Friends, a lot of the most interesting news stories today have a consistent theme: our right to free speech, and the various ways in which that fundamental right is imperiled. For one thing, it seems increasingly likely that the Biden Administration will appeal all the way to the Supreme Court to try to maintain its ability to...persuade/cajole social media companies into persecuting and silencing those who dare to refute deep state orthodoxy. Talk about a high stakes case! Also, there's a poll that reveals what we already knew: Democrats and liberals/progressives are much more comfortable than conservatives with the idea of restricting speech. In many cases, lefties don't even care what's being said. Their urge to proscribe has more to do with who's saying it! Scary stuff. In addition, we have below an account of a man who was locked out of all of his Amazon devices, and "the cloud", simply because a black delivery driver erroneously reported that his doorbell (I kid you not!) was racist. He had to prove his innocence, but the scariest part is that Amazon's devices are in our pockets and in our homes, and the company is thus in a position to surveil us indiscriminately, and to persecute us or cut us off altogether if it doesn't like the cut of our jib. Lastly, I offer you the Wall Street Journal's defense of Rupert Murdoch and his legacy. Whatever you may think of Murdoch and Fox, he did completely revolutionize the news business and make Republican/conservative news, opinion, and analysis, well, possible. Fox and News Corp may not be on the frontier of conservative thought anymore -- in fact, they may have defected to the establishment in important ways -- but they blazed a trail that many others, including myself, are still pursuing, even as I write these very words!
https://nypost.com/2023/09/20/how-dr-jay-bhattacharya-beat-biden-administration-censorship/
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/man-amazon-erased
In other news, Senator Bob Menendez (D - New Jersey) has been indicted on charges of corruption. This puzzles me, because he's a Democrat, and isn't the purpose of our system of justice to protect "democracy"...by persecuting Republicans? Very odd!
Nikki Haley has gained some momentum of late, due perhaps to her strong performance in the recent Republican debate. She's criticizing DJT for his wishy-washy position on Ukraine. Certainly Trump has been more willing to criticize Ukraine and the West's lavish support for that country than most Republicans, but whether, as president, he would fundamentally change our (adversarial) relationship with Russia is questionable. The establishment kept President Trump on a short leash last time (think: Trump's failed attempt to pull us out of Syria), and, as someone suspected of "collusion" with Russia, he might feel a lot of political pressure to stand firm against Putin. In any case, Trump's position on the Russia-Ukraine War only matters if he becomes president again, and I personally don't regard that as very likely.
Here's an extremely interesting analysis of what ails Western Civilization and civil society by Christopher Rufo. He suggests that we are now dominated by an elite afflicted by a range of psychological abnormalities, and which exults in its collective psychosis. He puts much of the blame on the feminization of modern society and women's tendency to elevate victimhood and grievance over all other possible standards of rectitude. There's much truth in what he says, but, as always, we might also question how many of these pathologies afflict us, as conservatives, too.
Finally, there are signs of dissension amongst the Chicoms, which, as per usual, we in the West might be tempted to applaud as a sign of China's impending decline, but on the other hand we might also find deeply troubling, since an unstable superpower is, almost by definition, a dangerous one!
