Let’s join USA Today and Fox News for a short, illuminating stroll down memory lane:

2001: Following the Bush vs. Gore election in 2000, “Members of the Congressional House Black Caucus spent 20 minutes objecting as they sought to block Florida’s 25 electoral votes” from being certified for George Bush.

2005: “In the joint meeting of Congress to certify Bush’s win over Democrat John Kerry, Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, received a Senate signature to object to the electoral votes from Ohio. It came from Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. The two Democrats raised concerns about voting irregularities.” (emphasis added)

At that time, Illinois’ corrupt senator Dick Durbin said,

Some may criticize our colleague from California for bringing us here for this brief debate. I thank her for doing that because it gives members an opportunity once again on a bipartisan basis to look at a challenge that we face not just in the last election in one State but in many States.

And Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) issued a statement saying,

I believe that Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) have performed a very valuable public service in bringing this debate before the Congress. As Americans, we should all be troubled by reports of voting problems in many parts of the country.

But that was then, and this is now, and now Durbin describes Senator Josh Hawley’s similar effort as “The political equivalent of barking at the moon. This won’t be taken seriously, nor should it be.”

Van Hollen harrumphed faux-indignantly,

Sen. Hawley’s actions are grossly irresponsible. He’s attempting to undermine our democratic process, fuel Trump’s lies about voter fraud, and delay the certification of Biden’s win.

While Van Hollen described the efforts of Boxer and Tubb Jones as a “very valuable public service,” he calls Hawley’s efforts a “reckless stunt.”

Please take special note that Durbin, Van Hollen, and many other leftists and some RINOs are focusing their laser beams of destruction on Hawley even though other Republicans in Congress objected to the vote-certification process. Is that just because Hawley was going to be the central spokesperson articulating the constitutional issue raised by peculiar electoral mischief that took place in Pennsylvania—an issue that mild-mannered, non-insurrectionist Byron York described as “a fundamental issue that is important to all 50 states”?

Or could it have something to do with Hawley’s singular and bold attack on the outrageous Big Tech monopolies and on social media tyrants’ Section 230 protections?  According to CNBC “About 98% of political contributions from internet companies this cycle went to Democrats,” and that 98% constitutes millions of persuasive dollars.

2017: Following the 2016 win by Trump, “Half a dozen Democratic House members raised formal objections to the Electoral College vote count. … The objections were based on Russian election interference, allegations of voter suppression or what Democrats considered to be illegal votes cast by Republican members of the Electoral College.”

Now, when Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz pursue the same constitutional procedure that Democrats have pursued three times, Congress-despots call for their expulsion from Congress, and the House Homeland Security Committee Chair, U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson, suggests they might be placed on the no-fly list once reserved for terrorists.

Democrats who unjustifiably whine that Hawley and Cruz were trying to subvert the electoral process have been weirdly silent about Twitter’s effective effort to subvert the electoral process by censoring the Hunter Biden/Joe Biden/China collusion story. And these hypocritical Democrats say nothing about Facebook’s and Google’s wildly successful algorithmic efforts to subvert the electoral process.

AOC and other leftist members of Congress have been demanding Silicon Valley autocrats get rid of the chief threat to “progressive” political hegemony by cancelling the upstart Parler, which serves as the neutral platform that Twitter and Facebook falsely claim to be.

Leftists in Congress argued that Parler had to be silenced because of the role it played in the Capitol attack. But liberal journalist Glenn Greenwald discovered that Twitter, Facebook, and Google-owned YouTube played a far more significant role in promoting the riot. To date, no member of Congress has demanded they be shut down. Greenwald writes,

The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube. As Recode reported, while some protesters participated in both Parler and Gab, many of the calls to attend the Capitol were from YouTube videos, while many of the key planners “have continued to use mainstream platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.” …

So why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather than Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a flamboyant showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis?

In part it is because these Silicon Valley giants — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple — donate enormous sums of money to the Democratic Party and their leaders, so of course Democrats will cheer them rather than call for punishment or their removal from the internet. Part of it is because Parler is an upstart, a much easier target to try to destroy than Facebook or Google. And in part it is because the Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them by silencing their adversaries.

Smelling the conservative chum in the water, corporate America has joined the congressional and Big Tech lefties’ feeding frenzy, cutting off all donations to any of the 147 Republican Congresspersons who contested the certification of election results. Here’s the list—so far—of the companies with conservative blood dripping from their lips:

Airbnb, Amazon, American Express, AT&T, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Comcast, Commerce Bank, Dow Chemical, Marriott, Mastercard, and Verizon.

They’re shutting down donations to any Republican who opposed certification—even if those Republicans did what Democrats have done in prior elections and even with no evidence that they supported, endorsed, or incited either violence or an insurrection.

The Walt Disney Corporation, Ben & Jerry’s, Coca Cola, and JP Morgan rightly issued statements of condemnation of the Capitol building assault. I’ve been searching the Internet far and wide, but I can’t find similar statements from corporate America during or following the lawless BLM riots that caused billions of dollars of damage and included destruction of federal property, harassment of members of Congress, direct assaults on police officers and police precincts, and the looting and arson of scores of businesses.

Oh wait, I remember now.  Corporate America issued statements of support for those riots and donated money to BLM.

Well, surely corporate behemoths issued condemnatory statements following these shocking words from Senator Chuck Schumer at a pro-human slaughter protest in October 2018:

I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

Sounds kind of like trying to subvert a judicial process. Has Hawley ever said anything even close to that?

Did corporate behemoths condemn Democrat U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal, who was arrested in June 2018 along with 630 other protesters at an illegal occupation of the Hart Senate Office Building? Thankfully, this lawlessness was led by women who are generally less likely to commit acts of violence—well, except for female BLM rioters who were recorded beating people up in the street riots of 2020.

Dishonest leftists argue ad nauseum that 1. private companies are entitled to make whatever decisions they want based on their corporate “principles,” 2. that the First Amendment doesn’t protect citizens from the consequences of their speech, and 3. that serfs customers who don’t like their corporate tyranny are “free” to take their business elsewhere.

The first point should be true and uncontroversial, but now the overriding operating principle of our soulless corporate behemoths that are vacuuming up America’s freedoms is a firm commitment to use their vast nearly unchecked power to impose destructive leftist ideologies everywhere.

Moreover, leftists don’t apply the principle of business freedom consistently. Leftists don’t really believe all businesses should be free to make business decisions in line with their principles.  Rather, leftists believe that businesses have the right to conduct business in line with their ethics as long as those ethics are pre-approved by leftists.

So, for example, teeny tiny Christian-owned businesses enjoy considerably less freedom than, say, the colossal Amazon. A Christian calligrapher is not permitted to refuse to make wedding invitations for a same-sex faux wedding based on her belief that homosexual acts and relationships are abhorrent to the God she serves.

The second point regarding consequences is completely true. Speaking freely does not guarantee freedom from consequences, and leftists are making sure those consequences include the inability to work in America or exercise one’s religion freely.

In a society controlled by corporate and Big Tech monopolies, only leftists are free to speak without fear of consequences. Conservatives face dire consequences for saying the very same things “progressives” say without fear of any consequences. Democrats can object to election certification, and they’re celebrated. Republicans object and they are accused of being insurrectionists, threatened with expulsion, and put on no-fly lists. Talk about a banana republic.

The third claim that conservatives are “free to take their business elsewhere” is false or will be soon if Americans don’t rise up in opposition to the tyranny of unelected corporate monopolists and Big Tech Overlords. If all corporate and Big Tech tyrants adopt the same unprincipled policies, conservative Americans will be unable to work, feed their families, exercise their religion, assemble, or speak in the public square.

If you know any honest leftists, ask them if they believe corporate behemoths should be free to fire or refuse to hire Americans who publicly say this election was unfair.

Ask them if they believe corporate behemoths should be free to fire or refuse to hire anyone who has publicly said homosexual acts are immoral and marriage is intrinsically sexually differentiated.

Ask them if they believe corporate behemoths should be free to fire or refuse to hire Americans who have publicly said persons born with healthy and properly functioning male anatomy are not and never can be women and don’t belong in women’s private spaces or sports.

What recourse do conservative, Constitution-respecting Republicans have left for fighting the dangerous collusion of Congress, corporate behemoths, and Big Tech monopolies to eradicate the First Amendment if the right to assemble and speak are in effect cancelled without even a public debate or vote?

See you in Siberia, my dissident friends.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

---

 

Please consider a gift to the Illinois Family Institute.
As always, your gift to IFI is tax-deductible and greatly appreciated!

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

Chinese Translation – 中文翻译

No matter what you think of Trump’s character or rhetoric (I’ve never been a fan of either), his presidency accomplished many great things for America, perhaps chief among them getting the left—especially Big Tech—to expose its purulent underbelly. The real power today rests in the delicate fingers of the tech Oligarchs sitting behind their screens moving walls to trap Americans in their prison-like mazes equipped with virtual solitary confinement cells and freedom-crushing language rules euphemistically called “community standards” and “policies.” Trump was the immovable force that stood for a brief moment in their way.

The tyrannical nature of leftists has emerged more fully following the indefensible and shocking 90-minute assault on the Capitol. The fury of those robbed of faith and family by leftist ideologies turned from the theft and arson of businesses and police precincts—targets Dems couldn’t have cared less about—to the Capitol. The monsters who were created and abandoned have turned on some of their Frankensteinian creators, that is Congressmen and women.

Yes, leftist ideologies create lawless anarchists on both the left and right. Violence is the business of fatherless, faithless, anchorless young men. Always has been, always will be.

After five months of lawless leftist anarchy during which CNN, AOC, and scores of other leftists defended and egged on alienated leftist anarchists who attacked symbols of government, law, and order, alienated far-right anarchists decided to attack a symbol of government, law, and order too.

Of course, Congress hasn’t worked alone on the pernicious project to destroy humans from conception to unnatural death. Leftists and RINOs in Congress colluded with among others, leftist academics, Hollywood, Christian apostates and heretics within the church, propagandists who self-identify as “journalists,” and, of course, Big Tech.

Big Techies have been colluding during a long game of 3D chess while Republicans have been in a corner playing tiddlywinks and occasionally wondering where their winkies disappeared to. (They disappeared long ago during the Great Gelding of Republicans in year … oh, I can’t remember. It was so long ago.)

And now we’re on the verge of the Great Purge of conservatives from society.

Those who had eyes to see discerned the oppression goose-stepping toward the center in stocking feet. Those with 20/5 vision tried to warn the flocks. They’re still trying to warn them. But the tyrants are now in our midst, and they’re replacing noise-cancelling socks with speech-cancelling jackboots. The center is not holding.

First Twitter suspended the accounts of President Trump, General Michael Flynn, and Sidney Powell. The collaborators at Google, Apple, and Facebook joined in the Purge.

Next came Amazon banning Parler—the up and coming Twitter competitor—from its web-hosting service. Apparently Jack Dorsey held his breath and stomped his feet at the mere thought of competition. Once servers refuse to host social media platforms like Parler, those platforms are toast. This is Big Brother on steroids.

And then there’s CNN business “reporter” Oliver Darcy who wrote this on Friday:

[I]t is time TV carriers face questions for lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories. After all, it was the very lies that Fox, Newsmax, and OAN spread that helped prime President Trump’s supporters into not believing the truth.

This from the “news” organization that refused to ask Biden any hard questions before the election and that censored news stories in order to shovel Biden, the malleable and dim marionette, into the seat of power.

Even a Democrat lawmaker got into the rollicking censorship fun. New Jersey assemblyman Paul Moriarty (distant relative perhaps of Professor James Moriarty, arch-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes?) texted a Comcast executive with this subtle message:

Fox and Newsmax, both delivered to my home by your company, are complicit. What are you going to do??? You feed this garbage, lies and all.

Some conservatives have drawn a line in the virtual sand, saying they refuse to be forced off Facebook. They don’t see that the Tech Oligarchs—now including Bezos-the-Bezillionaire—are not trying to force them off. Quite the contrary. The Oligarchs and Overlords are trying to keep conservatives trapped in their virtual prisons. They’re trying to prevent conservatives from leaving by cutting off all other means of communicating ideas in the public square or to friends.

If you want to communicate far and wide with friends old and new, you will be able to do it only on platforms created by the Oligarchs and Overlords and only within the speech parameters they create and impose—on their “neutral platforms.” The Tech Oligarchs don’t want us to leave their fiefdoms. They want us to stay and remain under their sclerotic poisoned thumbs.

It’s not just conservatives who are concerned about tech tyranny. Kate Ruane, attorney for the ACLU, issued a statement via Twitter last Friday saying,

[I]t should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions.

And Kevin Roose, technology columnist for the New York Times echoes the worries of many on both sides of the political aisle—but mainly on the right—about the power of social media wielded with no accountability and no transparency:

Above all, Mr. Trump’s muzzling provides a clarifying lesson in where power resides in our digital society — not just in the precedent of law or the checks and balances of government, but in the ability to deny access to the platforms that shape our public discourse. Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg’s names have never appeared on a ballot. But they have a kind of authority that no elected official on earth can claim.

While leftists have spent four years calling Trump a Nazi, tyrant and dictator, did he ever try to do what leftists are doing now? Has Trump or any other Republican ever attempted to compel or censor speech?

And this is what Never-Trumpers and their small-minded obsession with Trump’s pugilistic rhetoric have brought to our doorsteps. Never-Trumpers with their beady little myopic eyes still can’t see that without Trump’s pugilism, leftists would not yet have revealed their game plan, because unlike Trump, leftists, like the unctuous Obama and arrogant Oligarchs in charge of Big Tech—which is to say, our lives—are more practiced at the art of political deception.

Leftists and RINOs scorn the idea that drove thousands of law-abiding non-insurrectionists to Washington D.C., which is that the election was stolen. Curiously, those same scorners keep their gimlet eyes and forked tongues focused on the Kraken, never acknowledging other concerns of non-insurrectionists like, for example, what liberal Democrat and Biden-voter  senior research psychologist at the  American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology Robert Epstein—a Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—said in Senate Judiciary Sub-Committee hearing on the Constitution in July 2019:

Google presents a serious threat to democracy and human autonomy. … Data I’ve collected since 2016 show that Google displays content to the American public that is biased in favor of one political party—a party I happen to like, but that’s irrelevant. No private company should have either the right or the power to manipulate large populations without their knowledge. … [D]emocracy as originally conceived cannot survive Big Tech as currently empowered.

Epstein’s earlier research showed that millions of votes were shifted to Hillary in 2016, and post 2020-election research showed that millions were shifted to Biden by Google’s tricksy algorithms.

They’re also ignoring what liberal Democrat Senator Ron Wyden said in Feb. 2020 and which sounds a lot like what conservative non-insurrectionists are being pilloried by leftists for saying:

I fear the 2020 election will make 2016 look like small potatoes. The list of threats and vulnerabilities is enough to give you a migraine.

There were the ES&S voting machines that for years came with preinstalled remote access software.

There’s the fact that Russia hacked an election vendor called VR Systems in the summer of 2016.

VR systems machines in North Carolina malfunctioned on Election Day that year, and one polling place had to shut down for hours. It took two and a half years before the Department of Homeland Security investigated what happened.

Right now, many election officials across the country are buying election systems they believe are high-tech, but they’re vulnerable to hacking and out-of-date the moment they come out of the box.

There is the spread of mobile voting apps like Voatz that have never been vetted by top security experts.

There’s a reason cybersecurity experts have been sounding the alarm for years, warning that putting computers between a voter and their ballot is a recipe for disaster.

What happens when the “glitch” changes a candidate’s vote totals by just 2 or 5 percent, instead of 50 percent? What happens when a glitch shuts down machines in some precincts and not others, disenfranchising voters and skewing election results?

Five states still exclusively use hackable, paperless voting machines, and nine other states still use paperless machines in some counties.

The problems are daunting … but the solutions are clear.

My bill, the PAVE Act, mandates the three key priorities that experts most universally recommended—paper ballots, routine, post-election risk-limiting audits, and federal cybersecurity standards for election systems.

… Senator Klobuchar introduced the Senate version of the SAFE Act, which I’m proud to co-sponsor. The SAFE Act has all three key elements recommended by our nation’s top cybersecurity experts: paper ballots, security standards and post-election audits, as well as the funding necessary to make sure states can live up to the new standards.

There is another obstacle to the Oligarchs’ domination of infinity and beyond. It is Senator Josh Hawley, virtually the only Congressman to take on Big Tech by calling for social media platforms to lose Section 230 protections from liability. Section 230 protections apply to “neutral platforms” which Twitter and Facebook with all their censoring, de-platforming, and slammer-tossing clearly are not.

So, the whipsmart and courageous Josh Hawley had to be taken out by the delicate-fingered. His effort to demonstrate that Pennsylvania’s illegal and unconstitutional extension of the voting deadline matters provided just the opportunity the slimy Tech Oligarchs, Dems, and RINOs needed to do just that.

The problem for the delicate-fingered and their congressional collaborators was Hawley’s objections alone would not have been sufficient. The Oligarchs, conscience-free Dems, and RINOs needed something more.

And then the anarchists gave them the crisis they needed. Flying to their virtual barns, the Oligarchs and their collaborators hauled out their waiting pitchforks, tar, and feathers. Sparks flying from their fingertips, they demanded Hawley resign, accusing him of contributing to an insurrection. Then more gelded Republicans came creeping out of their dark corners squeaking in their high castrated voices that they would no longer support Hawley’s effort.

Somehow the well-respected and reasonable journalist Byron York didn’t notice how crazy the idea that Pennsylvania violated the Constitution was. In a piece titled “The Election Lawsuit Trump Should Win,” York wrote:

The court fight over Pennsylvania’s election rules … involves a fundamental issue that is important to all 50 states. … putting aside the specifics of the Pennsylvania situation, the matter concerns a hugely important principle, which is the constitutional authority of state legislatures to make election law for their states.

York’s essay is an important read for anyone who may not know the details of the Pennsylvania mess.

Not even Trump is guilty of “incitement to insurrection,” let alone Hawley. In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, attorney Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, known during his years as a D.C. prosecutor as “protestor prosecutor,” writes that “The president didn’t mention violence on Wednesday, much less provoke or incite it.”

All tyrants use crises to expand powers that are never relinquished. They inflame public fears about threats to their safety from disease, from foreign enemies, or from dangers lurking in their midst. They are skilled at fomenting social division, imposing censorship, and disseminating propaganda to acquire more control. What’s next? Facial recognition cameras everywhere? Then a social credit system like China has?

There’s something rotten in the Upside Down ruled by the Oligarchs and administered by their algorithmically determined minions who control the speech by which ideas are disseminated. Somewhere along the life journeys of the Oligarchs, they lost sight of the meaning of the First Amendment, which was intended to protect unpopular speech—not just the speech leftists like. Who knows, maybe one day the only way conservatives will be able to communicate is via underground newspapers. So, hold on to those archaic printing presses, my friends. I think we’re gonna need ‘em.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

---

 

Please consider a gift to the Illinois Family Institute.
As always, your gift to IFI is tax-deductible and greatly appreciated!

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.