The Big Tech billionaire who hates democracy

Three times last Monday morning, I attempted to post criticism of Joe Biden's open-borders immigration policy and its disastrous consequences. Specifically, a recent flood of hundreds of illegal aliens (the term used in government documents) over the Texas border. They violently overwhelmed that state's National Guard agents.

(Newsweek reported that, astoundingly, the invading rioters could be allowed to stay in the country whose sovereign right to enforce our Southern border they had given the finger. Credit Joe Biden and the Democrats.)

My attempted Facebook post disappeared each time. I eventually received a notice that my message violated "community standards," but no supposed offense was specified. The option to register an objection did not function.

Reportedly, Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg has begun blocking conservative expression on Instagram. Breitbart termed that his "latest scheme to help Joe Biden."

Instagram and Facebook are both owned by Meta. The liberal California media mogul is Meta's largest shareholder.

Are Zuckerberg/Meta now impeding Americans' political speech on Facebook, also? Should that possibility be revealed as actual, I will leave Facebook, as many others also surely will. To quote a popular maxim: "Go woke, Go broke."

Per Open Secrets documentation, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla have in past years lavished contributions almost exclusively on Democrat candidates and regional election offices, surely with the ambition of skewing ballot outcomes.

The couple did also contribute to RINO Chris Christie's stunt campaign. His sole reason for running was to hinder the overwhelmingly popular Donald Trump, a tactic that failed spectacularly for all the world to witness. The disgraced former New Jersey governor has since receded into deserved obscurity.

Last January, The Federalist published a damning report on a new election-warping gambit: The Zuckerbuck-flooded Center for Tech and Civic Life could "funnel more than $700 million to election offices during the 2024 election under the auspices of CTCL officials and their partners in the nonprofit world of left-wing activism.

There's nothing untoward about donating to candidates with whom one agrees. I do that. Most donors do.

But when such inclination is accompanied by partisan expression- blacklisting and greasing the palms of local election officials, a behavioral pattern is evidenced and corruption's stench becomes manifest.

In the hours following my illegal immigrant-invasion Facebook posts being blocked, I was able to post on other topics. My speculation is that the site may now screen for phrases like " illegal immigrant," and automatically prevent visibility for related messages.

No election witness would be flabbergasted by the left-wing Mark Zuckerberg attempting to pervert America's 2024 presidential campaign. It seems he, like the Democrat Party itself, hopes to despoil another ballot competition for mentally enfeebled Joe.

On Friday, 3/22, this letter of mine was published by the Des Moines Register, Iowa's largest newspaper:

Safeguard children by keeping school materials age-appropriate  

Though not a parent, I have been a child. That qualifies me to speak on this.

A March 17 story reported that the Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll had found majority support for student access to sexually graphic books. 

Throughout the piece, the writers freely used the sensational phrase "book ban," despite its not being applicable in this case. The books in question can be written, published, marketed, and stocked in public libraries. 

The writers did note that. But they sat on the inconvenient truth until their article's penultimate paragraph, and only portrayed the reality as merely child-protection advocates' partisan contention.

A question unaddressed in the story is this: Given that school computers are (presumably) set to prevent student access to XXX pornography, why should children have access to such imagery in school library books? 

Will those who today push for school libraries to stock graphically salacious books soon challenge school internet prohibitions of sexual depictions, as well?

The 'progressive' ambition of establishing youngsters as autonomous agents free from parental regulation and subject to state manipulation is apparent in disdain of parents' proper roles as education arbiters. (The identical desire to wrest control of minors from parents animates school personnel 'transitioning' children in secret.)

I take a backseat to no man in opposing censorship of materials available to adults like myself, whether it be books, records, movies, online sites, or some communication vehicle not yet invented.  

As a Marshalltown resident in the 1980s, I publicly opposed a pro-censorship pressure group there that called for the shuttering of an adults-only bookstore. My activism included an essay in the local newspaper.

But minors are another matter. The concept of "age appropriateness" is a legitimate one that should guide this discussion. 

Among adult responsibilities is the safeguarding of children. Those who would throw wide the inappropriate-material door for youths (who are definitionally underdeveloped in mind and temperament) are failing that moral obligation.

DC Larson, Waterloo

Speakers gagged by Biden Democrats

That many of today's Democrats despise the First Amendment as much as they do the Constitution's other guarantees to individual liberty is an egregious truth.

Two crisp examples are before us.

Steve Nikoui's son, U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, was among American personnel killed by a suicide bomber in 2021, at the Abbey Gate entrance of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. 

That tragedy occured during what Western Journal termed "Biden's disastrous and disorganized exit from Afghanistan." As Donald Trump often reminds rally attendees, the inept Biden also abandoned to the Taliban some $83 million worth of American military equipment.

Gold Star father Steve Nikoui attended Biden's preposterous State Of the Union address as a guest of Rep. Brian Mast of Florida. The SOTU speech is a traditional custom, but fog-headed invalid Biden perverted it into a campaign event. 

"Not since President Lincoln and the Civil war have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today!" the seemingly dosed president spat, as he smeared tens of millions of law-abiding patriotic Americans.

When Biden deceitfully boasted of the country's safety under him ("America is safer today than when I took office," lied the career politician), Steve Nikoui could tolerate no more of the bilge.

"Do you remember Abby Gate? U.S. Marines?" he yelled in response.

But in these days when liberty is so reviled by Democrats, defying an office-ensconced progressive autocrat brings harsh punitive actions from armed agents of The State. Praetorian Guard thugs quickly set upon Nikoui, stifling him and hustling the heretic from the hall.

Of course, he was then handcuffed and jailed. An 'enemy of The State,' Democrats might sneer.

Mast visited the imprisoned Gold Star father. "This is America," the representative told Florida ABC affiliate WPBF. "And the blood that paid for the ability for us all to demonstrate and address the government for grievances and everything else that the First Amendment enshrines and every amendment and every part of our Bill of Rights - his family paid for that in blood."

WPBF noted that it reached out to the White House, but had received no reaction. Which seems indicative of indifference.

(On Tuesday, 3/19, all charges against Nikoui were dropped. Of course, his attempt to seek "redress of grievances" had already been squelched by the Biden government.)

In Washington State, meanwhile, Democrat Sen. Javier Valdez has introduced legislation that would establish a "hate-speech hotline." The Gateway Pundit reported that Senate bill 5427 was passed by that state's senate in a 30-18 vote. In the House, the successful margin was 56-39.

The clampdown bill would allow self-righteous actors to report and potentially prompt State repression of citizen speech subjectively deemed offensive. 

Per Gateway Pundit, 5427 states: "Bias incident means a person's hostile expression of animus toward another person, relating to the other person's actual or perceived race, color, ethnicity, religion, ancestry, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, or mental, physical, or sensory disability."

The bill does exempt government criticism from its many prohibitions of citizen expression. But moves to squelch that, too, will doubtlessly follow.

It now awaits (and is expected to receive) Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee's imprimatur.

Inslee is notorious for his hostility toward political expression. Prior to a 2016 Washington visit by then-candidate Donald Trump, Inslee held a press conference at which he pompously declared "Your hate is not welcome in our state!" 

The governor went on to decry Trump's supposedly "dangerous rhetoric." Obviously, as is currently fashionable among his Democrat fellows, Inslee exploits the 'hate' hobgoblin as an anti-free speech  vehicle.

Fox News notes that critics of a previous bid to grant Washington State activists censorhip capacity called the bill a "tattletail hotline."

(A previous initiative guaranteed supposedly injured parties up to $2000 per individual or incident. While that provision is not replicated in SSB 5427, the freedom-restrictive nature lives on.)

Liberty Nation warned: "If one cannot say anything that another person of a different race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation finds offensive in some way without being reported to the attorney general's office, than one no longer enjoys the constitutionally protected right to freedom of speech."

This reminds that the Left's ideological inclination toward authoritarian State boot-crushing of citizen expression began with "hate speech" laws and regulations. 'It's for your protection,' partisans assured. 'The common good requires speech monitoring and control.'

Perpetual motion is inherent in progressivism. Its proponents never say "this is far enough."

Once society became acclimated to the non-legal concept of "hate speech," additional verbal classes were cited as also requiring clampdown. Mis- and disinformation (often merely ideas contrary to officially sanctioned opinions) were proclaimed threats in need of legal silencing.

Revelations of Biden agencies coordinating censorship of citizen speech with privately owned and sympathetic online platforms have emerged. Those reports surprised no one familiar with the ways of modern authoritarianism.

While sometimes stormy congressional hearings ensued, neither Biden Administration misddoers nor Big Tech fascists have been sanctioned.

These are perilous days for independent voices. 

An earlier version of this essay of mine was published by American Thinker on 3/13/2024.

The amorality of ABC's George Stephanopoulos

It is probable that ABC's Good Morning America host George Stephanopoulos genuinely feels he did nothing wrong in publicly assaulting teenage-rape victim Nancy Mace. His sleazy past portrays a politically obsessed hatchet-swinger without conscience. 

Examining doctors might conclude he's a sociopath. I can't make that diagnosis, but I am suspicious for sound reasons.

Stephanopoulos savaged Rep. Mace of South Carolina on GMA. Though her appearance had been proposed as an opportunity to share insights on 2024's presidential contest, the devious host opened the segment by attacking Mace personally.

"You endorsed Donald Trump for president," Stephanopoulos began. "Judges in two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming a victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony we just saw?"

It was a premeditated ambush offensive. The miniature monster lied numerous times during the segment. The former president was not found liable for rape, but rather "sexual abuse" - that's a pivotal legal distinction.

During her retort, Mace insisted "I'm not going to sit here on your show and be asked a question meant to shame me about another potential rape victim."

The GMA host purred that he had done no such thing, though all watching had just witnessed him doing precisely that.

The interview continued in that sorry vein, with Stephanopoulos attired in the gear of a partisan bully. Without apparent conscience, he pursued political interests and not journalistic ones.

"George Stephanopoulos tried to bully me and shame me as a rape survivor over my support for Donald Trump, which is insane to me, because he wasn't found guilty of rape anywhere," Mace subsequently told Fox's Harris Faulkner, per The Hill. 

The ABC network apparently shares Stephanopoulos's lack of conscience. The Hill article quotes an unnamed ABC spokesperson as praising the host's foulness: "George did his job by asking meaningful questions that are relevant to our viewers."

Democrats generally profess compassion for victims of sexual assault. That those claims are cynically opportunistic was made clear by their post-interview championing of Stephanopoulos and gang predations leveraged against Mace with despicable relish.

On MSNBC, Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough (sans banjo) and Mika Brzezinski, and guest Jonathan Lemire of the left-loyal Politico, castigated the South Carolina representative.

"She's not shamed because she's incapable of being shamed," chortled Scarborough.

"She was acting like an eighth-grader screaming at him," lied Brzezinski. Mace was legitimately outraged, but never screamed.

Politico's Lemire leapt into the anti-victim spectacle. "It is bad acting," he opined. "But really, it's bad faith. What we saw from Representative Mace, it was indeed, although it is impossible to shame. It is shameful."

Other cheerleaders included a Mary Sue writer who thanked (!) the ABC figure for his caddish molestation of Mace, and former Vox associate editor Aaron Rupar. Rupar tweeted commendation for the Democrat host in the scurrilous incident's aftermath. 

The Daily Beast and Raw Story also rushed to join in the pile on. 

Stephanopoulos is not new to levying attacks on women victims whose traumas he calculates as politically deleterious. In 2015, a Jackson Sun columnist recalled "The little guy cut his teeth managing 'bimbo eruptions' when Bill Clinton was running for president. His job was to destroy and discredit anyone who could make his boss look bad."

Decades later, predatory sexual deviant Clinton frolicked on Democrat mega-donor Jeffrey Epstein's 'pedophile island.' This writer has never heard of Stephanopoulos condemning the cretinous 'Slick Willie' for that jolly misbehavior.

At this point, numerous questions present themselves: 

- How do ABC's women employees feel? 

- Kimberly Godwin is the ABC News president. Has she addressed this? If not, why not? Might she perhaps share the effete GMA host's 'all's fair for the Democrat Party' maliciousness? 

- Have feminist and rape-crisis figures spoken out? Can it be that their decisions to remain silent on liberal Stephanopoulos indicate they prioritize abortion advocacy over women victims' welfare? 

Just as Stephanopoulos has a reprehensible record on sex crimes, so does ABC. Informed observers have long known that network's executives tolerate sexual abuses for the sake of political and institutional advantages. 

Its news division attempted to squelch the truth about Democrat Party-donor Harvey Weinstein's Hollywood sex crimes. And the scandalous carnal sins of former ABC celebrity host Matt Lauer are surely ones network suits would prefer be forgotten.

One dearly hopes the fetid Stephanopoulos and the network itself soon find themselves on the wrong end of a massive defamation suit brought by the slandered Trump.

Stephanopoulos's apparent smug confidence that his televised attack on teenage-rape victim Mace would go unpunished would be validated, were serious professional sanctions not forthcoming.

Given ABC's sordid history, though, blow-dried lout Stephanopoulos will get away with his vile performance. Kimberly Godwin might even give him a bonus.

New example of why discerning Americans distrust mainstream news

In October of last year, a Gallup poll found just 32% of Americans have a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in news media. 39% of respondents had "no confidence" in the Fourth estate. That was pronounced a "new high," as just 27% of 2016 poll respondents had answered similarly.

Legacy media brought that sorry appraisal on itself through routine dissembling. Here is the latest instance: 

On March 6, Huffington Post ran an article titled "Mark Robinson's Bizarre Ramble: 'I Absolutely Want To Go Back To the America Where Women Couldn't Vote.'" It related North Carolina's lieutenant governor Mark Robinson once enthused he'd "absolutely" desire to live in such a repressive era. 

While Robinson did in fact voice preference for that time, he did so for a pivotal reason. He explained that it was because Republicans of that era had agitated for women's electoral rights. "And they are the reason women can vote today," he accurately concluded.

The piece's author, Jennifer Bendery, scissored out that important sentence. And she compounded her wrongdoing by reusing the misrepresentative snippet in a subsequent X message. 

Other left-loyal venues quickly circulated Huffington Post's dishonest slant, also not conveying the entire quote - including the last sentence, in which Robinson explained justification. These included MSNBC, Vanity Fair, New Republic, and Vox. 

Surprisingly, usually liberal Snopes noted the quote had been "stripped of its context."

A classic example of ripping apart a full quote, that the remaining  fragment can be waved as sufficiently representative, is widespread mischaracterization of Trump's 2017 post-Charlottesille Unite the Right rally "very fine people" line. 

Viewers of that speech, and readers of its transcript, understand the then-president was referring to protesters on opposite sides of the Robert E. Lee statue debate. And that he specifically denounced hate groups. In fact, he also condemned them before that event and since then.

But for liberal agenda-pushing scribes, facts are irrelevant. They isolated just three of Trump's words - "very fine people" - and strove to palm them off on the gullible as honestly representative. One still reads and hears that false rendering regurgitated, including from conniving Democrats like Joe Biden.

The scurrilous tactic of cropping quotes to deceive news readers and channel them toward conclusions favorable to partisan fortunes joins other arrows of deception in the Fake News quiver. 

Included in that reprehensible number are skewed source selection, ladling subjective opinion phrases like "pro-choice," "gender-affirming care,' and "reproductive rights" into ostensibly straight-news articles, misrepresentative headlines, pro/con citation ratios, and photo choices.

It is also routine for supposedly objective ink-spillers to frame entire pieces acording to their personal progressive mindsets, or even abuse their situations to shovel partisan garbage.

For some three years, remember, allegedly reputable outlets peddled the "Trump-Russia Collusion" hoax. Scores of industry-ensconced donkey shills posing as journalists deceitfully assured America of its verity. 

Astoundingly, some uncritical sorts may yet believe that soundly discredited fiction and persist in patronizing sources that lied to them.

Persons so unwise as to rely upon mainstream news deserve their resultant ignorance.

Everything old and ugly is new again

Given the sickening embrace of antisemitism among many 'progressive' Democrats, it's probably only a matter of time until some Marxist donkey lackwit representing that odious contingent proposes the building of camps.

Such speculation is warranted: From London recently came accounts of anti-Israel scum in the streets shouting Third Reich slur "Judenrat" at opponents. American campuses like Harvard's are also acrawl with similarly hateful cretins. Remember that perpetual motion beyond accepted conventions animates progressivism. 

Another despicable example of Leftists zealously resurrecting a bygone evil is their recent extolling of racial segregation.

A March One Breitbart article told of renewed racial segregation in London. Two upcoming performances of Slave Play will be open exclusively to "black identifying" patrons, lest they be vulnerable to "white gaze."

(Note: This essay will not address the play's unsettling preoccupation with sexual deviance.)

Breitbart noted that during that play's Broadway run of some two years ago, similar racially restrictive performances were arranged.

Broadway and London producers evaded legal penalties with the gimmick of contriving racially segregated performances as private "invitation only" ones.

Ironically, interracial couples would be denied entrance to Slave Play which, per Breitbart "tells the story of interracial relationships throughout American history..."

(The present author is a white man married to a black woman, We would be barred from attending together. It's as if time had tumbled backward.)

That skin-color discrimination has been stoutly defended by New York and London theaters as well as by the play's author, who gushed to the BBC that he is "excited" by planned color-restricted performances. 

One remembers that the same disgusting racist notion sees Leftist employ in 'woke' Boston.

Late last year, Boston Democrat Mayor Michelle Wu convened a racially segregated seasonal event to which only "POC" officials were invited. White ones were purposefully excluded. 

Despite ensuing backlash, Wu refused to concede the truth that segregation is invariably wrong, especially when practiced by politicians like herself who shamelessly court all voters and regularly grab for their tax dollars.

Wu's husband is white. So she may ascribe to the illogical faith that racial integration and segregation are not mutually exclusive, that the latter is somehow a noble ideal of 'POC pride.'

Given her interracial marriage it may be that Democrat Wu, like other unprincipled electoral graspers, merely exploits the matter however advances her situational fortunes. Joe Biden built his career on just such scummy opportunism: An ardent segregationist when a senator - he lamented on the senate floor that busing to integrate schools would produce a "racial jungle" - he has in recent years falsely claimed to have been a youthful civil rights activist.

Boston's execrable Wu may seek reelection in January, 2026. Hopefully, word of her unapologetic flirtation with racial hatred will spread and dash her ambition against rocks.

Racial segregation is always to be condemned. It is flatly immoral, regardless of proponents' identities or their rationalizations. Long ago, such division was rightly condemned in the American public square and ripped from statutes where codified.

Despicable race division is resurgent in 'progressive' precincts. That  merits denunciation by all good people.