Gagging of Conservatives Continues on Social Media

Today I see that leftists are celebrating censorship again. This time the victim is Milo Ya…I’m not even going to try to spell it. It’s a gay conservative who works for Breitbart.com.

If I’m ignorant about the dispute that led up to the censorship, it’s not completely my fault. Milo was banned from Twitter, and whatever he said that upset people is now deleted. I Googled around, assuming every far-left Internet nut on the planet had screenshotted his offenses, but I can’t find any of it. Makes you wonder if he actually did anything wrong.

I don’t care about Milo’s work. I don’t know anything about it. I tried to read a movie review he wrote (the new Ghostbusters, and in all honestly, it was not very good. It verged on unreadable. There was no organization, and he didn’t produce many facts. It seemed that the article was a series of nearly unrelated paragraphs, in which he restated his dislike of the movie.

I know a tiny–and I do mean tiny–bit about Milo himself. He is gay, and he is provocative. He does things to upset people. Conservatives are giving him a ton of promotion. My educated guess? They want to say, “We’re gay, too. You don’t own gay.”

It won’t work. In America, conservatism is inextricably bound up with Christianity, and God does not have a rainbow sticker on the gates of heaven. It may be helpful to Christians if larger numbers of gays vote for conservative candidates, but if the conservative movement abandons God completely, we lose much of our incentive for supporting it. I would vote for a Christian-friendly Democrat before I would vote for a God-hating Republican. That choice doesn’t seem to come up, though.

Minority Republicans get a certain amount of promotion, too, and surely part of the reason is to remind minorities that you can be non-white and be accepted among our ranks. That’s somewhat more legitimate than promoting gays. Race doesn’t have to be a mental state; you can be black or purple or orange and be 100% on board with the conservative ethos. Non-whites do not change us. Homosexuality is different. When homosexuals enter the group, automatically, we have to change our positions in order to accommodate them.

Here is what people love to call “the narrative” in post-2000 America: Milo got into a Twitter fight with a Ghostbusters actress named Leslie Jones, and she is black. He bullied and tormented her on Twitter, he posted racist tweets (is “tweet” capitalized now?), and he reposted the racist tweets of others. She complained, and Twitter gave him a lifetime ban.

I can’t find his racist tweets. Someone dug up a 2015 racist tweet from Leslie Jones, but that’s all I’ve seen. I have seen some abusive tweets from people who took his side. Welcome to the web. Michelle Malkin gets worse treatment every day of her life, and has for years. I will never forget the comment from the loon who threatened to mutilate her genitals with his or her teeth.

Maybe Milo is a bad guy. On the other hand, there are some truly vile accounts that never get in trouble. Spike Lee sent black racists after the parents of George Zimmerman, and they had to leave their house. It’s my understanding that it’s okay to root for terrorists on Twitter, too.

A lifetime ban is going to be hard on a guy who is billed as a major website’s “tech” editor. It’s like telling a motivational speaker he’s banned from hotel ballrooms. I have a feeling it won’t stick, but maybe it will.

It’s an interesting story.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment, they did not intend to protect porn merchants, in spite of what you may think, given the way it has been used. They had ONE major goal in mind: to enable people to speak about political matters. When you strike at political speech, you strike at the heart of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment was motivated by the behavior of British kings, who had been known to publicly castrate and disembowel people who said things they didn’t like. If you had tried to blog in England in 1776, they would have castrated and disemboweled you in front of a jeering crowd, and before you died, they would have fried your genitals and internal organs in front of you. Simply for saying the king was wrong.

There was no Twitter when the Constitution was written. You could publish a newspaper, or you could write a book or simply stand up in your local bar and mouth off. It was very much like life in the 1980’s. No one depended on the Internet to make his voice effective. There was no danger that half of the population (the left half) would have a tremendous communication advantage over the other half, because of access to a medium provided by corporations. That has changed.

In 2016, merely being allowed to speak to your neighbor or wear a T-shirt does not put you on an equal footing with others. You need Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, blogs, and whatever else is out there. With social media, Milo was able to make a noise comparable to the noise someone like Lena Dunham can make. Without it, he may as well go home and yell into the toilet.

It’s not easy for leftists to violate the First Amemdment, which protects people from government censorship. It’s very easy for them to violate the spirit of the First Amendment and nullify it through private censorship. It’s a beautiful thing. If you like censorship.

For a long time, I’ve been saying that conservatives would eventually be driven off the web. The liberals who run companies like Facebook and Twitter are immune to First Amendment challenges. Blogspot belongs to a liberal-run company; blogs are not safe, either. Milo’s case shows how easy it is to silence us.

Things were different a few years back. Blogs were big. Remember blogs? I don’t mean corporate websites pretending to be blogs. I don’t mean The Huffington Toast or Wonkette. I mean sites like this one. Most blogs were run by individuals who had no corporate affiliation, and many of the top blogs were operated out of studies and bedrooms. That ended some time back. The big blogs are fake. They’re run by companies that pay for promotion. Many of them pay writers. We were allowed to sit at the big boys’ table for a while, and then they came and kicked us out. Predictable. I know, because I predicted it.

Real blogs are not very important now. We have become addicted to “free” social media sites. Does it really make sense to call any site that tracks you and feeds you ads “free”? Anyway, we loved the convenience and the instant audiences. So we gave up our autonomy.

Now we broadcast our opinions at the pleasure of leftists. They can unplug the machine whenever they like, and there is nothing we can do. If we sue, they can say, “We don’t have to obey the First Amendment. We are not the government.”

Can we complain? I don’t mean, “Are we able to complain?” It looks like we are losing that ability. I mean, “Do we have a right to complain?” I don’t think so. We put our own heads in the noose. Did we really think atheist tech nerds were going to give us a fair shake? Besides, people like me warned everyone.

If you can only speak in private, the First Amendment is useless. That’s the future we face. We will be pushed out of liberal-run forums. Then they’ll find a way to come after blogs, which are, after all, hosted by corporations.

Interesting times.

It reminds me of the problems people have when they lose their driver’s licenses. The courts always remind us, “It’s a privilege; not a right.” You don’t have a Constitutional right to drive. But if you can’t drive, you might as well be crippled. In most parts of the country, pedestrian status will make it impossible for you to compete in the job market. You don’t have a right to Tweet, either, and if you depend on Twitter to make money, you better kiss the ring.

What if the conservative movement can be persuaded to divorce Jesus? In that case, everything changes. Conservatives will persecute Christians right beside liberals, and presumably, Christians and Jews will be the only ones who are ostracized. Any way you slice it, Christians will be pushed aside.

What can you do? Nothing. So I don’t get upset about it. I just blog my observations and wait for them to be proven right. I am thrilled to be disconnected from social media, and I have no plans to fight anyone about social media abuses. I don’t care about things that are doomed to fail. It’s a waste of the space in my heart.