The New American Censorship Program

By Jim Buckley

Sep 19, 2024

We’d be living in a different world today if Elon Musk had not purchased X, formerly known as Twitter. But because he did buy the online platform, conservatives have at least one national and international media outlet that treats every user as an equal. Had Musk purchased X before America’s 17 “intelligence” agencies successfully conspired to snuff the true New York Post story of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and his infamous laptop, we most certainly would have had four more years of the booming Donald J. Trump economy, despite the interruption of Covid-19.

Unfortunately, by colluding with the Democrat Party, the intelligence agencies’ work was enough to slip basement-dweller Joe Biden into the presidency.

That conspiracy was so effective that Democrat politicians ever since have fallen over themselves to promote bills that would codify the kind of insidious complicity that collusion represented.

An interim result is this year’s California Assembly Bill No. 2655, entitled the “Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act of 2024,” which does away with the annoying Constitutional imperatives of the very First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

A Long History of Attempted Censorship

Despite its definitive wording, there have been many challenges to the First Amendment. Presidents as far back as John Adams – who signed off on the “Alien and Sedition Acts” (there were four of them) – tried and often succeeded in suppressing freedoms in the name of “internal security.” The Alien and Sedition Acts specifically banned “the publishing of false or malicious writings against the government and the inciting of opposition to acts of Congress or the president.”

Even otherwise good presidents such as Abraham Lincoln – who suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus in the aftermath of the formation of the Confederacy – acted to suspend portions of the Constitution for the sake of “internal security.” Lincoln jailed perhaps as many as 2,000 political opponents during the Civil War and kept them imprisoned, offering neither a criminal charge nor the benefit of a trial.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously allowed the rounding up of all Japanese speakers – including many U.S. citizens – in the aftermath of Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

German speakers – citizens and non-citizens alike – were regularly and illegally detained during World War I, etc.

After the horrific terrorist acts of 9/11, Congress passed, and the then-president George W. Bush signed into law an anacronym of “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, better known as the USA Patriot Act of 2001. The act allowed for expanded surveillance of individuals and groups both internationally and domestically, made it easier for various federal intelligence agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, to coordinate and communicate with each other. It also called for increased penalties for those engaging in a long list of new charges, mostly connected to terrorism. All, naturally, meant to “strengthen national security.”

The Patriot Act effectively suspends the Constitutional rights of those charged under the act by allowing government to hold them indefinitely and without trial. The Act was scheduled to sunset on December 31, 2005, but it has been regularly extended, at least through 2020.

California Enacts New Law “Defending Democracy”

The state of California has stepped into the breach with passage of the “Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act of 2024” (signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on 17 Sep 2024).

Here are just some of its provisions, as outlined by the California Legislative Counsel’s Digest:

“The bill would require a large online platform, as defined, to block the posting of materially deceptive content related to elections in California, during specified periods before and after an election. The bill would require a large online platform to label certain additional content inauthentic, fake, or false during specified periods before and after an election in California. The bill would require a large online platform to develop procedures for California residents to report content that has not been blocked or labeled in compliance with the act.”

The actual wording of the 14-page bill is filled with gobbledygook that would allow the powers that be (read: California Democrats) to pretty much shut out anything they deemed “misinformation.”

Hello George Orwell; good-bye freedom of speech.

When Democrats once again hold the reins of the Presidency, Senate, and House –and they will one day – there should be no doubt they’ll craft their own version of “Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act of 1984… er, 2024,” and there is also no doubt the Act they create will be even more menacing.

Though the two following ladies may not be around by the time Democrats seize control of the levers of power, they represent the kind of thinking that lurks behind these measures:

Morning Madness on MSNBC

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and his wife, Mika Brzezinski, recently featured former Obama White House adviser Susan Rice on their program. This is some of that interview:

Mika Brzezinski: “I’d love to hear your comments on what Trump plans to do in Springfield and across the board when it comes to denaturalization processes and mass deportations.”

Susan Rice: “This is really quite terrifying. We’ve heard for many, many months about his plans for mass deportations of undocumented persons here in the United States. That would be hugely violent and disruptive, separating families, causing millions to be expelled through the use of force, but what he’s saying now is something quite different and even more scary.

“What he is saying is, you recall last week Donald Trump went out and said that he was going to expel the Haitians in this country starting in Springfield who are here in this country legally, legally, working with authorization, and send them to Venezuela of all places. He has said very clearly that he is going to deport immigrants who are here legally, but he said something that’s even more outrageous, and that is what is reflected in Stephen Miller’s social media post, and that is that he will expel and denaturalize American citizens, American citizens who were not born here.

“There are over twenty-five million American citizens who are naturalized, who are law-abiding, who are taxpayers, who have families in this country. They are fathers, they are mothers, they are children, they are our neighbors, they are American citizens. Back in the Trump administration they set up an office in the Justice Department to denaturalize American citizens…

“…Can you imagine what that means for this country when American citizens living here lawfully, living their lives with their family, can one day wake up and find themselves denaturalized and deported? Now that the Supreme Court has said that the President of the United States, Donald Trump – if God forbid it were to be him again – can do whatever he wants in the office of the presidency with immunity, this is a recipe for mass expulsions of American citizens…

“…With the Supreme Court saying that a president has literally no constraints on what he does in that office, then there is nothing preventing the federal government from literally – without due process – walking into people’s homes and separating families if they don’t like, you know, the color of their skin, or their country of origin, or their religion, or you name it, of whomever it is who is here in this country legally as an American citizen.”

She Wants to Lock You Up

Whew.

If that MSNBC interview isn’t “misinformation” and “disinformation” I don’t know what is. Susan Rice’s statements are the rambling of a certifiable lunatic.

Here’s more from another defender of “our democracy,” someone who came within a cat’s whisker of becoming President of the United States:

Hillary Clinton (during an on-air “conversation” with left-wing MSNBC hack Rachel Maddow): “There were Russians engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016, but I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda and whether they should be civilly or criminally charged would be something that would be a better deterrent.”

Hillary opined later, shaking her head in dismay, that “The press needs to create a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is. He is a danger to our country and world.”

This, from the woman whose campaign hired British ex-MI6 operative Christopher Steele to put together a dossier of rumor and innuendo gathered from various – and completely unreliable – Russian sources.

Rice and Clinton are and/or would be the kind of apparatchiks who’d be assigned to classify what would or wouldn’t be criminally liable “misinformation” and who would also have the ability to fine and/or imprison you for infractions.

You have every reason to be afraid.

The New American Censorship Program

By Jim Buckley

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