Can opinions be defamatory? Jacob G. Hornberger posted an article at fff.org earlier this week that said that: “Alex Jones Got What He Deserved.” SLL posted that article, agreeing with Hornberger’s conclusion in the introduction and in a discussion with a reader in the comment section. Andrew P. Napolitano has a different interpretation of the law. Hornberger has posted two follow-up articles, Part Two and Part Three are at fff.org and I’ve linked them here for those who want to read them. In Part Three Hornberger addresses Napolitano’s argument in the article below. From Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:
“Congress shall make no law abridging … the freedom of speech.” — First Amendment to the Constitution
The iconic language of the First Amendment can be recited by schoolchildren, yet it is ignored by judges in Connecticut when the speech has been uttered by Alex Jones.
Since the modern interpretations of the First Amendment began in the late 1960s, opinions on matters of public interest have been protected speech, so long as some reasons for the opinions were articulated. The reasons can be inaccurate, and the opinions can be wild, bizarre or irrational. But if it is an opinion, it is protected speech — except in Connecticut and except if the speaker is Alex Jones.
Here is the backstory.
The tragedy of Sandy Hook — in which a young madman used his parents’ rifle to slaughter 20 schoolchildren and six adults before killing himself — is a lifelong horror for the surviving family members and their friends. This tragedy is also a matter of public interest implicating the right to keep and bear arms, school security, mental health and free speech.
When the First Amendment was ratified, America was a bold experiment in personal liberty. Yet, the First Amendment only restrained Congress. After the Civil War amendments were added to the Constitution, the courts interpreted the 14th Amendment so as to apply the First Amendment to the states as well.
Keeping unwanted voices off the internet and social media serves the purposes of those who would indoctrinate. From Daisy Luther at theorganicprepper.com:
Just about every website owner I know is feeling personally victimized by the recent social media purge that has been going on. But here’s an interesting fact: it isn’t, as is widely perceived, just conservative voices that are being silenced. It is dissenting voices.
It’s the voices of critical thinkers whose ideas run the gamut of philosophies who find that they no longer have much in the way of reach.
This social media purge affects everyone, even people who are not on social media. It does so in several ways:
Dissenting information is silenced which stifles discussion
Young people who are avid consumers of social media are being literally brainwashed because they only see one side of the story – any story
The social media purge harms websites that post non-establishment information because it stamps out their ability to reach readers who would be interested in their content.
The unfairly biased search results show people who are trying to learn more about a topic only one side of the information.
You don’t have to be on a Twitter feed to see how this is an overwhelmingly anti-American problem. Like it or not, social media is a monumental source of information these days, and when it’s censored to only show one point of view, the future of our republic is in peril. We are well on our way to peak censorship and this has been carefully orchestrated.
Non-establishment websites are in trouble.
Their website traffic is plummeting because they no longer show up anywhere near the top of search results. Their posts on social media are not presented to the public – or even the people who deliberately opted to “follow” them. Here’s an example from my own page. I have more than 30K people who chose to follow my page, as you can see in the top image. But in the bottom image, you can see how many of those people were actually shown my post. And this was actually a more successful one than many.
And the same thing goes for social media like Twitter too. I have an email list and if I didn’t, I’d hardly reach anyone. (If you haven’t signed up for my newsletter, you can do so right here.) And I really have to wonder – will our “offensive” websites one day just disappear, scrubbed from the internet permanently? It’s only a matter of time until the web hosting companies are being pressured to get in on the censorship game.
For the record, I consider myself neither conservative nor liberal. I try to veer away from any form of extremism and I make an effort to think a situation through before automatically aligning myself with a “side.” If anything, I’m a small l libertarian. My core beliefs are personal autonomy and freedom of association are to be sought in all cases that are not harmful to others. And yet, somehow, that is threatening to some people.
Don’t think it’s limited to website owners. Twitter recently banned 70 million accounts, claiming they were “fake.” But there have been repeated accusations that conservative accounts have been at the very least “shadow-banned” if not all out deleted.
The most notable purge recently has been Alex Jones and Infowars.
Love Alex Jones, hate him, or feel utterly ambivalent aside from an occasional eye-roll, he has been the most notable victim to have been thoroughly erased from the public eye as far as the large social media outlets are concerned. He lost his voice on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Apple, and Google. Even his email service provider dumped him.
I’m not personally a huge fan of Jones, but I do believe what happened to him was collusion between social media giants. Big Tech got together and now Alex Jones has to find new ways to reach his very large audience. No one is going to stumble across him accidentally in a Google Search anymore. No one is going to see his videos embedded in another website anymore. Like him or not, he has the right to exist publicly.
Jones has a lot of money so this may not be the end of him, but for most website owners, this would be the absolute end of our ability to do business. And to be able to bring the information we bring, we do have to run our websites as businesses. It’s far more expensive than most people realize to run a site. I know that my own operating costs every month are more than $2000. A site as big as Jones’s would be many times that amount. When all your avenues of monetization are cut off, it wouldn’t be hard for a site – and the dissent and information they share – to cease to exist.
If it’s been a while, I’ll recap the pertinent parts of the plot from Spark Notes.
Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in London, in the nation of Oceania. Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, the Party watches him through telescreens; everywhere he looks he sees the face of the Party’s seemingly omniscient leader, a figure known only as Big Brother. The Party controls everything in Oceania, even the people’s history and language. Currently, the Party is forcing the implementation of an invented language called Newspeak, which attempts to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal. Such thoughtcrime is, in fact, the worst of all crimes…
…As the novel opens, Winston feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of the Party, which prohibits free thought, sex, and any expression of individuality. Winston dislikes the party and has illegally purchased a diary in which to write his criminal thoughts…
…Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party. (source)
The Ministry of Truth is control of all the things from which people could garner their opinions. They provide their own twist on history, current events, entertainment, education, and the arts. The people of Oceana believe them because there isn’t enough information to believe anything else. And questioning the Ministry is a thoughtcrime, punishable by horrible torture or worse. Part of Winston’s job is to turn anyone who doesn’t follow the Ministry line into an unperson and erase them from history as though they never even existed.
So who is behind this mass purge of dissenting voices?
There’s always a money trail to follow. Any time you wonder why or how something has occurred, look for the money. In this video by Ben Swann, an independent journalist who was mysteriously silenced for quite some time, he provides some important insight.
This is happening RIGHT NOW. We are living it. We are living in the world of 1984.
Rest assured, the way things are going, it isn’t long before we will see only what “they” – the people with the power and money to make it happen – want us to see.
Social pressure is also limiting free thought.
And not only do we have organizations limiting our views of things that would broaden our minds, there’s also the rampant social pressure that we’ve seen since the last election.
When we were recently looking at rental homes, a potential landlady asked me for whom I voted in the last election. I didn’t even bother looking at the place because that is not a standard question one asks of a new tenant. It certainly has nothing to do with my ability to pay the rent. It has nothing to do with my potential for keeping things clean and in good shape. I just left because no house is worth dealing with a person who clearly let me know she was not someone with whom I wanted to do business.
And that is only my personal example. Employers check the social media accounts of prospective employees to see if they approve of how the person thinks. People who disagree publicly with powerful groups get doxxed. Dozens of stories have circulated about social pressure, lost friendships, disagreements, and mistreatment in the workplace that originated from differences in political beliefs.
How can people be expected to form accurate opinions without all the information? How can they do so when they’re under pressure for their livelihood or their ability to rent a home or when they fear for their privacy?
It’s pretty clear that there are those who don’t want people to form accurate opinions. They want to gently, quietly, insidiously get everyone on board by limiting our access to the variety of philosophies and theories that make the world go round.
First it was social media, now it’s the payments processors. You can bet that now that PayPal has done it, others will also ban Infowars. From Paul Joseph Watson at infowars.com:
Payment processor PayPal has banned Infowars in what represents nothing less than a political ploy designed to financially sabotage an influential media outlet just weeks before the mid-term elections.
Company representatives called Infowars yesterday to confirm that PayPal was terminating its agreement after “a comprehensive review of the Infowars site.”
The company claimed that Infowars violated PayPal’s “acceptable use policy” because it “promoted hate and discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions.”
No specific examples whatsoever were officially provided to back up this claim, which relies on a nebulous definition of “hate” which is so vague that virtually anything could qualify.
Off record, Infowars was told that criticism of Islam and opposition to transgenderism being taught to children in schools were two of the examples of “hate”.
The ban was instituted despite InfowarsStore.com containing no political content whatsoever, emphasizing how the decision was a broader attack on the Infowars platform.
PayPal representatives said they were giving Infowars 10 days to switch payment processors, after which all services would be terminated. Continue reading →
Many of Trump’s many enemies are enemies of the Constitution and American freedom. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:
In the wake of a number of the Lehman and 9/11 commemorations in America, and as a monster storm is once again threatening to cause outsize damage, we find ourselves at a pivotal point in time, which will decide how the country interacts with its own laws, its legal system, its Constitution, its freedom of speech, and indeed if it has sufficient willpower left to adhere to the Constitution as its no. 1 guiding principle.
The main problem is that it all seems to slip slide straight by the people, who are -kept- busy with completely different issues. That is convenient for those who would like less focus on the Constitution, but it’s also very dangerous for everyone else. Americans should today stand up for freedom of speech, or it will be gone, likely forever. Continue reading →
Twitter said it didn’t ban Alex Jones because he hadn’t violated its rules, then it said it banned Alex Jones saying he violated its rules. From Elizabeth Vos at disobedient media.com:
It has been a busy month for Twitter, and Alex Jones, with Jack Dorsey forced to defend the decision not to ban Jones early last month, only reverse course by suspending Jones shortly after a tense Senate hearing on social media.
The Senate hearing, in which Dorsey spoke alongside Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, saw the Twitter CEO questioned on his decision not to ban Jones. Shortly afterward, Twitter permanently suspending Jones’s verified account as well as that of Infowars.
“I was taken down not because we lie, but because we tell the truth — and because we were popular… And because we dared to go to that committee hearing and stand up to Rubio and stand up to the lies of mainstream media and speak the truth.”
Alex Jones’ banishment by most of the prominent social media companies demonstrates how closely those companies are allied with the US government. Not that it wasn’t obvious already. From Dmitry Orlov at cluborlov.blogspot.com:
Something happened recently that made me feel like a bit of an endangered species. A set of transnational internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and several others, all synchronously removed content belonging to infowars.com, which is run by Alex Jones. Such synchronicity is a sure sign of conspiracy—something that Alex Jones harps on a lot.
I once appeared on a radio show run by Alex Jones, and he did manage to boil down what I had to say to “the USA is going to collapse like the USSR did,” which is pretty good, considering how poorly we managed to connect, having so little in common. He is a conservative and a libertarian whereas I think that conservatives don’t exist in the US. What have they “conserved” lately—other than the right to bear small arms? As far as libertarianism, I consider proper historical libertarianism as a strain of socialism while its American cooptation is just plain funny: these ones remain libertarian only until they need the services of an ambulance or a fire engine, at which point they turn socialist. To boot, American libertarians like Ayn Rand, who to me was a relentlessly bad writer full of faulty thinking. However, I find her useful as a litmus test for mediocre minds.
Moreover, Jones is political while I remain convinced that national politics in the US is a waste of time. It has been statistically proven that the US is not a democracy: popular will has precisely zero effect on public policy. It doesn’t matter who is president; the difference is a matter of style. Trump is a bull in a China shop while Clinton would have been a deer in the headlights. The result is the same: the US is bankrupt and its empire is over.
The coordinated ouster of Alex Jones from various social media outlets was at the behest of the government. When ostensibly private companies become agents of the government, does banning someone constitute an abridgement of his or her First Amendment rights? From Doug Casey at caseyresearch.com:
Justin’s note: In today’s Conversations With Casey, Doug Casey and I discuss one of today’s biggest stories—the Alex Jones media ban.
Jones, as you may know, is a popular right-wing voice. He also founded Infowars, a far-right media outlet.
Last week, Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and the music streaming service Spotify all banned Infowars. On Wednesday, Twitter followed suit by suspending Jones for seven days after he asked Trump to “take action against web censorship.”
As a result, Infowars is now off every major media platform. Some people are infuriated by this. Others couldn’t be happier about it.
But I wanted Doug’s perspective…
Justin: Doug, Infowars has been banned from just about every major media platform. What do you make of this?
Doug: It’s interesting that they zeroed in on Alex. I know Alex personally. I’ve been on his show a couple times, and he spoke at one of our conferences.
It’s certainly true that he’s a rabble-rouser. He often makes allegations that may not be well substantiated, he puts forward a lot of rumors, and he’s partial to conspiracy theories that may or may not be true. His style is closer to that of a carny barker, a revival preacher, or an infomercial pitchman than a university professor. But so what? His style certainly rubs the elite and liberals the wrong way—but that’s got nothing to do with why he was deplatformed.
He was kicked off because he not just implicitly, but explicitly, challenges what the Deep State thinks “loyal Americans” are supposed to believe.
I’m not familiar with everything he questions. But it’s things like what really happened at the Murrah Building, Waco, the Twin Towers, and the recent wounding and killing of over 500 people in Las Vegas. He asks who might have really been responsible, and why. Why is Russia accused of having undue influence, but not Israel? How and why did the IRS, the Fed, and other agencies become as powerful as they are? Who really are the people in the Deep State? Worse, he supports Trump.
The object of the game is getting clearer all the time: silence voices discordant from the mainstream narrative. From Ben Garrison at grrrgraphics.com:
In early America many cities had ‘town squares’ in which citizens could stand on soapboxes and shout out various messages. Our First Amendment protects such speech.
The Internet is today’s town square. The soapboxes are social media.
The Deep State and the left are intertwined with Silicon Valley. The CIA helped Google and Facebook get started. Why? To make it easier to spy on people. Over time, millions gravitated toward Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Conservative and Libertarian voices became very strong and that alarmed the Deep State. So they began demonetizing conservatives. Then they shadow-banned them. Now they are deleting them outright.
For many years, Alex Jones reached millions with his journalism and rants. His tirades helped wake people up. He yelled at us about the Deep State, including the corrupt security agencies, the Bohemian Grove, the CFR, the Bilderbergs, fluoride in our water, the lies about 9-11, and yes, even Sandy Hook. The latter had many anomalies that should be questioned. Alex brought all of this up and more before anyone else had a inkling about what was really going on with such matters. He was routinely dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ by the establishment. However, much of what he has been saying over the years is now acknowledged as self-evident. The legacy media, the Deep State, and Silicon Valley could not stomach the fact that he was informing and influencing minds and elections. They all got together and confiscated his soapbox. Their lame excuse? They claimed he was a purveyor of ‘hate speech.’
Banning conservatives from popular social media platforms meddles with the 2018 elections much more than anything the Russians are likely to do. From Peter Korzun at strategic-culture.org:
An all-out battle is raging against alternative views in the country that has positioned itself as the champion of the freedom of speech despite the fact that 90% of its media are controlled by just 6 companies. For comparison, in 1983, 90% of US media were controlled by 50 companies. Naturally, the trend negatively affects press freedom. According to the 2018 World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders or RSF, the US dropped two positions compared to 2017, sliding to No. 45 overall. The role of competition has diminished while bias has become a norm. According to the 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation Survey on Trust, Media and Democracy report, only 44 percent Americans say they can identify a news source that they believe reports the news objectively.
There have been many examples of freedom of speech trampled on in the United States. True, the First Amendment bars Congress from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” but it says nothing about big high-tech companies or social networks banning political commentators out of favor with the “establishment”. And that’s what they did.
Major tech giants – Facebook, Apple, Google, YouTube, Pinterest, iTunes, LinkedIn, Podcast add, MailChimp, YouPorn, and Spotify – have banned Alex Jones, a well-known journalist, and his website InfoWars – from their services for spreading around “wrong stories”, which the platforms’ owners found “hateful”. The move is unprecedented, it’s a real bombshell. It should be noted that it was President Donald Trump who praised Mr. Jones for his “amazing” reputation.
The privately owned companies with their own rules and regulations teamed up against Mr. Jones and did it simultaneously to leave no doubt the ban is nothing else but collusion. The giants are engaged in political censorship, using their market dominance to target dissenters. Alex Jones is the same investigative journalist he has been for many years. What makes them crack down on him now? Probably, they had their fill as he had irritated them disproportionately.
Alex Jones was banned in a coordinated action by several of the social media platforms. This post was originally posted three days ago, but technical difficulties prevented it from being posted correctly. Here’s the second try, from Eric Peters at theburningplatform:
The other day, YouTube and Facebook and several other inter-related social media platforms banned Alex Jones – the founder of Prison Planet and InfoWars. The reason given isn’t that Alex is a “conspiracy” theorist – the ancient charge – but chiefly that he is a purveyor of “hate” speech.
What this really means is that the powers that be hate the things Alex speaks about – his political incorrectness – and can no longer abide his being free to speak about such things.
Having locked down colleges, the workplace and most other places, the very last place where it is still possible to openly express non-orthodox views – and to hear and read them – is online.
And now that is to be locked down, too.
The powers-that-be are almost literally chewing the carpet over the success of politically incorrect alternative media. They cannot stand it that people aren’t listening to them – and instead are listening to such as Alex and anyone else who does not parrot the party line.
The Internet opened up a level playing field. Made it possible to end-run the curatorship of the powers-that-be over the dissemination and analysis of information to a mass audience. One no longer needed to have the budget of The New York Times or CNN to compete with both of them.
Which has been driving the curators to Bunker Scene paroxysms of rage.
Since it’s not yet formally illegal to voice – and publish – contrarian views (which are often simply correct views which deviate from politically correct orthodox views; for example, raising questions about the government’s official explanation for the symmetric, almost free-fall collapse of WTC 7 on 911) the method used to silence these views was first to “demonetize” those who voiced and published them.
