Today’s blacklisted American: Garden hoes banned by Facebook!

Garden hoes banned by Facebook!
According to Facebook, a garden hoe apparently represents evil
and the worst of white supremacy.

Today’s blacklisted American, garden hoes, is meant more to illustrate the utter brainlessness of the blacklist culture, and why every intelligent American should refuse to bow to it in any way.

It appears that Facebook has been repeatedly flagging and then blocking posts on a gardening group because those gardeners periodically make reference to the gardening tool called a “hoe.”

A group called WNY Gardeners has been repeatedly flagged by the social network for “violating community standards,” when its more than 7,500 members discussed the long-handled bladed implement, which is spelled with an “e,” unlike the offensive term.

When one member commented “Push pull hoe!” on a post about preferred weeding tools, Facebook sent a notification that read, “We reviewed this comment and found it goes against our standards for harassment and bullying,” a moderator said.

“And so I contacted Facebook, which was useless. How do you do that?,” Elizabeth Licata said. “You know, I said this is a gardening group, a hoe is gardening tool.”

Nor has this been Facebook’s only “hoe” error. It had also been routinely flagging posts that referred to the English seaside community of Plymouth Hoe.

Facebook of course never responded to gardening group when they complained, as is usual for these inhumane big tech companies. However, when this story began appearing in the press, it told the AP that it was sorry about it, had corrected the algorithms that had caused the problems, and had assigned a real human to monitor the gardening group to make sure it is not censored for ordinary gardening discussions.

Hah! That didn’t work. The gardeners soon found themselves censored for writing about the various techniques they use for battling the Japanese beetle, a destructive pest to “flowers, trees and shrubs, fruits and vegetables, field crops and turf.” When on commenter suggested that gardeners should “Kill them all. Drown them in soapy water,” and “Japanese beetles are jerks,” the posts were blocked by Facebook.

It seems Facebook employees really don’t know how to read. Instead, they work eagerly to silence anyone for any statement they think should be silenced, without thought.

Throwing away the Kerwood Derby

All this reminds me of the short clip below from the early 1960s cartoon show, Rocky & Bullwinkle.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Conservative student disqualified from student government because he’s conservative

No free speech at Auburn University
No freedom of speech allowed at Auburn University!

The new dark age of silencing: A conservative student at Auburn University was voted down for government office essentially because it was revealed that he was conservative and Christian, and had expressed entirely reasonable views on Twitter criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and its racist and Marxist agenda.

A junior nominated for a position on Auburn University’s student government was successfully shot down because he expressed Christian and conservative beliefs on social media.

Stephen Morris was nominated for the position of chief justice of Auburn University’s Student Government Association. To his surprise, at the session where his nomination was to be taken up, held remotely over video, several members of the student senate strongly opposed his nomination.

Morris’s critics accused him of racism over tweets they found offensive, and declared him unfit for service in student government.

The story at the link provides three examples of Morris’s tweets. None show the slightest indication of racism, merely a strong opposition to the agenda of Black Lives Matter, which despite its name seems entirely disinterested in the terrible crime rate in black communities, where innocent blacks are daily killed and robbed by the black criminals in their midst. Instead, all BLM cares about is eliminating any police protection for those innocent blacks, and for gaining as power and money for itself.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Professor fired by university for having opinions

Today's modern witch hunt
Burn witches: What St. Joseph’s University is doing,
with great enthusiasm.

Today’s blacklist story is an update from a March 25 story. Then, St. Joseph’s University in Pennsylvania had merely suspended Professor Gregory Manco because he dared to publicly express opposition to the idea of paying reparations to blacks for something (slavery) that hasn’t existed in the U.S. for more than 150 years.

The university has now doubled down on that action by terminating Manco’s employment.

The biggest irony is that the school’s own investigation found that Manco had done nothing wrong.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Big time comic book artist and screenwriter Frank Miller banned from British comic convention

Banned: Artist and screenwriter Frank Miller
Banned: Comic book artist and movie screenwriter Frank Miller

Genocide is coming: Frank Miller, well known comic book artist and the screenwriter of several major Hollywood movies, was banned from a British comic convention recently because fifteen years earlier — only a few years after the destruction of the World Trade Center and during the American effort to defeat the Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaeda — Miller had penned a comic book whose main character fought those terrorists.

And what prompted Miller’s banning by the convention, dubbed the Thought Bubble festival? Apparently, it received a single complaint from one very unknown Islamic cartoonist.

Miller was dropped after Zainab Akhtar, whom The Mix describes as an “award-winning cartoonist and small press publisher ShortBox founder,” said that she would “no longer be attending Thought Bubble festival this November” because Miller was set to be there. Akhtar explained: “As a proud Muslim woman, I cannot in good conscience attend a festival that deems it appropriate to invite and platform Frank Miller, a person who is responsible for the propagation of abhorrent anti-Muslim hate, particularly via his work.”

Akhtar in her complaint never actually cites any specific examples of Miller’s anti-Muslim hate, thus forcing everyone to guess what Miller’s specific crime might be. The only possible example is that earlier work, which very specifically attacked a terrorist group, not all of Islam.

But then, for the oppressive left, which includes radical Islamists like Akhtar, any criticism of their allies or agenda must always be labeled as “racist.”

As usual, what makes this story most appalling is the obsequiousness of the convention management, which immediately bowed to Akhtar’s slanderous complaint, begging forgiveness in the most cowardly way.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Former President Donald Trump

The cancelled Bill of Rights
What Facebook & Instagram want cancelled.

They’re coming for you next: Both Facebook and Instagram instantly removed today an interview of former President Donald Trump in which he suggested he might run again for president in 2024, merely because the clip contained his voice.

[The interview] was for The Right View. … During the 18-minute interview, Trump also spoke about running for President again in 2024. Lara [Trump, whose show it was and who is Trump’s daughter-in-law] had been promoting it on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter beforehand.

At 9.26pm on Tuesday night, four minutes before it was due to be uploaded, Facebook emailed Lara’s team warning them that it would be removed if it went live. At 9.51pm, they emailed again to say that they’d taken it down.

Lara shared screenshots of the emails on Instagram afterwards. ‘And just like that, we are one step closer to Orwell’s 1984. Wow,’ she wrote alongside them.

Trump has been banned from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram since the January 6 riots, cut off from his supporters and unable to get messages to them in the way he did before.

In their email, the Facebook employee said that ‘content posted in the voice of President Trump is not currently allowed on our platforms (including new posts with President Trump speaking) and will be removed. ‘This guidance applies to all campaign accounts and Pages, including Team Trump, other campaign messaging vehicles on our platforms and former surrogates’. [emphasis mine]

The audacity of this censorship of a former president of the United States by these companies is breath-taking. The highlighted quote makes it clear: Their goal is to silence Trump, in every way possible. They do not celebrate free speech, or the ability of everyone to express themselves publicly. The only people who will be allowed freedom of speech will be those who agree with them.

Though they are private companies who should have the freedom to publish who they wish, these companies also have been granted special tax status as utilities which provide a platform for everyone, not a publisher who picks and chooses what he wishes to publish. Under this tax benefit, they have no right to block anyone’s show, period.

Putting aside these legalities, why would any Republican, conservative, or anyone who supports free speech remain a user of Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter? They are not only clearly Democratic Party operatives, working to promote that political party’s agenda, they also clearly view anyone who disagrees with that agenda to be pond scum. Why provide any support to such authoritarians?

Today’s blacklisted Americans: Conservative news organizations, as proposed by Columbia journalism professor

The cancelled Bill of Rights
What this academic wants cancelled.

They’re coming for you next: In complete ignorance of the free speech’s most basic principle — not to give the government or any ruling body veto powers over anyone’s speech — the head of the digital journalism center at Columbia University, Emily Bell, recently demanded exactly that, calling for the government and news media to tighten its rules to restrict speech at conservative news organizations.

Bell was testifying at a House hearing engineered by Democrats to encourage such censorship.

Bell said that the unprecedented events of 2020 and 2021 coincided with “widespread and often politized information” on “conservative cable news channels” and that local reporters need to “learn new cadence.” She added that the country needs to “rethink what public broadcasting is in the digital age” and “apply some pressure to the platform companies to allow much greater auditing.”

While she had couched her words carefully, there was no mistaking her meaning. She wants the government, the media, and the big social media platforms to work together to silence any conservative opinions she dislikes.

I would give her the benefit of the doubt and consider her merely sincere and naive, someone who simply wants to stop misinformation in the press, except that the only misinformation she identifies is connected with conservatives and conservative protests. Somehow the bad reporting in connection with the rioting by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, designed to hid their violent and rebellious nature, seemed perfectly okay with her. Nor was she apparently bothered by the effort of the mainstream press and the big tech companies like Twitter and Facebook to censor all mentions of corruption by Biden and his son Hunter, prior to the election.

To put it bluntly, Bell is a typical leftist academic, partisan to her bones and eager to smash her boot into the face of anyone with whom she disagrees. And her goal is to smash that boot into the face of all conservatives, now and forever.

Today’s blacklisted Americans: Lincoln and Washington, by Chicago’s Democratic mayor

Lincoln banned as evil by Chicago politicians
Chicago Democrats to ban Lincoln.

Blacklists are back and the Democrats got ’em: Lori Lightfoot, the Democratic Party mayor of Chicago, has begun the formal process for removing forty historical monuments in Chicago, including statues of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Ulysses S. Grant.

Her reasons for throwing these fundamental Americans into the scrap heap of history? Well, she created a committee to review 500 monuments in Chicago and ended up deciding that 40 should go. It has said this:

Reasons for making the list include promoting narratives of white supremacy; presenting an inaccurate or demeaning portrayal of Native Americans; celebrating people with connections to slavery, genocide or racist acts; or “presenting selective, over-simplified, one-sided views of history.”

…Besides five statutes of Lincoln, others on the list include the General John Logan Monument in Grant Park; the General Philip Henry Sheridan Monument at Belmont and Lake Shore Drive; a statue of Benjamin Franklin in Lincoln Park; the Haymarket Riot Monument/ Police Memorial at 1300 W. Jackson Blvd; the Italo Balbo Monument in Burnham Park; and the Jean Baptiste Beaubien plaque at the Chicago Cultural Center. [emphasis mine]

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Anyone who worked for Trump

The cancelled Bill of Rights
A document no one in Washington believes in.

Blacklists are back and the Democrats got ’em: It is now very clear that anyone who worked for President Trump during his term in office is now being blackballed by the political class in DC and in the media.

[R]esumes are gathering dust, book manuscripts are being rejected, and corporations are being threatened with boycotts if they hire members of Trump’s team. “They are being blocked everywhere,” said Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union.

It’s “natural for the party that lost the White House, just as we saw after the Bush and Obama administrations, to spend a few months in the wilderness, so to speak,” added Brian Walsh, a partner at PLUS Communications.

But this time feels different, and many critics have said it is deserved. “They took a wrecking ball to the ‘swamp.’ Why would the ‘swamp’ want them back?” a top K Street lobbyist asked. [emphasis mine]

I find the highlighted quote especially ironic, in that I think Trump’s biggest failure is that he did not take a wrecking ball to the “swamp,” never truly cleaned house, even when it was patently obvious — especially in agencies like the FBI and the Justice Department — that a housecleaning was desperately needed.
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Today’s blacklisted Americans: The oppressed fight back at Boise State

The good black half of this student
A typical slide from a critical race theory class.

They’re coming for you next: Forced to attend a bigoted critical race education class at Boise State University where a white student was apparently treated like scum, it appears other students there taped the session and forwarded it to the Idaho state legislature.

The results were somewhat gratifying.

[A]dministrators have abruptly suspended all of the school’s general education classes called “University Foundations 200: Foundations of Ethics and Diversity.”

“We have been made aware of a series of concerns, culminating in allegations that a student or students have been humiliated and degraded in class on our campus for their beliefs and values,” states a March 16 memo from President Marlene Tromp to the campus community. “This is never acceptable; it is not what Boise State stands for; and we will not tolerate this behavior,” Tromp stated. “…Given the weight of cumulative concerns, we have determined that, effective immediately, we must suspend UF 200.” She goes on to note that academic leadership will determine next steps “to ensure that everyone is still able to complete the course.”

Tromp’s decision came around the same time as Idaho lawmakers passed a state education budget that takes away about $409,000 from Boise State University because of its social justice curriculum, Idaho Ed News reports. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words provide us the real reason Boise administrators suspended these race lectures. » Read more

Today’s blacklisted Americans: In Iowa the oppressed fight back

The Bill of Rights, not cancelled!
Not yet cancelled, at least in Iowa.

Today’s story about blacklisting might actually be revealing a hopeful sign, albeit only one which is still not resolved entirely in favor of freedom.

Our story begins in October 2020:

In October, David Johnsen, the dean for the college of dentistry at the University of Iowa, sent a mass email to the college criticizing an executive order issued by then-President Donald Trump. The email condemned the barring of certain types of diversity training that aim to promote “anti-American race and sex stereotyping.”

A conservative student, Michael Brase, “replied all” to the email, asking clarifying questions and sparking discussion on the email chain of about 1,200 students, faculty, and staff. Between two email threads, 18 emails were exchanged over the topic. According to the Daily Iowan, in one of his follow-up emails on the thread, Brase says “simply do the trainings without intentionally race/sex scapegoating people in those trainings. That shouldn’t be that hard.”

According to The Gazette, administrators at the university then summoned Brase to a disciplinary hearing for “unprofessional behavior.” The letter used to summon Brase included warnings of “dismissal” based on his actions.

This is very typical of our modern fascist and bankrupt academia. While partisan Democrats and leftists always have the right to say anything they want, and use all resources — some that are entirely inappropriate — to spread their message, partisan Republicans and even non-partisan neutrals have no right to question this behavior, and if they do must be punished immediately.

In this case however Iowa elected officials actually appear to be doing their job. After getting his disciplinary summons, Brase immediately contacted his local legislator, complaining that this behavior by administrators in a publicly financed institution seemed unjust and wrong. And unlike most modern legislators, who routinely run for the hills when such issues are brought before them out of fear of being called racist, these legislators heartily agreed with Brase.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Students condemn UConn student president for defending free speech

The cancelled Bill of Rights

They’re coming for you next: The Undergraduate Student Government (USG) Governing Board at the University of Connecticut has condemned its student president, Mike Hernández, because he is supporting campus legislation that would protect the free speech rights of students.

The bill, which was introduced by sixth semester junior political science and economics double major Isadore Johnson, aims to protect students and their right to freely express their opinions within student government and also at UConn as a whole.

Opponents of the bill, however, have argued the legislation gives students a free pass to express casual racism, homophobia and misogyny without consequence, and have expressed concern over Hernández’s support of the bill.

The board is using as its trigger to condemn Hernández a single comment he supposedly made privately to another student, where he allegedly said that affirmative action legislation as well as rules forbidding anyone from saying anything offensive about minorities is equivalent “to treating minorities like children.” From that board’s statement, which was approved by this board by a vote of 8-1, with one abstention:
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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Conservative student journalism conference shut down by city of Alexandria, Virginia

They’re coming for you next: Based on a single anonymous complaint, the city of Alexandria, Virginia, shut down a conservative student journalism conference this coming weekend, claiming it was not following its Wuhan flu health regulations.

About 72 hours before the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Collegiate Network student editors’ conference was slated to begin this weekend, Hilton was told it could not take place due to COVID health regulations, organizers said. “We received news from our hotel that the local department of health … in response to an anonymous health complaint, someone called expressing concerns about the safety of the attendees at our conference,” John Burtka, president of the ISI, told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Wednesday.

“In response to that complaint, an eager and willing bureaucrat complied and reclassified ISI’s educational program as a social event, and all social events in the state of Virginia are limited to only 10 people, effectively canceling our student journalism conference,” he said.

Burtka said there are many other conferences being held throughout the state and ISI is willing to complying with all COVID safety regulations.

“This had nothing to do with public health,” he said. “What it had to do with is there was someone who clearly did not want this event to happen. … We are working to find another city that welcomes freedom, diversity and civil discourses for a variety of perspectives.”

Note the dishonest game played by Alexandria government. They clearly misused their insane and odious COVID rules — rules that make no sense under any definition of scientific and medical research — to silence a political event that they disagreed with, proving once again that these COVID restrictions never had anything to do with preventing the spread of COVID, but instead were designed to prevent the spread of ideas hostile to leftist ideology.

The organizers of the conference say it will go on, but they will not publicize the location or any details, meaning that only previously registered attendees will be included, and that anything said at the conference will essentially be muzzled from the public square.

Today’s blacklisted American: Leftist professor who demanded others be fired for their conservative opinions has now been fired for her leftist opinions

The cancelled Bill of Rights

They’re coming for you next: Lora Burnett, a leftist professor who demanded that conservative teachers be fired or punished for expressing their conservative opinions, in February lost her university job due to the virulence of her own leftist opinions, expressed in a number of very ugly tweets.

The Collin [College] administration has now confirmed it won’t renew the untenured scholar’s contract, which ends in May, for not conducting herself “in a professional manner.”

Burnett shared images from the human resources letter she received, which allege she violated “delineated standards of conduct” through her “insubordination, making private personnel issues public that impair the college’s operations, and personal criticisms of co-workers, supervisors, and/or those who merely disagree with you.”

She characterized the firing as retaliation for “mean tweets.”

No, those tweets were not merely “mean,” they were part of a long tract record of demanding the punishment or firing of anyone whose politics disagreed with Burnett’s. For example,
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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Two educators in NYC fired for refusing to do Black Panther salute

They’re coming for you next: Two different educators in New York City, one Jewish and the other a Dominican-American who calls herself Afro-Latina, have been fired for refusing to do the Black Panther salute popularized by the Disney sci-fi 2018 movie, Black Panther.

The latter, Rafaela Espinal, was fired as head of the Community School District 12 in the Bronx and forced to take a demotion in order to save her retirement and health benefits. Not only did she refuse to do this salute because she believed it created a racial divide, she found the policies of New York’s Department of Education (DOE) particularly offensive and bigoted, as described in her $40 million lawsuit filed against New York’s DOE.
.

Fellow DOE administrators also allegedly told Espinal she wasn’t “Black enough” and she should “just learn to be quiet and look pretty,” she claims in the $40 million suit.

Espinal, 50, claims racial fissures began to emerge in superintendent meetings in the fall of 2017, when some Black administrators would meet separately after the larger group’s monthly gatherings. Soon, only the birthdays of Black superintendents were recognized at official meetings, she claims.

The other educator, Karen Ames (who is also suing the DOE), experienced equally bigoted treatment before she was fired.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Leftist journalist who called for blacklisting finds his work blacklisted by YouTube

They’re coming for you next: Jordan Chariton, a leftist journalist who had called for the widespread blacklisting of anyone who discussed the allegations of vote tampering and election fraud during the November 3rd election — many of which were quite creditable and deserve a hard investigation — has discovered that blacklisting is really bad, especially when he discovered YouTube blacklisting some his own work.

On January 6th Chariton had tweeted the following:

EVERY media outlet that pushed this INSANE election fraud conspiracy for clicks should be taken off the air. They’ve incited a Civil War.

Less than a month later YouTube endorsed his advice and took down one of his own videos that had featured footage of the protests at the Capitol Building on January 6th. As usual, YouTube’s reasoning was dishonest, claiming that footage violated its policies against “spam and deceptive practices.” Yet, as Chariton noted, that same footage was being aired and posted on YouTube by CNN and many other mainstream news outlets, with no negative consequences.

Chariton however deserves some credit. He openly admitted in a new tweet that his initial position had been wrong.

With time to reflect, & seeing Silicon Valley’s censorship onslaught, I regret this tweet made in [the] heat of moment. Whether certain cable/YouTube outlets mislead audiences w/ dishonest claims lacking real evidence, they shouldn’t be targeted.

Too bad it took some actual personal censorship for Chariton to come to his senses. Beforehand he was like the rest of the left, living in a fantasy world that imagined the censors and blacklisters and storm troopers would never come for them.

Hah! Just give it time. For these thugs what people actually say is really irrelevant. What they really care about is having the power to censor and blacklist. When they run out of conservatives they will then point their guns at the naive leftists like Chariton who had stupidly worked to give those thugs such power.

San Fran school board abandons plan to blacklist Lincoln & Washington

Beating the blacklist: In response to an enormous outcry of outrage from parents and citizens, the San Francisco school board that in January had voted to rename 44 schools named after many traditional American historical figures, including Lincoln and Washington, has now abandoned that effort.

The San Francisco school board has halted its effort to rename 44 schools named after George Washington and other Americans board members concluded held “racist” or other beliefs of which they disapproved. “I acknowledge and take responsibility that mistakes were made in the renaming process,” Gabriela Lopez, president of the San Francisco Unified School District board, said Sunday.

Lopez said school district officials will instead focus on re-opening classroom for in-person learning and called the months-long controversy about the re-naming school “one of the many distracting debates.”

Don’t be fooled. These politicians have not changed their mind about America and its history. They still think it evil and want to blacklist it. They will now simply move to do so in a more quiet and unobtrusive way.

What really needs to happen is for San Francisco citizens to wake up and vote these anti-American bigots out of power. Sadly I am doubtful this will happen. Once the fervor dies down the public will go back to the sheeplike state of somnolence that it has been living in for now more than three-quarters of a century, and these thugs will go about their business of transforming America from a free nation of educated citizens to a socialist state of ignorant slaves.

Today’s blacklisted American: Amazon blacklists book for criticizing transgender movement

They’re coming for you next: Amazon has removed a book from its inventory simply because it is critical of the movement by cross-dressers to be allowed to identify with the opposite sex, even when their sex remains entirely unchanged.

Amazon removed the bestselling book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding To The Transgender Moment” from its online store on Sunday, the book’s author announced.

Published in 2018 by then-Heritage Foundation research fellow and now-Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan T. Anderson, the book was an immediate bestseller, even on Amazon, according to the Washington Post. However, the online shopping giant removed the book on Sunday, Anderson tweeted. “I hope you’ve already bought your copy, cause Amazon just removed my book ‘When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment’ from their cyber shelves…. my other four books are still available (for now).

Amazon links to both the hard copy and Kindle e-book versions of the book show “page not found” signs. (RELATED: Parler Relaunches After Amazon Removes It)

Amazon did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment.

I fear this is the future for all conservative books or any books that the modern bigoted left dislikes. Including my own. I therefore beg my readers to buy books from other booksellers, including my ebook publisher ebookit. We need to bypass blacklisters like Amazon.

Note too that I will not play the fake language game of this “transgender” movement. Just because you claim you are woman does not make you one. If a guy likes to wear women’s clothes that is his privilege. He is still a guy, however, and I won’t call him a “she” just because he demands I do so.

It is for this reason that I fear my books will soon disappear from outlets like Amazon. So be it. I will not submit to stupidity, bigotry, and the distortion of our language.

Bypassing the blacklist: Robert Pratt’s new podcast

Just over a month ago long time and very successful talk radio host Robert Pratt found himself suddenly fired by the corporation that managed the Texas radio stations where his show aired.

By all measures, it appeared the reason for the cancellation of his show was because he happened to be conservative and had dared report on the numerous creditable allegations of vote tampering during the November 3rd elections.

His firing ended up to be one of the first of my daily “Today’s Blacklisted American” posts, and in fact inspired the series.

Pratt however is, like me, not one to take oppression or blacklisting sitting down. He has now begun a regular podcast, and had me on as a guest today. We did several different podcasts, two of which are now available. The first on the landing Perseverance is part of a longer podcast and is available here. In the second, available here, we talked at length about the passing of Rush Limbaugh and his significance in American history.

A third podcast, on the modern culture of blacklisting will be posted next week.

Pratt is doing what I have done for years. When blocked by petty tyrants and close-minded thugs, you find an alternative route to reach your audience, and use it. You don’t simply complain, you make those jack-booted bullies squirm because their attempt to silence you is a failure.

All power to Robert Pratt. As a podcast his reach could actually be larger than when his broadcasts were confined to local Texas radio stations. And wouldn’t that be sweet?

Today’s blacklisted Americans: Any lawyer who defended Trump

They’re coming for you next: Two lawyers — who did what any good lawyer should do when they accepted the job of defending Donald Trump during the recent Democratic Party impeachment show trial — have now found themselves subjected to harassment, death threats, and blacklisting with the loss of work.

First there is attorney Michael van der Leen. His house was vandalized with smashed windows and ugly slogans painted on the driveway after he spoke as defense attorney for Trump during the impeachment.

Because of the violence and threats, van der Leen has been forced to hire armed guards and move his wife and children to a secret location.

Equally egregious treatment has been handed out to Trump attorney David Schoen:

An attorney who represented President Donald Trump during the recent impeachment trial says a law school canceled a civil rights law course he was going to teach and he was suspended from a civil rights lawyer email discussion list.

“I was hoping to teach a civil rights course at a law school in the fall. We’ve been in talks about it, kind of planning it out. I wrote to them and I said, ‘I want you to know, I’m gonna be representing Donald Trump in the impeachment case. I don’t know if that impacts on your decision at all,’” David Schoen, one of the three attorneys who argued before the Senate, told The Epoch Times.

“And they said, you know, they appreciated my writing and, frankly, it would make some students and faculty uncomfortable, so I couldn’t do it.

There once was a time that the left in America trumpeted the importance of every American having the right to an attorney. Now, not so much. If you are accused of badness by the left, you are required to accept that accusation as true without a fight, and anyone who dares comes forward to defend you has joined you in that badness and must therefore be destroyed as well.

Or to put it another way, to the left you are no longer innocent until proven guilty. If they accuse you of something, you are automatically guilty, and no trial is needed. And anyone who disagrees is automatically guilty as well, and must be hounded and blackballed.

Today’s blacklisted American: The sci-fi publishing company Baen Books

They’re coming for you next: Because of a single hit piece falsely claiming that a forum run by the long-established science fiction publishing company Baen Books was “fomenting insurrection” (the new buzzword of the brainless left being used to silence dissent), the publisher’s web-based operations were threatened with shutdown.

As a result Baen was forced to close-down, it says temporarily, that forum.

Yesterday some nobody, wannabe writer, social justice twit released a hit piece “expose” about how posters on Baen’s Bar were fomenting insurrection or some such nonsense. It was the usual [expletive deleted] hit piece (the sad part is, by saying the usual, half the country immediately knows exactly what I’m talking about). It was lots of pearl clutching over regular people not toeing their arbitrary political lines, misquotes, errors, quotes taken out of context, and some flat out lies.

However, this was clearly part of a coordinated attack in order to materially harm our business, because immediately after the hit piece was released complaints were filed with the various internet companies Baen uses for services to pressure them into kicking us off the internet. This hit piece was presented as “evidence”. Without going into details the companies then contacted Baen about these “serious allegations” so last night Baen temporarily took down the Bar forum to protect the rest of the company from being deplatformed.

The link provides lots of background, including the publisher’s response and statements of support from a number of published authors from across the political spectrum.

The internet companies who immediately kow-towed to these storm-troopers and threatened Baen Books deserve nothing but contempt. If they were truly American, they would have told the complainants to go jump in a lake. Don’t like what people are writing in the Baen forum? Either join the conversation and refute what they are writing, or go somewhere else. Don’t try to blackball someone just because you disagree with them.

Instead, these corporate internet platforms joined the two-minute hate and threatened Baen with blacklisting. To my mind the people at those platforms are not Americans, but narrow-minded petty dictators who either like oppressing people who disagree with them or live in constant cowardly fear which requires them to join the mob when it seeks violent retribution.

We need to know who these internet platforms are. Now. This will allow free Americans to begin searching for alternatives.

And if we don’t get those alternatives we will soon face a situation where any complaint against a publisher will lead to that publisher being shut down and its books flushed down the toilet, simply because someone doesn’t like them.

A historian’s memorial to Rush Limbaugh

I originally posted the essay below a year ago when we first learned that Rush Limbaugh was seriously ill with lung cancer. With his passing today, I think it needs to be reread, with an addendum at the end.

A historian’s memorial to Rush Limbaugh (February 4, 2020)

It was very strange to me to hear yesterday’s sad announcement by Rush Limbaugh that he had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. In the last six months or so my mind had actually been contemplating the fact that Limbaugh had been doing his show for more than three decades, was in his late sixties, and was not immortal. I had been trying to imagine what it would be like when he was no longer a fixture in the daily news reporting cycle, and I had been failing. I couldn’t imagine it.

Now it appears we might all be finally facing it. As they say, reality bites.

For those who have listened to him regularly these past three decades, the loss will be immeasurable. Without question Rush Limbaugh has been the best political analyst, from a conservative perspective, for the past half century. You might disagree with his opinions, but no one has been as correct and as pertinent and as thoughtful, consistently getting to the heart of every political battle, and doing it in an amazingly entertaining manner.

I first heard Rush Limbaugh back in 1988, when I lived in New York and was starving for a different and refreshing perpective on the news.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Biden sign language interpreter blackballed for also translating for conservative outlets

The cancelled Bill of Rights

They’re coming for you next: In a news article soon after Biden became president, the Washington Post demanded that a sign language interpreter be blacklisted from working in the Biden administration simply because she previously translated for conservative and pro-Trump organizations.

From the Post’s article,

[The interpreter] who appeared in the White House coronavirus briefing on Monday beside press secretary Jen Psaki was identified by deaf and hard-of-hearing advocates and Time Magazine, fueling questions about the White House’s vetting process and what could have happened if [she] misinterpreted Biden officials or inserted her own bias. No one has publicly disputed her interpretation, but many questioned why the White House would legitimize her by giving [her] the national platform.

…More than 3,500 people have signed a petition to have [the interpreter] banned from interpreting for the White House. Some indicated they intended to report her.

That petition now has 9,000 signatures, and it appears that the Biden administration is now blackballing her, as she has not been given any work by them since the Washington Post story was published. It also appears that she has since been harassed and slandered online as well.

I have removed the interpreter’s name because I do not wish to help these storm-troopers in their two-minute hate campaign.

As noted at the first link above,

It’s a blacklist, and, in a sad devolution from the days when the press was the enemy of such things, now our national press is the very conduit. Here is a woman who has done nothing wrong. Her only sin was working. Even the reporter [Meryl Kornfield] admits that there is absolutely no evidence that this woman has done anything wrong — anything but her job. Her interpretations to this point seem to be deemed faultless.

All this woman did was take work from any who called her, from both sides of the political spectrum. That’s not good enough for our modern Democratic Party and its army of jack-booted thugs. They must always ask this paraphrased question from the worst of the McCarthy era : “Have ever been a member of or worked for the Republican Party or any pro-Trump organization?” If the answer is yes, then your life must be destroyed.

Welcome to the modern leftist paradise, brought to us by the supporters of the Democratic Party.

Today’s blacklisted Americans: Ivy league students & teachers demand revocation of all degrees earned by Republican politicians

The dead Constitution
The dead Constitution

They’re coming for you next: Both students and professors at a number of Ivy league colleges are petitioning their schools to revoke the degrees of numerous high-ranking Republican politicians, merely because they dared request an investigation into the many creditable allegations of voter fraud and election tampering during the November 3rd election.

The article outlines campaigns to blackball Republicans at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, among others. The Harvard campaign is typical, demanding that these Republicans be banned merely because they exercised not only their first amendment rights of free speech, but their duly elected responsibilities as elected officials.

Students and alumni of Harvard University are signing a letter, titled, “Revoke Their Degrees,” which asks Harvard’s leadership to take action against Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany by banning them from campus and stripping them of their degrees.

The Harvard petition argues that, by contesting Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results, these Republican officials “incited a violent attempt to overthrow the U.S. government.” Harvard University dropped Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) from her role on the university’s Kennedy School advisory committee because she contested the 2020 election results.

The article also notes that no such similar petitions have been instigated against any Democrats for challenging previous election results in 2000, 2004, and 2016. Nor have any petitions been put forth against the many Democrats who during the entire Trump adminstration were calling for a violent uprising against the government and Republicans.

The goal of these college brownshirts is therefore not to protect the election process or the Constitution. No, their goal is to dehumanize all Republicans and any positions they take on any subject. Make them appear evil so that no one will pay any attention to them. Then ban them so they have no power at all.

What I gather from this story however is the utter intellectual bankruptcy of these Ivy League schools. For any reasonable parent it would be insane to send your children there. Not only would these schools indoctrinate your child into leftist politics, it would also teach them to hate anyone who disagreed with them. Such an education is not something any parent should wish upon their children.

Government takes down pro-Trump sign on private property, without permission

They’re coming for you next: California state officials quickly moved to take down a pro-Trump billboard, even though it was on private property and they apparently did not have permission to do so.

This LA Times report on the massive Trump sign on a hill near the 405 says that state authorities went on private property to take it down because they claimed the political speech was a “visual distraction” to drivers.

So, in California your first, fourth, fifth, and sixth amendment rights are now null and void. If government officials don’t approve of your political signage, they now claim the right to enter your property, without permission and without a search warrant, and take down your signage.

The article at the first link notes that for some reason, these same California authorities did not consider it a “visual distraction” for Antifa and Black Lives Matter protests to stand on these same highways and block traffic.

Suppression of academic freedom a global crisis

A new report the charity Scholars at Risk (SAR) reveals that the attacks on academic freedom and free speech are part of a growing global crisis.

SAR’s report Free to Think 2017 summarises a year of data collected by SAR’s monitoring project; it includes 257 reported attacks in 35 countries. ‘Attacks’ include killings, violence and disappearances; wrongful prosecution and imprisonment; loss of position and expulsion from study; improper travel restrictions; and other severe or systemic issues including, for example, university closures or military occupation of a campus.

There is a growing trend that, in societies experiencing armed conflict or extremism, higher education communities are perceived as symbols of state authority or sources of potential opposition to radical ideologies. Attacks are generally intended to punish or deter inquiry, or even expression, on unpopular topics. During the past year, SAR found evidence of large-scale violent attacks on campuses in Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria, while targeted killings of individuals were reported in Pakistan, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

Thousands of people in the higher education sector have been targeted in Turkey where state and university authorities continue to take sweeping measures in retaliation for alleged political links or content of research, publications or teaching. Punitive actions by the Turkish state have included imprisonment and prosecution; dismissal and expulsion of scholars and students; and restrictions on travel and institutional autonomy.

Incidents of violence against organised student expression were reported in increasing numbers this year. In Venezuela, South Africa, Niger, Cameroon, Turkey and India, state authorities responded to nonviolent student protests with force, including with rubber bullets, tear gas and stun grenades. In some cases, however, students engaged in violent or coercive conduct, including incidents in South Africa, where campus facilities were damaged, and in the US, where physical force was used to intimidate and disrupt certain speakers on campus.

It is shameful that American campuses, once the world’s shining beacon of freedom of speech, have now become part of this oppressive trend.

UC-Berkeley student group backs out of free speech event

Academic fascism: The student group at the University of California-Berkeley that was sponsoring the “Free Speech Week” event that was scheduled to begin this coming week has withdrawn their sponsorship.

The student organizers of the “Free Speech Week” at the University of California, Berkeley have announced that they will no longer be hosting the event due to pressure from school administrators. Milo Yiannopoulos, however, insisted during a Saturday press conference that the event would begin as planned on Sunday, though he said Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon would have to be rescheduled.

It is presently unclear exactly what happened. The university denies that it was pressuring the student group to cancel the event, and is instead claiming that they were doing all that they could to make the event happen. Meanwhile, this story paints a bad picture of Milo Yiannopoulos’s methods for organizing the event.

My inclination now is to believe the student organizers, based on Berkeley’s recent track record supporting censorship and violence against conservatives. However, it is also possible the organizers were not very organized, as suggested by the university and the last link above. Either way, the real source of the problem here is the fascist intolerant culture of Berkeley itself, which encourages violence against conservatives or anyone else who happens to dissent from leftwing orthodoxy. That thuggish culture has made it very difficult to schedule any conservative speaker, since everyone knows that these speakers will require a fortune in security to protect them.

Yiannopoulos meanwhile says he still plans on speaking there, regardless. We shall see.

UC-Berkeley comes out for free speech

Progress in Berkeley: The University of California-Berkeley has created a website that unapologetically defends the traditional view of the first amendment and freedom of speech.

A statement by the university’s new Chancellor Carol Christ also says this:

We all desire safe space, where we can be ourselves and find support for our identities. You have the right at Berkeley to expect the university to keep you physically safe. But we would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous. We must show that we can choose what to listen to, that we can cultivate our own arguments and that we can develop inner resilience, which is the surest form of safe space. These are not easy tasks, and we will offer support services for those who desire them.

This September, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos have both been invited by student groups to speak at Berkeley. The university has the responsibility to provide safety and security for its community and guests, and we will invest the necessary resources to achieve that goal. If you choose to protest, do so peacefully. That is your right, and we will defend it with vigor. We will not tolerate violence, and we will hold anyone accountable who engages in it.

This sounds good. Let us hope she stands by her words. If you want to explore the full site, go here.

UC-Davis establishes rules to allow free speech

This could be a victory: A working group established by the administration of the University of California in Davis (UC-Davis) has recommended rules that will punish students who disrupt speakers and prevent them from speaking.

[T]he working group recommended the implementation of an “anti-disruption disciplinary rule” that would punish student who disrupt speakers, as was the case during Yiannopoulos’ visit to campus.“Although the determination of what constitutes disruption may be fact-specific and contextual in some cases and require the exercise of official discretion, the campus should clearly delineate disruptive behavior it deems presumptively unacceptable and provide clear notice to students engaging in such behavior that their conduct warrants a disciplinary response,” the working group explains.

Additionally, the report recommends regular “freedom of expression education events” to highlight the “values served by freedom of expression on a university campus.” Among such events, the working group suggests “interactive town halls and workshops” that would include discussion on the “theory of creative political expression to provide compelling examples of other, constructive and expressive options students have to respond to controversial speakers.”

This sounds good, but we will only find out if the administration means it when a conservative speaker decides to come to UC-Davis to speak. The article includes many comments from students who participated in the working group that opposed these recommendations and were hostile to allowing any dissenting voices on campus.

Pennsylvania school district apologizes for teacher who attacked pro-life protesters

This is a victory: The Pennsylvania school district where a teacher had verbally and physically harassed two pro-life demonstrators has apologized to the demonstrators as part of a lawsuit settlement.

It has also changed their school policy, making it clear that all students, whether pro-life or pro-abortion, have the right to express their opinions and should not be harassed by teachers for doing so.

I had posted the original story of the teacher’s misbehavior (including the video of his actions) under an essay entitled The Coming Fascism. This victory for freedom of speech gives me some reason to hope that my previous pessimism might have been premature.

Facebook moves to protect Islam from criticism

Even while Facebook and Twitter allow violent threats to be posted against critics of Islam, the sites are moving to censor and block posts by those critics.

What happened on that day was that Facebook and Twitter began to censor Jihad Watch as “hate speech,” in accordance with the assurances they had given to the European Union.

Facebook, immediately after concluding an agreement with the European Union, began moving aggressively against foes of jihad terror and mass Muslim migration in the West. Nina Rosenwald, the president and founder of the conservative think tank Gatestone Institute, on June 2, 2016 recorded Facebook’s haste to implement the new speech regulations: “On Tuesday, the European Union (EU) announced a new online speech code to be enforced by four major tech companies, including Facebook and YouTube. On Wednesday, Facebook deleted the account of Ingrid Carlqvist, Gatestone’s Swedish expert.”

Carlqvist’s crime, according to Rosenwald, was to take note of real crimes by Muslim migrants: “Ingrid had posted our latest video to her Facebook feed—called ‘Sweden’s Migrant Rape Epidemic.” In that video, said Rosenwald, “Ingrid calmly lays out the facts and statistics, all of which are meticulously researched.” Rosenwald added that the video was adapted from a “research paper that Gatestone published last year. The video has gone viral—racking up more than 80,000 views in its first two days. But the EU is quite candid: it is applying a political lens to their censorship…. ”

This is just one example. The article gives others, including examples where death threats against Islam’s critics are allowed to remain online.

Just one of many reasons I will have nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter.

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