The Patriot Post® · Monday Short Cuts

Upright I: “If you say that targeted deplatforming, though not Stalinist, is troubling, the same people who want to compel everyone to buy state-mandated health insurance, who want to dictate how corporations compensate their employees, who want to force nuns to buy abortifacients and who want to destroy the lives of bakers and florists who run businesses according to long-held religious beliefs will vigorously defend the value of free-association rights that allow corporations to act this way. So I’m pretty skeptical that most of these people are genuine champions of individual market choices, and aren’t just super excited about silencing people.” —David Harsanyi

Upright II: “Perhaps we could take Twitter’s claim that it is upholding the sanctity of democracy more seriously if it didn’t host Chinese Communist officials who treat slave ownership as a social good or anti-Semitic Iranian officials who regularly use exterminationist rhetoric. I’d rather we just hear everyone, and mock, stigmatize, debunk and undermine bad actors.” —David Harsanyi

Upright III: “Cable news is bad for you. It doesn’t matter if you are addicted to Fox or MSNBC. It’s all infotainment. With some notable exceptions, and there are some, TV is not designed to inform or educate you. TV producers are a lot like the engineers who obsess over how to keep us in casinos. Casinos famously spend amazing amounts of time and money figuring out how to keep people at the tables: the sounds, the air pumped in, the free drinks and the confusing layouts with the hidden exits. These are not perks or design flaws. They are all deliberately placed to keep you in your seat gambling more than you planned on. Most cable news is the same. They know what you are emotional about, and they play it up to keep you watching. If guests aren’t partisan enough, the producers tell them to up the volume and the rancor. This can make for entertaining programming, but it’s not good for us.” —Neil Patel

Upright IV: “We have an amazing country, unique and impressive in so many ways. It’s worth fixing. Given where we are, though, things are not going to fix themselves. It’s easy to pretend that the problem is just with our leaders or with the people who think differently, but it’s not. We have the leaders we deserve. We are the problem. We each have some responsibility for the sad place we are at, and we each have a role to play in fixing it.” —Neil Patel

Upright V: “[Democrat leaders] put these [COVID] rules in place. They’re not even following their own rules. I mean, how many people have gotten caught? ‘Don’t travel. Don’t leave the state.’ Oh, here’s so-and-so on a vacation. Oh, here’s so-and-so at a salon. ‘Don’t eat out at a restaurant unless you’re wearing a mask and separate.’ Oh, here’s a picture of the governor of California violating those rules. Oh, public schools are closed, but I can send my kids to a private school in person.” —NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers

Non compos mentis: “[Not wearing a mask is] chemical warfare so far as I’m concerned.” —Rep. Ayanna Pressley

Hot air: “In protecting our Constitution and our Democracy, we will act with urgency, because this President represents an imminent threat to both. … It is their constitutional and patriotic duty… They will do so guided by their great love of country, determination to protect our democracy and loyalty to our oath to the Constitution. We know that we faced enemies to the Constitution … and we know that the President of the United States incited this insurrection, this armed rebellion against our common country.” —Nancy Pelosi on the Democrats’ “oath to the Constitution” and protecting “our Democracy [sic]”

Orwellian: “We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences. There are people on YouTube, for example, that have a larger audience than daytime CNN, and they are extremely radical and pushing extremely radical views.” —Alex Stamos, former chief security officer of Facebook

And last… “A week before Biden’s inauguration and a study is released announcing that lockdowns don’t work, [Andrew] Cuomo comes out and says that New York can’t stay closed, and the mayor of Chicago is urging restaurants to open ASAP. We are supposed to believe that the timing is coincidental.” —Matt Walsh