Re: The Twitter Files … Advocates of free speech argue, “We can’t regulate private industry; particularly freedom of speech. If Twitter doesn’t want to have certain people on their platform, as a private company, then it’s their choice.”
I agree, in principle. However: do private companies get to work with the government — relying on the use of government authority, power and influence — to turn on their own customers? Does the government have a right, in a free country, to pressure, intimidate or bribe an otherwise private company into acting as private contractors to brazenly violate the First Amendment? Absolutely not.
The answer here is to regulate the government — not to regulate social media companies. If it’s impossible to regulate the government (and at present, it is), then it will NOT be possible to have that corrupt government regulate the social media companies as you fantasize.
Adding yet another government agency to be in charge of Facebook and Twitter to “regulate” them on the behalf of dissenting citizens will not work. Why? Because it won’t happen. The type of people staffing these agencies will be the same types of people who presently staff and run the FBI, DHS, the CIA and frankly, even now, the U.S. military. While good people probably still work for these organizations, these agencies clearly are run (at the top, especially since Obama) by corrupt and rotten people who treat American citizens with differing political views as THE enemy. No regulatory structure will resolve this.
The entities who require regulating are the government agencies themselves. My vote goes for DEFUNDING — immediately — the FBI, the DHS and massively curbing (if not eliminating) the CIA and strongly reforming what’s left of the American defense, assuming that’s still possible. I know Republicans don’t have enough power in Congress to do so, and never would do so, because most Republicans are just as corrupt as the hard core Communists themselves.
Short of that, sadly, we’re left with a metastasizing dictatorship in the former apparatus of the American republic, and nothing but secession, nullification and (tragically) civil war and strife will be the outcome, at least on our current course. Our current course consists of the leftist totalitarians controlling EVERYTHING (government and business) and winning EVERYTHING, with the rest of us as victims. Tell me how this is sustainable.
It’s interesting to note that according to the Twitter files, the FBI began its use of a private company (Twitter) to impose censorship on American citizens in earnest in early 2020 (and to a lesser degree starting in 2017). President Trump was still in office. Read that again. It was the Trump Administration who began the scandalous activity that ultimately led to Trump’s likely unlawful removal from office, the destruction of American cities via Black Lives Matter domestic terrorism and, of course, the “scamdemic” orchestrated by 21st Century oligarchs who literally stopped the engine of the world for a year or two.
I’m pointing this out not to condemn President Trump or the many good people in his administration, people who worked hard and paid a terrible price to do this country a lot of good. I would vote for Trump again (not that elections matter any longer). However, doesn’t this show that by the time Trump came to office, it was already too late to reform an FBI, DHS, CIA and American military that had already been corrupted by Obama and others?
The writing, to me, seems to be on the wall. Either we start looking at things like secession or perhaps a Constitutional Convention (legal under our existing Constitution) to massively (and I mean massively) rein in the powers of the existing federal authoritarian regime — or we’re done as a free country.
Speaking for myself, I’d rather fight than be done. What say you?
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