A Look Back at Egypt

May 29th, 2020

Wearing a Red Hat is Violence, but a Riot is a Protest

The polarization of Christians and anti-Christians continues, and the Beast’s mob continues to form and train. Donald Trump just took a gigantic step to curtail the political mind control coming from social sites, and black people all over America are rioting because one man died during an arrest.

I’m always amazed to see pundits and pundettes miss the obvious when discussing our nation’s issues. One thing I have not been able to understand is the rarity of comment regarding our lack of protection when using new forms of public discourse. The First Amendment was written in a time when discourse took two forms: actual speech and writings on physical media. You could talk to people, or you could write things and disseminate them on paper or parchment or other materials. The First Amendment prevented the government from interfering, and that was adequate. It didn’t protect people from other entities that wanted to censor. It didn’t prevent private parties from censoring employees, students, and so on. But it took government out of the game.

The primary goal of protection of expression was to allow political dissent, not pornography. Many ignorant Americans would be surprised to learn that, since we generally see the First Amendment invoked in connection with obscenity.

When social media became our most powerful means of expression, everything changed. We entered an era in which a few left-leaning private entities had the power to shut people down without fear of legal resistance. The First Amendment doesn’t apply to Twitter and Facebook. We now live in a time where anti-Christians have a tremendous advantage in communication. The most important public fora are run by anti-Christians, and they can stifle us at will. Their only incentive to refrain has been monetary; they want to present a false image of neutrality in order to keep Christians and conservatives on their sites. They balance this desire with a burning drive to silence us.

The First Amendment doesn’t help Christians if they lack typical access to the public ear. Freedom to criticize Barack Obama doesn’t mean much if you’re restricted to inferior means of communication.

I knew all this, but I didn’t think there was a legal solution to the problem. I didn’t study it. To my surprise, the Trump administration just came up with a weapon. They are taking away special legal protections the anti-Christian social media rulers used to enjoy.

I’m not going to study the matter in depth, because I don’t feel like it, but the basic idea is that it’s hard to sue people who run websites for disseminating content you don’t like, because the law says that as long as they only censor content sparingly and for good reason, they are not considered content creators.

If your neighbor Bob slanders you on Facebook, you probably can’t sue Facebook, because Facebook didn’t utter the slander. They just served as a conduit. According to the Trump administration, that changes when Facebook begins nannying account holders. It’s okay for Facebook to remove child porn and other types of information just about everyone finds unacceptable, but when Facebook starts removing political material posted by conservatives, without a symmetrical response to leftists, Facebook begins to be responsible for the things that are and are not published, as though Facebook itself were creating content.

Twitter inserted a message into a Trump tweet, alerting people to Twitter’s position that the tweet should be fact-checked. Twitter generally does not do this to high-profile anti-Christian tweeters, regardless of what they post. Trump didn’t like it, so now he is trying to expose the social giants to lawsuits.

Isn’t it funny that we call the communication sites “social giants”? In the Bible, giants were evil children of Satan. They ruled the earth and intimidated righteous people.

Does Trump’s tactic have any teeth? I don’t know. The text suggests his order only applies to the executive branch. I don’t know how much power that branch has over the Internet. It would be more powerful if courts had to follow it. Federal prosecutors presumably have to obey, and it seems likely that conservative judges will be sympathetic, but I don’t think it binds anyone in the judiciary branch. Maybe I’m mistaken.

I suppose that in order to find out whether Trump’s order has any effect, people will have to start complaining to executive branch entities and suing in federal courts.

It’s a beautiful gesture, albeit very late in coming. I’ll say that.

I keep telling people Christians will be driven off the web. It’s fascinating to see the battle exposed.

Now, what about unintended consequences? Those are always fun.

I run a blog. I delete ridiculous comments. I remove spam and obscene remarks. If I were to see anything sufficiently offensive to me, personally, I would delete it.

Am I running a public forum? Will I be sued if I delete comments?

Andrea Harris, who used to blog as the Twisted Spinster, called comment trolls “blog roaches.” I agree. A blog is a person’s Internet home, and it’s unreasonable to expect bloggers to host malicious idiots.

Tomorrow, I’m going to let a whole family into my home, and they will spent the night. That doesn’t mean I have to let a vanload of smelly, violent Antifers take the remaining bedroom and urinate on the carpet.

Running a personal blog would be unpleasant and unsafe if I had to let every comment through. I delete very, very few comments, but then my blog doesn’t attract trolls the way it used to. If I had a popular right-wing blog, as I used to, I would be fielding vicious, filthy comments right and left. I used to get a lot of them. People used to threaten to mail me their feces, for example. There are many bloggers who still live under these conditions. What will happen to them if they find out they have to post every comment? Their sites will be ruined. Their enemies may figure out the unintended consequences of Trump’s order, bury them in comments, and then file complaints and even sue them.

Maybe the answer is commenter registration, but I don’t know if it will work. You have to register for Facebook, and they’re still in the crosshairs.

Does it matter if real (i.e. private) blogs disappear? They don’t have the power they once had. Still, it would be bad if an effort to promote speech anti-Christians don’t like ended up discouraging it.

The position of legislators and courts has always been that every individual’s right to free expression is extremely important.

It may be that there is no good way to restrain the political and religious censorship of the left. It will probably turn out to be up to judges. If they interpret the law a certain way, we’ll be okay. But look at all the bizarre anti-Christian interpretations courts have made in the past. For example, somehow we went from refraining from creating laws establishing religions to banning prayer in schools.

As for the rioting, it’s quite a spectacle. A man named George Floyd was killed by the police in Minnesota, and people are rioting in places over a thousand miles away. People are looting stores, supposedly as a means of expressing their political and moral views. A police station was burned in Minnesota, and the police ran away instead of defending it.

It used to be that when the police killed someone, rioters waited for the authorities to fail to react. In the case of George Floyd, they chose rioting as their first option. It appears that no one is backing the cops involved in the killing, yet there are still riots. That’s the Beast in action. He is training people who have a victimhood complex. He wants them to think that every evil thing they want to do is justified, and that mob behavior is righteous.

God showed me that the Beast would work through mobs. There is a body of Christ, ruled by the Holy Spirit, and there is a body of Satan, ruled by demons and the flesh. Satan is teaching his kids to be bolder and bolder. Eventually, they’ll riot with no proximate provocation at all. They’ll gather and go to neighborhoods where people are better off, and they’ll do as they please. The police won’t be able to do much, and in some areas, mayors will actually discourage the police. At least one mayor has already done this.

We’ve already seen flash mobs enter stores, beat people, and take whatever they wanted.

There are areas where America has completely lost control. We don’t like to talk about it, but it’s very obvious. There are places where people of the wrong race simply can’t go. There are places where you can be killed for having a blue bandana in your back pocket.

I knew a Cuban named K.C. He was a former criminal. He lived in Texas, and then he moved to South Florida. He told me he had to call himself “K. Three” because if he said “C,” he risked being hurt or killed. Apparently, the Crips think they own the letter “C.” Yesterday, I read a story about coronavirus (“3oronavirus”?) masks. Authorities delivered a warning to people in a certain area. They said people shouldn’t wear masks in certain colors because gangs might attack them. The victimhood machine rose up and shamed the authorities for trying to save lives, and guess what they got. An apology and retraction!

The Bloods and Crips are not really big gangs. They’re small gangs which belong to a bigger gang: the Body of the Beast.

Decent Christian people are in retreat now. This is how I ended up living in the country. It’s why so many other people are leaving cities. It may also have something to do with covid. It’s hitting cities hard and making people think about rural living. Maybe God is using it to move his people to relative safety.

I expect our retreat to continue and increase. We will see Cambodia-style scenes in America. It will be like the French Revolution, in which evil, bloodthirsty, victimhood-crazed peasants dragged wealthy people out of their homes and cut their heads off. Politicians won’t protect us. They’ll be under the spell. They’ll be against the innocent.

People who are on top socially tend to make a fatal error. They think they put themselves on top. In reality, all power comes from God. If you turn from him, he stops backing you up. That’s what’s happening now. It’s why England lost its empire. Americans who are civilized and well off are like Samson. They think they still have the power to rise up and rend their enemies like kittens, but while they were asleep, Delilah shaved them bald.

It’s very interesting to contemplate my situation with regard to the future wave of murder and confiscation. On the one hand, I get more and more interested in firearms, and my collection of guns and ammunition increases. On the other, I have less and less interest in using them to defend myself. A lot of Christians and conservatives rattle their AR-15’s and say they’re going to shoot “zombies” on their properties when things really get bad. Not me. I enjoy firearms as a hobby. I don’t think guns will save me. The idea of shooting a bunch of people in order to stay on this wretched planet is repugnant to me.

I don’t want to defeat my enemies by becoming like them.

When America devolves into a true idiocracy, won’t rational Christians regard execution as a favor? A bullet in the head would be a “million-dollar wound,” to use the phrase soldiers used during World War Two. It would be a fast ticket home.

Many of us like to say, “Molon labe.” “Come and take them.” Maybe we should mean that sincerely. Allowing yourself to be taken is more dignified than turning into an ape.

I’m extremely grateful to be far from Miami. I hope God moves me even farther from leftists. They are rapidly becoming so impervious to advice that there is no purpose in associating with them.

I expect to witness some very ugly things in the future, from a distance. I feel like a Jew who left Germany in 1934. The stubborn people who stay behind are going to suffer horribly, and no one will be able to help them.

8 Responses to “A Look Back at Egypt”

  1. Juan Paxety Says:

    Eugene Volokh has some early thoughts and history on section 230.
    https://reason.com/2020/05/28/47-u-s-c-%C2%A7-230-and-the-publisher-distributor-platform-distinction/

  2. Steve H. Says:

    I’m glad someone else is doing the legal research, because there is no way I’m going to do it. It looks like I can continue deleting comments without fear.

    His analysis is very incomplete. I guess he was just throwing out a quick note in order to have some sort of timely response. It would almost be interesting to read whatever he comes up with when he feels like filling in details.

    But I don’t think I’ll read it.

  3. Ed Bonderenka Says:

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070403/joe-biden-president-election-section-230-communications-decency-act-revoke
    “The idea that it’s a tech company is that Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For Zuckerberg and other platforms,” Biden said. “It should be revoked because it is not merely an internet company. It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false.”

  4. Steve H. Says:

    Wonder if he’ll be able to weasel out of that.

  5. Rick C Says:

    He already has: since Trump wants to curtail Section 230, Biden’s all in favor of keeping it the way it is, and of course nobody in the media is going to call him out on it.

  6. baldilocks Says:

    The only thing I wish you had on this blog is the reply notification option going to email.

  7. Steve H. Says:

    I’m so primitive. Maybe there is a plug-in.

  8. Chris Says:

    I remember you making an off-hand comment several years ago about how much your traffic had fallen off after you started focusing on your tools and your testimony. It’s interesting to see how many once-notable bloggers from the early-mid 2000s are gone now, either because they lost interest, couldn’t afford the time/money, or passed away.

    There’s a certain infamy that comes with notoriety, and as a Christian, you’re already battling enough wickedness without having to deal with the kind of trolls you used to get when the blog was more popular.