Dana Mathewson

John Hinderaker, whom I'm proud to say is a resident of my fair city in Minnesota, and a mover and shaker of Minnesota politics (I met him personally when he moderated our local GOP caucus in 2016), is the senior partner (I believe) of the trio of lawyers who run the Power Line blog. In this piece from yesterday, he explains how the Left is attempting to deny a voice to any who oppose them.

Liberals control every newspaper in America, as far as I know, except the Manchester Union Leader. They control CBS, ABC, NBC and every cable network except Fox News. They control what is left of the news magazines, and pretty much every other magazine, too. Only talk radio and the pesky internet lie outside their grasp, so that is where they seek to impose censorship.

But they have a problem: the First Amendment. The government can’t suppress conservative speech on the ground that it is "hate speech,” i.e., something that liberals don’t like. That was recently reaffirmed by a 9-0 decision of the Supreme Court.

So liberals have outsourced censorship of the internet to the tech titans of Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, most political conversation these days occurs not on the "free” internet, where independent sites like Power Line reside, but rather on social media–Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on. Other players include Google (in its search capacity), Apple, Pinterest, Spotify, etc. Happily–if you are a leftist–all of these tech companies are run by liberals. And because they are private companies, they are not constrained by the First Amendment. They can restrict or ban conservative communications on the ground that they are "hate speech,” or on no grounds whatsoever, with impunity.

And that is exactly what they are doing. This is a big topic. I brought it up this morning while hosting the Laura Ingraham radio show, and it blew up, ultimately consuming half of the three-hour show. Many aspects of the left’s outsourcing of censorship to liberal-run corporations need to be explored, but for now, this is an astonishing example: "Silicon Valley Strikes Back: Facebook Censors PragerU After Google Lawsuit.”

Dennis Prager is probably the foremost public intellectual of our time. His Prager University has been wildly successful. It brings a much-needed conservative antidote to the liberal nonsense to which so many Americans, especially young people, are subjected. That has made Prager a key target of the Left.

This is very, very serious business, folks! The Left has a lot of money available to it (George Soros and Tom Steyer spring to mind, and there are others), in addition to the fact that Google and the outfit that Timothy and I like to call Facebunk, or Fakebook, and a few other names that don't come from childrens' books just automatically don't want to support any ideas they didn't dream up themselves.

Please read the rest of the article. It's here: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/08/how-the-left-is-outsourcing-censorship-of-the-internet.php

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