Let’s Let Those Who Hate us Guard our Freedoms

A certain number of leftists are losing their minds because the Fifth Circuit upheld a law preventing big social media companies from performing certain types of censorship.

I’ll show you Wikipedia’s description of the law. A footnote is omitted, but you can find it on Wikipedia.

The law applies to social media companies with “more than 50 million active users” in the U.S. each month, that operate in Texas. The law also bars social media companies from labeling posts with warnings or impeding “the transmission of an unsolicited or commercial electronic mail message.” The law also has a “prohibition on discriminating against Texans based on their geographic location”.

Here is what Governor Abbott’s site says:

House Bill 20 prevents social media companies with more than 50 million monthly users banning users simply based on their political viewpoints. The law also requires several consumer protection disclosures and processes related to content management on the social media sites to which the bill applies. These sites must disclose their content management and moderation policies and implement a complaint and appeals process for content they remove, providing a reason for the removal and a review of their decision. They also must review and remove illegal content within 48 hours. House Bill 20 also prohibits email service providers from impeding the transmission of email messages based on content.

The law itself is very long and boring. A lot of it is taken up with the wonderful, satisfying requirements that companies disclose just about everything they do as censors and that they provide real mechanisms for complaining and getting relief. Here is the money part which leftists hate:

Sec. 143A.002. CENSORSHIP PROHIBITED. (a) A social media
platform may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s
ability to receive the expression of another person based on:
(1) the viewpoint of the user or another person;
(2) the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression; or
(3) a user’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.

The state’s power to regulate Facebook, Twitter, et alia comes from the fact that social media companies are “common carriers.” This phrase is what lawyers call a “term of art,” which means it has a specific legal meaning which is not necessarily its plain meaning as laymen might use it. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit explains this in its decision:

[T]he common carrier doctrine is a body of common law dating back long before our Founding. It vests States with the power to impose nondiscrimination obligations on communication and transportation providers that hold themselves out to serve all members of the public without individualized bargaining.

If you sell handmade pottery at a table on the sidewalk, you can discriminate against buyers for all sorts of silly reasons, because no one cares about your pottery or has concerns that anyone will be substantially hindered in their enjoyment of privileges common to all of us if they can’t buy it. On the other hand, if you open a motel on an interstate highway, you are appealing to a big customer base and offering an essential service, so you can’t turn customers away because they’re ugly or you suspect they don’t like the Beatles.

I am a retired lawyer and not a great legal scholar, but the common carrier argument makes complete sense to me. If thousands of socialists are allowed to buy airline tickets to go to a riot political event, and the airlines refuse to sell tickets to conservatives, it’s pretty clear that it’s a huge problem even though 1) the airlines are not government entities and, 2) it’s hard to find a constitutional problem with banning conservatives. Similarly, if the social giants work hard to amplify the voices of far-left nuts and annihilate or diminish the voices of conservatives, which they do every second of every day, in order to function as a sort of shadow government, it’s also a huge problem.

I have been muzzled so often, I now expect it, and I don’t think a lot about it. For example, Yahoo News keeps putting up lewd pictures of old, fat, and/or unattractive women, and I have said things like, “Why is Yahoo News trying to make men find unattractive women attractive? It doesn’t work that way. Old women and homely women will always be less attractive. Young women will always be less attractive than old ones.” These comments always got deleted. I remember saying simply, “Gross,” in response to a supposedly provocative story about poor old Madonna or the very elderly Jane Fonda, and Yahoo deleted me.

I think the kids at Yahoo seriously believe 1) the natural sexual inclinations of men are somehow an important problem, perhaps caused by greenhouse gases, and 2) these inclinations can be changed by Yahoo News stories. This is how insane leftists have become. They should run stories telling us liver tastes better than strawberry ice cream.

Old women are liver. Young women are strawberry ice cream. That’s just how it works. Being tall is better than being short. Dumb people are worse off than smart people. Having hair is better than being bald. Some things can’t be changed.

Were my comments hateful or dangerous? No. Were they subject to government censorship based on First Amendment case law? No. Were they libelous? No. They weren’t even untrue. They were just expressions of opinions held by perhaps 95% of normal males.

My friend Mike can’t share funny or critical content about Joe Biden and the hopeless dunce Kamala Harris. Facebook either deletes it or restricts republication so no one or virtually no one sees it. He’s not putting up deepfake videos of the Bidens being shot to death. He’s not making false claims. He’s just putting up critical posts. What happens when people post critical things about Trump and DeSantis? They go live and many people see them.

Youtube is somewhat different. It appears you can post a lot of controversial material there, and they will leave it up. But will they leave it up if a lot of people see it? Probably not. Will they recommend it to people the way they recommend things they approve of? I wonder.

Youtube takes down popular Christians who criticize the abomination of sodomy. That much is certain.

I think the complaint-procedure requirements will cause the giants more agony than anything else. They will have to hire a lot more employees, and they will have to hire a lot of lawyers. They will have to provide explanations for what they do, and if the Texas AG doesn’t like them, they will have to defend themselves in court.

Of course, unlike the faceless censors of Big Tech, the AG is accountable. Wonder if leftist see the irony. They’re suing him, but they don’t want users to have the power sue them. Why? Because they’re right! They’re leftists! This has already been decided.

As it stands now in most of the country, nameless giant employees with no accountability whatsoever can delete or shadowban all they like. They are accountable to no one. They can censor people for laughs. They can censor their ex-boyfriends or teachers who gave them bad grades.

There is no way to complain or get relief unless you have a gigantic number of followers, and even then, your groveling may not help you. Somehow, leftists think that’s okay and that it doesn’t cause abuse. Now the cockroaches will have to operate in the sunlight, and that won’t be pleasant for them. It’s not their natural environment.

They also have a problem because they will have to know which posters live in Texas. And people in Texas will be able to post just about anything they want, and it will be seen by other users all over the world. The law is from Texas, but it allows Texans to speak to people in every single nation where the giants operate.

Smart pundits will establish businesses in Texas. What will Facebook do then?

The remedies aren’t very good. I don’t see anything about damages for users or fines. That should be changed.

The giants and their supporters are complaining, saying the law opens the doors to things like Holocaust denial and racist propaganda. Know what I say? Good.

Right now, I can go to Amazon and buy books by Holocaust deniers who openly say they are denying the Holocaust. I can buy racist, lie-filled books written by leftists who hate whites. I can buy tons of sexist, lie-filled leftist screeds aimed at males. I can buy Mein Kampf. So what?

If the book and periodical industry is full of dishonest and inflammatory material, why shouldn’t the giants publish the same kind of things? Historically, the American remedy for disinformation and misinformation has been correct information. You don’t censor. You supplement. You counter. Do I really have to explain this in America?

Mein Kampf has probably been in print continuously since it was written around a century ago. It hasn’t led to a global Fourth Reich. Holocaust deniers have been in business since before the Holocaust ended. Nuts have published books claiming the CIA knocked down the World Trade Center. Very few people take these authors seriously. On the other hand, the danger of letting elite, untouchable, hidden leftists decide what we can say and read is very, very obvious.

Let’s go ahead and let racists post on Facebook. Let’s let people say what they want about coronavirus. Then those of us who disagree can have their say. That’s how we’ve always done things. It works. Have we forgotten Skokie?

The idea that the giants are private companies that should be left alone is ludicrous. Had they existed in the 1770’s, the Constitution would have language pretty much like that in the Texas law. In 2022, free speech that can’t be seen on the Internet has as much impact as talking to yourself at the bottom of a mineshaft. The Founding Fathers (not “non-birthing persons”) didn’t simply intend to allow us to speak; the Germans had that privilege under Hitler. They could go into their basements alone and say what they wanted. The Founding Fathers intended to make sure our speech could have an impact on other people; that it would reach them.

It’s amazing that this has to be explained, but Americans have become idiots. Mike Judge saw the future. Well, he saw the stupidity and coarseness, but he didn’t anticipate the censorship.

Political discrimination is actually much more harmful than racial or sexual discrimination, but somehow people don’t understand this.

We have laws that allow us to break up monopolies because private companies can have too much power. Leftists argue that inheritance taxes are important because they prevent oligarchs from getting too strong. Somehow, though, half of our population thinks it’s okay to have our speech censored by pimply pierced kids who think a man with a fake vagina is a woman.

I don’t know what will happen to laws like the one in Texas in the future. I believe they will be repealed and struck down, however, because Satan is very angry these days because his time is short. He really needs to control what we see and hear, and he controls the vast majority of Americans.