Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:
Via Reason.com:
“’My biggest concern,’ said Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday, ‘is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways.’
That comment came during oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, the case that asks if President Joe Biden’s administration violated the First Amendment when it sought to pressure social media apps to remove information it deemed harmful.”
Now, as a caveat, I wasn’t properly educated at Harvard Law School like Jackson was, but it’s been my layman’s understanding since around the age of eight years old or so that, in fact, the entire point of the First Amendmentis “hamstringing the government in significant ways” in terms of its ability to censor information unfavorable to the interests of the state.
Continuing:
“Her ‘hamstringing’ comment came attached to a hypothetical scenario she posed to Benjamin Aguiñaga, Louisiana’s solicitor general, who argued the Biden administration had overstepped when it contacted social media platforms and attempted to pressure them to remove posts it found objectionable. Suppose a challenge circulated on social media concerning ‘teens jumping out of windows at increasing elevations,’ Jackson said. Could the government try to persuade* those platforms to remove that content?”
*“Try to persuade” is simply a fascistic euphemism for “threaten consequences like the revocation of Section 230 for non-compliance.” We must refuse to play their semantical games. No agenda of the state is more cloaked in euphemism than censorship, precisely because enough of the American people still find censorship repugnant and because state censorship is still, for however long, explicitly prohibited by the Constitution.
Reason, which has become a bit of a cancerous pseudo-libertarian rag in recent years (a story for another day), plays footsie in the rest of its article with the authoritarian trash passed off as intellectual discourse by Jackson, but here’s the simple answer to her concocted hypothetic about teen suicide (they always hide behind protecting children to justify censorship): no, the government cannot pressure social media platforms to censor information it does not like if that information does not run counter to the law.
Full-stop.
If you surrender an inch of ground to these monsters, they’re only going to push further and further and further until CCP-level information control is achieved. We must metaphorically cut the camel’s head off before it gets into the tent.
KBJ — as her idolaters term her in the great tradition of former Supreme Court glass-ceiling-shattering slay-queen sea-hag RBG — is the same absolutely retarded and/or ideologically captured (not mutually exclusive) woman who infamously could not define the term “woman”in Congressional testimony.
It’s unclear whether she literally doesn’t know basic definitions that toddlers understand or if she knew instinctively that if she answered correctly, there would be woke hell to pay. But, again, it could be both; these are not mutually exclusive exigencies.
Note that, in her answer, she flat out refuses even an attempt at a sophistic, meandering, obfuscating non-answer — exactly what any attorney worth her salt gets paid to produce, the stock and trade of lawyerdom, and she couldn’t even manage that, instead mumbling incoherently: “I’m not a biologist.”
On a slightly unrelated note, though it’s no big stretch, one of the primary benefits of importing Third World migrants by the millions, aside from the drastic demographic rejiggering, is that none of these people have the slightest understanding of, much less deep-seated appreciation for, the values of the European Enlightenment, preceded by the Renaissance and going all the way back in an ideological evolutionary line to the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.
They don’t know and don’t care what the Declaration of Independence says about man’s natural rights. They couldn’t name a single amendment in the Bill of Rights, nor would they cherish their import even if they could.
And the corporate state couldn’t possibly be more titillated by a sea of newly arrived, ignorant slaves to weaponize and exploit against the native population for its own purposes.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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