The January 6th Committee recommends prosecuting Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Surprise, surprise!

Not.

Here are the details.

Will the DOJ follow through and actually indict him on these charges or on others connected with the government’s MAL raid? I suppose it depends on whether they think it’s more in the interest of the Democratic Party to indict him or to let him be. If they would like him free to run for president in 2024 because they think he’s much weakened and absolutely will lose, than they might desist. Otherwise, I predict it will be full steam ahead. And of course, he can run for president even if indicted and being tried, a la Netanyahu.

They want to destroy him one way or the other. And January 6th was their Reischtag Fire.

On free speech: from Robert Reich, Yale Law School graduate

The New Neo Posted on by

And he graduated from law school a long long time before wokery took over. And yet, he writes this:

Earth to Reich: Twitter has always been a torrent of ad hominem attacks, lies floated as jokes, and blatant “misinformation.” You’re just upset because your side used to dominate those categories.

But the more interesting part of Reich’s statement are those last two sentences: “This isn’t freedom of speech. It’s just dangerous.”

Again we have the strange definition of “dangerous,” which seems to mean “anything I don’t like which could conceivably hurt the feelings of someone on the left, or anything with which I disagree and think is incorrect or misleading.” And even more importantly, we have the idea that speech that is dangerous in those ways – hurting someone’s feelings, or bad jokes, or “misinformation” – is not free speech.

But it most certainly is. In fact, any lawyer (and certainly anyone as old as Reich, who is 76) should know that free speech is often awful in any number of ways. It takes nothing to defend the allowance of speech with which you agree, and which you think is kind or great or otherwise good. The importance of the doctrine of free speech rests on defending the allowance of speech with which you disagree and which you dislike.

And hateful speech or misleading facts can indeed spawn violent actions. That is very unfortunately true. But it is the price we pay for liberty, just as letting a guilty person go free because his or her guilt cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt is the price we pay for the presumption of innocence in criminal cases. Reich knows these things – or once knew them – but, like most leftists, now pretends not to know them because of politics and power. He does not want the left to relinquish any portion of the enormous power it has gained in the last half-century, and in pursuit of that goal he’s quite willing to sacrifice the liberty of others.

And this post isn’t meant to be about Reich himself, who is relatively small potatoes these days. It is about a certain way of looking at things that is very common on the left, despite the fact that many of the people espousing the point of view actually know better or used to know better.

Twitterfiles #6: The FBI is not amused

The New Neo Posted on by

The latest Twitterfile drop is from Matt Taibbi, and it focuses on the camaraderie between the FBI and the folks at Trust and Safety at Twitter. It’s not solely limited to the FBI, either; there were other government players, but the FBI was most heavily involved. In fact, we learn there were 80 FBI agents dedicated to the task of going though Twitter and rooting out “disinformation,” which seems to have been heavily focused on jokes.

I kid you not. Then again, tyrannies rarely have a sense of humor and I guess they don’t want anyone else to have a belly laugh, eithe.

Some excerpts:

3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary…

10. The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.

And as you read this next bit, remember the DOJ’s refusal under Obama to allow the New Black Panther election interference lawsuit to come to fruition [see NOTE* below]:

As I already mentioned, one very consistent target of the FBI seems to have been humorous tweets, especially those involving the election. The campaign against humor extended to tweets from users who had very few followers. It seems that no account was too small to be stamped out for humor.

Also, classified information was apparently allowed to be shared with the FBI’s buddies at Twitter:

5.The Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were “impediments” to the sharing of classified information “with industry.” The answer? “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.”

Here’s a summary:

44.The takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.

Twitter was also riddled with ex-intelligence officers in its employ.

Some people are saying “Well, we already knew all this.” My answer is no, we didn’t, although we strongly suspected it. Now we know it.

[*NOTE:

I referenced this article about the New Black Panthers case, which concerned actual voter intimidation of an egregious sort. The article was written in 2010, and here’s an excerpt [emphasis mine]:

The [US Commission On Civil Rights] is investigating the [Obama] Administration’s politically-motivated dismissal of a voter intimidation lawsuit against members of the racist, anti-semitic New Black Panther Party. Career justice department lawyers brought and won the lawsuit, which was then dismissed by political appointees in the Justice Department, so that they could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Members of the New Black Panther Party, one of whom was an Obama campaign poll watcher and local Democratic official, used nightsticks and racial epithets to drive white voters away from the polls in a Philadelphia precinct. But the Obama administration killed a successful lawsuit against them, dismissing it after career Justice Department lawyers had already obtained a default judgment against the defendants (As a result of the dismissal, the only consequence for the defendants was a temporary injunction telling just one of the three defendants not to repeat his crimes in Philadelphia for a short period of time.) The New Black Panther Party, which attacks what it refers to as “bloodsucking Jews,” is recognized as a racist, anti-semitic hate group even by liberal civil-rights groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.

After the case was dismissed, the Civil Rights Commission began investigating the Obama administration’s actions. The administration ordered the career attorneys who had worked on the lawsuit to remain silent and not comply with the Commission’s investigation (contrary to federal law, which mandates that “all Federal agencies shall cooperate fully with the Commission“), and refused either to comply with the Commission’s subpoenas, or to bring a motion to quash the subpoena (which is the appropriate step to take if a subpoena is somehow invalid). This left the subpoena and one of the career lawyers “in limbo” and in apparent violation of the law, forcing him to run up thousands of dollars in legal bills. (The other lawyer was transferred to the civil-service equivalent of Siberia to take him “out of reach of the subpoena power of the Civil Rights Commission.”)…

(The idea that the civil rights laws do not protect whites or apply to minorities was rejected by a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in 1976, in an opinion authored by the black justice and civil-rights icon Thurgood Marshall. See McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transportation Co. There are limited to exceptions to bans on race discrimination for affirmative action, but they do not apply to voting, as the Supreme Court made clear in its 7-to-2 ruling in Rice v. Cayetano (2000).

Yes, they really cared about election interference.]

Why doxxing is different

The New Neo Posted on by

The special nature of doxxing is not that hard a concept to comprehend. But the same people who shriek “Words are violence!” when the subject matter is “mere words,” and who demand “safety” from the expression of thoughts they don’t like, fail to acknowledge that doxxing is qualitatively different. Doxxing informs the reader, “Here’s where this person you hate is located at the moment,” or “Here’s where this person you hate lives,” or “Here’s where this person’s child can be found right now or very soon.”

There is no innocent reason for real-time doxxing. Its purpose is to assist the reader in harming a person or that person’s family or property in the real 3-dimensional world rather that just to hurt that person’s feelings in the virtual world. It’s about physical space in real time or in future time.

And it’s not okay no matter who might be the doxxer or the doxxed, left or right. Therefore social media’s banning of doxxers, especially habitual doxxers, is appropriate.

When the age of the blog ended, the age of social media began

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I see that Twitterfiles #6 is now up [hat tip: commenter “Griffin]. I plan to deal with it in a post tomorrow.]

John Hayward writes:

The corruption Musk is exposing at Twitter makes it seem more obvious in retrospect that the Internet would become an instrument of totalitarianism, much more than it would be a bold new frontier for free speech…

The idealistic vision of Internet freedom came closest to reality during the golden age of the blog, which only lasted a decade or so. Bloggers built their own networks and found their own audiences. It was difficult to silence them. They made history a few times.

Blogging was supplanted by social media, which allowed totalitarian ideologies and political corruption to flourish because they created choke points that could be controlled by a few massive corporations and their politicized staffers.

Instead of bloggers setting up their own websites, linking to each other, and building their own traffic networks, now we had a handful of platforms that provided the ILLUSION of free speech, and it seemed to be easier than blogging – but as Musk is showing us, it was a lie.

Centralization of information was too big a temptation for those who yearn for power, and for those who already have power. That became apparent even before the Twitter files were released, but now it’s completely obvious.

For whatever reasons, I loved blogs from the start and hated social media from the start. But I don’t think that was because I looked into a crystal ball and immediately saw what the future held. What did I see in social media? I saw huge rewards for the cruel quick jab and a way to amplify the nastiness across the country and even the world. I saw wokeness destroy people early on – Justine Sacco, for example, whom I wrote about here, who learned how very costly a joke on social media could be if it offended the woke.

Here are some Twitter banning decisions I wrote about that disturbed me in various ways: this and this. And here’s an interesting post from 2017, about the power of Twitter. It ends with this thought:

Prior to Twitter, presidents and other government officials communicated with the public through government channels, sometimes filtered through the MSM. Social media such as Twitter allows a president to reach the public more directly. But there’s still a middleman—Twitter itself. The president and the public rely on the integrity of the Twitter system, but is there any real reason to trust it?

That last question was always merely rhetorical.

And hey, I even wrote about Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council and called it “Orwellian” in early 2016, which is when it first was instituted:

Apparently the social justice warriors have come to police twitter, via something with the quasi-Orwellian title of the Trust and Safety Council. I suggest you follow the link to learn more about it, but it seems to be some sort of attempt to “ensure that people feel safe expressing themselves on Twitter.”

But I thought the whole point of Twitter was verbal combat in an unsafe place…

Oh, did I mention that conservative blogger and author Stacy McCain was recently banned, and several conservative bloggers have also quit in protest?

Apparently Yoel Roth had not yet come onboard as the head of Trust and Safety. His predecessor was mentioned here:

Only a few weeks earlier, Twitter had announced the creation of a “Trust and Safety Council,” to which it appointed Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist known for denouncing “sexism” in video games, a prominent figure in the Gamergate controversy—and oh yes, a frequent target of criticism from McCain. So it sure looks like the moment Twitter gave Sarkeesian the power to do so, she started blackballing her critics.

Is this what has come from the Internet’s promise of open and unfettered speech, liberated from the gatekeepers of the “legacy media”? Or did we make the old gatekeepers obsolete, only so we could impose new ones?

The whole thing reminds me of the book Alexis de Tocqueville wrote after Democracy in America. In The Old Regime and the French Revolution, he examined the failed promise of France’s rebellion against monarchy. What concerned him was not just the Terror and the beheadings, but the fact that the French toppled all of their institutions and tried to remake their politics, only to see all the old institutions re-assert themselves. They ended up with the same system, just under new rulers. The main similarity between the new system and the Ancien Régime was its administrative centralization, the way everything was controlled out of Paris, sapping all power and initiative from local institutions.

But I think social media became a worse system than what it replaced. A centralized platform such as Twitter facilitates a more extreme reach for the censor.

[NOTE II: Yesterday Elon Musk banned some Twitter users on the left, several of them journalists, and the left was outraged. They’re used to being the ones to control things and they believe they have an absolute right to do so. Musk’s bannings don’t seem arbitrary or political, because they have to do with violating rules about doxxing by location tracking in real time. Please read this.]

Robert Barnes: what crimes are revealed by the Twitter files, and what issues are raised in Kari Lake’s lawsuit

The New Neo Posted on by

I profoundly disagree with Robert Barnes on certain things (in particular Ukraine, but not limited to that), but these two clips represent him in his wheelhouse. He states many things here with which I agree. One prominent one is that it’s not a good idea to expand the notion of undeclared campaign contributions, in order to nail your enemy. In fact, although he doesn’t mention it, that was the sort of legal reasoning Netanyahu’s enemies have been using to try to convict him.

Here are the two clips. The first one is on Twitter and the law, and it’s about seven minutes long:

The second is about Kari Lake’s case concerning irregularities in the 2022 election in Maricopa County, and it’s about eighteen minutes long. Well worth listening to, though, and quite shocking even if you think you already know all the serious irregularities that occurred there. I bet some of it will still be a surprise:

The politicized Department of Justice

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “stan.”]

Here’s an interesting look back at the history of the DOJ, and how it’s been a politicized force for a long time – often but not always on behalf of the Democrats. The article includes suggestions for reform.

I want to add that one of Obama’s less well-known but nevertheless consequential acts was to import large numbers of leftist lawyers into the DOJ during his term. And by “large numbers” I mean large. Attorneys J. Christian Adams and Hans A. Von Spakovsky have written about it here, in a series of pieces that much alarmed me at the time (starting in 2011):

In 2011, we produced the Every Single One series for PJ Media about an unprecedented wave of ideological hiring of leftist attorneys into the career ranks of the Justice Department. The series documented the partisan and radical background of every single one of the 113 new Justice Department lawyers hired into the Obama Civil Rights Division from January 2009 to January 2011.

With the help of PJ Media, we will now be updating that revealing report — and sharing details about the background of Justice Department attorneys hired since 2011. Because we have obtained all of the resumes of the attorney hires in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice since then.

And once again, every single one of them has an intensely ideological background…

When we are finished, you will see that the Obama Justice Department has assembled a law firm of hundreds of fringe leftists to enforce a brave new vision of civil rights law.

Why the Civil Rights Division? Simple — it may be one of the most powerful components of the entire federal government. If a president wanted to “fundamentally transform” the nation, he would likely start with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

The tentacles of the Division reach into virtually every crevice of American life.

And that’s exactly what happened, making things much much worse.

You can also read this piece about why Adams resigned from the DOJ.

It was around that same time – 2011 – that attorney Harvey Silverglate wrote the book Three Felonies a Day, a book with the thesis that the expansion of federal law allows the DOJ to successfully target anyone it wishes. This represents a grave and obvious danger to liberty. From the description at Amazon:

In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.

But as long as it’s the right that’s being targeted, Democrats don’t mind. In fact, they cheer.

Trump makes a second announcement today

The New Neo Posted on by

And this one is considerably more substantive:

More here.

As Ace points out, it should be made very clear that this would only apply to large – essentially, monopolist – social media platforms and not to other formats like blogs. The latter are vehicles for the views of one person (or just a few people) rather than huge social media forums with no central speaker and where the entire raison d’etre is discourse among the millions of commenters.

I believe, although I’m not sure, that all of what Trump describes would have to be passed though legislation rather than executive fiat.

China and the revenge of COVID

The New Neo Posted on by

I never trusted China’s COVID statistics to begin with. Could it be that a nation where COVID began, with the largest population in the world, had almost no COVID deaths and little COVID after an initial surge and then a draconian lockdown? That seemed improbable to the point of being nearly impossible.

But whatever was happening, it seems that the rigid reaction of China’s government did keep COVID at least somewhat in check for a while, until they couldn’t keep their fingers in the dike anymore. Now China appears to be experiencing a surge:

Empty streets, deserted shopping centers, and residents staying away from one another are the new normal in Beijing – but not because the city, like many Chinese ones before it, is under a “zero-Covid” lockdown.

This time, it’s because Beijing has been hit with a significant, and spreading, outbreak – a first for the Chinese capital since the beginning of the pandemic, a week after leaders eased the country’s restrictive Covid policy…

Similar scenes are playing out across Beijing, as offices, shops and residential communities report being understaffed or shifting working arrangements as employees fall ill with the virus. Meanwhile, others stay home to avoid being infected.

Pay now or pay later.

China isn’t even keeping a full range of statistics anymore – not that their statistics were ever reliable, as I said earlier. But it does seem clear that the number of cases are exploding there:

“The current strains will spread faster in China than they have spread in other parts of the world because those other parts of the world have some immunity against infection from previous waves of earlier Omicron strains,” said University of Hong Kong chair professor of epidemiology Ben Cowling.

At least the Omicron strains are milder in terms of very serious cases and deaths than the earlier strains were. That may keep the hospitals from being utterly overwhelmed. I read somewhere (can’t find it now) that the number of ICU beds per capita in China is a lot lower than in most Western countries.

China’s government propaganda organ says that the situation is under control and everyone should trust Xi. Sure thing.

It’s roundup time again

The New Neo Posted on by

So much is going on:

(1) Jonathan Turley opines on the Biden family’s threats against those who would testify against them:

(2) Trump says he’ll be making a big announcement, which turns out to be that he’s selling something called NFTs, in this case Trump Digital Trading Cards. What’s going on? Perhaps he’s trying to be funny. But let’s just say that he’s certainly not on a roll these days.

(3) There was praise in the comments for this interview, and although I haven’t read it yet I thought I’d call your attention to it.

(4) One Iranian exile’s opinion of what’s going on in Iran right now:

The demonstrations need to be continuous. The Iranian regime is very weak now. I know many people who were senior in the regime, in the IRGC, and who have stopped working with them. If the demonstrations continue, and larger numbers come to the revolution, and the strikes continue and spread, I think that step by step, the regime will begin to lose control. I think it’s going to happen.

Historically, that’s certainly the way these things tend to happen: first slowly, then all at once, and involving people in the regime or doing its bidding ultimately breaking off with it. I have no idea whether that’s the case in Iran right now, but I hope so.

(5) I’ve certainly noticed – have you? – a lot of people are sick lately. Someone I know who has a bad cough said the pharmacies are out of basic cough medicine and nearly out of more specialty types.