Like everywhere else populated by humans, the United States has a zeitgeist:
“[T]he general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.”
The U.S. zeitgeist has for many decades been rotting on the vine. Because of its great and growing infestation by Leftism.
Leftism destroys everything. And it is well on the way to destroying America.
The 2020 presidential contest between American re-revolutionary Donald Trump and Leftist DC lifer Joe Biden will determine whether or not the country again staves off the Left’s national coup de grace:
“[A] death blow or death shot administered to end the suffering of one mortally wounded; a decisive finishing blow, act, or event.”
Which is why the 2020 presidential election is such an existential event. Even more so than 2016’s Flight 93 election.
Four years ago, the Left wasn’t sure Donald Trump meant business with his “Drain the Swamp” rhetoric. Now they know he does. So they have gone full-on, full-out nuts:
The Left has finally, once and for all, pulled out all the stops. Gone is the relatively patient incrementalism that has served them so well the last half-century-plus. Like Queen’s Freddie Mercury, they want it all, and they want it now.
Pack the Supreme Court? Of course. Add Leftist states to pack the Congress? Of course. End the Electoral College? Of course. End the Senate filibuster? Of course. End all real energy production? Of course. Destroy us with environmental radicalism? Of course. Jam us with trillions of dollars in additional taxes? Of course.
And if they don’t win? The most costly manmade damage in history will be made to look like a parking violation: Cities Across U.S. Boarding Up in Anticipation of Election Night Riots.
Left’s Point Person for Post-Election Violence Prep Linked to Arabella Advisors:
“The point person for the Fight Back Table, a coalition of liberal organizations planning for a ‘post-Election Day political apocalypse scenario,’ leads a progressive coalition that is part of a massive liberal dark money network.…
“Fight Back Table’s efforts to prepare for ‘mass public unrest’ following the Nov. 3 election [is] … a project of Arabella Advisors’ Sixteen Thirty Fund. The Sixteen Thirty Fund is a dark money network that provides wealthy donors anonymity as they push large sums into the left’s organizational efforts.
“The connections suggest that post-election mobilization isn’t just the project of a liberal fringe, but that powerful Democratic Party interest groups are also involved.”
The only civilized way to fight back against all this Leftist barbarity is with free speech and the free exchange of ideas. That is why our Founders ensconced in the Constitution unfettered protection of free speech.
Except we have mostly outsourced our First Amendment rights to a gaggle of unelected Leftist Big Tech billionaires. And they have been very busy eviscerating the rights of anyone not of the Left.
Trump is the chief executive of our government. He isn’t silencing anyone. However, Big Tech is silencing him. And his Press Secretary.
Oh: And Big Tech is censoring hundreds of thousands of websites and people who do not toe the Leftist line:
The Likes of Google and Facebook Are Now Driving the ‘News’ Media Cart
Twitter Employees Admit to Censoring and ‘Shadow Banning’ Conservatives
Facebook Moderators Brag About Deleting Pro-Trump Posts
Dr. Robert Epstein: Google Will Shift 10% of Voters to Make Trump a ‘Blip in History’.
Election interference, anyone? Speech suppression, anyone? Communist China, anyone? Consider this: Facebook Hires Chinese Nationals to Censor Platform.
Leftist Big Tech billionaires got to be billionaires—and their companies trillionaires—via the biggest case of government cronyism in the history of government cronyism. That would be Section 230:
“The law, passed in 1996, was designed to prevent internet companies from being treated as publishers and was done in part to allow the internet to flourish.
“It shields companies that can host trillions of messages, like Facebook and Twitter, from being sued by anyone who is wronged by something someone else has posted.
“Section 230 protections also allow social media platforms to moderate their content by removing posts that violate the services’ own standards, so long as they are acting in ‘good faith.’”
Except …
‘In Bad Faith’: Big Tech’s Growing Conservative Censorship.
In defense of their mass cronyism and mass censorship, the Left absurdly asserts,
All About Section 230, a Rule that Made the Modern Internet.
Except it didn’t make the modern Internet. It made the modern Comment Section. And comment sections are the Internet’s sewer.
Most Big Tech sites—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.—are nothing more than glorified comment sections.
Section 230 shielded Big Tech from the legal realities the rest of the Internet must face. So they grew much more gigantic than an actually free market would have ever allowed.
Here’s a thought exercise:
If the Web’s comment’s sections disappeared tomorrow, the Earth would not go careening out of its orbit and into the Sun. In fact, most of the Web would be almost wholly unaffected. In fact, it would be made demonstrably better.
In addition to massively warping elections, these Big Tech trillion-dollar comment sections have contributed mightily to the evisceration of civil discourse and civilization:
How Social Media Is Ruining Society.
“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe.”—Ayn Rand
Non-Leftists have begun dipping their toes in the Section 230 water, though only timidly:
Section 230 – Mend It, Don’t End It.
The problem? Any attempt to create change within the confines of Section 230 is rightly cited as a First Amendment violation:
Trump Section 230 Order Would Violate the First Amendment in the Name of Free Speech.
So you can’t mend Section 230. You have to end it.
That is a great idea. Ending government cronyism is always a great idea.
Big Tech is constantly, incessantly violating Section 230 anyway: Big Tech’s Lying Legal Two-Step—To Defend Their Censorship of Conservatives.
So it’s got to go.
Not satisfied with one massive dose of gargantuan cronyism, Big Tech has for two decades pushed for another. Behold Network Neutrality.
Net neutrality would outlaw Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from charging Big Tech for the massive bandwidth they use. Which means we would pay much, much more for our service, to subsidize the trillionaire Big Tech companies.
Net neutrality is also the government dictating what ISPs can and can not say: How Net Neutrality Violates the First Amendment.
Too-Huge Big Tech got too huge via the massive government cronyism that is Section 230. And it defends its massive government cronyism by citing the First Amendment while demanding even more massive government cronyism via net neutrality, which would massively violate the First Amendment.
Conclusion: we should have neither Section 230 nor net neutrality.
We are attempting to conduct the most important presidential election in our nation’s history within Big Tech’s ultra-Leftist, massively warped, bigoted, biased, unfree speech landscape.
We have a lot of reforming to do.