As ever, the political caste, in general, and “the party of industry and commerce,” in particular, has shown itself to be arrayed against Middle America.

How so?

An army of Covington Kids ought to have advanced on social media’s loathsome moral crusaders and censors. It can’t, because stripping the tech trolls of their state-grants of privilege has slipped down the order of business.

Depriving social media’s social engineers of their state grants-of-privilege seems more than reasonable.

Nobody conservative is arguing that “government should regulate content moderation of social media,” CATO Institute.

What is being advocated is that social-media censors be deprived of their state-grants of privilege and protections against liability. For social media are collective frauds. While acting as editors and social engineers, they are legally safeguarded as mere platform providers.

Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, tech companies currently enjoy broad immunity from civil lawsuits stemming from what users post because they are treated as “platforms” rather than “publishers”.

Trump’s executive order is designed to pressure regulators, including the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, to come up with new rules that would curtail that immunity. It is likely to face legal challenges. (The Guardian)

Look, laws exist. Too many of them. It would be great were there fewer of these laws. However, whether intended or not,  the upshot of corporate libertarianism is that laws only ever hamper the little guy and gal, never the multinational shyster and fraudster.

Naturally, conservatives must agree that unfettered speech is just that.  They can’t start carving out pet exceptions.

UPDATE (4/13/021):  The Civil Rights Act route is way better than Section 230 repeal—although that, too, must be tackled.

#Section230 ideas are common & likely won't work. Better idea is https://t.co/jzIHDI9NM3 to target Civil Rights Act, which we already have. To financially segregate, banish & cripple politically irksome people & enterprises flouts its spirit, if not strict letter. @emeriticus https://t.co/uaYiEq3GcX

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) April 13, 2021

One wonders if there is a difference in COVID infection rates between Trump opponents and his supporters.

The Economist: “…a third of Americans who had voted for Mr Trump said they thought covid-19 was either a minor problem nationwide or not a problem at all. A recent Gallup poll showed that 94% of Democrats say they always or very often wear a mask when outside their homes compared with 46% of Republicans (and 68% of independents).”

… evidence suggests that younger adults are behind the latest surge in the virus. In Floridathe median age of covid-19 patients has dropped from 65 to near 40. Third, there is usually a lag of several weeks between a patient contracting the illness and when the patient’s death is reported to state authorities. Fourth, doctors seem to have become better at treating severe cases of covid-19, reducing the death rate even for those who must be hospitalised.

Given the rise in cases, however, it seems unlikely that the death rate will remain stagnant for much longer. Deaths for patients infected weeks ago will probably start to pile up. Some morgues in Arizona and Texas are running out of capacity and are already seeking refrigerated trucks, just as those in New York City did months ago. Uncontrolled community transmission among young people is likely to result in a spread in nursing homes, where a large share of fatalities occurs among the more vulnerable elderly. Should hospital capacity become strained, as appears to be the case in Houston, the quality of care could deteriorate and result in increased deaths as well.

Denial has not proved to be a particularly effective virus-suppression strategy. When polled by YouGov last week, a third of Americans who had voted for Mr Trump said they thought covid-19 was either a minor problem nationwide or not a problem at all. A recent Gallup poll showed that 94% of Democrats say they always or very often wear a mask when outside their homes compared with 46% of Republicans (and 68% of independents). To many voters, worry about the virus transmuted into coded disapproval of the president; mask-wearing is seen as a talisman of deranged coastal liberalism.

MORE: “Covid deaths v cases:America is in the midst of an extraordinary surge of covid-19. Will the gap between cases and deaths persist?“

*Image courtesy the Economist

The other day on “Life, Liberty & Levin,” Ben Shapiro trashed, but absolutely rubbished, John C. Calhoun, one of America’s greatest political theorists, in the estimation of historian Clyde Wilson, editor of the John C. Calhoun papers, and the foremost scholar of Calhoun in our time. From what I’ve read of Calhoun’s works, I concur.

Especially magnificent is “A Disquisition on Government,” published in 1851, wherein Calhoun developed the profound idea of ‘two different modes in which the sense of the community may be taken.’ The one ‘regards numbers only.’ The other invokes an entirely different quality or dimension, over and above the ‘numbers.’”

I was inspired to apply Calhoun’s idea in “Has Trump Awakened John C. Calhoun’s Concurrent Majority?” The column is from the book, The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June, 2016).

The more important point is logical. Ben Shapiro trashes Calhoun using the logic of the left—namely that a towering American intellectual and statesman held views considered improper to the American Idiocracy of the 21 Century.

As Professor Wilson has brilliantly written, “This is not historical debate. It is the propaganda trick of labeling something you do not like in order to control and suppress it. Such are those who want the war to be all about slavery—hateful, disdainful, ignorant, and unwilling to engage in honest discussion.”

Another fundamental flaw in Ben Shapiro’s decidedly Republican view of America, expressed on “Life Liberty & Levin,” is the idea that his party is the Good Party.

Libertarians (check) don’t have a bone in the bi-partisan fight, except to advocate for the truth. And the truth is that lot of pseudo-history rests on the deification of, say, the Radical Republicans.

Here is the truth with a caveat: “The Radical Republicans were far more vicious and barbaric than the Antifa. The Republicans supervised the genocide of some 60,000 Plains Indians from 1865 to 1890, led by General Sherman himself”:

MORE:  “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865,” September 6, 2017

UPDATED (7/22):

Great comment, Daffy Duck, aka Dale @dalerooster
One more thing: As someone who reads biblical Hebrew and gets it, I am Daisy Duck if Ben Shapiro knows any serious Hebrew, as boasted. Maybe Pidgin Hebrew, i.e., the Americanized crap they speak in Israel, these days.

?Great comment, Daffy Duck, aka Dale @dalerooster. One more thing: As someone who reads biblical Hebrew and gets it, I am Daisy Duck if #BenShapiro knows any serious Hebrew, as boasted. Maybe Pidgin Hebrew, i.e., the Americanized crap they speak in Israel, these days. https://t.co/u9licF1Xyn

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) July 22, 2020

NEW COLUMN IS “How Con Inc. Sells Out Dissidents To The Southern Poverty Law Center.” It is currently on WND and The Unz Review.

Grubbing it with the SPLC and those conservatives who slip between the sheets with these scammers is ill-making. But, three years on, and my hand was forced by this fracas on Twitter. There was no option.

My thanks to WND, The Unz Review, American Greatness, Cassandra Fairbanks, Patrick Howley, and those who man-up.

Excerpt:

They’re unwilling to defend true dissidents, but Beltway lite libertarians and Con Inkers are forever genuflecting to privileged legacy journalists, who can afford to voluntarily leave their rich gigs in “protest” of cancel culture.

The Right hasn’t shut up about the New Yorker’s Andrew Sullivan, who is far less banal than the New York Times’ Bari Weiss. Both belong to the “nothing new, more of the same” neoconservative tradition. Her resignation antics are a storm in a C-cup; his “defiant” departure is the fussy equivalent (just for gay men).

For a more meaningful scandal, to the Right at least, consider the farce of a Conservative news and opinion organization (founded by a dragon slayer of a broadcaster), which has published lacerating pieces condemning America’s foremost hate group, yet has proceeded to purge writers, in compliance with the demands of said shakedown hate group.

American conservatism capitulating to America-haters? Negotiating with terrorists? Hypocrisy? Yes, yes, and yes.

Prone is the natural position of the Establishment Republican, Con Inker, neoconservative, whatever his latest opportunistic, political permutation may be.

The news site is the Daily Caller. The hate group is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The ransom demands issue from the illiterati of the SPLC, who regularly publish lists of—and hit pieces against—untouchable dissidents. They then proceed against us with all the vigor of a “a money grabbing slander machine,” to quote John Stossel, a veteran investigative journalist who has exposed this corrupt syndicate that lives off destroying people.

For his part, economist Thomas DiLorenzo has skillfully pried apart the revenue-rich, “racial racketeering” of the Southern Poverty Law Center, showing it to be nothing more than a “hate group hedge fund.”

Wrote the great leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn, in the New York Press, in 2007: “I’ve long regarded Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center as collectively one of the greatest frauds in American life. The reasons: a relentless fundraising machine devoted to terrifying mostly low-income contributors into unbolting ill-spared dollars year after year to an organization that now has an endowment of more than $100 million.”

An organization that shakes down paupers and pensioners to support its “ritualized forms of defamation.”

One would expect the Daily Caller, which has written against cancel culture and the Southern Poverty law Center, not to capitulate to such rot. But one would be wrong to expect principled positions from any Con Inc. org.

Opportunistic and prone are the only principles known to the D.C. media types. For they have no philosophy to speak of. Whatever political raiment he happens to be cloaked in—defeatism, hypocrisy and betrayal are the default positions of the D.C. “conservative” swamp dweller.

And so, July 7 saw Geoffrey Ingersoll, Daily Caller’s editor in chief, assume the supine position in a Twitter exchange, which ceded the terms of debate to the Democrats and their most diabolical proxies.

The Twitter entity before which Mr. Ingersoll was kneeling metaphorically in contrition was an account called “Sleeping Giants.” “They’re the worst,” attests Steve Bannon. They appear to be attached to a shakedown hub of cancel-culture activism. Illiteracy precludes any manifesto, but the constant nattering on a Twitter account has earned these cyberthugs a Wikipedia page.

To thrive, thugs need enablers. Enter Mr. Ingersoll.

First up on my Twitter feed, July 7, was a tweet from gutsy reporter Patrick Howley, founder of Big League Politics. …

…  READ ON. There’s lots of intrigue, unfortunately.

NEW COLUMN IS “How Con Inc. Sells Out Dissidents To The Southern Poverty Law Center.” It is currently on WND and The Unz Review.