Britain is even further along on this “the brown minorities are always right” road than we are here. For example, one of the first things that came to mind for me were the Rotherham rapes in which Muslim (mostly Pakistani) men groomed and raped underage white British girls. I recalled that not only was the situation allowed to continue for decades, despite constant reports, because British authorities feared upsetting the Muslim immigrant communities by pointing the finger at them, but also that some of the Rotherham victims were themselves arrested. Checking to see if that memory was accurate, I found this sort of thing [emphasis mine]:

On a number of occasions, victims of sexual abuse [in Rotherham] were criminalised – arrested for being drunk – while their abusers continued to act with impunity. Vital evidence was ignored, Jay said, with police apparently trying to manipulate their figures for child sexual exploitation by removing from their monitoring process girls who were pregnant or had given birth, plus all looked after children in care.

Blame the victims, not the perpetrators, if it was racially woke to do so.

Also, we could go all the way back to the post-9/11 emphasis in the US on a backlash “Islamophobia” which really didn’t even exist to any extent. There was a bending over backwards to make Muslims in the US the potential victims.

In Britain, there’s also the phenomenon in which Jews are being told not to wear symbols of their religion so as not to inflame or enrage their persecutors, rather than punishing the demonstrators harassing them. And some Jews have been arrested; for example these cases:

(1) Niyak Ghorbani:

Niyak Ghorbani, 37, waved the sign in the middle of last Saturday’s rally before protesters turned on him leading to a confrontation.

Police said he was arrested for assault before being de-arrested after officers reviewed footage. …

Ghorbani said that he would make a complaint after the incident and that he was not given back his sign.

He said: “[Police] told me that it is a danger for [my] life and for the people when they see maybe attack [me]. I told the police they attacked me and I want to complain and they say go to police station near your home.”

(2) Gideon Falter:

London’s police force has been forced to issue two apologies after officers threatened to arrest an “openly Jewish” man if he refused to leave the area around a pro-Palestinian march because his presence risked provoking the demonstrators.

Gideon Falter, chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, was wearing a traditional Jewish skullcap when he was stopped by police while trying to cross a street in central London as demonstrators filed past on April 13.

One officer told Falter he was worried that the man’s “quite openly Jewish” appearance could provoke a reaction from the protesters, according to video posted by the campaign group. A second officer then told Falter he would be arrested if he refused to be escorted out of the area because he was “causing a breach of the peace.”

Here’s another article on the phenomenon. Fortunately, none of those incidents caused serious physical harm, but they are indicative of the same trend of placating the country’s Muslim population at the expense of white British natives and of Jews.

As I said, it’s not quite as bad in the US; at least, not yet. But there is the MSM believing Hamas reports on the Gazan conflict, which exploit this same “brown people are automatically the truthful victims” mentality. This is in line with fake hate crimes here (Jussie Smollett, take a bow), a tactic which began long ago (Tawana Brawley, for example). The belief in the veracity of a once-persecuted group came originally from the desire to correct what used to be the opposite – the automatic belief in the white person even if that person was lying. But what started out as a needed correction ultimately became a dangerous overcorrection.

Will the same dynamic be at play in the Karmelo Anthony trial now beginning? He will be pleading racism on the part of the victim, whom he allegedly stabbed and killed with little to no provocation.

Then we also have the coverup – until recently, anyway – of various kinds of government aid fraud perpetuated by Somalis and allowed to go on for fear of being called a racist if it were to be exposed and prosecuted. Officials would rather lose billions of dollars than be called racists.

The post On the treatment of Henry Nowak: it didn’t happen in a vacuum appeared first on The New Neo.

The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book – as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers – that I was assigned in school.

It was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad – and unfair, too – that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students – au contraire.

Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades.

I think this feeling gathered more adherents (at least in this country) during the Vietnam era, and certainly the same is true lately. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were thought to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, coupled with a lot more than nationalism itself. But the experience seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which a particular type of amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US (as shown by the election of Donald Trump, for example) has been seen by those who agree with Mann as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that – human nature being what it is – no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but has been a good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that traditionally recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Those lines from the anthem express a hope that has been fading. But even though things had been looking dim for both liberty and courage in recent years, it is not over.

When I looked back at my original, longer version of this post, I saw that it was written on Memorial Day in 2005, not that long after I began blogging. Seems longer ago than that. This is another portion of what I wrote then, and although I was describing my post-9/11 thoughts, I think it’s especially appropriate now [updates in brackets]:

I’d known the words to [our national anthem] for [over sixty years], and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).

The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion – of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.

The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country – its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.

And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.

The post For Memorial Day: on nationalism and patriotism appeared first on The New Neo.

But the question originates with this news about Galindo, running for Congress is Texas’ 35th District, and the current Democrat frontrunner although she faces a runnoff:

Controversy-tarred congressional candidate Maureen Galindo this week pledged to transform a site south of San Antonio now used by the Trump administration to detain migrants into an internment camp for “American Zionists.”

“She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,” Galindo wrote in an Instagram post over the weekend, referring to herself in the third person. “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.”

As you might expect, Galindo accuses her opponent in the runoff, Johnny Garcia, “of participating in a human trafficking conspiracy orchestrated by billionaire zionist Jews. She also pledged during a Texas Public Radio interview to put Garcia on trial for treason.”

Well, of course she has. In addition, she claims – another common defense of those promoting this sort of approach – that she’s not an antisemite, and she doesn’t hate Jews, just is against “Zionists.” Funny thing, that’s a group which happens to include a great many Jews (and others) who support the only country in the world that is the historical and ancestral (and Biblical) Jewish homeland, a tiny tiny country that was formed legally by UN partition of former colonial possessions and has had to fight for its existence every step of the way against vicious enemies that would obliterate it.

Maureen Galindo received 29.2% of the Democrat votes in her primary, to Garcia’s 27%. Two other candidates received 20% or more, so the race was split four ways relatively evenly. Nevertheless, that Galindo is the frontrunner is very disturbing. Whether you care about Israel or not, her “solution” is astoundingly alarming.

Galindo is so exceedingly extreme that even Democrats have condemned her – for now, when the district still has other viable Democrat candidates that could be the nominee. Democrat leadership would prefer that one of her Democrat opponents wins, because otherwise not only might Galindo lose the election to the Republican, but she would become the poster child for Democrat Jew-hatred. But I wonder if, in the event that she wins the runoff and becomes the Democrat nominee, whether they will rally behind her as they have with the abominable Platner.

I think I know the answer.

NOTE: It’s not easy to find a lot of background on Galindo, but I did locate this:

Maureen Galindo, 38, is a marriage and family therapist who has a master’s in community psychology from Concordia University in Portland, Ore. She’s also a housing advocate who fought the razing of her old downtown apartment complex to build a baseball stadium, and ran unsuccessfully for City Council in 2025.

I’ve also read elsewhere that she’s a sex therapist. At any rate, she’s young (as expected), but her degree – “community psychology” – is in a field with which I’m unfamiliar, although I do know a lot about degrees in the general area of psychology and specifically marriage and family therapy. Turns out that, curiously enough, “community psychology” doesn’t seem to be a clinical degree so I don’t see how it would ordinarily qualify a person to be a therapist, and it’s basically a leftist thing (no surprise there either), a sort of glorified community organizer:

Community psychology goes beyond an individual focus and integrates social, cultural, economic, political, environmental, and international influences to promote positive change, health, and empowerment at individual and systemic levels.

Depending on one’s training, experiences, and preferences, community psychologists can work as educators, professors, program directors, consultants, policy developers, evaluators, and researchers in community organizations, universities, or government agencies to promote mental health and community well-being. …

We seek to expand “helping” beyond traditional psychotherapy to promote wellness.

We engage in action-oriented research to develop, implement, and evaluate programs.

We base our work on a scientific foundation to better understand the multiple influences of the social environment on health and wellness

We build collaborative relationships with community members, groups, and organizations to solve social problems.

We consult with and provide tools to organizations to build capacity to address social problems such as exploitation and victimization.

We analyze government, civic life, and workplace settings in order to understand and improve fair and diverse participation.

We fight oppression, work to reduce social inequalities, and work with marginalized people toward their empowerment.

.

This article also adds a bit of background to Galindo’s views on Israel and Jews. Although it’s written by someone who is not especially happy with Israel, it nevertheless recognizes how far Galindo goes towards Jew-hating. She seems to be somewhat in the Candace Owens mode:

Galindo often gestures toward a conspiracy theory, common in the Nation of Islam, that the people who identify as Jews today are not the Jews of the Bible but impostors. In response to two questions I emailed her, she pointed me to Revelation 3:9: “Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie.” In Congress, she said, she would write legislation decreeing “that any support of Zionism is antisemitic, since it’s the Zionists literally killing the Semites of the Middle East.”

Tucker Carlson also leans towards that notion. It’s the reason he suggested, in the course of his Huckabee interview, that the Jews of Israel should be DNA-tested to see if they’re actually descended from Abraham. I wonder where he intends to get Abraham’s DNA for comparison.

The post Can we call Democrat Maureen Galindo a Nazi yet? appeared first on The New Neo.

Katy Tur: What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government? They come from you, our creator and heavenly father. Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?

McKay Coppins: I actually think that that idea is not wholly uncommon. I mean, the idea that we have certain inalienable rights that come from god can be read in a fairly benign way, which is basically that we have innate human rights, that our constitution and our government, our democratic government are meant to codify. Right. That idea is not totally abnormal.

Good to know it’s not “totally abnormal” (Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic). Tur is 42 years old and Coppins is 39. Do they know anything about the text of the Declaration of Independence? Back in the ancient times of my own youthful education, we were required to memorize a couple of paragraphs, including the relevant passage “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

It reminds me that it was often Obama;s habit to leave out the “Creator” part (from 2010):

At a Democratic fundraiser on Monday night, President Obama once again misquoted the Declaration of Independence’s most famous sentence and once again omitted its reference to our “Creator.” According to the text of his remarks published on the official White House website, he said: “[W]hat makes this place [America] special is not something physical. It has to do with this idea that was started by 13 colonies that decided to throw off the yoke of an empire, and said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”

The first time that something happens and is met with publicity and criticism, it could well be an accident or part of the learning curve — like the first time one bows down to foreign royalty when other U.S. presidents haven’t; or the first time one issues a public apology abroad for past (real or imagined) American sins in a way that other presidents haven’t. But the second time, the assumption must be that it’s probably deliberate — and that makes it all the more appalling. Other presidents didn’t deliberately misquote the Declaration, and they didn’t leave out (or rewrite) the words about our rights being endowed by our Creator.

NOTE Some of what is going on with Tur et al. is that she suffers from a lack of cultural literacy (see this).

NOTE II: I know I’ve already written a lot about the abominable Kristof article, but here’s a link to a good essay about it, by Judge Roy K. Altman.

The post Our brilliant and knowledgeable journalists appeared first on The New Neo.

The Golden State’s Supreme Court blessed this position when, on April 15, it denied the conservative lawyer’s petition for review of the state bar’s yearslong disciplinary jihad against him and ordered him stripped of his license to practice law.

What was the nefarious behavior that this former Supreme Court clerk, university law school dean, and public interest litigator allegedly engaged in? Effectively, in the eyes of the bar and California’s highest court, his thoughtcrime, punishable with professional destruction, was “lawyering for MAGA.”

The whole article is worth reading. Eastman has been disbarred for giving legal advice on the 2020 election with which the left disagrees, but which certainly was based on solid grounds. The left doesn’t think the right is entitled to legal representation, however – or at the very least wants to make it extremely costly and to thus deter lawyers from taking those cases. This would destroy the entire basis for the adversarial legal system, of course. I hope that SCOTUS ultimately rules against this form of lawfare, which reached its height (so far) in something called “The 65 Project.”

I’ve written about Eastman many times before; you can see a list of the post links here. The term “travesty of justice” applies. I’ve also written about The 65 Project, which was set up by leftist lawyers to disbar any lawyer on the right who worked on challenges to the 2020 election: see this post, in which I quote Alan Dershowitz thusly :

Our system of justice is based on the John Adams standard: he too was attacked for defending the British soldiers accused of the Boston Massacre, but his representation of these accused killers now serves as a symbol of the 6th Amendment right to counsel. That symbol has now been endangered by The 65 Project and others who are participating in its McCarthyite chilling of lawyers who have been asked to represent Trump and those associated with him.

In that post, I closed with this:

For decades, the left screeched about McCarthyism. They got a lot of mileage out of that, but in reality their main objection seems to have been that they were the targets rather than the ones behind the threats.

NOTE: Another post I wrote on The 65 Project can be found here.

The post California’s highest court has allowed the Eastman disbarment appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s an article from 2014:

For decades, soldiers and their families have been able to purchase guns for personal use in retail stores on some bases. Even today, some “base exchanges” sell guns. Soldiers and their families can fire personal firearms at target ranges, participate in competitions and in gun clubs – all located on the nation’s military bases. But a federal directive won’t allow them to carry concealed weapons on bases, even though it’s legal in the rest of Texas.

Now, with two separate rampage shootings within five years of one another at Killeen’s Fort Hood Army base that left a total of 17 people dead, there is renewed discussion over whether soldiers and their family members should be able to carry concealed handguns on military posts in states like Texas. …

Until the 1990s, military personnel often kept personal firearms in their base homes without question. But starting in the 1990s, first under then-President George H.W. Bush, the Department of Defense issued an order prohibiting privately owned weapons on bases unless a commander makes an exception.

There were actually two fatal mass shootings at Fort Hood, the first in 2009 and the second in 2014. The 2014 one happened on April 2, which happens to be the same date as today. Perhaps that wasn’t lost on Hegseth when he issued this declaration:

The War Department’s uniformed service members are trained at the highest and unwavering standards. These warfighters, entrusted with the safety of our nation, are no less entitled to exercise their God-given right to keep and bear arms than any other American. Our warfighters defend the right of others to carry — they should be able to carry themselves. Recent events like what happened at Fort Stewart, Holloman Air Force Base, or Pensacola Naval Air Station have made clear that some threats are closer to home than we would like.

If you look at the responses to the tweet of Hegseth’s that I linked, many are negative. For example:

The sheer amount of negligent discharges that will inevitably follow is gonna be wild. There is no legitimate reasons non-mp’s to carry service rifle/pistol when not within a combat zone or conducting training. Accountability, safety, and oversight will be a nightmare.

Of course there can be problems. But there are already obvious problems with the present situation. The comment ignores the fact that it’s only been since the presidency of Bush I that the carrying of such weapons on base was banned. Why? Were there a lot of problems?

From that 2014 article:

“If they live in the base housing … guns have to be registered,” said Geoffrey Corn, professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston, who served more than 20 years as an Army officer.

Corn said he opposes proposals to allow concealed weapons on bases.

“The idea of carrying a concealed weapon is really inconsistent with the military culture,” he said.

He said military supervisors have enough to worry about without the concern that a soldier made unhappy by a particular order could be packing a hidden firearm.

But in 2014 at Fort Hood that’s exactly the situation, and it didn’t stop the shooter at all:

On April 2, 2014, a spree shooting occurred at several locations on the Fort Hood military base near Killeen, Texas. Four people, including the gunman, were killed while 14 additional people were injured; 12 by gunshot wounds. The shooter, 34-year-old Army Specialist Ivan Lopez-Lopez, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Immediately prior to the shooting, Lopez went to the 49th Transportation Battalion administrative office where he tried to obtain a ten-day leave form so he could attend to “family matters”. However, he was informed that he would have to come back later to retrieve it, sparking a verbal altercation between him and several other soldiers. The request was ultimately denied because Lopez had already secured housing in an apartment in Killeen.

Lopez then went outside to smoke a cigarette. At approximately 4:00 p.m., he returned and opened fire with a .45-caliber Smith & Wesson M&P pistol inside the same building, injuring three soldiers—?PFC Wilfred Sanchez, Sgt. Jonathan Westbrook, and SFC Warren Hardnett—?all of whom had been involved in the altercation with Lopez. [6][12] Lopez also killed Sgt. First Class Daniel Ferguson, who was attempting to barricade a lockless conference room door to prevent Lopez from gaining entry and harming anyone inside.

This went on for many minutes, as Lopez went to different areas of the base shooting people, all of whom I will assume were unarmed. What finally stopped him? This:

Approximately eight minutes after the shooting first started, Lopez drove to the parking lot of another building, Building 39002, where he was confronted by an unidentified military police officer, with whom he had a verbal exchange. When he brandished his weapon, the officer fired a shot at him that missed. Lopez responded by committing suicide, shooting himself in the right side of the head.

He finally encountered someone armed.

The post Hegseth allows the military to carry arms on base appeared first on The New Neo.

Ms. Chiles [a therapist] does not question that Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy has some constitutionally sound applications. See Brief for Petitioner 53. She does not take issue with the State’s effort to prohibit what she herself calls “long-abandoned, aversive” physical interventions. Instead, Ms. Chiles stresses that she provides only talk therapy, employing no physical techniques or medications. Yet, she argues, Colorado’s law still applies to her, prescribing what she may say in “voluntary counseling conversations” with her clients. And because that application of the law strikes at the heart of the First Amendment’s protections for free speech, she contends, it warrants considerably more searching scrutiny than the rational-basis review the Tenth Circuit applied in this case or the intermediate-scrutiny review some other lower courts have employed in cases like hers.

I have written two fairly lengthy posts on the subject of these laws, so I’m not sure there’s much more to add except that I strongly believe this was the right decision and long overdue. My first post on the subject was in 2013, when New Jersey passed such a law (and Governor Christie signed it). An excerpt:

It is no use pretending that therapy—and the licensing of therapists by the state—is not at least partly a political endeavor subject to political fashion rather than a science. Nor should therapists be completely unrestricted. For example, therapists are already prohibited from sexual contact with patients—even willing patients, even adult patients—because it is considered inherently exploitative. But the most harmful practices that could be used by conversion therapists (for example, electric shock) could be banned without banning the entire enterprise. And as the articles point out, mainstream therapy organizations have already condemned conversion therapy and do not advocate it.

But apparently none of that would be enough for the advocates of this bill; the therapy itself must be defined by the government as inherently and unfailingly abusive (what’s next, taking children away from parents who don’t applaud and celebrate their gayness?) As the nanny state grows, so will these essentially political moves by the government. This bill opens the door for a host of governmental abuses in which the state dictates the enforcement of politically correct thought through the mechanism of so-called therapy, and therapists become the instruments by which the public is indoctrinated in what is currently politically acceptable and what is verboten.

The present ruling arrests that trend at least somewhat. It is encouraging that even two of the liberal justices voted with the majority.

My other previous post on the subject can be found here. It is about the Colorado law. An excerpt:

I have some retired therapist friends who are Democrats, and a few years ago when I told them that anything other than “gender-affirming” therapy was discouraged or even sometimes banned they were aghast. That’s how quickly the policies have changed, and how radically.

What is banned under the Colorado law is described this way: “efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.” That’s pretty darn broad.

The post SCOTUS rules 8-1 against anti-conversion therapy laws as First Amendment violations appeared first on The New Neo.

Led by [Tucker] Carlson, the network [of anti-Israel pundits supposedly on the right] systematically undermined the organizing principle of the anticensorship movement, which was aggressive, open inquiry skeptical of ideological dogma and institutional authority. In its place, members of the Carlson clique obey two imperatives: to shield other members from legitimate criticism and to uphold anti-Jewish ideology as the ultimate principle of free speech.

I have noticed this again and again and again. If you’ve been ignoring Carlson, Owens, and the rest of the crew – an understandable thing to do, actually – you may have missed it. But there are many of them, and part of their m.o. is to purposely conflate criticism of them with attempts to “cancel” them or silence them. A typical comment of theirs is, “we’re not allowed to criticize Israel” or “we’re not allowed to ask questions about Israel” when in fact they are completely allowed to do so and in fact do so incessantly. But they accuse their critics of stifling their speech, when all that’s happening is that they are being criticized for promulgating destructive lies, much of them classic anti-Semitic ones such as the blood libel. And in accusing their critics that way, people such as Carlson are slyly appealing to people on the right who are justifiably angry at the rise and previous dominance of cancel culture from the left in recent years.

More from the article:

The structural reshaping of the news ecosystem into “independent” voices and outlets, which once held so much promise to cut through entrenched interests and provide audiences with an unvarnished view of the world around them,, instead ended up as a propaganda industry promoting the work of fantasists and open antisemites.

That’s not the only propaganda it fosters, of course. But it’s a hatred with a long and dangerous history, and the internet is ideal for spreading it.

Actually, the prevalence of Jew-hatred was one of the very first things I ever noticed online when I first started using a computer in the mid 1990s – before there was even Google, using the older search engines. I immediately noticed that, whenever a search was related to Israel or Jews, it opened up and brought forth a huge stinking cesspool of blatant antisemitism. The first few pages of results were full of it. After a while, the people running the search engines fixed the algorithms so the Jew-hate was relegated to the second or third page of results, but over time much of it crept back up in rankings although often in a less blatant form. The loosening of censorship on X and other platforms, which I support, unfortunately opened the door to its return in copious amounts.

Online Jew-hatred is almost like online porn – perennially popular.

NOTE: I’m not sure where to put this, so I’ll put it here:

The post The use of “free speech” as a shield for virulent anti-Semitism appeared first on The New Neo.

Various federal agencies and the White House directed social media companies to censor viewpoints that conflicted with the government’s preferred policies and messaging on topics ranging from covid policy and election integrity to gender ideology and foreign policy. These egregious First Amendment violations silenced not only the plaintiffs in our case but tends of thousands of other Americans. …

…[T]he government cannot take actions, formal or informal, correctly or indirectly – except as authorized by law – to threaten Social-Media Companies with some form of punishment (i.e., an adverse legal, regulatory, or economic government sanction) unless they remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. …

This prohibition does not extend to providing Social-Media Companies with information that the companies are free to use as they wish. Nor does it extend to statements by government officials that posts on Social Media Companies’ are inaccurate, wrong, or contrary to the Administration’s views, unless those statements are otherwise coupled with a threat of punishment within the meaning of the above provision.

In other words, government can comment on the speech of others on social media but can’t threaten the companies if they don’t actively suppress the speech in question. The ruling only gives this relief to the plaintiffs in this particular case, but it sets a precedent.

But the damage is done, and the damage is considerable. It very much helped elect Joe Biden, for example. It sowed much distrust of the government, and that has encouraged many people to believe the government always lies, and to place more stock than ever in wild and destructive conspiracies (more about that in another post).

Also, it ignores the fact that, even without direct threats to such companies, when the federal government tells companies that something they’re allowing to be published is wrong, the company could assume that allowing it to be aired on their platforms would incur some sort of government retribution even without a direct threat being issued by the government.

But it’s still a victory.

Then there is the recent California case in which YouTube and Facebook were sued for fostering social media addiction in vulnerable children:

The jury awarded $3 million to the plaintiff, a young woman identified as KGM, and her mother, according to NPR, which noted Facebook parent company Meta would be responsible for about 70% of that amount and that the companies could face future penalties as well. The family had accused the platforms of willfully making their products addictive and targeting teens, despite internal research showing it could damage their mental health.

The Los Angeles Superior Court decision is among the first in a wave of hundreds of suits by schools, attorneys general, and others, making personal injury claims about major tech companies’ alleged recklessness.

A New Mexico jury recently found Meta liable on similar claims and the company was ordered to pay $375 million in damages. Meta said it would appeal that decision. Meanwhile, a case is also ongoing in a federal court based in California.

“We disagree with the verdict and plan to appeal,” José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement. “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”

It is no accident that the case involve minors. The law has traditionally allowed more restrictions regarding content or practices aimed at them. The idea is that the companies purposely tried to get kids addicted and that it harms their mental health and that the companies knew this.

I have some trouble with these rulings. I think that the “addiction” model is being overused, although maybe I’m just quibbling here. But I think there is no doubt that YouTube is habit-forming (I can attest to that from personal experience as an adult) and that much of the content is harmful. And I would very much like to protect children. But what is the remedy? Isn’t it parental control? But is parental control totally possible, because even if parents block a child’s access, doesn’t the child probably have access through friends’ devices?

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The launch of the CPI brings to the fore something often forgotten when discussing Iran: the Islamic Republic has suppressed political parties so completely that an entire generation of Iranians has never experienced genuine political pluralism.

If the regime collapses, the absence of organized political institutions could leave a vacuum. Groups like CPI are attempting to prepare for that possibility. …

“The Conservative Party of Iran stands firmly upon the enduring pillars of Iran’s historical and political truth,” the declaration states. “Its national identity, its sovereignty, and the continuity of Iran’s native polity – the monarchical institution.” …

Amiri argues that the resurgence of monarchist sentiment in recent years has been visible across Iranian society. …

Still, Amiri emphasized that the ultimate decision must come from the Iranian people.

“The legitimate determination of Iran’s political system must come through a free national referendum held under democratic conditions,” he said. “We do not prejudge the sovereign will of the people.”

Even if the outcome were to differ from current expectations, he added, the party would adapt. …

[The CPI’s] draft constitution outlines a political organization that resembles parties operating in established democracies. …

“To restore Iran’s economy we would begin with disciplined monetary policy aimed at stabilizing the rial,” he said.

Much more at the link.

They’ve certainly had a while to think about all of this.

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