “misinformation”.

The second fact is that the internet is not the work of a handful of aspiring entrepreneurs who built it out of thin air using nothing but their talent, brains and nimble fingers.

The internet was the work of DARPA. That stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is part of the Department of Defense. DARPA had funded the creation of the core technologies that made the internet possible. The origins of the internet go back to DARPA’s Arpanet.

Nor did the story end once the internet had entered every home.

Where did Google come from? “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” the original paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, reveals support from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and even NASA.

Harvard’s computer science department, where Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg learned to play with the toys that turned him into a billionaire, has also wallowed in DARPA cash. Not to mention funds from a variety of other DOD and Federal science agencies.

Taxpayer sank a fortune into developing a public marketplace where ideas are exchanged, and political advocacy and economic activity takes place. That marketplace doesn’t belong to Google, Amazon or Facebook. And when those monopolies take a stranglehold on the marketplace, squeezing out conservatives from being able to participate, they’re undermining our rights and freedoms.

“A right of free correspondence between citizen and citizen on their joint interests, whether public or private and under whatsoever laws these interests arise (to wit: of the State, of Congress, of France, Spain, or Turkey), is a natural right,” Thomas Jefferson argued.

There should be a high barrier for any company seeking to interfere with the marketplace of ideas in which the right of free correspondence is practiced.

Critics of regulating dot com monopolies have made valid points.

Regulating Google or Facebook as a public utility is dangerous. And their argument that giving government the power to control content on these platforms would backfire is sensible.

Any solution to the problem should not be based on expanding government control.

But there are two answers.

First, companies that engage in viewpoint discrimination in response to government pressure are acting as government agents. When a pattern of viewpoint discrimination manifests itself on the platform controlled by a monopoly, a civil rights investigation should examine what role government officials played in instigating the suppression of a particular point of view.

Liberals have abandoned the Public Forum Doctrine, once a popular ACLU theme, while embracing censorship. But if the Doctrine could apply to a shopping mall, it certainly applies to the internet.

In Packingham v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court’s decision found that, “A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen.”

The Packingham case dealt with government interference, but when monopolies silence conservatives on behalf of government actors, they are fulfilling the same role as an ISP that suspends a customer in response to a law.

When dot com monopolies get so big that being banned from their platforms effectively neutralizes political activity, press activity and political speech, then they’re public forums.

Second, rights are threatened by any sufficiently large organization or entity, not just government. Government has traditionally been the most powerful such organization, but the natural rights that our country was founded on are equally immune to every organization. Governments, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, exist as part of a social contract to secure these rights for its citizens.

Government secures these rights, first and foremost, against itself. (Our system effectively exists to answer the question of who watches the watchers.) But it also secures them against foreign powers, a crisis that the Declaration of Independence was written to meet, and against domestic organizations, criminal or political, whether it’s the Communist Party or ISIS, that seek to rob Americans of their rights.

A country in which freedom of speech effectively did not exist, even though it remained a technical right, would not be America. A government that allowed such a thing would have no right to exist.

Only a government whose citizens enjoy the rights of free men legally justifies is existence.

If a private company took control of all the roads and closed them to conservatives every Election Day, elections would become a mockery and the resulting government would be an illegitimate tyranny.

That’s the crisis that conservatives face with the internet.

A couple years back I wrote the following:

We were the first to sue the social media giants for our First Amendment rights. In light of that fight, I began to focus AFDI activism to pursue anti-trust laws be used to break up social monopolies and duopolies. The Wall Street Journal suggests the same thing, albeit for the wrong reasons. For the WSJ, it’s all about the Benjamins, but for principled Americans, it’s all about freedom. Please contribute to that fight here. Make no mistake, it is the most pressing issue of day. If we are going to fight against the forces of far-left authoritarianism, and we must, freedom of speech in the social media public square is essential. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society. Without it, these leftist tyrants can and are wreaking havoc unopposed, while we are silenced. I have written extensively on this here.

Quick synopsis here: Pamela Geller, American Thinker: Urgent Case for Legislation against Facebook and Google

Here is what I argued back in 2016:

If the US government could break up Ma Bell, the USG can break up Facebook. Today’s IP address is yesterday’s phone number. It’s how we communicate today — whether by FB comment, messenger, Twitter DM etc.

Facebook adhering to the most extreme and brutal ideology on the face of the earth should trouble all of us, because Mark Zuckerberg has immense power. He controls the flow of information. He controls what you see and don’t see on Facebook. We did not give him the power to abridge our unalienable freedoms.

The US government used anti-trust laws to break up monopolies. They ought to break up Facebook. Section 2 of the Sherman Act highlights particular results deemed anti-competitive by nature and prohibits actions that “shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations.” Couldn’t the same be applied to information? The United States government took down Standard Oil, Alcoa, Northern Securities, the American Tobacco Company and many others without nearly the power that Facebook has.

I do not know how far my lawsuit against the social media giants will get but I do know that something must be done. Whether through legislation or anti-trust lawsuits, the chokehold that the uniformly leftist corporate media managers at social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google have on our means of communication must be broken.

Facebook, Google search, AdSense, Twitter, YouTube have banned, blocked, shadowbanned and scrubbed my site, my work, from their platforms and my millions of followers. And I am hardly alone. It is now standard operating procedure to silence conservatives and counter terror activists.

Thoughts on Current Events

January 11, 2021

There Was No Revolution

By Pamela Geller

There was no revolution. There was no pro-Trump coup attempt. Everyone knows it.

A couple of crackpots who pranked at the Capitol are now being called a “revolution.” As if that crazy, painted-face shaman with the buffalo-horn hat was leading — what are they calling it? Ah yes, an insurrection.

There was a call by millions of Americans for election integrity. It was met with “shoot to kill” behavior and then a great purge. It wasn’t a revolution; it was more like anambush. No one is asking who gave the shoot-to-kill order or who gave the order to invite protesters into the Capitol building.

We do know that the January 6, 2021 Capitol protesters were invited in. See the video here. And here.

What we do know is that there were scores of Trump rallies attended by hundreds of thousands of people, with not one incident.

What we do know is our people are peaceful, respectful and law-abiding. What we do know is we are a subclass — “Untouchables” — who have been brutally punished at every turn, most especially this past year, by Democrat despots.

We do know is that we witnessed months of “insurrection” — burning cities, government buildings, streets, and even sometimes homes, and were told it was peaceful and necessary.That was insurrection.

We watched Democrats take over the Hart Senate Building and State Capitol buildings and were told it was beautiful. On September 24, 2018, during the Kavanaugh hearings, NARAL tweeted:

“RIGHT NOW: Large crowd of activists & allies in black are occupying the Hart Senate building to make sure our lawmakers know we will NOT be silenced. We need our senators to step up to the plate — Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination must be withdrawn. #StopKavanaugh #CancelKavanaugh”

And according to political consultant Mike Yoder, “In 1983, Susan Rosenberg planted a bomb outside the US Senate chamber to assassinate Republican senators. House Judiciary Committee Chairman @RepJerryNadler got Pres. Clinton to pardon Susan Rosenberg. She’s now a board member of Black Lives Matter Network, Inc.”

We do know that all talk of the greatest election theft in history has utterly and absolutely ceased.

There was no revolution. There was a call by the people for election integrity.

It was, it must again be emphasized, met with “shoot to kill” behavior and then a great purge. We’re all being terminated on social media. For years we warned for years as social media did this to conservatives with the courage of their convictions. The soft Right either ignored us or worse, quietly nodded in assent.

The Garland, Texas free speech event we held in Texas in May 2015 was purely in defense of free speech. But we were painted as “anti-Muslim,” “agitators,” “provocateurs,” etc. Just as the young mother shot down in the Capitol in cold blood, we were told we “had it coming.”

Overnight, the great purge began, and the CCP-Democrats haven’t even taken the reins of power yet.

The Democrat totalitarians mean to impose one-party rule. They are criminalizing political dissent as “domestic terrorism” and mean to criminalize it in ways one can only imagine (leaf through non-PC history books).

The biggest conservative voices have been exterminated on Twitter.

President Trump, his son, General Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and a great many others have been banned from Twitter. Rush Limbaugh deleted his account in disgust. Hundreds of thousands of followers are being shaved from conservative accounts. Facebook is threatening to shut down my pages.

Even Senator Josh Hawley was cancelled. Oblivious to the irony, Simon and Schuster killed the Missouri Republican’s upcoming book, The Tyranny of Big Tech.

I chose to leave Twitter.

For years we were told, “if you don’t like it, build your own social media platform!” And we did. Parler. But the totalitarians didn’t think we actually would, so now Google and Apple have removed Parler for their platforms. But even that wasn’t enough; now Amazon is disabling Parler’s servers.

The Chief Executive Officer of Mozilla, Mitchell Baker, said in a statement that the internet needs “more than deplatforming” and that change “requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms.”

Again, remember: they don’t have their grubby fingers on the levers of power yet.

Patriots who attended the protest are being hunted down like dogs, fired from their jobs, shamed in the public square.

Were there a couple of bad actors in the million-person march for America? Of course. But there were also agitators from Antifa. You’ll read nothing of that, either.

So why the desperate frenzy? They fear Trump. They fear us. But mostly because it’s an opportunity for totalitarians. It provides the context — the optics — to put down the people, as CNN and the rest of the Goebbelsesque media want to do. It is the Democrat version of the Reichstag fire.

They will force us underground. We will communicate like Germany’s “White Rose” Society (aka “Leaflets of the Resistance”).

If you think I am exaggerating, look around. I was right about it all.

The Great Purge is hardly new. It is used in all totalitarian seizures of power. Think Hitler, Stalin, Mao et al…. destroy the opposition. Crush dissent.

For now, subscribe to news curators and information disseminators you trust. Stay away from the nuts. Subscribe to the Geller Report here.

For the record, I support President Trump.

The pile-on, especially from the right, is most foul. Trump saved the right, saved the Republican party, and he delivered in spades. Trump is the greatest President in modern history. But he is more than that. He is akin to a biblical figure — Job.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report and author of the bestselling book, FATWA: Hunted in America, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/there_was_no_revolution.html#ixzz6jFebZHCA
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

LET’S HAVE MORE WRITER LOVE

Hello friends.  It’s been a rough couple of weeks down here in central Florida but this article really captured me.  I thought it was well spoken and from a really good heart.  I originally found this over on another great blog, The Writer’s Path.  Thanks Ryan.  This was written By Melanie Mole.  Thank you Melanie.  

If you are reading this, please share.  We could all use this.  

You all really should drop over and meet these folks. You’d like them.

Hope your weekend is a great one,  If you’re digging out from the storm as I am, be safe.

Peace,

Lee

 

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by Melanie Mole

Writing can be a lonely business. By its very nature it is often a solitary existence. As a writer I have often thought how sad it is that some writers don’t support each other more. We are probably all after the same goal. We all want to write, and most to be heard. Some do write for pleasure only which is great, because to write just for the pleasure of it is a lovely thing. But whatever the reason, writing is our aim.

Writing affords us a time to reflect and to get our thoughts out onto the page. As each word tumbles out of our brain we can feel both mentally and physically lighter, and know that we are positively getting nearer to our goals as a writer. Each word carries with it a deluge of thoughts, feelings, and a tiny part of us as the writer. Each chapter, note, finished poem, screenplay, or project, is like the birth of a child as we have nurtured and cared for them until they are ready to start a life of their own. Like the tiny fledglings that are now leaving their nests, ready to go out into the world no matter how scary it looks. Flapping their wings abundantly to ensure that they take off and soar.

Earlier this year I watched the Springwatch programme on BBC. It was an absolute delight to see nature in close up. What has struck me is how hard those little creatures work just to survive. But nature is cruel, as is the writing world at times. Not everyone survives. Some get only a short way along the writing path, and others much further. All negotiating the rough terrain, the ups and the downs along the way. Some tough enough to make the distance, and others not making it.

When I looked at the television screen as Springwatch aired, I saw sheer panic in some of their little faces. Some have no idea whether they will survive, but are going to try their hardest anyway. Parents feeding their young and looking after them, sometimes with little sleep, determined to nurture them in the best way that they can.

Nurturing the writer within us is what we all need at some point. You may even need to do that daily. It is important to do so, because without it we will not thrive, just like those little chicks won’t if their parents don’t nourish them.

Like the adult birds do with their young, we need to nourish ourselves. To think about what the writer within us needs. To nourish it with all our might. So that we are both strong enough to write, and to survive the emotional turmoil that the writing life throws at us. It is a tricky road for some, but can be eased by others, especially by those who know what we are going through.

Only another writer can really know what writers go through. Others who don’t write can eagerly sympathise, which is great. But to actually live through the writing life day by day is another thing. Only one who lives it can really understand the highs and the lows, the difficulties which abound in a writer’s life which nobody else sees, but which we feel all too often.

So why then do some writers not think about others who are having a bad time? Why do they not support them, even in the smallest of ways?

A simple message on something like social media is all that it takes. Even one sentence can help. Something to lift their spirits and to help them through their writing day.

Listening helps too. Hearing them at their worst, then seeing them when they rise gloriously in all their splendour. Finding their equilibrium, where they feel at their best, able to write freely and without doubt. A simple question to ask them how their writing is going can be such a tonic when it is tough?

When another writer puts their work out into the world, it is a joy. We then have more words to mull over, each conveying a message from within. So we should be pleased for them, encouraging their courage and their words. Happy that they have finished their piece of writing and put it out there for all of us to see.

Writer love is such a simple, yet effective thing. Let’s have more writer love. There is no better time to start that than today.

Guest post contributed by Melanie Mole. Melanie loves to connect on Twitter, Facebook, and her website. Why not connect with her there, or read her books – Man + Woman = Trouble, and Simply Does It.