Oh Freedom Over Me

But not for everybody, of course. What were you thinking?

In the email from rightwing poll aggregator Real Clear Politics:

Sweet Christ, Carl, you're still fretting about how four and a half years ago Twitter followed FBI advice that the New York Post's Hunter laptop story might be infected by Russian disinformation and blocked links to the Post for [checks notes] nearly three whole days, leaving users to the humiliation of having to find it on Facebook instead?

(If it had been two days or less, Trump totally would have won the election? Uh, maybe a comforting thought for Trump but I really don't think so.)

Meanwhile, the Republican White House is openly blackmailing the country's public school system, public and private universities, medical research institutions and hospitals, museums, national parks, armed services, federal and state judges and prosecutors, numerous prestigious law firms, and the privately owned press and public broadcast media to adopt its ideological positions on everything from history to biology and energy production, for which Twitter now, acquired by a multibillionaire who appears to have become literally the president's single-dad housemate, what a setup for Aaron Sorkin's new series "The East Wing", serves as a propagandist.

Maybe you'd like to say that there's no constitutional prohibition against the Executive making laws abridging the freedom of the press so there's nothing we can do about it? It's not over till it's over! Don't surrender in advance!

And the FBI was right, too, BTW; the laptop (which wasn't in fact the laptop, which seems to have been squirreled away in impenetrable FBI secrecy for years, but Rudolph Giuliani's alleged copy of its hard drive), was certainly infected by Russian disinformation from the Russia agents he worked with, Pavel Fuks, Andrij Telizhenko, Andrij Derkach, and so on, though it never made it into a criminal case against Hunter Biden anyway, largely because as evidence it was total garbage with which special prosecutor Durham could never think of anything to do. And it was never a First Amendment case even under one of the weird interpretations that are going around (social media companies were always able to, and frequently did, ignore the FBI's advice).

But whoever has ever been living in terror that a bunch of college students might "cancel" them or even be publicly rude to them really needs to wake up to the evidence of what real deprivation of freedom of speech is like, where the president's impression of wrongthink is getting people fired from their jobs in really large numbers, prevented from doing peer-approved research, prevented from curating peer-approved museum exhibitions and staging peer-approved plays and dance events and the like, fired from research jobs and medical jobs and teaching jobs or if they're students thrown out of school, or if they're foreigners thrown out and transported by midnight plane without communicating with their families or lawyers to the 21st-century equivalent of Devil's Island. Something like the McCarthy era (under the guidance of Roy Cohn's old pupils Stone, Manafort, and Trump) is really back.

I mean, the Reagan administration and the Bush II administration had the cynicism and clownishness and the violent foreign policy from South and Central America to West Africa and the Middle East and the furious push to increase economic inequality through the tax system, a democratic society really shouldn't have tolerated any of it. I'm not fighting it because I'm such a good person, I'm fighting it because they're after me. I'm not even saying it's worse now, I'm saying it's personal.

If I should have fought it harder in the past, now I have no choice. They're really after me and my friends and family. If I should have felt the attack on everybody, now I feel it on us. If I've made fun of the cult of the Founders and their commitment to FREEDOM, because of the way they willingly denied freedom to enslaved people and women and workers and foreigners and "deviants" of one kind and another from the beginning, it's my freedom now: I've always been able to complain about the abuse I saw around me, and do a little something for others, giving a few dollars to ACLU and a candidate here and there, grousing about the reactionary views of some of my kids' teachers, writing a blog. I'm not sure even these little things can last. All freedom is threatened now, except for the freedom you can buy with huge amounts of money, like Justin Sun openly—openly!—escaping fraud charges with $400 million in bribes, or that other asshole with the fake e-vehicle, Trevor Milton. That kind of freedom works better than ever.

They want us in jail. They want suicides. And they give zero fucks about "free speech" because, you know why? Because they've got expensive speech, all you could ever desire, from the philosophical Charles Koch to the drugged-up Elon Musk. You know what I'm saying? Your freedom is absolutely in jeopardy.