My longtime friend and former college roommate recently asked me a thought-provoking question: if America’s Big Tech platforms can blatantly and with impunity discriminate against a readily identifiable class of patrons, then why couldn’t Woolworth’s back in the day, or the bus companies in Montgomery or Tallahassee?
That’s a damn good question, I thought to myself.
I had already written 80 percent of what would have been a multiple thread Twitter post about the wrongs Section 230 allowed our Big Tech titans to inflict on Americans, but this question drew a compare and contrast I knew would trigger left-wingers everywhere with its juxtaposition of 1950s violations of equal protection by corporate giants with 21st century violations of the same by equally wrong corporate giants.
So, as our national civics lesson continues to unfold an examination of why Big Tech is representative of America’s New Ku Klux Klan orthodoxy is in order.
Little recognized facts today include this: the 20th century KKK was actually bigger in the North than it was in the South in the 1920s, and progressive Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, formerly the head of Princeton University, seriously boosted the popularity of the KKK by screening the 1915 film, “Birth of A Nation.”
Progressives, most often through the auspices of the Democratic Party, historically have wreaked havoc upon our nation and successfully hidden their role in the damage done.
As I have taken pains to note on Twitter threads before being suspended by that corporate giant, America has been under attack for 100 years by a godless theology (Communism) masquerading as an ideology (Socialism) successfully fooling useful idiots for decades by lurking within a movement (Progressivism) designed to destroy the American Republic.
In the language of today, Communism is malware and anathema to the God-given rights bestowed upon every American citizen by our world-historic Constitution.
The most effective application of communistic malware in American history may well be Section 230.
But it was not always or even necessarily so. For a quick overview regarding one aspect of the problem presented today by Section 230, download and read this piece by Ron Coleman, “Corporate Censorship in Social Media, Section 230 and a Role for the States.” This is not the problem, however.
For that, a 2001 Florida Supreme Court decision, Jane Doe v. AOL, paints the picture, makes the point clear, and indirectly exposes the work of our controlling progressive cabal that bastardized the clear meaning Section 230 as passed by Congress. It did this not in its controlling decision; instead, we can find it in the remarkable dissent by Justice Fred Lewis, a West Virginian who came to Florida for college, got sand in his shoes, and never left.
Something about the holding in the case was so off, Lewis had to eviscerate it.
I understand that it may be somewhat attractive for the majority to follow an existing published opinion from a different jurisdiction; however, I conclude that, because the analysis upon which it is based is faulty and leads to a totally unacceptable interpretation, it should not be followed. Therefore, I dissent.
Lewis went on to say,
By interpreting the statute to provide this carte blanche immunity for wrongful conduct plainly not intended by Congress, the majority view:
[1] ignores the common law underpinnings of the present controversy;
[2] fails to accommodate the traditional distinction between publishers and distributors consistently recognized in American jurisprudence;
[3] overlooks the historical timing of the subject legislation in the context of developing case law;
[4] excludes proper analysis of the careful wording of the subject legislation; and
[5] does not consider the obvious intent additionally underscored by Congress both in the stated policies underlying the statute, and in the statute’s legislative history.
“These grounds,” Lewis concluded, “collectively—coupled with the rationale of the very case which the majority deems controlling—warrant a far different result.”
Indeed they did. Precisely how a federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia—essentially Washington, D.C.—could get this congressional statute so wrong likely merits criminal investigation. Suffice it to say, some form of wrongful influence seems apparent to me.
None of which is surprising given the events of today. As it was in the heyday of the KKK during the 1920s, it is only a select component of Americans who now constitute the in-crowd. Their norms, social values, and interpretations of the law control the ruling landscape.
As I argued in a November 2017 American Greatness column, Donald J. Trump is simultaneously our deprogrammer-in-chief and liberator-in-chief. Not just for White America, but for all of America.
As I listened to Patrick Gunnels open his live stream broadcast on the night of January 15 with a reading of Trump’s first term inaugural address, I was reminded of the applicability of those two titles, deprogrammer-in-chief and liberator-in-chief. I was also reminded how Trump’s voice weirdly affects so many.
We live in a time where such profoundly unserious and untruthful narratives are insisted upon, I can’t help but wonder . . . if Barack Obama read Donald Trump’s inaugural address to an unsuspecting podcast audience, would many fundamentally receive it differently?
Yes, they almost certainly would.
And isn’t that merely another manifestation of a Klan-like irrationality stamped, approved, and reinforced by our Big Tech overlords who dare to otherize some of us?
Isn’t that merely another manifestation of our Klan-like, self-anointed overlords who dare to try and rule over us in contradiction to our God-given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Where’s the Civil Rights Act when a conservative American, black or white or otherwise, needs it merely to reinforce a right already possessed?