U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has introduced a bill that would allow Americans to sue companies such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook for censoring political speech. The bill comes as an activist NBC journalist contacted Google to demonetize The Federalist and then reported on it.

The Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act, which was introduced June 17 would amend Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, is co-sponsored by U.S. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Braun (R-IN), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA).

“Big Tech companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook,” Hawley said, “have used their power to silence political speech from conservatives without any recourse for users. Section 230 has been stretched and rewritten by courts to give these companies outlandish power over speech without accountability. Congress should act to ensure bad actors are not given a free pass to censor and silence their opponents.”

Under the terms of the bill, companies would be prohibited from receiving Section 230 immunity unless they “update their terms of service to promise to operate in good faith and pay a $5,000 fine (or actual damages, if higher) plus attorney’s fees if they violate that promise.”

It would also let users sue companies for breaching the terms of good faith and prohibit companies from discriminating when enforcing terms of service and failing to honor their promises.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is also preparing legislation that would remove legal protections from companies “when they facilitate or solicit content or activity from third parties that violate federal law.” According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the DOJ’s proposals will not only address the question of censorship, but also tackle social media’s facilitation of child exploitation, terrorism, cyberstalking, and other crimes:

The department’s proposal, for instance, would remove legal protections when platforms facilitate or solicit third-party content or activity that violates federal criminal law, such as online scams and trafficking in illicit drugs. The department also wouldn’t confer immunity to platforms in instances involving online child exploitation and sexual abuse, terrorism or cyberstalking. Those carve-outs are needed to curtail immunity for internet companies to allow victims to seek redress, the official said.

The Justice Department also will seek to make clear that tech platforms don’t have immunity in civil-enforcement actions brought by the federal government, and can’t use immunity as a defense against antitrust claims that they removed content for anticompetitive reasons.

Regarding the situation with NBC, Google, and the Federalist, the journalist from NBC made a complaint to Google about criticism of Black Lives Matter that appeared on The Federalist’s website. She then bragged about her “co-investigation” with Google getting the site demonetized. Everything was quickly sorted out, with Google claiming it never demonetized the Federalist.

This censorship issue will most likely continue to come up as the election season goes on. Twitter has been in the spotlight for slapping warning labels on tweets by President Donald Trump saying they violate the company’s policies forbidding abusive behavior. The president has responded that the company is trying to silence conservative voices and hurt his re-election campaign. An executive order he tried to put in place to ease social media restrictions on speech has been blocked in court.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to contact Illinois’ U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth to ask them to support and/or co-sponsor S. 3983. The “big tech” social media giants should be held accountable facilitating federal crimes, including terrorism and child exploitation as well as for their anti-conservative bias (censorship) in moderating content.

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois! 

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

I had awarded Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey the award for Most Cringeworthy Performative Act/photo op of 2020 for his fake body-wracking sobbing while kneeling at George Floyd’s casket. Frey’s performative act/photo op topped even that of the genuflecting congressional thespians adorned in culturally appropriated African kente-clothe scarves led by prayer warrior Nancy Pelosi.

You might want to take some Zofran 30 minutes before watching this:

But now I must rescind the award and give it to the dozen apparently racist celebrities publicly confessing and self-flagellating before the Black Lives Matter Crusaders for their collective, systemic white transgressions.

In melodramatically somber tones, lesbian Sarah Paulson, Aaron Paul, bisexual Kesha (formerly Ke$ha), Bethany Joy Lenz, Kristen Bell, Justin Theroux,  Debra Messing, Mark Duplass, Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron Howard’s daughter), Julianne Moore, Piper Perabo, Stanley Tucci, Ilana Glazer, and gymnast Aly Raisman are taking responsibility for “every unchecked moment, for every time it was easier to ignore than to call it out for what it was, for every not-so-funny joke, every unfair stereotype, every blatant injustice, no matter how big or small, every time” they “remained silent,” and “every time” they “explained away police brutality, or turned a blind eye.”

Eleven of the twelve sanctimonious celebrities work in an industry rife with sexism and exploitation of women and now we learn they are also, apparently, guilty of racism. While profiting from one of the most hypocritical and destructive industries in the country that creates and promotes soft-core porn and glorifies violence, all these self-indulgent, privileged celebrities are now confessing to being racists.

Are they really responsible for every not-so-funny joke, unfair stereotype, and blatant injustice in the world? Did all twelve of them really explain away police brutality? If that’s true, they have a lot to atone for.

The moralizers/offenders identify what they see from their snazzy digs:

Black people are being slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes. Going for a job should not be a death sentence. Sleeping in your own home should not be a death sentence. Playing video games with your nephew should not be a death sentence. Shopping in a store should not be a death sentence. Business as usual should not be life-threatening.

No disagreement. Is there anyone in America who believes black people should be slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes, killed while playing video games with their relatives, or killed while shopping?

But is there a pervasive problem with black people being slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes, or murdered while shopping? Well, yes, there is, but the slaughtering of blacks—including innocent children sitting on their porches, sleeping in their beds, and walking home from school—is being committed primarily by young black men raised without fathers.

Here are some data from scholar Heather MacDonald that the celebrity social justice warriors may want to consider:

However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is. …

A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

Of course, everyone knows the celebrity pontificators aren’t really confessing and don’t really feel guilty. They’re doing what socially insular, intellectually myopic, presumptuous, and self-righteous celebrities do best: scold the deplorables—oh, and act.

What other icky cultural manifestations of kowtowing to the destructive Marxist ideologies of BLM and Antifa fascists are emerging? Here are a few:

• As of this writing, Seattle, a sanctuary city with a plague of homelessness, is now a lawless Antifa/BLM enclave, which has been named the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ). At the command of political leaders, Seattle police surrendered the entire 6-block area to anarchists, including their own police precinct, which has been renamed “Seattle People’s Department East Precinct.” Leftists promptly erected borders around their zone and appointed a defacto armed police department. Lawlessness and chaos–which ultimately result in tyranny–are the logical ends of “progressivism.” Next up, the Purge. If current policemen all across this once-great nation walked off the job and BLM members took over “protecting” our rights and communities, would we have less racism, fewer bad “cops,” and communities better suited for human flourishing? I wonder if any businesses will open stores or corporate headquarters in Seattle? I wonder if any families will move there? Other than anarchists and zombies, who will want to move there?

• There are a number of candidates vying for the title of “Progressive” Hypocrite of the Pandemic Year. Top of the list is Michigan governor Christine Whitmer, or as Andrew Klavan calls her, “Obersturmfuhrer Whitmer, ” who prohibited Michiganders from buying seeds or paint when they were shopping at Home Depot, who told Michiganders not to travel north on Memorial Day weekend as her husband traveled north on Memorial Day weekend to get their essential boat on the water early, and who banned lawn care workers from mowing lawns—alone. Well, here she is marching shoulder-to-shoulder with BLM. Sheltering in place is good for thee but not for she when there’s a campaign for the vice presidency that needs a photo op. #PerformativeAct
  Does anyone think that if there had been hundreds of thousands of conservatives marching peacefully in streets for the past two weeks to protest the crushing quarantine—with zero rioting, arson, looting, and brick-throwing—that leftist quarantine zealots would have been silent? Or would there have been mass rage, rending of clothes, and sanctimonious scoldings over the iniquitous disregard for human life demonstrated by demonstrators?

• The mob is coming for your jobs. John Daniel Davidson writing for The Federalist warns that your position on BLM has consequences:

There will be no opting out of the Black Lives Matter movement. You’re either for BLM or against it—and if you’re against it, you’re a racist. You will either support BLM publicly and enthusiastically, or you will be harassed, shunned, and shamed out of mainstream America. If you dare to speak a word against BLM, you will be targeted, mobbed, and probably fired.

• Leftists now want to burn books (and movies and historical monuments), but since they can’t actually say that, they had to figure out a way to conceal that they want to burn books. What to do, what to do? 💡Brainstorm!Just rename book-burning. Call it “decolonizing your bookshelf.” Oh, and when you’re done with all that decolonizing, call the Firemen:

Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. (Captain Beatty, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury).

We just put our American flag up at our house. I think it’s going to stay up for a while. I am deeply thankful to live in America where “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and where our forefathers wrote, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

This is a remarkable country built on principles that enable it to become “a more perfect Union” as long as we remember the Creator who endowed us with Rights. Without a Creator, there exist no unalienable Rights. Without a Creator, there exist no transcendent truths, no moral absolutes. Un-created human lives don’t matter. Un-created humans create and inhabit a world of highly intelligent dogs eating dogs.

I hope Christians who, in the face of slander, hostility, and threats, offer feeble, vapid defenses of their silence on issues that both culture and Scripture address realize that 1. We the people are the government, 2. Children are watching as parents model cowardice and rationalization, and 3. Silent capitulators are feeding the behemoth that will devour their children’s and grandchildren’s hearts, minds, liberty, and maybe their bodies.

But by all means continue. Take up your crosses daily, and hide them in the basement.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/nauseating-performative-acts-by-celebrity-racists.mp3

We take very seriously the trust you place in Illinois Family Institute when you send a gift.
We understand that we are accountable before you and God to honor your trust. 

You’ve heard the old saying that starts, “Hell hath no fury”? It pretty well describes today’s transgender activists.

If you want to see how far down the slope civic discourse has slid in the land of free speech and “tolerance,” I give you an article in The Atlantic by Jesse Singhal [sic] entitled, “When Children Say They’re Trans.”

Rather than the unabashed cheerleading you might expect in a secular, progressive magazine, the article is surprisingly balanced. And that’s just the problem for transgender activists.

Said one on Twitter: “This guy’s one-man crusade against trans people has gone on for years. It really doesn’t make sense. Sad that the Atlantic gave him a cover story to spread his pseudoscience and bigotry.”

Said another: “This article can and will cause real, tangible harm to the trans community and trans youth.”

And finally this: “[Bleep] off with this transphobia. And on pride month too. This article and cover are an absolute disgrace. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

My goal in these next couple of articles is to make three basic points.

First, after every mass murder, whether at a school or nightclub or concert venue, conservatives write many excellent op-eds effectively addressing nearly every aspect of the tragedy. Unfortunately, too few Americans actually hear or read those commentaries. That failure in the information war continues to plague the nation.

Second, so many Republican politicians and candidates fear the “social issues.” Several days ago when a shooting took place in that Florida school, these “leaders” still failed to grasp the connection between a failing and corrupt culture and mass murder.

Third, in a terrific piece over at The Federalist, Stella Morabito asks a question about the public (government-run, taxpayer-funded) schools. Here is the title and lede of her article:

“13 Ways Public Schools Incubate Mental Instability In Kids”
The correlation between public school environments and the deteriorating mental health of children has been intensifying for decades.

Stella Morabito’s point is one I’ve been making for years when I have referred to the public schools as “Lord of the Flies child warehouses.” “Lord of the Flies” is a reference to a novel that has been made into a movie twice about 30 schoolboys who are marooned on an island where they attempt to govern themselves and instead become savages.

The long-running national discussion about bullying in public schools always raises the question to which few good answers are offered: Where are the adults in these schools?

The “child warehouses” part gets to the point about what constitutes a proper learning environment. It’s not complicated: no child can learn when the atmosphere is not conducive to learning. You can read more of my argument here.

Here is the opening of Morabito’s article:

Why doesn’t anyone investigate the toxic effects of today’s bureaucrat-run mega-schools in the wake of a school shooting? It’s high time we place a share of the blame there.

Apologists for these noxious systems continue to shift blame for their failures using the media, various left-wing lobbies, and the kids themselves as programmed mouthpieces for statist agendas like gun control. Meanwhile, they keep feeding the beast by mass institutionalizing kids.

The correlation between public school environments and the deteriorating mental health of children has been intensifying for decades. We ought to consider how these settings serve as incubators for the social alienation that can fuel such horrors.

First, consider how common it is for a public high school today to house thousands of teenagers for most of their waking hours for four solid years. (More than 3,000 students attend the Florida school where the most recent shooting took place.) During their time in that maze, kids learn to “socialize,” basically by finding their place in a school’s hierarchy of cliques.

This sort of pecking order dynamic tends to breed resentment, status anxiety, and social dysfunction. Combine that with the toxic effects of social media and family breakdown, and you’ve got a deadly brew. Public schooling is increasingly unhealthy for kids’ emotional stability.

You can read her entire post here.

To the second point: Conservative office-holders and candidates have no clue how to fight the information war and, therefore, have no ability to stand up for what’s right when it comes to the culture. In a recent op-ed at American Thinker titled “A Weak and Crumbling Foundation,” Deana Chadwell writes:

If we grew up certain:

· that God is just a convenient fairy tale;
· that the government’s purpose is to take the place of indulgent parents;
· that sexual desires, all sexual desires should be fulfilled ASAP;
· that people are just the evolutionary top of the food chain;
· and are merely animals and therefore expendable;
· that drugs are enlightening;
· that truth is nonexistent;
· and that, most important of all, utopia is within our reach because we know better than God how to organize a nation,

…then what do we do when we see even our most important leaders functioning as if there is no moral code? What do we think when the people we see as special turn out to be sexual predators? How are we to understand our misery when our children OD on opioids, kill themselves over Facebook bullying, or kill others just because they are angry or want to be famous? How do we handle it when we pray to the God we no longer believe in and get no response at all?

What do we do? Most people look around desperately for someone else to blame, or even better, some inanimate object to hold accountable. Ban guns! It takes no moral courage to blame a thing, but it takes massive internal fortitude to look in the mirror and blame the unsustainable ideas we’ve held dear now for several generations.

It’s hard to look at the slaughter of our children in a schoolyard, but we are still willing to kill them by the thousands in an abortion facility. It’s horrifying to see the damage wrought by social media, but we don’t have the stomach to face down our spoiled children and deny them access. It makes us sick to see the sexualization of our young children, but we’re too spoiled ourselves to limit our own indulgence in nearly pornographic television. We don’t seem to have the national backbone to admit our part in the destruction of our offspring.

. . .

And the screamers don’t follow up their hollering with careful thinking about what taking guns out of our society would look like. There are over 300 million privately owned firearms in this country. We understand — those of us who know anything about history — how important it is that we keep them. We know that all our other rights rest on the right to defend ourselves against tyranny. I’m not giving up mine without a fight, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. The confiscation of guns in America will be a bloodbath that makes Parkland look insignificant.

“The Parkland shooting proves that our culture is a disaster,” she writes, “not that our gun policies are. We need to be able to face that fact, or there will be hell to pay.”

Up next: A Case Study: Pro-Second Amendment Arguments Do Not Reach Enough Americans.

I did not intend to write about this story, but when I saw a picture of the teenager in question, I had to. He is 15-years-old, clearly a biological male. Look at his picture for yourself, mustache and all. As Joy Pullman notes on The Federalist, he has “not taken drugs nor undergone surgery to mimic femininity.” Yet he was allowed to compete against other girls in a recent sporting event, and to no one’s surprise, he won – quite handily, at that. Is this what is meant by “equality”?

In recent weeks, we’ve read about a female high-school wrestler who identifies as male and who has been taking testosterone to prepare to “transition” to male. Unsurprisingly, she defeated the other girls, all of whom are not taking testosterone.

We also read about a male weightlifter who now identifies as female. Unsurprisingly, he defeated the women he competed against, setting a new record along the way.

Other examples could be supplied as well, since this is becoming more and more common.

How is this fair? How can progressives and liberals and leftists and LGBT activists and their allies think this is right? And do the feminists of the world really want to engage in head-to-head athletic competition with their male peers?

If this was done in the world of professional sports, there would not be a single woman winning, let alone playing, at the elite, highest levels.

Not one female basketball player would earn a berth in the NBA. Not one female athlete would make it to the Olympics – in swimming or rowing or weightlifting or skiing or running or jumping or hurdling or boxing. Not one.

Men would dominate in every event, and women would be relegated to cheerleading.

That’s why we have men’s sports and women’s sports, men’s world records and women’s world records. And that why we celebrate the accomplishments of female athletes as females rather than comparing them to males.

There is nothing sexist about this. There is nothing hateful about this. There is nothing condescending about this. This is a matter of fairness, equality, and common sense.

At least it should be. Today, common sense is in danger of extinction, and concepts like fairness and equality are turned upside down.

The 15-year-old in question goes by the name of Andraya Yearwood, and as the Hartford Courant reported, Andraya’s first event with female peers was a cause for celebration: “With family, friends and teammates cheering her on at her first high school track meet, Andraya won the girls 100- and 200-meter dashes, and helped her 4 x 100-meter relay team take second place.”

What did this look like in person? One picture says it all, as Andraya leaves the other girls behind, girls who trained so hard for these events, only to be beaten by a boy. And I mean beaten decisively.

But Andraya’s mother had a response to anyone would protest the event: “I know they’ll say it is unfair and not right, but my counter to that is: Why not? She is competing and practicing and giving her all and performing and excelling based on her skills. Let that be enough. Let her do that, and be proud of that.”

What kind of logic is that? Because this 15-year-old biological male is competing and practicing and giving his all, that makes it fair and right for him to compete with his female peers? No matter what these other girls do, no matter how hard they try, no matter how much they push themselves, they will not be able to keep up with an equally devoted male peer. How is this fair and right to them?

Andraya’s father is also supportive, saying that his son is competing just where he should be competing, also explaining that you are born into a particular body but you grow into being a particular person.

But athletic events are conducted in the body, regardless of how the person inside that body identifies. Yet when people ask Mr. Yearwood, “Why is your daughter running with the girls?” his response is, “Because she’s my daughter, much like the reason your daughter is running with girls.”

With all respect to the Yearwood family, and with understanding that for them this was a matter of life and death for their child, what Mr. Yearwood is saying is patently false. His child is not running with the other girls the same way the other daughters are running, just like his child does not have to deal with monthly periods or female hormonal changes, since Andraya is not like the other girls.

“But,” you ask, “what about Andraya? What if Andraya has gender dysphoria? What if identifying as female will save her life?”

That is between Andraya and his family and the Lord. But Andraya’s personal struggles cannot be imposed on everyone else, meaning, as a biological male, he has no business competing with other girls, or, for that matter, sharing their locker rooms and shower stalls. That is not the meaning of equality.

Even according to activist ideology, gender is a social construct but sex is biological. And when it comes to male and female athletic competition, we divide based on biological sex.

In the end, this is just one more example of why I believe LGBT activism will ultimately defeat itself.

You cannot wage a winning war against gender distinctions any more than you can redefine marriage while preserving its integrity. As expressed by Joy Pullmann, “It’s a pretty sure bet Americans did not expect tolerance for two consenting adults doing whatever behind closed doors to become a spearhead for forcing naked boys to shower next to naked girls and make girls second-class players on their own fields.”

Exactly.

And so, I appeal to progressivists, leftists, feminists, and LGBT allies and their allies, along with all those who cherish fairness, equality, and justice. Look carefully at the trajectory of your activism, and ask yourself: Is this really the kind of world that you want?

This article was originally posted at Townhall.com