IT’S hard not to laugh at the fugitive Texas Democrats, now that three of them have been struck with COVID. Of course, the right thing to do is to wish them good health. But they must never lecture anyone about masks after posting selfies — from their chartered private jet, no less — in which not one of them was wearing a mask. Don’t CDC guidelines say you have to wear masks on planes? Not for Democratic lawmakers. It’s always one rule for them and a different rule for the peasants.
The stunt has been a mortifying self-own for Democrats, who have tut-tutted and scolded us like neurotic nancies all pandemic while privately doing as they please.
Then there is Kamala Harris, who greeted the Texans as if they were heroes instead of ridiculous runaways liable to being arrested when they go home. Yes, she met with them in person Tuesday, in a cramped, windowless room in DC, without a mask in sight, cackling about how “courageous” they were for shirking their legislative duties (pictured).
But we’re supposed to believe that when they started testing positive four days later, it wasn’t a problem for the veep. No COVID test, no quarantine and her visit to Walter Reed on Sunday was a coincidence.
Oh, imagine the uproar if this were Mike Pence and a bunch of Republicans. But if the media don’t call them out, did the Dems do anything wrong? This is the entire basis of our political reality today. Fanatical hyperbole at the most minor transgression of establishment norms by the right and hypocritical embrace of the most egregious behavior of the left.
As if that’s not bad enough, now the Biden administration wants to codify this state of affairs and make it permanent.
Under the guise of protecting public health, the administration last week made a frightening leap into fascism. And that’s not hyperbole, as the president would say.
They explicitly aligned the government’s aims with Big Tech censorship. If it’s something the Democratic Party doesn’t want said, it must be banned. It is dangerous “misinformation,” as defined by the government. And it can’t just be banned from one social-media platform. Big Tech must act in concert to crush misinformation super spreaders from every platform. For our own good.
That’s what White House press secretary Jen Psaki told us.
It’s not just the dirty dozen disinformation devils cited by Psaki as deserving of deplatforming and eternal damnation. Or President Biden’s intemperate outburst about Facebook “killing people.”
The president needs scapegoats to blame for the failure of his July 4 target date for 70 percent of the population to be vaccinated. What went wrong? Republicans of course.
When the president said Facebook is “killing people” he didn’t actually mean Facebook, which was such a friend to his campaign.
He meant conservative content on Facebook that contradicts the government narrative. It’s really Fox News he hates and its 2 million Trump-loving viewers, the pesky folk who didn’t vote for him and don’t buy his fake unity, as in: “Shut up and do what you’re told.”
So he calls them killers in the hope of siccing his media allies on them. It’s not really Dr. Mercola he wants floating in the Yangtze. It’s Tucker Carlson.
Having convinced you that only his government can keep you safe from the virus, now Biden has to eliminate any information to the contrary — or PEOPLE WILL DIE!
As New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told her people last week after being warmly praised by Biden, the government “will continue to be your single source of truth. Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.”
It’s not censorship, it’s keeping you safe from misinformation.
In the same way, it’s for our own good that tech companies hand over every morsel of digital information they hold on any customer to law enforcement.
The media don’t complain about this Orwellian overreach because it’s employed against people they detest. So what if the FBI was granted a search warrant to rummage through Rudy Giuliani’s cloud for a year without his knowledge. He deserved it.
As for the MAGA boomers rounded up over the Capitol riot, no punishment is harsh enough. Six months of solitary confinement in a DC jail, drinking water so dirty it has to be strained through a sock, no problem. The president is keeping the nation safe from civil war!
So it’s not really a surprise to learn that Big Tech is working as an arm of the surveillance state. The FBI is spraying around so many search warrants that Apple, Facebook and Google now have official law enforcement departments devoted to this growth industry.
Apple calls it a “privacy and law enforcement compliance department,” compliance being the operative word and privacy nonexistent.
Documents obtained through discovery from a lawyer for some of the January Sixers show the extent of the intrusion. One warrant requires Facebook to hand over: “The contents of any available messages . . . attachments, draft messages, posts, chats, video calling history, ‘friend’ requests, discussions, recordings, images . . . IP addresses . . . subscriber records and login history . . . full name, physical address, telephone numbers, birthdate, security questions and passwords” etc.
It’s not metadata. It’s megadata, and all purloined without your knowledge, since courts are placing gags on tech companies not to disclose the existence of the warrants.
There is no clearer evidence that the tech monopolies are trampling on our constitutional rights on behalf of a government which is prohibited from doing so.
This is the basis of Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter and Google for censoring him. Their collusion with the government means they no longer should be treated as private companies but as state actors bound by the First Amendment.
The Biden administration has handed Trump a gift. Another selfown for the Dems.
Talk about a ship of (dangerous) fools.