Source: ☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Tuesday, September 20, 2022 ☙ SHAKING
🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞
🔥 In an epic win for social media user rights, on Friday, the Fifth Circuit upheld a new Texas statute prohibiting large social media platforms from political viewpoint-based user censorship. The Court noted that the platforms made the bizarre oxymoronic argument that they have a free speech right to “muzzle speech.”
The Fifth Circuit judges were having none of it. They explained that the platforms’ argument makes no sense:
The implications of the platforms’ argument are staggering. On the platforms’ view, email providers, mobile phone companies, and banks could cancel the accounts of anyone who sends an email, makes a phone call, or spends money in support of a disfavored political party, candidate, or business. What’s worse, the platforms argue that a business can acquire a dominant market position by holding itself out as open to everyone-as Twitter did in championing itself as “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” Then, having cemented itself as the monopolist of “the modern public square,” Twitter unapologetically argues that it could turn around and ban all pro-LGBT speech for no other reason than its employees want to pick on members of that community.
The short, two-page order ended like this:
Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say. Because the district court held otherwise, we reverse its injunction and remand for further proceedings.
BOOM.
The appeal was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been doing some truly fantastic work lately.
The Court’s holding interferes with the deep state’s narrative-manipulation tools, so you can imagine that they must be thinking this is the worst thing that could ever have happened, literally a million times worse than the Hindenburg disaster. They’re squawking, too. For instance, here’s how deep state mouthpiece Foreign Policy magazine described the ruling in its headline:
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See? According to the deep state, the problem is that a free and open social media town square is NOT SAFE. “Extremists” from “the globe” might post stuff that hurts your feelings, which is even worse than ACTUALLY hurting you, say through a jab mandate or something.
Safety uber-alles!
The authors of the Foreign Policy op-ed admitted their conflict of interests, noting parenthetically that “(Full disclosure: At Valens Global, we have received funding from Meta, the owner of Facebook, for our work on how national security intersects with technology.)” So.
The parade of horribles offered by the op-ed’s writers is mostly fantastical. For example, they begin the piece by warning their hands over a lunatic who live-streamed a shooting incident. If the platforms can’t censor THAT, then even more lunatics will be encouraged to shoot people and live-stream themselves.
The problem with that argument, of course, is that censoring criminal activity is not political viewpoint discrimination. The authors next invoked “radical Islam,” worrying that social media can be used to “radicalize” jihadists.
I’d say that letting the radical jihadist talk on social media helps us figure out where they are, and frankly I’m more concerned about the social media platforms censoring opinions for “Islamophobia.”
As my First Amendment professor used to say, “the antidote to bad speech is more speech.”
🔥 One of the dumb excuses Martha’s Vineyard locals used to justify why the 51 illegal immigrants couldn’t stay on their idyllic little island was that is just no work for them, what with the summer rush over and everything. For example, Charles Rus, music director at St. Andrew’s, the episcopal church in Edgartown where the illegal immigrants were temporarily housed, flatly told the Epoch Times there were no jobs on the island for the migrants, so. Buh bye.
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But the Epoch Times did a little digging — a very little digging, it didn’t take much — and found jobs all over the place, in scads and buckets. For instance, there are over 50 help wanted ads in classified section of the Vineyard Gazette alone, including jobs for laborers, custodians, landscapers, bakers, cooks, dishwashers, technicians, library assistant, and several retail positions.
Epoch’s reporters also called the Martha’s Vineyard YMCA and discovered several more open positions, including housekeepers, “ice arena” workers, and a front desk administrator. The YMCA shares a building with a local charity, Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, which itself needs a “bilingual” administrative assistant.
Bilingual.
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Although the Community Services charity almost certainly receives state and/or federal funding, Epoch couldn’t find anyone in the generously-appointed offices when the reporter went by to ask about the job opening.
Even more appalling, Epoch’s reporter discovered that the island’s local supermarket chain, Stop & Shop, has empty worker dormitories — where the summer overflow workers live during the busy summer tourist season. Obviously the immigrants could have been housed there — and Stop & Shop is even hiring for several open positions right now.
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Martha’s Vineyard is one of eight “sanctuary cities” in Massachusetts and — up till about 10 minutes ago — regularly “celebrated diversity.”
Not any more, apparently.
📈 MSN begrudgingly ran a story Friday headlined, “Ron DeSantis Breaks Fundraising Record For Governors Amid Martha’s Vineyard Immigration Stunt.”
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The news agency reported that, following the news over last week’s Martha’s Vineyard disaster for liberals, Florida’s governor broke all-time fundraising records, ever, by any governor in U.S. history.
And it’s not just fundraising…
🔥 The latest figures on party registration in Florida show that, since DeSantis was elected governor in 2018, Florida’s Republican Party had added 509,420 new registered voters, but in the same period, Democrats have only added 17,197 voters.
Oops. Pretty soon, democrats in Florida might find out what California Republicans feel like.
🔥 Is the great cleanup starting? USA Today ran a revealing investigative story a couple weeks ago headlined, “Cashing In On Covid: USA Today Investigates Claims Against Companies That Profited In Pandemic.”
The article rounds up a series of related articles about state and federal investigations into pandemic “no bid” profiteering, where people who got government covid contracts under emergency authority are now having to account for where the money went.
And guess what? A lot of taxpayer money went right into people’s pockets. I know; shocking, right?
For now, the investigations are mostly into covid testing labs, the same ones who used absurdly-high PCR thresholds to inflate covid infection figures and keep the pandemic cash machine rolling — while keeping the rest of us locked down and masked up.
Here’s a list of headlines from USA Today’s linked articles:
- “This Utah Startup Had No Public Health Experience, But GOP Governors Paid It $219M For Questionable Covid Tests.”
- “Timeline: How An Upstart Utah Company Made Millions Off Covid-19 Tests.”
- “Utah Firms Gave $1M To GOP After Getting No-Bid Covid-19 Contracts.”
- “How Pop-Up Coronavirus Test Sites And Labs Capitalize On Lax Regulations.”
- “They Got Rich Off ‘Covid Money’ And Flaunted It. Now They’re Under Investigation.”
- “Covid-19 Testing Chain Amassed Fortunes Amid Betrayal Of Trust: Lawsuit.”
If the references to GOP governors and states troubles you, don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of these cases in the blue states, too, you’ll see. They just won’t get as much corporate media coverage.
And if you ever wondered why the RINOs jumped right behind the pandemic madness — I didn’t — this is your explanation.
Covid was the biggest cash grab in human history. And I really believe that — sooner rather than later — we WILL ultimately crawl all the way up the chain, right up to the big pharma execs who snatched generational wealth from citizens, by selling dangerously defective snake oil to 70% of the first world’s population using no-bid government contracts.
Trust the greed process. There’s blood in the political water. The lower-level sharks are already circling around all that new generational wealth money, and the feeding frenzy could start anytime.
🔥 A powerful 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck southwest Mexico off the Pacific coast yesterday, which, along with the Taiwan quake, makes TWO recent serious earthquakes, on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, within a couple days of each other.
Fortunately there were no casualties or major building damage, according to reports.
The quake was weird for another reason. Yesterday’s earthquake hit on the September 19th anniversary of TWO previous large earthquakes around Mexico City, one that killed over 10,000 people in 1985, and another that killed over 360 in 2017. In other words, three major earthquakes have now hit Mexico on the same day of the year — September 19th.
In fact, because of the anniversaries, officials had JUST finished an earthquake drill in Mexico City when yesterday’s earthquake hit. You have to admit it’s kind of weird.
🔥 There are signs of intelligent life and ethics in the FBI. Yesterday, Jim Jordan sent a letter to FBI Director Chris Wray, complaining about what the FBI agents who are providing the House Judiciary Committee are saying about what’s been going on in the agency since Biden took up residence in the White House.
Jordan explained that, all around the country, FBI agents are being told to stand down child sex trafficking investigations, and start prioritizing investigations about J6 cases:
The whistleblower disclosed that the FBI is sacrificing its other important federal law-enforcement duties to pursue January 6 investigations. The whistleblower recalled, for example, being “told that child sexual abuse material investigations were no longer an FBI priority and should be referred to local law enforcement agencies.”
Jordan told Wray that “whistleblowers describe a “rotted” culture within the FBI’s senior leadership in Washington.” According to the whistleblowers, to make it look like there’s some kind of sudden explosion of domestic terrorism around the country, the DC field office is referring J6 cases to local offices around America and telling them to “originate” the case in those local jurisdictions.
According to the whistleblowers, this statistical sleight-of-hand lets the DOH claim that new cases are breaking out all over the country (instead of coming right from D.C.) amounting to “significant increases in domestic terrorism … instead of hundreds of investigations stemming from a single, black swan incident at the Capitol.”
I don’t know what will come of this, but the story shows there are still good cops in the FBI, and they’re talking a blue streak. Finally.
🔥 There are some significant signs that the culture may be shifting. Yesterday, Business Insider reported that Charlamagne The God, a center-left social media influencer turned Comedy Central “black news” commenter, called DeSantis a genius for sending the illegals to Martha’s Vineyard:
🔥 And last week, classically-liberal Bill Maher even called out leftist historical revisionism.
Maher is looking more conservative by the minute. But he hasn’t changed. Neither has Charlamagne. I’ll remind you of the brilliant cartoon illustration popularized by former democrat Elon Musk, showing how moderate liberals must be starting to view their place in the world:
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So, be encouraged! We’re moving in the right direction. It just takes a long time to turn a mega-cruise-ship around, what with with Klaus Schwab constantly showing up on the bridge and trying to grab the helm.
Have a terrific Tuesday! I’ll see you guys back here tomorrow for more.
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