Mexican President Defends Trump and Calls Out Big Tech for Violating Free Speech He’s defending Trump better than most Republicans.
In a strange turn of events, Mexican president Andres Manuel López Obrador recently came to President Donald Trump’s defense after social media platforms blocked his account.
Facebook and Twitter’s decision to ban President Trump elicited strong words from the Mexican president, who described the actions as a “bad omen.”
The concept of private companies deciding who can be censored and muzzled violates the freedom of speech, according to a statement AMLO made during a press conference on January 8.
“It’s like a censorship court is being created, like the Holy Inquisition, for the management of public opinion,” he declared. take our poll – story continues below
VOTE NOW: Did Kyle Rittenhouse act in self defense when he shot three BLM rioters?
AMLO said that he found Zuckerberg’s behavior to be “arrogant.”
“He’s talking about his norms, but what about freedom and the right to information? What’s the role of legal and legitimately constituted authorities?” the president said. “We can’t allow one corporation that is the owner of Facebook, or of Twitter, decide who it can and who it can’t grant the possibility to communicate.”
AMLO and President Trump have been able to forge a solid working relationship, as evidenced by Trump’s success with the Remain in Mexico policy that has largely prevented asylum seekers from Central America from clogging up America’s immigration system by having them stay in Mexico as their asylum requests are processed.
Although Mexico has all the trappings of a failed state — out of control crime, cartels effectively exercising sovereignty over pieces of land, and an inability to keep cartels in check —, President Trump has found proactive ways to cooperate with AMLO and lay the foundations for a strong relationship between two neighboring countries.
The Mexican president can sympathize with Trump because of the former’s experience with voter fraud in some of his previous attempts to run for the Mexican presidency.
Good on AMLO’s part for defending Trump and calling out Big Tech overreach. He’s actually defended Trump more effectively than most GOP leaders.
John Minchillo / APSupporters loyal to President Donald Trump clash with authorities before successfully breaching the Capitol building during a riot on the grounds Wednesday. (John Minchillo / AP) By Kipp Jones Published January 9, 2021 at 1:36pm Share on Facebook Tweet Share Email Print
Mozilla, the foundation and developer of the popular free web browser Firefox, published a blog post on Friday arguing that silencing and de-platforming President Donald Trump is not enough and that the entire internet needs to be re-tooled to stifle political dissent.
“There is no question that social media played a role in the siege and take-over of the US Capitol on January 6,” Mozilla said in a blog post. “Since then there has been significant focus on the deplatforming of President Donald Trump. By all means the question of when to deplatform a head of state is a critical one, among many that must be addressed. When should platforms make these decisions? Is that decision-making power theirs alone?”
“But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality,” the company said. “Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won’t be the last. We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done.”
Mozilla essentially called everyone who didn’t vote for Democrats in the last election racist. Then, it advocated for more censorship and more voter disenfranchisement for conservatives who already face so much discrimination in their daily lives.
The company said it is time to unmask “who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted,” which sounds an awful lot like an advocation for doxing people. Surely, that won’t be misused and unevenly applied.
“Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact. Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation,” Mozilla added.
Finally, the Mozilla said the tech must “Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.”
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“These are actions the platforms can and should commit to today. The answer is not to do away with the internet, but to build a better one that can withstand and gird against these types of challenges. This is how we can begin to do that,” concluded Mozilla.
Mozilla also took to Twitter to share its message: https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?creatorScreenName=WestJournalism&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1347633954497548289&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.westernjournal.com%2Ftop-tech-foundation-deplatforming-not-enough-entire-internet-needs-change-capitol-incursion%2F&siteScreenName=WestJournalism&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px
Top Tech Foundation: Deplatforming Not Enough, Entire Internet Needs to Change After Capitol Incursion
John Minchillo / APSupporters loyal to President Donald Trump clash with authorities before successfully breaching the Capitol building during a riot on the grounds Wednesday. (John Minchillo / AP) By Kipp Jones Published January 9, 2021 at 1:36pm Share on Facebook Tweet Share Email Print
Mozilla, the foundation and developer of the popular free web browser Firefox, published a blog post on Friday arguing that silencing and de-platforming President Donald Trump is not enough and that the entire internet needs to be re-tooled to stifle political dissent.
“There is no question that social media played a role in the siege and take-over of the US Capitol on January 6,” Mozilla said in a blog post. “Since then there has been significant focus on the deplatforming of President Donald Trump. By all means the question of when to deplatform a head of state is a critical one, among many that must be addressed. When should platforms make these decisions? Is that decision-making power theirs alone?”
“But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality,” the company said. “Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won’t be the last. We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done.”
Advertisement – story continues below
Mozilla essentially called everyone who didn’t vote for Democrats in the last election racist. Then, it advocated for more censorship and more voter disenfranchisement for conservatives who already face so much discrimination in their daily lives.
The company said it is time to unmask “who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted,” which sounds an awful lot like an advocation for doxing people. Surely, that won’t be misused and unevenly applied.
“Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact. Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation,” Mozilla added.
Finally, the Mozilla said the tech must “Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.”
Advertisement – story continues below
“These are actions the platforms can and should commit to today. The answer is not to do away with the internet, but to build a better one that can withstand and gird against these types of challenges. This is how we can begin to do that,” concluded Mozilla.
Mozilla also took to Twitter to share its message: https://platform.twitter.com/embed/
Nineteenth century Scottish writer Robert Louis
Stevenson is remembered mostly for his novels Treasure Island, featuring the pirate Long John Silver, and Kidnapped. Almost as well-known as these, and probably
far more influential in terms of the number of imitations it has inspired and
adaptations that have been made, is a shorter work, published in 1886, the same
year as Kidnapped, entitled Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1).
The story is about a physician, Dr. Henry Jekyll, who
like everybody else, struggles with the inner conflict between his base
instincts and urges on the one hand and his ethical standards on the other. Unlike everybody else, he, being a scientist,
tries to find a scientific solution to the problem, which he sees more in terms
of the need to protect his reputation than to suppress his vicious
desires. He invents a serum that
transforms him into Mr. Edward Hyde so that he can indulge the latter without
damaging his reputation. The potion,
however, also produces a division in his moral character, basically separating
all the wickedness into the persona of Mr. Hyde and all of the goodness into
the persona of Dr. Jekyll. The
consequence of all of this, is that Mr. Hyde is left with no inner constraints
on his wickedness, and becomes a thoroughly depraved, sadistic, sociopathic,
murderer. Dr. Jekyll, who by contrast
becomes more upright, humane and saintly, eventually loses control over the
transformation process and starts to transform into Mr. Hyde involuntarily, at
first in his sleep, later when he is awake.
Then, running out of the serum that reverses the transformation, and
being unable to produce another batch that will work, he realizes that he is
about to become his evil alter-ego permanently, and commits suicide.
After the story was published and became widely known,
the names of the character became more or less synonymous with the kind of dual
personality in which a person can be sweet, gentile, and charming one minute
and the exact opposite of that the next.
I have been reminded of this story every time that
Doug Ford, the current premier of Upper Canada, or Ontario as those who like to
keep up with the times prefer to call it, has appeared in the news in the last
eight months and especially the last two.
Two summers ago, when the Progressive Conservatives
led by Doug Ford, won a majority of 76 out of the 124 seats in the provincial
legislature, I breathed a sigh of relief for our neighbours to the east. They had suffered under Grit misrule for
fifteen years, first under Dalton McGuinty and then under Kathleen Wynne, who
were in my opinion the two worst provincial-level Liberal leaders in the entire
history of the Dominion. The election
that put Doug Ford in the premier’s chair, also reduced the Grits to seven
seats, the worst defeat they have ever suffered in that province, which was
itself even greater cause to rejoice than the Conservative victory.
When Doug Ford became leader of Upper Canada’s
Progressive Conservatives in the lead-up to the provincial election of 2018, I
knew little about him other than that he was the brother of the late Rob Ford,
who from 2010 to 2014 had been mayor of the city which had been known as York
before political correctness prompted its being rechristened with the Indian
name of Toronto in 1834. During the
years in which Rob Ford was mayor, he was constantly under attack by the CBC
and the rest of the mainstream progressive media, which only strengthened me in
my conviction that, as I said at the time, Rob Ford, drunk and on crack, ran
his city better than any other sober mayor in Canada, including and especially
our own here in Winnipeg. That would
have been Sam Katz back then, and Mayor Duckie (2) who has since replaced him
is even worse.
The same corrupt left-wing media that had relentlessly
pursued the destruction of his brother, went after Doug Ford during the 2018
election. They shamelessly dug poor old
Rob up from his grave – he had passed away from cancer two years previously –
and began whipping and crucifying his corpse.
Since Ford was using populist rhetoric in his campaign, they naturally
compared him to Donald the Orange who through populism and nationalism had
become president of the American republic in 2016. Now,
just to be clear, since my politics happens to be the royal-monarch-as-defender-of-the-Church
kind of Toryism from which the Conservative Party has been lamentably drifting
for decades – or rather centuries – populism and nationalism are actually lower
in my own estimation than they are in that of the progressive media. Forced to choose between the former and the
latter, however, I would gladly chose the populists any day. So it was that this progressive assault on
“Ontario’s Trump” raised his stock considerably in my books.
Despite the media’s amusing attempt to use his
populist rhetoric to hang the “far right” label on him – neither populism nor
what the media considers to be “far right” is right wing at all, let alone
extremely right wing – Doug Ford was
basically a mainstream, centre-right, Progressive Conservative. His platform consisted mostly of tax
reductions, infrastructure improvement, de-regulation, and cleaning up the mess
that McGuinty and Wynne had made of the province’s school system. While there was much that was lacking in
this platform, it was a major improvement over what the former governing party
had been offering. After Ford won the
election, the first year and a half of his premiership were fairly
impressive. He stuck it to the
provincial bureaucrats with a salary-and-hiring freeze, and went to war with
the environazis who were determined to make life more miserable and
unaffordable for everybody because of their superstitious belief in a climate
apocalypse extrapolated through a computer simulation from the pseudoscientific
theory of anthropogenic global warming.
This included standing up to Captain Airhead, whom we are unfortunate
enough to have as the Prime Minister of Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa, and
who was threatening to impose a federal carbon tax on all provinces that did
not voluntarily adopt one of their own.
Shortly after the election, the new Minister of Education announced that
the province would repeal everything the outgoing government had done to turn
the schools into indoctrination camps for brainwashing young children with
sexual perversion and gender identity politics although there have been reports
that the follow-through on this was less than spectacular and that all they
really did was make a few minor adjustments.
(3)
The qualifying remarks in my last sentence
aside, Ford had gotten off to a fairly good start for a contemporary,
mainstream, Progressive Conservative premier.
Then the Chinese bat flu arrived in Upper Canada. When that happened, Doug Ford underwent an
almost-overnight metamorphosis into a despotic, bullying, COVID-monster, and
became the darling of the media that had been demonizing him for the last two
years.
Of course, something similar could be said about every
premier in the Dominion. Our own Progressive
Conservative Premier here in the south-east corner of Prince Rupert’s Land, Brian
Pallister, declared a state of emergency and put our province into a most
draconian lockdown before there was any significant outbreak, gave that – in my
opinion – power mad goon Dr. Brent Roussin a blank cheque for imposing
restrictions, no matter how stupid, self-contradictory, and outright harmful
they were, and only the other day doubled the fines for people who violate
these arbitrary regulations. Pallister,
however, has long been known to be a jerk.
The only reason I welcomed his re-election the other year is that the
other option was the truly odious Wab Kinew.
Doug Ford, on the other hand, had given us every reason to expect much
better of him, before he turned around and started acting like a squirt bottle
used for cleaning the orifices of the nether regions of the body.
Now, some might come to Doug Ford’s defence by saying that
his province was hit particularly hard by the bat flu. Granted, out of all the provinces its number
of deaths was exceeded only by those of Lower Canada. This hardly constitutes justification of his
actions, however. It is only to be
expected that in a country-wide outbreak, the two provinces of Central Canada
would have the most deaths. They have
the most people, after all. There is
more to it, however, than just that.
The bulk of the deaths in those provinces took place in long-term care
facilities, which, again, is predictable from the fact that the only people who
are at any sort of statistically
significant risk from the Chinese bat
flu are those who are really old, with two or more complicating health
conditions. In Upper and Lower Canada,
the situation in the nursing homes got so bad that the Armed Forces had to be
sent in to take the place of the staff who had either contracted the virus
themselves or deserted in fear of doing so.
They sent back to their superiors reports of the horrendous conditions
they found there – conditions such as cockroaches, rotting food, bedding left
soiled for days on end, and worse – caused not by the bat flu but by neglect
and abuse on the part of the administration and staff. While Ford is hardly to blame for such
conditions, for in many of these places this sort of thing had been going on
for years prior to his premiership, the fact of the matter is that had he done
the common sense thing at the beginning of the “pandemic” and taken measures to
provide extra protection for the people most at risk, rather than listening uncritically
to the imbecilic advice of medical experts who, themselves regurgitating
nonsense cooked up by the World Health Organization to serve the nefarious ends
of the Chinese Communists and the pharmaceutical conglomerates, recommended a universal
quarantine on the young and healthy instead, this sort of thing could have been
dealt with much earlier, and steps could have been taken which might have prevented
the outbreaks in the nursing homes from getting so bad. Jumping on board the lockdown bandwagon,
prevented him from pursuing other, sounder, options, and made the situation
even worse.
When the World Health Organization screamed “pandemic”,
Ford traded in his tired old populism and common sense for a shiny new superstitious
belief in the infallibility of international health organizations and other
medical experts, and imposed their recommendations with a particularly heavy
hand. When people with legitimate
concerns about the erosion of their rights, freedoms, livelihoods and businesses
under public health orders and who likely largely overlapped the people who had
voted Ford into the premier’s office two years ago, began to protest against social
distancing, lockdowns, and the like, he dismissed them all as yahoos. In July, he rammed Bill 195 through the legislature,
a bill which gave him two years’ worth of emergency powers which he could
exercise without consulting the legislature.
This was a province-level equivalent of what Captain Airhead and his
Liberals had tried to sneak into an emergency spending bill in Parliament in
March, but which Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition had mercifully thwarted. Ford punished the members of his own party
who voted against this bill, such as Belinda Karahalios, the MPP representing
Cambridge, by expelling them from the caucus.
On Monday, September 28th, Ford held a
press conference in which he announced that his province was officially in the “second
wave” of the bat flu, and that it “will be worse than the first wave we faced
earlier this year.” As with all the other
claptrap about this so-called “second wave” this was a cunning form of
sleight-of-hand. That day, Upper Canada
had seen the highest number of new cases recorded in a single day since the
beginning of the pandemic. It had not
seen a commensurate spike in the number of people gravely sick, being
hospitalized, put in intensive care, and dying. Indeed, the new cases were mostly among age
groups which were not at any significant risk from the disease. This has been more or less the case
everywhere throughout this so-called “second wave”. My province, which seen the number of deaths
multiply since the beginning of September – we were at fourteen at the
beginning of September and are now at forty-seven, is not an exception. These deaths are, like those which more
populated provinces experienced in the spring, almost entirely among those who
are both extremely old and extremely sick, because this is Manitoba’s first
wave, the entire misguided and totalitarian “flatten the curve” strategy having
merely delayed it, while causing a whole lot of unnecessary other harm in the
process.
Even before Ford made this announcement, he had
lowered the number of people allowed to meet socially in Toronto, Peel Region,
and Ottawa to ten, slapped a $10 000 fine on anyone who organized an event that
broke this rule, and a $750 fine on anyone who attended. It is difficult to decide which is more
ridiculous, the limit of social gatherings to ten in a country where assembly and
association are two of the officially recognized fundamental freedoms, or the
insanely high amounts of those fines. (4) Certainly,
the late Rob Ford, who was well known for his love of large social gatherings,
must be spinning in his grave over all this party-pooping, and the whole
general way in which his brother has turned into a piece of rotting Communist excrement.
My unsolicited advice to Ford is to find the serum
that will turn him back to his original self and to do so quickly. Nobody, except the media progressives, who
want everybody to spend the rest of their lives, hiding under their beds in
their basements, curled up in the fetal position, sucking their thumbs, afraid
to go out lest the SARS-Cov-2 Bogeyman get them, likes this new version.
(1) Stevenson
deliberately left out both the definite article and the periods after the
abbreviations for doctor and mister from his title. His original publisher followed his
whims. Most subsequent publishers have
not.
(2) Brian Bowman looks like Jon Cryer, who, prior to his role as Alan on Three and a Half Men, was best known as
“Duckie” in John Hughes’ 1986 “Brat Pack” teen rom-com, Pretty in Pink. An
interesting bit of trivia, although as completely irrelevant as this entire
footnote, is that Charlie Sheen, Cryer’s co-star in Three and a Half Men (and earlier in Hotshots), was the original choice for the role of Blane, “Duckie”’s
ultimately successful rival for the affections of Andie (Molly Ringwald) in
this film, a role that ended up going to Andrew McCarthy.
(3) See
this
article from The
Interim. It is worth noting that a
serious effort to clean up the schools would have to involve more than just
repealing Kathleen Wynne’s curriculum.
I was in Toronto for a wedding almost ten years ago, while Dalton
McGuinty was still premier. On the ride
back to Pearson International, my driver, a recent immigrant from somewhere in
the Middle East, struck up a conversation.
When he found out I was from Manitoba, he told me how lucky I was to be
living in a rural, conservative, province, where I did not have to put up with
the likes of Dalton McGuinty, who was making the schools teach sexual
perversions to young children. I didn’t
have the heart to break the news to him, that the NDP which was governing
Manitoba at the time was just about as bad, although they had not taken the
schools quite that far. My point, however,
is that this conversation could not have taken place when it did, had McGuinty
not already started the schools along the path down which Wynne would take them
much further.
(4) Of
course there are those who have gone even further than Ford in this
absurdity. Dr. Brent Roussin has
limited social gatherings to five in Winnipeg and the surrounding region. Back in Ford’s own province, Patrick Brown,
his predecessor as PC leader and currently the mayor of Brampton, imposed fines
of up to $100 000 on those not practicing “physical distancing” as far back as
April. An orchard owner in neighbouring
Caledon was threatened with a fine that large by the Ontario Provincial Police in
late September for letting people pick their own apples on his farm.
If Trump doesn’t win our issue will be basic survival.
All
of this is to say: information has to be taken at face value, and all
information should be examined through a critical lens by adult readers.
The social media companies are now dealing with people as though they
are children, incapable of any kind of critical analysis whatsoever. I
don’t know if people are or are not capable of critical analysis, but I
do know that the primary, foundational assumption of a universal
suffrage democracy is that every adult member of society is capable of
rational analysis and critical decision-making. That’s the most basic
claim of this system, as it justifies allowing them to vote and
determine who runs the government.
By undermining the ability of people to make rational and informed decisions, Twitter is undermining the concept of universal suffrage democracy itself. Of course, they don’t care, because our rulers do not actually believe in anything other than power. They profess various ideologies at different times, but only use these ideologies to push their agenda that exists totally independently from the ideologues.
TAKE ACTION AGAINST TRUMP’S “END OF FREE SPEECH” DECREE!!!
17 December, 2019 By Rev. Ted Pike
President
Trump’s recent Executive Order IS THE TEXT of the Jewish ADL’s
“Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, S852, recently rejected by the US Senate
for Committee consideration. See the Senate Bill here:, and See the Executive Order here:
S852 can make a “hate criminal” of any student, teacher,
administrator or even employee of U.S. Public Education who strongly
criticizes Israel. It says they can be arrested for the crime of
“anti-Semitism&lrquo; and “intimidation&lrquo; of Jewish
students on campus. They then can be punished under the harsh “anti-
discrimination” rules of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
THREAT TO CHRISTIANS
But
S852 also has Christians as its primary target. It contains eleven
examples by which the U.S. Government can identify and prosecute any
Christian in Public Education who is deemed an “anti-Semitic hate
criminal”. Making such a determination is simple according to S852’s
example 9. It says that any Christian who agrees with the frequent New
Testament “claims of Jews killing Jesus” is guilty of “Classical
Anti-Semitism”. Most Jews believe that the Christian charge that the
Pharisees persuaded the Romans to kill Christ smears Jews as “Christ
killers”, leading directly to the “Holocaust™”. Since the “anti-Semitic”
New Testament led to so much Jewish suffering, S852 must presume that
anyone distributing such “hate literature” should be prosecuted. https://womenfightantisemitism.org/ihra-definition-of-antisemitism
Remember, S852 is no longer just another Jewish ADL hate crimes bill, designed to entrap Christians. Rather,
S852 and its insidious intentions toward Christians is now Federal Law.
It must, by command of the President, be considered to provide the
fairest, most enlightened and workable standards by which not only the
U.S. Department of Education, but all levels of Government help him, as
Pastor John Hagee vowed, “to root out and destroy” the curse of
unrestrained criticism of Israel.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
Unfortunately,
most Christians are unaware that President Trump has destroyed our
First Amendment free speech rights to criticize anyone, Including Jews
and Israel, without fear of arrest. Yet, aside from
prayer, there is one very effective way to begin to reverse what Trump
has done. It’s by many hundreds of “TruthTeams” — groups of lovers of
freedom bringing the whole truth to Trump’s massive soft underbelly,
Evangelical Churches. You and your friends can reproduce
this article on 8.5 x 14 paper, preferably by the thousands. Then
select the first Church you will visit. Call beforehand for the exact
time Church usually ends. When you arrive station yourselves (with
hundreds of extra flyers) to cover all exit points to the parking areas.
Be neatly dressed and smiling. Tell them: “We are very concerned that
President Trump’s recent Executive Order outlawing speech critical of
Israel in public education violates our First Amendment rights. Would
you like to learn more?”
Below is a tear off petition to Trump which millions of Christians can be persuaded to sign and mail to the White House.
If
you are the only person in your area to undertake this project, don’t
be daunted. You can always come back repeatedly. Once one Church has
been reasonably reached, by a single person or group, go on next week to
another Evangelical Church until you have covered all in your area.
Thus, as a result of only one hour a week, hundreds, perhaps thousands,
may be weekly awakened to Trumps dictatorial ban on free speech. Think
of the result if hundreds of “TruthTeams” visited churches in America
weekly!
Rev. Ted Pike is director of the National Prayer Network,
a Christian/Conservative watchdog group. An international authority on
ADL hate crimes legislation Rev. Pike’s many writings and radio and
YouTube broadcasts have played a powerful role in defeating the
“Equality” and “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” this year. His activism is
chronicled at Truthtellers. org and he may be contacted at npntedpike@gmail.com
Rev.
Ted Pike is director of the National Prayer Network, a
Christian/Conservative watchdog group.An international authority on ADL
hate crimes legislation Rev. Pike’s many writings and radio and YouTube
broadcasts have played a powerful role in defeating the “Equality” and
“Antisemitism Awareness Act” this year. His activism is chronicled at
Truthtellers. org and he may be contacted at npntedpike@gmail.com
Rev. Ted Pike is director of the National Prayer Network, a Christian/conservative watchdog organization.
TALK SHOW HOSTS: Interview Rev. Ted Pike on this subject. Call (503) 631-3808.
The
freedom-saving outreach of Rev. Ted Pike and the National Prayer
Network is solely supported by sale of books, videos and your financial
support. All gifts are tax-deductible.
Tulsi Gabbard sues Google for suspending her ads after first Dem debate
July 26, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – While most of the voices accusing tech giants of political discrimination are conservative, some left-of-center figures have been caught up in the controversy as well, including 2020 Democrat presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii, announced Thursday that she’s suing Google for suspending her campaign’s Google Ads account for several hours after the first Democrat primary debate.
The New York Timesreported that following the debate, Gabbard was “briefly” the most-searched presidential candidate on Google, and the campaign wanted to seize that momentum with some ad buys, but found their account suspended.
“For hours, Tulsi’s campaign advertising account remained offline while Americans everywhere were searching for information about her,” Gabbard’s campaign charged. “During this time, Google obfuscated and dissembled with a series of inconsistent and incoherent reasons for its actions. In the end, Google never explained to us why Tulsi’s account was suspended.”
The campaign gave the Times emails indicating that Google initially suspended them for “problems with billing information or violations of our advertising policies,” then sent a notice several hours later reinstating the account and claiming the temporary suspension was meant to verify billing information and compliance with Google’s policies.
Google spokesman Jose Castaneda told the Times that the company’s automated systems, which are designed to catch “unusual” activity such as large spending changes, “triggered a suspension,” but “the account was reinstated shortly thereafter.”
“Google’s discriminatory actions against my campaign are reflective of how dangerous their complete dominance over internet search is, and how the increasing dominance of big tech companies over our public discourse threatens our core American values,” Gabbard declared in a statement. “This is a threat to free speech, fair elections and to our democracy, and I intend to fight back on behalf of all Americans.”
The lawsuit seeks an injunction against Google engaging in further election interference and a minimum of $50 million in damages. It also alleges that her campaign emails found their way into Gmail spam folders at “a disproportionately high rate” compared with those from other Democrat primary campaigns.
Gabbard has drawn some interest for ostensibly being more moderate than the rest of the Democrat field. As recently as 2004, she opposed same-sex “marriage,” but is now a doctrinaire liberal on abortion, LGBT issues, and even decriminalizing prostitution.
Since the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, Google has been under fire for allegedly intensifying efforts to slant their platforms and services in favor of Trump’s opponents and other left-wing causes in a variety of ways, including blacklists, biased algorithms, and more. Concerns have also been raised that figures within Google and other tech companies have been “subverted” by foreign governments.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Ajit Pai told Congress last month that he considers “unregulated Silicon Valley tech giants” today’s “greatest threat to a free and open internet.” Earlier this month, Trump announced that he was “directing my administration to explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to tech censorship.” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, has proposed legislation that would require social media platforms to certify their political neutrality with the FCC if they want to keep their congressionally granted immunity from legal liability for what they allow users to post.
On the fourth Sunday in Lent we were given a sermon on the “love thy enemy” passage in the Sermon on the Mount. While it is probably not entirely within the spirit of that passage to engage in schadenfreude over one’s enemies’ misfortunes, I find it impossible to resist doing so since this era of triumphant liberalism afford few opportunities for such to a man of the right.
The Liberal Party of Canada has, over the years, made itself odious to all sorts of Canadians but most consistently to two distinct groups who despise them for very different reasons. The old Tories of the kind frequently but erroneously called “Red,” (1) i.e., the ones who prize Canada’s British and Loyalist history, traditions, and heritage, her constitutional monarchy, Westminster parliamentary system of government, and Common Law, her ongoing ties to the British Commonwealth and who associate all of this with an older, more organic, more rooted, vision of society than modern, individualistic, commercialism see the Liberals, quite correctly, as a party of rootless, modernizers who can conceive of value in no terms other than those of a price tag and whose goal is to sell out the Dominion and everything for which she once stood to Yankee capitalism for a quick buck. On the other hand, the rugged, rural, inhabitants of the prairie provinces of the Canadian West whom the Liberals and their academic and media fellow travelers dismiss with “redneck” and other, worse, epithets, have long loathed the Grits as being a party of totalitarian socialists who a) tax them to death, b) ignore, or worse, aggravate, their economic difficulties, and c) display the same arrogant contempt towards them that the Obama/Clinton Democrats display towards middle and working class red state Americans. Both of these negative views of the Liberals are entirely valid. (2) Someone like myself, who has belonged to both groups simultaneously for all of his life – a Redneck Tory, would be one way of putting it, I suppose – has particularly good reason to look upon the Liberal Party with utter abhorrence.
The Liberal Party has always been bad but it has sunk to new depths of depravity under the current leadership of Captain Airhead who, more than any of his predecessors, has brought shame and disgrace upon the office of Her Majesty’s First Minister in this Dominion. Will Ferguson divided Canada’s Prime Ministers into two categories, “Boneheads” and “Bastards”, but Captain Airhead has the distinction of being both. Smug, arrogant, self-righteous and preening, all of his public statements and actions, before and after taking office, have been calculated to project, with the cooperation of a fawning media, a carefully crafted image of himself. Since that image was that of the opposite of, at first, his predecessor Stephen Harper, then later of American President Donald Trump, it has all along resembled a bad caricature of the worst sort of loony leftist. He began his term by trying to import the migrant crisis that has been threatening to inundate Europe and create a Camp of the Saints scenario for half of a decade, creating a miniature version of America’s southern border crisis on the 49th Parallel, and at the end of his term, signed an insane and evil United Nations accord on migration which in effect, amounted to an agreement to surrender the Dominion’s essential right to maintain and police her own borders. Any and all criticism of this, or, for that matter, any of his other policies, was met with accusations of “racism”. He used the federal summer jobs funding program to coerce employers into agreeing with abortion on demand, having previously evicted pro-lifers from the Liberal Party, and otherwise attempted to shove his “woke” notions down all Canadians throats by legislation, or at any rate Parliamentary motions, condemning “Islamophobia” and protecting the new found “right” of individuals to choose or even make up their own gender identity. Jumping on board the bandwagon of an environmentalist movement that had long ago lost sight of its original, legitimate, goal – the conservation and preservation for future generations of natural resources and aesthetics – and gone to seed on apocalyptic, end-of-the-world, alarmism, he sabotaged and destroyed Canada’s energy industry and then, just this year, pulled the world’s most tasteless April Fool’s prank, by slapping down a carbon tax that will accomplish nothing but a needless rise in the cost of living, which hurts the poor and the working class the most. All the while his extravagance with the public purse has made his father, previously noted for his record deficits, look like a model of budgetary austerity in comparison. Speaking of money, he had the audacity to take the image of our first – and greatest – Prime Minister, the man who spearheaded the Confederation project and led the Dominion for most of its first two decades, fighting tooth and nail to get the railroad built and prevent the country from splitting up and falling into the avaricious hands of the republic to our south, off of our ten dollar bill and replace it with that of a woman who achieved fame, decades after the fact thanks to the Liberals’ desperate sifting of Canadian history for an equivalent of the figures in America’s Civil Rights Movement, for sitting down in a theatre.
It has been with much joy and pleasure, therefore, that I have been watching Captain Airhead’s image and popularity implode over the past couple of months. If there has been a cloud amidst all the silver lining of the SNC-Lavalin Affair it is that it took an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, corruption scandal to bring about the collapse of his reputation after all the evils mentioned in the preceding paragraph failed to do so. Perhaps the best way to look at that is to regard it as a case of the straw finally breaking the humpy back of the camel. To briefly summarize the scandal, a large corporation that has been a significant contributor to Liberal Party funds and which is based in the home province of the Prime Minister has been under prosecution for bribing a foreign government and last year our government snuck a bill in with the budget that allows for slap-on-the-wrist treatment of white collar crimes of this nature. When Jody Wilson-Raybould was shifted out of her Cabinet position of Minister of Justice and Attorney General in January of this year, rumours began to circulate that this was because she had refused to give in to pressure from the Prime Minister’s Office to apply the new rules retroactively to SNC Lavalin. As Jay Currie observed, the real scandal in all of this ought to have been the revelation that the government snuck legislation in to give their friends a break. Instead, what everyone jumped on was the compromise of an independent judiciary by inappropriate political interference in a prosecution. To put the same matter in Canadian rather than Yankee terms, as our press should have been doing all along although they have probably long ago forgotten what little they ever knew of Canadian civics, the rulings of the courts of the Queen-on-the-bench are not to be decided and dictated for political reasons by the ministers of the Queen-in-Council. Whether we speak Canadian or American it is a rotten and corrupt thing to do – and the Prime Minister’s being guilty of it would not have come as news to anyone still capable of remembering that we were not always at war with Eastasia. What, after all, did his inappropriate tweets following the Gerald Stanley jury acquittal last year constitute if not an unashamed and public display of such interference? Indeed, this was a far worse instance of such interference and one in which Jody Wilson-Raybould was equally guilty for it had all the appearance of promising changes to the jury selection process that would compromise such ancient principles as the right of the accused to presumption of innocence and the right of the accused – not the victim – to a trial of his peers and put in the place of the justice based on such principles, a primitive form of blood-based-vengeance, as if the Oresteia were being played out in reverse. It was at this point that Captain Airhead and the then-Justice Minister should both have received a summons to Rideau Hall and been told that Her Majesty no longer requires their services. Of course this didn’t happen and for that we ought to burn an effigy of William Lyon Mackenzie King annually for it was that, longest sitting Grit premier, who subverted the Westminster system and undermined the accountability of the Prime Minister’s Office turning it into a virtual dictatorship whenever there is a majority government..
As the SNC-Lavalin scandal developed, Captain Airhead’s team tried desperately to salvage their leader’s reputation, but their every effort, beginning with the self-immolation of Seymour Butts – my apologies to Matt Groening and his creative staff for appropriating what was originally a joke of theirs but I refuse to sully my own Christian name by admitting that it is shared by this man – was like adding fuel to the fire. Now, the very people who for the past four years swooned at the very mention of Captain Airhead’s name, are falling over themselves in their efforts to get as far away from him as possible. The scandal having broken on the eve of the next Dominion election things have gotten so bad for the Airhead Grits that they can think of nothing else to do than recycle the lame tactics that failed to win Hilary Clinton the last American presidential election by telling us that Andrew Scheer is courting the “far right” and, most hilariously since it has come a week after Robert Mueller announced that he could find no evidence that the Trump team had colluded with Russia, warning us about Russian interference in the upcoming election.
There is a lesson in this for Captain “Because it is 2015” Airhead if he is capable of learning it. Those who ride to the top on the crest of the wave of fashion, will crash and crash hard, when the tide goes out.Taylor Swift may very well have been right and she and whoever she was singing to at the time will “never go out of style”, but Justin, baby, you just ain’t her.
(1) This is due mainly to the socialist sympathies of George Grant and Eugene Forsey. While Grant attempted to argue that “socialism” was “conservative” his argument depended entirely upon a clever redefinition of socialism and he, like Forsey, acknowledged that this positive view of socialism was not that of the Tories as a group.
(2) This is true despite the fact that one view sees the Grits as being capitalist while the other sees them as being socialist. Capitalism and socialism are but two sides to the same coin which is the economy of the Modern Age. The true reactionary seeks wisdom, economic and otherwise, in the older traditions that predated the Modern Age. George Grant was a man who sought to do just that and this is reflected in his admirable criticism of capitalism but it was lamentable, pun intended, that he chose to stay within the limits of Modern thinking in using the term “socialism” for the opposite of where capitalism had gone wrong. Friedrich Hayek, on the other hand, was a man who made no effort whatsoever to think outside of the Modern box, and while he produced an otherwise admirable critique of socialism, could see it in no other terms than a return to pre-Modern feudalism, which it was not.
One of the great contributions of President Donald Trump is to undermine and expose what he calls the lying media or the “fake news” media. Much of North America’s media is in the control of the Cultural Marxists or minority special interest groups. News, as I have argued for years, is not really news — that is,. the facts about what is happening, like the scores of last night’s hockey game — but, in fact, a soap opera, where there are good guys and bad guys and few in betweens. And, guess what, we in the nationalist or pro-freedom or populist movement are always the bad guys. Whatever the specific story might be, through labels and selective presentation of details, our side is presented as evil The reader or viewer is not presented with objective facts from which he or she can then form an opinion.
Here is a textbook example of soap opera false news journalism — a recent smear on me by the HAMILTON SPECTATOR, which, I would more properly dub as the EXPECTORATOR.
On March 19, THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR printed an article by Teviah Moro entitled “Paul Fromm investigated for posting of New Zealand shooter’s manifesto.”
The entire article is defamatory, misleading to the point of falsehood and utterly unprofessional. I demand a complete retraction.
The article has three elements: I posted Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto; there was a complaint about this; the Hamilton Police “hate crimes unit” is investigating.
I am the main focus of this article. Many details are given about me, all of a negative nature. However, I was never interviewed or asked to comment.
The headline itself clearly suggests that I agree with the shooter. Otherwise why would I post the manifesto.
The opening paragraph strengthens that impression by labelling me a “White supremacist”, The accused shooter has also been widely identified as a “White supremacist.” Interestingly, when one accesses this story on the SPECTATOR’S website, there is a link to an article announcing my candidacy for mayor last year correctly identifying me as a “White nationalist” (“Self proclaimed White nationalist Paul Fromm running for Mayor of Hamilton”). There is a profound difference. A nationalist wants to promote the interests of his people, in this case, the European people. A supremacist seeks to rule over or dominate others. I emphatically reject the “‘White Supremacist” label, as your reporter would have learned had she contacted me.
What is missing in the story is the vital information that I wrote an introduction before posting the manifesto and made it quite clear that I reject violence. I largely agreed with Tarant that European people are being replaced in their own countries by massive Third World immigration and that this is a bad thing. I urged peaceful discussion but pointed out that, in many Western nations, we are restricted by “hate laws” and other legal barriers. I warned that, when you silence the man of the pen, you must deal with the man of the sword. I attach the introduction as it appears on the CAFE website.
Did you reporter even look at the online post? If so, she’d have seen the story changing introduction: I do not support violence. If she didn’t look at the post, she’s incompetent and should be fired. If she did, she’s a deliberate liar by suppressing vital information and should be fired. Another media outlet, Global did interview me and got the story essentially correct,
The article is about me but never quotes me once. Whatever views I might have are explained by hostile sources. A paragraph in the version of this article that appeared in the Toronto Star quotes an American group, the Southern Poverty Law Centre. This group is discredited and notorious. It raises hundreds of millions of dollars from liberal donors by spreading hyperventilating accusations of “hate” against many people and groups on the right of the political spectrum. It has been successfully sued by its victims on a number of occasions. It recently fired its co-founder and longtime board member Morris Dees for persistent sexual harassment of Centre employees. Yet, the Star version of the article quotes the SPLC as saying the Canadian Association for Free Expression of which I am the Director defends “anti-Semites, racists and Holocaust deniers.” Yes, we support anyone whose rights to free speech are being impinged. Over the years, we’ve also defended Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver which was being harassed by Canada Customs for importing homosexual and lesbian publications. We opposed efforts by pro-censorship groups to keep Minister Lewis Farrakhan out of Canada for a series of talks, some years ago. Again, fairness involving an interview with me would have provided a different perspective.
The article reeks of bias. I am described and defined only through the words of mortal enemies of free speech.
The only details about me in the article are those calculated to be negative, with no balance provided by a reaction or explanation I might have made, had I been asked.
The article is a defamatory hatchet job. It is utterly unfair to me and misleading to the HAMILTONSPECTATOR’s readers.
I demand a retraction and want to hear from you by week’s end.
Sincerely yours,
Paul Fromm
INTRODUCTION TO BRENTON TERRANT’S NEW ZEALAND MANIFESTO PUBLISHED ON THE CAFE WEBSITE]
[For years, I have warned human rights tribunals and others: “When you silence the men of the word, you will have to deal with the men of the sword.” When debate and dissent are silenced by “hate laws” you make violence almost inevitable. Sadly, that seems to be what happened in New Zealand with the alleged shooter’s killing of some 49 Moslems at two Christ Church area mosques.
Such repression has choked immigration and historical debate in almost all West European nations and, of course, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Canada has its notorious “”hate law” — Sec. 319 of the Criminal Code, which saw Don Andrews, an immigration critic, jailed in the 1970s. Brad Love got 18 months for writing fierce but non-threatening letters to 20 MPs and other public officials. Most recently, a humourless Toronto judge in the fine Puritan tradition of banned in Boston, found Dr. James Sears and Leroy St. Germaine guilty for satire targetting Jews and radical feminists. This vile hate law was enacted after years of Jewish lobby pressure. Jewish lobby groups have stoutly supported it and other anti-free speech measures in Canada. I have seen the human wreckage caused by Richard Warman’s use a decade ago of SEC. 13 (Internet censorship) of the Canadian Human Rights Act — fines, bank accounts looted, lifetime gags and even jail time. Oh, yes, and truth in such “human rights” cases was no defence — only the feelings or perceived possible hatred or contempt directed at privileged minorities.
Many European countries, especially Germany, have laws criminalizing criticism of the Hollywood version of World War II — or the new secular religion of holocaust. Dissent from Islam in Saudi Arabia and you can get lashed and/or imprisoned; dissent from the new religion of holocaust in Germany and you can be beggared and jailed.
Here is the manifesto of Brenton Terrant, the alleged shooter in New Zealand. His analysis of the crisis we face is cogent. In Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, we ARE being invaded and replaced by Third World aliens. This is not the result of having lost a war. It is the result of the cold blooded, White-hating policies of our political elites. The European indigenous people of Europe and the European founding/settler people of North America, Australia and New Zealand are being replaced by policy. This is planned genocide and will see its fulfillment before the end of this century. Hate laws in Canada have made this mortal threat to us as a people hard even to discuss. Critics of our genocidal immigration policies have been marginalized. Our trust fund kid prime minister who has never passed a Gay Pride Parade without participating refused to meet with a truck convoy of protesters in February because they included some members of the Yellow Vest movement which had criticized our immigration policies. One of several reasons Trudeau reneged on his 2015 election promise to change our electoral system to the more representative proportional representation model was the far of having some White nationalists elected to Parliament. Thus, a significant segment of Canadian political opinion is silenced, marginalized and unrepresented BY POLICY.
When you silence dissent, you invite violence.
I disagree with the violence indulged in by the shooter. It is not the way to go, but our vile elites have made it all but inevitable