In the wake of a number of the Lehman and 9/11 commemorations in
America, and as a monster storm is once again threatening to cause outsize
damage, we find ourselves at a pivotal point in time, which will decide how the
country interacts with its own laws, its legal system, its Constitution, its
freedom of speech, and indeed if it has sufficient willpower left to adhere to
the Constitution as its no. 1 guiding principle.
The main problem is that it all seems to slip slide straight by the
people, who are -kept- busy with completely different issues. That is
convenient for those who would like less focus on the Constitution, but it’s
also very dangerous for everyone else. Americans should today stand up for
freedom of speech, or it will be gone, likely forever.
The way it works is that
president Trump is portrayed as the major threat to ‘the rule of law’, which
allows other people, as well as companies and organizations, to drop below the
radar and devise and work on plans and schemes that threaten the country itself,
and its future as a nation ruled by its laws.
Bob
Woodward’s book “Fear: Trump in the White House” and the anonymous op-ed
published in the NYT a day later serve as a good reminder of these dynamics. If
you succeed in confirming people’s idea that Trump is such an unhinged idiot
that an unelected cabal inside the White House is needed to save the nation
from the president it elected, you’re well on your way.
Well on your way to separate the country from its own laws, that
is. Not on your way to saving it. You can’t save America by suspending its
Constitution just because that suits your particular political goals or points
of view.
Late
last night, Michael Tracey wrote on Twitter: “Trump’s preference to pull out
of Afghanistan is depicted in the Woodward book as yet another crazy impulse
that the “adults in the room” successfully rein in.” “We’re
going to save you from yourselves, thank us later!” Nobody voted for those
adults in the room anymore than anyone voted for the Afghanistan ‘war’ to enter
year 17.
Meanwhile
Infowars said: “Several people within Trump’s inner circle
know the threat to the mid-terms and his re-election chances that social media
censorship poses, including Donald Trump Jr. and Brad Parscale, his 2020
campaign manager. However, older members of the administration are completely
unaware of the fact that banning prominent online voices and manipulating
algorithms can shift millions of votes and are oblivious to the danger. This
ignorance has placed a temporary block on Trump taking action, despite the
president repeatedly referring to Big Tech censorship in tweets and speeches
over the last few weeks.”
Yes, Infowars, I know,
everybody loves to hate Alex Jones. And perhaps for good reasons, at least at
times. But does that mean he can be banned from a whole slew of internet
platforms without this having been run by and through the US court system?
Without even one judge having examined the ‘evidence’, if it even existed, that
leads to such banning, blocking and shadowbanning?
Alex Jones is an ‘easy example’
because he’s so popular. Which is also, undoubtedly, why all the social media
platforms ban him so easily, and all at the same time. ‘He’s a terrible
person’, say so many of their readers. But that’s not good enough, far from it.
Twitter and Facebook should never be allowed to ban anyone, using opaque
‘Community Standards’ or ‘Terms and Conditions’ interpreted by kids fresh out
of high school.
These platforms have
important societal functions. They are for instance the new conduits
governments, police, armies use to warn people in case of emergencies and
disasters. You can’t ban people from those conduits just because a bunch of
geeks don’t like what they say. If you can at all, it will have to be done
through the legal system.
That this is not done at present
poses an immense threat to that legal system, and to the Constitution itself.
But Americans, and indeed Congressmen and Senators, have been trained in a
Pavlovian way to believe that it’s not Google and Facebook who threaten the
Constitution, but that it’s Trump and his crew.
Meanwhile, Trump is being put
through Bob Mueller’s Special Counsel legal wringer 24/7, while Alphabet, Jack
Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg escape any such scrutiny at all. That discrepancy,
too, is eating away at the foundations of American law.
And like it or not, Trump had
it right when he said “You look at Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social
media giants and I made it clear that we as a country cannot tolerate political
censorship, blacklisting and rigged search results..”
America as a country cannot tolerate a few rich companies deciding whose
voice can be heard, and whose will be silenced. It is entirely unacceptable.
That goes for voices Trump doesn’t want to hear as much as it does for whoever
Silicon Valley doesn’t. That’s why neither should be in charge of making such
decisions. It kills the Constitution.
None of the above means that
everyone should be free to post terrorist sympathies or hate speech on social
media platforms. But it does mean that legislative and judicial systems must
define what these things mean, that this not be left up to arbitrary ‘Community
Standards’ interpreted by legally inept Silicon Valley interns, nor should it
be left to secret algorithms to decide what news you see and what not.
America itself hangs in the balance, and so do many other western
countries. What exactly is the difference between China’s overt internet
censorship and America’s hidden one? That is what needs to be defined, and that
can only be done by the legal system, by Congress, by the courts, by judges and
juries.
And it’s not something that
has to be invented from scratch, it can and must be tested against the
Constitution. That is the only way forward. That social media have taken over
the country by storm, and nary a soul has any idea what that means, can never
be an excuse to leave banning and silencing voices over to private parties,
whoever they are.
It’s not a unique American
problem. In Europe there are all sorts of attempts to ban ‘hate speech’, but
there are very few proposals concerning who will define what that is. And since
Europe has no Constitution, but instead has 27 different versions of one, it
will be harder there. Then again, it will also be easier to get away with all
sorts of arbitrary bannings etc.
Hungary will be inclined to
ban totally different voices than for instance Denmark and so on. And nobody
over there has given any sign of understanding how dangerous that is. Banning
‘hate speech’ doesn’t mean anything if the term hasn’t been properly defined.
But that also allows for banning voices someone simply doesn’t like. To prevent
that from happening, we have legal systems.
It’s
essential, it’s elementary, Watson. But it’s slipping through our fingers
because our politicians are either incapable of, or unwilling to, comprehending
the consequences. Why stick out your neck when nobody else does? It’s like the
anti-thesis of what politics means: stay safe.
So
the social media’s industry’s own lobbying has a good shot at getting its way:
they tell Washington to let them regulate themselves, and everything will
be spic and dandy. That would be
the final nail in the Constitution’s coffin, and it’s much closer than you
think. Do be wary of that.
In the end it comes down to two
things I’ve said before. First, there is no-one who’s been as ferociously
banned and worse the way Julian Assange has. His ban goes way beyond Silicon
Valley, but it does paint a shrill portrait of how far the US, CIA, FBI, is
willing to go, and to step beyond the Constitution, to get to someone they
really don’t like.
But has Assange ever violated and
US law, let alone its Constitution? Not that we know of. Mike Pompeo has called
WikiLeaks a ‘hostile intelligence service’, and the DOJ has said the 1st
Amendment, and thereby of necessity the entire US Constitution, doesn’t apply
to Assange because he’s not an American, but both those things are devoid of
any meaning, at least in a court of law.
Bob Woodward has an idea of
what Assange faces, and he’d do much better to focus on helping him than trying
to put Trump down through anonymous sources. And that also leads me to why I,
personally, have at least some sympathy for Alex Jones, other than because he’s
being attacked unconstitutionally: Jones ran/runs a petition for Trump to free
Julian Assange.
Come to think of it: it’s when that petition started taking off that
Jones’s ‘real trouble’ started. Given how closely interwoven Silicon Valley and
the FBI and CIA have already become, I’m not going to feign any surprise at
that.
And before you feel any
wishes and desires coming up to impeach Trump, do realize that he may be the
only person standing between you and a complete takeover of America by the
FBI/NSA/CIA/DNC and Google/Facebook/Twitter, which will be accompanied by the ritual
burial of the Constitution.
Think Trump is scary? Take a
step back and survey the territory.
Reprinted
with permission from The Burning Platform.
Copyright
© 2018 The Burning Platform
