January 13, 2021

The Systemic ‘Redlining’ of Free Speech — Violating Civil Rights

Mass suppression of conservative speech by Big Tech and Leftmedia platforms is the Demos’ key strategy for controlling public opinion.

“But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood, I leave to others to restore it to its strength, by recalling it within the pale of truth.” —Thomas Jefferson (1805)

The political consequences of the January 6th 2021 Capitol riot, and the political theatrics of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “insurrection investigation committee, will have significant consequences on the upcoming 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election.

Democrats in the Executive and Legislative branches are using that disgraceful incident as the latest catalyst to shift their government-backed media cancel culture into in high gear, empowering Big Tech to use that riot as a smokescreen to unleash a surge of suppression and purges across various social media platforms, and penalizing financial institutions and vendors who support conservatives.

The First Amendment states plainly: "Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or the press…” but they have done just that by passing laws protecting BIG Tech media platforms from liability associated with doing the Demos’ political bidding – silencing their opponents.

What started as a trickle turned into a flood, first with the Facebook and Twitter cancelations of President Donald Trump’s accounts, which severed his ties with almost 90 million followers. Mark Zuckerberg claimed that his Facebook and Instagram applications will be blocking Trump indefinitely: “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.” A day later, Twitter also canceled Trump. (Remember when Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey insisted, “Twitter stands for freedom of expression. Twitter stands for speaking truth to power”?)

No word on when they will be blocking the accounts of leftists who have been serially guilty of violating the same platform policies.

This comes after the Demo social- and mass-media collusion to defeat Trump in November – most notably the massive and unprecedented coordinated cover-up of Joe Biden’s indisputably corrupt ChiCom dealings in the weeks ahead of the 2020 election. Only after the election, when it was safe to reveal the truth, did Leftmedia outlets begrudgingly admit the evidence they suppressed before the election, was factual.

Recall that in the two weeks before the presidential election, Facebook and Twitter blacked out user references to a New York Post story connecting Hunter and Joe Biden in a quid pro quo with corrupt Ukraine officials. As I had previously noted, the Democrats attempted to impeach Donald Trump for what Joe Biden actually did in a shady influence scam with Ukrainian officials.

(For the record, on behalf of Twitter’s disgraceful blackout, a month after the election CEO Jack Dorsey admitted, “Our communication around our actions on the New York Post article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable. … Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix. Our goal is to attempt to add context, and now we have capabilities to do that.” Too little, too late.)

If Trump’s claim the election was stolen is grounds for canceling social media accounts, then why was Nancy Pelosi not canceled in 2017 after posting this comment on social media? “Our election was hijacked,” she asserted. “There is no question.” Her post included the hashtag “ProtectOurDemocracy.” Democrats have repeated that theme ad nauseam over the last four years, but with no takedowns.

I should note here that Trump’s list of grievances about why he lost the election obscure the real reason he lost – the Democrat’s bulk-mail balloting fraud. Counting bulk-mail ballots without authenticating who submitted those ballots, combined with the systemic suppression of conservative views, are two very powerful tools to achieve perpetual Democrat control.

The most recent Big Tech bans were the proverbial “tip of the iceberg.” These leftist-controlled platforms have launched a much broader purge of conservative organization and affiliates, and now includes Big Tech collusion between Apple, Google, and Amazon to shut down competing views and organizations, including social media competitor, Parler, which should prompt antitrust and racketeering investigations. They are even going after citizen journalists.

Remember 2016, when the mainstream media eagerly lapped up the claim by the Obama/Clinton co-conspirators and their Deep State operatives that Russia had something on Trump?

As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned this week, the ChiComs are “inside the gates,” and as I have noted, they are just days away from being inside the White House.

In addition to the Left’s canceling and de-platforming frenzy, a far more consequential factor in the suppression of free speech is collusion between the Demos and their Leftmediafact-checkers,” the most insidious and least visible means of systemically redlining free speech. In reality, their so-called “fact checkers” are fact blockers, who are propagating their own politically-motivated disinformation while claiming to ‘check’ disinformation. And they are deploying a new censorship facade under the auspices of identifying “false and misleading” information.

In effect, they are aggressively suppressing speech that does not comport with their leftist political agenda while simultaneously promoting that agenda.

And now social media “fact checkers” are employing a catch-all method for shutting down speech, the ubiquitous claim that a quote or post is “missing context” prompting blackout, removal and account penalties against conservative media outlets, including The Patriot Post. And we have no recourse to end the deliberate “shadow banning” of our content on social media – systemically limiting our content reach to our followers on their platforms, despite the fact those followers have deliberately selected to see our content – despite the fact their “fact checks” fail fact check scrutiny.

Here’s what you need to know about the Demo/Leftmedia/Big Tech efforts to cancel conservative voices.

First, given the fact Democrats are coming to power, conservative censorship and purges by Big Tech play right into their favor. Regarding the prospect of any meaningful congressional regulation regarding the suppression of free speech, in June of 2020, Trump issued an Executive Order on Section 230 in an attempt to address abuse of that provision by social media platforms, and the objective of that EO will eventually be taken up by the Supreme Court.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 stipulates, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” 1996 was the year The Patriot Post launched our publication online, and there were no social media platforms at that time.

But with the rise of leftist-controlled platforms, came censorship of opposing views, such censorship becoming systemic in recent years. That clearly pose a direct threat to our Constitution and is a violation of Civil Rights.

And the suppression of free speech extended deep into Leftmedia outlets and search engines.

Trump’s order clarified the existing rules and called for the Federal Communications Commission to engage in greater enforcement and oversight in order to end the abuse of Section 230’s provision which has allowed social media companies to censor content using the dubiously defined decency rules with no recourse for those being censured.

Of course, Biden will dispense with that EO (already erased from the White House website).

Democrats will orchestrate a legislative ruse, colluding with the Big Tech giants to appear they are reigning in that censorship, but that appearance will be a deception. As I have argued previously, Democrats will use Big Tech legislation to further empower censorship of conservative views. The Big Tech platforms are assured of no meaningful Demo challenges to their Section 230 protections and they will not be subjected to congressional anti-trust hearings and litigation.

Whether or not the Supreme Court will take on social media Redlining of free speech, we will see.

Second, and of more grave significance, the mass and social media assault on free speech constitutes an abject civil rights violation of First Amendment assurances guaranteed to all Americans — and a model for the coming civil rights violation of the Second Amendment.

When Americans are targeted because of our constitutionally protected political and/or religious views, leading to coordinated shadow-banning of content, de-platforming individuals or organizations and in some cases then defunding those individuals and businesses when financial institutions selectively refuse services, that constitutes a digital form of “redlining” in violation of the most fundamental of civil rights. Without a Republican gauntlet, the the surge in the systemic redline suppression of civil rights by institutions will continue – and at present few Republicans sufficiently understand the enormous impact of this background suppression being used by social media giants.

If Republican legislators truly understood the threat of speech suppression by the Demos’ Leftmedia and Big Tech propagandists, and the implications for undermining free and fair elections, they would aggressively pass into law regulations that could immediately curb social media data mining as a means to ensure limits on shadow-banning conservative free speech.

Let me be clear about this: When commercial social media companies ban individuals from their platforms because the expression of their views don’t comport with that company’s views, that is an open violation of that individual’s civil rights. However, the shadow-banning of content for the same reasons is invisible, but has a far more egregious impact on suppression of civil rights than the highly visible de-platforming of high-profile individuals.

While all the congressional focus is on Big Tech high-profile bans, there is virtually no congressional focus on the invisible shadow banning – which is a much more effective means of suppression of free speech, and by a magnitude of 100, more consequential.

As you may recall, financial institutions once used redlining to ensure that Black citizens living in certain areas did not get loans. This coordinated systemic discrimination excluded financial and other services based on race and ethnicity rather than one’s particular merits for receiving services, an abject civil rights violation.

The Obama leftists re-launched financial institution redlining in their 2012 “Operation Chokepoint” strategy using political pressure to “encourage” banks to withdraw any financing for gun manufacturers, a measure the Trump administration stopped. However, some financial institutions continued the practice using alternate justifications. Now, the Biden/Harris regime is undoing of the Trump administration’s “Fair Access to Financial Services” rule, and you can expect the institutional redlining against the Second Amendment to resume with a vengeance.

But institutional discrimination against individuals is, once again, exploding, this time in violation of our fundamental rights to free speech. When commercial institutions, including social media platforms, discriminate against people because of our views, despite the fact they meet the same qualifications as others being served, that constitutes a brazen violation of our civil rights. The “private company” defense for discrimination did not apply in racial redlining and does not apply now.

When considering the Big Tech and Wall Street assault on freedom of speech, religion, the press, and assembly — and the coming assault on the Second Amendment, the “palladium of the rights of the Republic” — understand that this is the Left’s latest discriminatory version of redlining.

So egregious is this collective assault on freedom of speech that even the ACLU is taking note. The ACLU’s legislative counsel, Kate Ruane, notes: “It 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 — especially when political realities make those decisions easier.”

To Ruane’s point, there was an astounding display of hypocrisy this week in a Twitter Public Policy notice ahead of a Ugandan election: “We’re hearing reports that Internet service providers are being ordered to block social media and messaging apps. We strongly condemn internet shutdowns — they are hugely harmful, violate basic human rights and the principles of the #OpenInternet. Access to information and freedom of expression, including the public conversation on Twitter, is never more important than during democratic processes, particularly elections.”

Seriously, read this again: “Access to information and freedom of expression, including the public conversation on Twitter, is never more important than during democratic processes, particularly elections.”

But I would not hold your breath waiting on the ACLU to go after the First Amendment redliners.

Notably, de-platforming concerns have also prompted The Patriot to reluctantly remove the comments page hosted on our site, because if a leftist pretend “Trump supporter” posts something advocating violence or insurrection, a “false flag” attack on our site, we could then suffer the consequences of that post.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and their socialist Democrat Party, are the primary benefactors of the Leftmedia and Big Tech suppression of free speech – making support for that suppression a key component of their strategy to establish a permanent majority. Systemic institutional redlining is the most perilous overt corporate threat to Liberty in the history of our nation.

Thus, expect the acceleration of this unlawful redline purge to continue. They know that the Big Tech purges are the best way to advance their deceptive BIG Lie political agendas.

(Update: As Nate Jackson reports in subsequent analysis on who censors what you read and how it is presented, the Left has significantly expanded its subversive efforts to suppress the free press.)

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776


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