Unintended Irony Of The Bezos Post Pantshitting About Musk's Bid To Own Twitter

WaPo  |  “What we need is a First Amendment-respecting process in which the government doesn’t dictate content but does cause there to be an acceptable behavioral code,” Wheeler said.

Even professionals who think that social media is a net good say that Twitter as Musk envisions it would be terrible for users and investors. The past few years have spawned any number of Twitter knockoffs catering to those who feel muzzled by the original, including Gab and Parler, but none has taken off in the mainstream.

That is not an accident, said Alicia Wanless, director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington. People want basic rules in the same way they would avoid a nightclub that turns a blind eye to casual violence.

“Musk can buy Twitter and try to take it back to some nostalgic lost Eden of the early days of the Internet, but platforms with the least community standards, like Gab, hardly rank because it isn’t a good business,” Wanless said.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has helped protect global rights activists from government hacking and ordinary people from domestic stalking, said she “would be concerned about the human rights and personal safety impacts of any single person having complete control over Twitter’s policies.”

She added, “I am particularly concerned about the impact of complete ownership by a person who has repeatedly demonstrated that he does not understand the realities of content moderation at scale.”

Citing Musk supporting the idea for allowing anything legal, Galperin said: “Twitter’s content moderation practices leave a lot to be desired, but they tried the policies that Musk seems to favor more than a decade ago, and it did not work.”

A pullback in moderation would disproportionately harm women, minorities and anyone out of favor with the establishment, civil rights advocates said. “Without rules of the road, we are going to be put in harm’s way,” said Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice group Color of Change. “Our protections cannot be up to the whims of billionaires.”

Alex Stamos, the former Facebook chief security officer who called out Russian disinformation on that platform during the 2016 election, said Musk has a notion of Twitter as a public square for free expression that is divorced from the reality of many individuals and failed to acknowledge that it would give more power to the most powerful.

Without moderation, Stamos said, “anybody who expresses an opinion ends up with every form of casual insult ranging to death and rape threats. That is the baseline of the Internet. If you want people to be able to interact, you need to have basic rules.”

Speaking Of Toxic White Women...,

greenwald  |  Even when one marvels, as one must, at all these impressive displays of cynical elite emotional manipulation and self-victimization, there is absolutely nobody who exploits it better than Taylor Lorenz. Raised in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, educated at Greenwich High School and lovely private boarding schools in the Swiss Alps, then graduating from the leafy private liberal arts Hobart and William Smith Colleges in bucolic upstate New York, Lorenz developed an intense and unyielding obsession with TikTok teenagers and their TikTok houses. This interest in the lives of online teenage culture was cultivated as she approached middle age, and she parlayed this unique interest into stints as a star front-page reporter with the two most powerful newspapers in the U.S.: The New York Times, which she quit two months ago, and The Washington Post, where she is now a star columnist.

It is almost impossible to envision a single individual in whom power, privilege and elite prerogative reside more abundantly than Taylor Lorenz. Using the metrics of elite liberal culture, the word “privilege” was practically invented for her: a rich straight white woman from a wealthy family raised in Greenwich, Connecticut and educated in actual Swiss boarding schools who now writes about people's lives, often casually destroying those lives, on the front pages of the most powerful East Coast newspapers on the planet. And yet, in the eyes of her fellow media and political elites, there is virtually no person more victimized, more deserving of your sympathy and attention, more vulnerable, marginalized and abused than she.

That is because — like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and Labour MPs and columnists from The Independent and The Guardian and The New York Times who pioneered these paths of elite victimhood before her — Taylor Lorenz must sometimes hear criticisms of her work and her views. Virtually alone among journalists — who are famously universally beloved and never subjected to any form of real abuse: as Julian Assange will be happy to tell you if you can visit him in his high-security prison cell in the UK, or as these Sri Lankan journalists will explain from their hospital beds after being physically brutalized by the police for covering an anti-government protest on Thursday — Lorenz hears criticisms of her work, sometimes in the form of very angry and even profane or threatening tweets from anonymous people online. This not only means that she deserves your sympathy and concern but, more importantly, that you should heap scorn and recrimination on those who criticize her work because they are responsible for the trauma she endures. Most of all, you must never criticize her publicly for fear of what you might unleash against her.

In other words, Lorenz — like all employees of large media corporations or powerful establishment politicians in Washington and London — is and always should be completely free to continue to publish articles or social media posts that destroy the reputations of powerless people, often with outright lies. But you must never criticize her because she suffers from PTSD and other trauma as a result of the mean tweets that are unleashed by her critics. If you believe that is some sort of straw man exaggeration of what political and media elites are trying to do — create a shield of immunity around them while they retain the right to target, attack, insult, malign and destroy anyone they want — then it means you did not see the Emmy-worthy performances of Lorenz and various NBC News personalities on Friday afternoon during their five-minute segment on Chuck Todd's Meet the Press Daily designed to fortify this warped, inverted standard of morality and power.

The NBC segment was ostensibly designed to "cover” a “study” from January published by the Brookings Institutions and conducted by "NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and the International Women’s Media Foundation.” This study purported to forensically analyze — and I am not joking — the increase in criticisms of Taylor Lorenz as the result of a tweet I posted criticizing her (re-cast in elite parlance as “attacking” and "targeting” her), as well as a television segment that aired on Tucker Carlson's Fox program that also criticized the NYT reporter. You will never guess what the study revealed: namely, our criticism of her was responsible for a torrent of violent abuse, misogynistic rage, and traumatizing brutality against the corporate journalist:

Our analysis used large-scale quantitative data to assess how the public conversation surrounding these journalists changed in the aftermath of being targeted by prominent media personalities. The research findings showed sharp increases in harmful speech after the journalists were targeted by Carlson and Greenwald….After Carlson targeted Lorenz in a segment on his Fox News show, we found that one in two tweets mentioning Lorenz contained either toxic or insulting language….In Figure 2, we plot the 24-hour moving average of tweets before and after Greenwald targeted Lorenz. The figure shows that after Greenwald’s attack, the likelihood that tweets mentioning Lorenz would contain harmful speech increased by 144%, peaking on Aug. 15, 2021, two days after he targeted Lorenz.

Now, permit me to pause to acknowledge an important concession. The three academic scholars who are the authors of this groundbreaking study on online abuse of powerful elites are absolute experts in marginalization, victimhood and abuse. They have the lived experience of it. Indeed, nobody has suffered worse deprivations than they, so one should be extremely deferential in treating their pronouncements with the respect they deserve. Zeve Sanderson is a graduate of Brown University and the Masters’ Program of New York University and is now the Founding Executive Director at the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics. The other two have degrees from New York University and George Washington University and are also now employed studying “online extremism” at NYU, one of the country's most expensive private universities residing in the heart of Manhattan. So they clearly know marginalization and victimhood when they see it.

The on-screen title of the NBC segment was “1 in 3 Women Under 35 Experience Online Attacks.” This was an extremely odd title since they interviewed two journalists who recounted their online trauma, neither of whom fall into that category. Though Lorenz is often infantilized by her media supporters as some teenager or very young adult — a natural assumption, I suppose, given her obsession with teenaged TikTok houses and other adolescent online paraphernalia — in fact her age is expressed at anywhere in the range from 36 to 43 years old depending on her mood of the day.

The other featured journalist alongside her was Kate Sosin, who does not identify as a woman at all but rather “a proud trans person” who uses the pronouns “they/them"; by referring to Sosin repeatedly as a woman and using the pronouns “she” and “her” to reference their work, NBC repeatedly misgendered the journalist. Anyway, one would think, or at least hope, that if NBC is going to broadcast a report on “women under the age of 35 [who] have experienced harassment online,” they could find journalists who actually fall into that group and not misgender a journalist who is already complaining about abuse and trauma.

The NBC segment has to be watched in its entirety to be believed. Though the emotional performances are moving and spectacular — no denying that — it is important not to let your tears drown out the actual point they are making. It is a quite sinister and insidious lesson they are preaching. When powerful media elites receive mean and abusive tweets from anonymous and random people on Twitter, it is not the fault of those sending those tweets but rather the fault of anyone criticizing their work and their journalism. The only moral conclusion is clear: one should refrain from criticizing employees of media corporations lest one be responsible for unleashing traumatizing abuse at them. Marvel at this performative elite victimhood by all the actors involved:

We Live In The Toxic Hen-House That White Women Have "Created"...,

newyorker  |  In 2013, when people still nursed high hopes for the salvific effects of the Internet and cancellation was a fate reserved for poorly rated TV shows, a private citizen with a hundred and seventy Twitter followers was loitering in Heathrow Airport, waiting for a flight to Cape Town, South Africa. “Going to Africa,” she dashed off before boarding. “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” By the time she landed, eleven hours later, her ill-advised missive had gone disastrously viral. She stumbled off the plane to discover that a multitude of online detractors had weighed in on her character. Now she was a globally known racist.

The woman, Justine Sacco, was one of the first high-profile casualties of public shaming in the digital era, and she suffered all the consequences that have since become routine: job loss, wide-scale condemnation, and a public identity subsumed by a very public sin. Still, in the wake of subsequent disasters, her story is almost quaint. How pleasant it is to recall a simpler, kinder time when an online mobbing was an occurrence so unusual that it merited two articles in the Times.

Our social fabric has since frayed considerably. What’s curious about the brutality that fuels Internet shaming frenzies is that in real life—that is, IRL, in the usual online parlance—most of us would hesitate to consign a normal nobody to nationwide notoriety and several years of unemployment. We might even have mustered the charity to read Sacco’s quip as a satirical, if clumsy, sendup of the white privilege and parochialism that give rise to public-health inequalities. (Sacco, as people in her inner circle would have known, was no stranger to either Africa or progressive causes.) Yet the nasty comments went on accumulating, as if of their own accord. “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.” “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail.” “Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!”

It’s an open question whether there is anything redeeming about our transformation into bloodhounds as soon as we log on, and two new investigations into the nature of shame offer contrasting answers. In “How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame Across Cultures” (Princeton), Owen Flanagan, a professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, suggests that our tense political climate is the product of poor emotional regulation. In “The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation” (Crown), the data-scientist-cum-journalist Cathy O’Neil suggests that shaming is structural: its ubiquity is the fault not of individual vigilantes but, rather, of the many industries that manufacture and exploit mortification for profit.

At the heart of these diverging perspectives is an ambiguity built into the very concept at issue. Shame is an emotion—a person can suffer from its bilious bite, as Sacco did—but it is also a state of affairs. No matter how Sacco felt, her ostracism was an established fact, a thing that happened to her. Is shame fundamentally a feeling or fundamentally a social phenomenon? Should we treat it as a matter of psychology or of politics?

In “How to Do Things with Emotions,” a scholarly plea for a renovated emotional landscape, Flanagan casts his vote for psychology. Troubled by the churlishness of contemporary American politics, he sets out to isolate “emotional habits that are mixed up in our troubles,” by which he means our descent into polarity, chaos, and mutual mistrust. He’s against the more vituperative forms of anger, which he believes are too prevalent, and is in favor of shame, which he regards as all but absent from our ethical repertoire. Shame, in his view, is an unjustly maligned emotion that we might rehabilitate in order to discipline racists and misogynists.

Shame, canonically, is the sinking sentiment that attends deviation from widely endorsed mores, whatever they happen to be. You can be sad or elated for any reason or for no reason, but shame requires a shared social context. The emotion in question arises not because you violated a standard that you set for yourself but because you violated a standard that your milieu (perhaps policed by Twitter) imposes on you. Because shame is a means of enforcing whatever values are operative in a given society, whether it proves salutary hinges on the merits of the moral system in which it is deployed, at least according to Flanagan. He admits that shame has too often been conscripted as a weapon against the oppressed—as when women and queer people have been encouraged to suppress their sexual impulses. Nonetheless, he calls for shame to be enlisted in the service of social justice, as it was when a concerted social-media campaign ejected the Hollywood producer and serial rapist Harvey Weinstein from power.

Too Many Witches, No Honest Stitches - Guarantee A Culture Of Snitches...,

chronicle |   When I read about the downfall of the University of Michigan’s president, Mark Schlissel, fired after an anonymous complaint about his consensual though “inappropriate” relationship with a subordinate, my first thought was “What kind of idiot uses his work email for an affair?” Then I recalled that I myself am the kind of idiot who persists in using my university email account for everything, despite pledging at least once a year to tear myself away from this self-destructive habit. Schlissel, c’est moi. The next time I get in trouble, will my employer emulate the classy behavior of the Michigan Board of Regents and release troves of my own embarrassing emails for my enemies to savor and mock?

My next thought: Who was the snitch? I knew none of the players, but my inner Hercule Poirot went right to work, assembling likely suspects in the drawing room of my imagination (betrayed spouse, disappointed paramour, assorted foes and rivals, maligned underlings), cleverly disarming them with my continental charm until the culprit was exposed — most likely by the irrepressible look of creepy satisfaction playing across his or her face. To bring down an apparently much loathed and vastly overpaid university president, even for the stupidest of reasons: what ecstasy!

Among the questions prompted by Schlissel’s termination is whether higher education has, on the whole, become a hotbed of craven snitches. From everything I’ve heard and experienced, the answer is yes.

First let us pause to consider our terms: Was Schlissel’s narc a “snitch” or a “whistle-blower”? Whistle-blowers are generally attempting to topple or thwart the powerful, and Schlissel was certainly powerful. But the reported offense was, in the words of a lawyer I spoke with, “a nothingburger.” Let us provisionally define snitching as turning someone in anonymously, for either minor or nonexistent offenses, or pretextually. Also: using institutional mechanisms to kneecap rivals, harass enemies, settle scores and grudges, or advantage oneself. Not to mention squealing on someone for social-media posts and joining online mobs to protest exercises of academic and intellectual freedom.

This last is a variant of the “social-justice snitch,” a burgeoning category composed of those who want to defund the police and reform the criminal-justice system but are nevertheless happy to feed the maws of a frequently unprocedural and (many say) racist campus-justice system. There are, to be sure, right-wing students and organizations dedicated to harassing professors whose politics they object to, but that’s to be expected. What’s not is the so-called campus left failing to notice the degree to which the “carceral turn” in American higher ed — the prosecutorial ethos, the resources reallocated to regulation and punishment — shares a certain cultural logic with the rise of mass incarceration and over-policing in off-campus America. Or that the zeal for policing intellectual borders has certain resonances with the signature tactics of Trumpian America, for which unpoliced borders are equally intolerable. But what care social-justice types about fostering the carceral university if those with suspect politics can be flattened, even — fingers crossed! — expelled, or left unemployed and penurious?

Americans once famously disliked snitches. Witness the parade of Hollywood liberals who refused to stand or applaud when the director Elia Kazan, who’d named names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, received an honorary Academy Award in 1999. According to Kazan’s autobiography, he named only those who’d already been named or were about to be, and he’d long since come to despise the cultural despotism of the American Communist Party. But he’ll still go down in history with “snitch” attached to his name. If only he’d labored in today’s academe! He’d be lionized for it.

The carceral campus provides a haven for that formerly reviled personality type, the jailhouse snitch, around whom so many classic prison dramas revolved. The Big House (1930) established the category and delivered a message for the ages: Snitches get stitches. When the privileged 24-year-old Kent (Robert Montgomery), in for carelessly killing someone while driving drunk, starts ratting out his fellow inmates, things don’t turn out well for him. In the film’s moral universe, only snivelers snitch. Or as the seen-it-all warden opines: “Prison does not give a man a yellow streak, but if he has one, it brings it out.”

Hen Houses With Long Incumbency Must Inevitably Become Toxic Environments

reason  |  Much of the information provided in this article, comes from the most extensive investigation into Jaeger, which can be read in full here. This piece also relies on additional investigations as well as interviews with Jaeger's colleagues and contemporaries, some of whom requested anonymity for fear of professional consequences.) 

The fundamental issue may have been that Jaeger refused, in some ways, to assimilate, to act his station in life. Part of this was probably his personality and part of it probably cultural. He dated or slept with several students in his early years as a professor at U.R., although none worked in his lab or were under his tutelage. This was, at the time, permitted under departmental policy, but this once-common practice is now taboo, perhaps guaranteed to cause problems for both the professor and for his or her students. Jaeger says he sees that now, but in his early 30s, to him, it seemed normal. 

All of this—his personality, his jokes, his flirting and boundary-pushing and sleeping around—made some people in his department uncomfortable enough to avoid him.

One of those was Keturah Bixby. In November 2013, Bixby, then a graduate student, wrote a letter to department head Greg DeAngelis. She then printed it out, brought it to his office, and sat there while he read it. (Bixby did not respond to a request for comment.)

"There's a professor here who's been doing unprofessional things that make me uncomfortable," the letter, which was provided to Reason, began. "It's never anything huge, but it's built up over the years I've been here and I don't feel safe around him. Although I'm generally really happy at Rochester, these situations have made me miserable at times. It's Florian."

Bixby went on to describe two incidents in which Jaeger made her uncomfortable.

In the first, she wrote that he walked into her shared office and, without asking, picked up a pen and Post-it notes off her office mate's desk and stood behind her writing a note. She said it was "creepy and unprofessional."

In the second incident, Bixby said that at a recruiting party that year, Jaeger asked if he could take a picture of her. She refused, and he later took a picture of her anyway.

"I was pretty angry," she wrote in her letter, "and the picture (if it still exists anywhere) is of me flipping him off. It makes me feel angry, sick, and my skin crawl to think of him having a picture of me anywhere."

Bixby added that she avoided both social and professional events for fear of seeing Jaeger, and asked that DeAngelis look into Jaeger's behavior and require "training on boundaries and respecting them." She also wrote that she never wanted to interact with Jaeger again.

"I never want him at a talk I give," she wrote. "Is that possible? If he ever tries to push for interaction, is it ok to tell him I prefer not to because of how uncomfortable his unprofessional behavior has made me?"

I Do Not Now And Never Have Owned A Single Apple Product....,

foxnews  |  A recent software update for Apple's iPhones includes a "pregnant man" emoji as well as a number of other gender neutral cartoons.

Apple rolled out the update in mid-March according to the Wall Street Journal, adding the pregnant emoji, as well as a gender neutral "person with crown" emoji to go alongside the king and queen cartoons. Apple also added 35 other emojis. 

Apple first rolled out the pregnant man and "pregnant person" emoji in January as part of an optional update, but it came to all users with the iOS 15.4 update.

The decision to roll out the new emoji was met with criticism and mockery from many conservatives. Fox News Host Greg Gutfield praised the emoji as a step toward acceptance for men with ‘beer guts.’

"Yes, thank God finally, it's here. A beer gut emoji has arrived to Apple iPhones with its latest voluntary update," he wrote.  "This new emoji comes in five different skin tones, so someone with a massive beer gut can be any shade that he, she or they want."

If It Makes You Sick And Kills You - You May Want To Reconsider Making It Your Identity

rnz  | Days before her death a fat studies conference chaired by academic Dr Cat Pausé was parodied by American conservative figure Steven Crowder.

In a YouTube video watched more than a million times, Crowder pours scorn on Pausé's work and her field of study.

Pausé, who died aged 42 of medical causes 10 days ago, was a fat studies scholar at Massey University in Palmerston North.

Her research and activism attracted controversy and sometimes vitriol.

Shortly before she died Crowder, an American comedian, actor and former Fox News commentator, posted a video to his YouTube page where he, in his words, infiltrates a 2020 fat studies conference hosted by Massey.

Posing as a gender-queer scholar and fat pride activist with a made-up name, Crowder wrote a bogus paper and was accepted to the conference, held online, as a speaker.

A presentation about the paper included false stories of sexual assault.

At the end of his video, Crowder said being accepted without question showed the idiocy of the field.

Comments below the video on YouTube are heavily critical of Cat Pausé and that has continued after news of her death.

Pausé's friend and former Tertiary Education Union Massey representative Heather Warren is not surprised.

"A lot of Cat's research is around how fat bodies and fat people are dehumanised in our society, and the comments online further go to validate that even in death fat people are dehumanised by society and discriminated against by our society."

Warren said her Twitter post about her friend's death attracted only supportive comments, but that was not the case when public figures such as MP Deborah Russell and microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles posted to the platform.

Warren and Pausé had held discussions with Massey about how institutions could better protect academics from online abuse.

It was an issue institutions had to grapple with, because they encouraged academics to use social media to promote their research, yet had social media policies focusing on the conduct of their staff.

 

The Week The Trans Spell Was Broken

unherd |  Not very long ago, the fear of being denounced as a transphobe meant that doubts about extreme gender ideology were confined to private WhatsApp groups and quiet conversations among friends. This is very much no longer the case. Two weeks ago, the Times’s chief sports writer, Matt Dickinson, wrote on Twitter, “Are we really talking about fairness in sport in the transgender debate – or fear and prejudice?”

“Fairness” replied hundreds of women, including some from his own paper. The only replies agreeing with Dickinson were from other male sports writers, insisting that the way the trans women athletes had been treated was “horrendous and disgusting” (John Cross, Daily Mirror ) and “awful” (Martyn Ziegler, The Times) It’s sweet how males always stick together, isn’t it?

Gender ideologues complain that this shift in public tolerance is merely a conservative backlash against trans rights, but they are wrong. What we are seeing is the inevitable result of trans activists – and, most of all, Stonewall – pushing far beyond civil rights for trans people and insisting instead on unpopular and unworkable policies, such as trans women in sport, child transition and any open acknowledgement of female biology.

This third issue caused the Labour Party to have one of its regular internal breakdowns, as its politicians – and leader – became unable to answer the question, what is a woman? And not only could they not answer the question, they couldn’t think of a way to not answer the question, hemming and hawing about it being a “gotcha” question. Yes, it is, interviewers replied, and what we’re trying to get is an answer that a three-year old could provide. Last month, Angela Rayner came up with a solution: “I think we should be taking it off social media and taking it away from commentators,” she intoned solemnly. Ah yes, censorship from the left. That always plays so well! Oddly, only a month earlier Rayner had been loudly insisting that the next leader of the Labour party will be a woman. Presumably that kind of woman-chat is permitted by Rayner, just not what a woman actually is.

The Tories have certainly not been spared from all this. On 30 March, at 2:48am, the Tory MP Jamie Wallis posted on Twitter to say that he’d been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and would like to be trans. Suddenly, his long history of dodginess – from running companies that attracted more than 800 complaints, to being affiliated with a sugar daddy website, to fleeing the site of a car crash – was instantly forgotten and his honesty and courage were trumpeted to parliament’s rafters by, among others, the Prime Minister. It was strikingly reminiscent of that time, in 2015, when Glamour magazine named Caitlyn Jenner Woman of the Year, two months after she was involved in a car accident in which a woman, Kim Howe, died. The district attorney ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Jenner, but Glamour decided they had all the evidence they needed to cite her as the year’s best woman. At least Caitlyn bothered to make an effort: in the sobering light of day, Wallis tweeted, “I remain the same person I was yesterday, and so will continue to use he/him/his pronouns.” So no change at all, then, other than the identity of being trans. Or wanting to be, anyway.

 

Dudes Out'Chere Getting Knocked Up Like Hotcakes - So - Pregnant PEOPLE Not Pregnant Women

WaPo  | Pregnant people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus are nearly twice as likely to get covid-19 as those who are not pregnant, according to a new study that offers the broadest evidence to date of the odds of infections among vaccinated patients with different medical circumstances.

The analysis, based on medical records of nearly 14 million U.S. patients since coronavirus immunization became available, found that pregnant people who are vaccinated have the greatest risk of developing covid among a dozen medical states, including being an organ transplant recipient and having cancer.

The findings come on top of research showing that people who are pregnant or gave birth recently and became infected are especially prone to getting seriously ill from covid-19. And covid has been found to increase the risk of pregnancy complications, such as premature births.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been urging people to get coronavirus shots before or during pregnancy, seeking to dispel fear — widespread in some communities, without scientific basis — that those vaccinations could be harmful. As of March, nearly 70 percent of people who were pregnant had been vaccinated before or during their pregnancy, according to federal data, though disparities persist among racial and ethnic groups.

The new study goes beyond what has previously been understood, suggesting that even pregnant people who are fully vaccinated tend to have less protection from the virus than many other patients with significant medical problems.

“If you are fully vaccinated, that’s magnificent,” said a lead author of the study, David R. Little, a physician who is a researcher at Epic, a Wisconsin company that maintains electronic patient records for nearly 1,000 hospitals and more than 20,000 clinics across the country. “But if you are fully vaccinated and become pregnant, you remain at higher risk of acquiring covid.”

Little said the findings buttress CDC recommendations that additional precautions against the virus should be taken during pregnancy, such as wearing masks and maintaining safe distances. He said the study also suggests that health-care workers should “be on the lookout” for symptoms and encourage testing to detect the virus early, when it is easier to treat.

The data also raises scientific questions that warrant further research into how best to protect pregnant individuals and their babies from infection, according to public health leaders and specialists in pregnancy.

All Russia Needs Do Now Is Wait

 

The cauldron has already been formed. It is already complete: Russia has destroyed all rail lines into Donbass, and now has full fire control (artillery and air power–especially drones) over all roads leading into the fortified regions where the Ukrainian government had amassed its forces for the planned ethnic cleansing of DPR and LPR. Nothing can get into Donbass–nor can anything get out of it–without Russian consent.

All Russia needs to do is wait, as the Ukronazis in the Donbass run out of food and ammunition and are forced to surrender. If they refuse to surrender, then it’s simply a charge up the middle, pushing the massed Ukrainian forces back to the Dnieper, all the while killing them in their bunkers with “smart weaponry” and artillery, or along the roads as they try and flee.

Also, that map Moulitsos is using is both spectacularly incomplete and just as spectacularly inaccurate regarding the current deployment of Russian forces. It looks to be about a week old, maybe older (and it was incomplete even then). For instance, the Russians as of mid-yesterday had already advanced well beyond the fronts laid out on his map.

Finally, his reasoning simply isn’t sound. The Ukrainian forces C3 systems have been entirely wiped out, so there will be no means of coordinating maneuvers of any kind, much less flank maneuvers that will require a great deal of detailed minute-by-minute intelligence–as well as a lack of ranking officers to coordinate them. The fuel reserves of all of Ukraine have been mostly destroyed, military transport has been mostly wiped out, and there are two sustained and increasingly rapid advances taking place from the east and north-east which are tying down the vast majority of the troops that would be needed for the flanking maneuvers he envisions (which are impossible, now, for reasons stated above).

Now that Mariupol has been taken, the troops there will likely be redeployed and advance into Zaporzhzhia, parts of which are already held by Russian forces. Those freed up troops may also be deployed into Donestk. For the last two days we’ve been seeing video coming out of Ukraine showing Russia deploying fresh, top-tier weaponry (tanks, artillery, rocket/missile systems, troop transports) into place for a sustained attack from the east, north-east, and south-east.

Frankly, Moulitsos’ assertion that Russian troops have been “shredded” is as laughable a fantasy as is his assertion that Russian troops were “defeated” at Kiev. The Russian troops at Kiev were sent there to hold the Ukrainian troops in place while Russia destroyed any means they might have to redeploy to Donbass and relieve or resupply the troops in the east. Once Russia had degraded Ukrainian transport, C3 capabilities, anti-aircraft/artillery power, and armor to such a level that those troops were no longer a credible means of relief or resupply, they were withdrawn and redeployed in the east, in preparation for a full run to the Dnieper.

The Russian air force now has full control of the skies over all of Ukraine, so I really have no idea where Moulitsos is getting this idea that Russian forces are “shredded.” Russia is clearly doing the shredding–or rather, grinding–here, and doing it in a methodical, determined way with an attention to detail that indicates iot will not end until their stated political objectives are achieved.

From the videos I’ve seen (50 or so, over the last three days) coming out of Mariupol, the Russian forces seem to have excellent morale and are conducting themselves in a highly disciplined, professional fashion. There are lots of videos coming out of mopping up operations by Russian forces–Kadyrov’s Chechen urban warfare commandos particularly like to post videos–and Russian morale appears quite high and determined. There are also lots of videos of long lines and big crowds of civilians welcoming the Russian forces in as liberators, thanking them for their work and celebrating their arrival.

What we see of the Ukrainian forces, they seem extremely demoralized. The Ukrainians, in contrast to the Russians, have posted videos of the torture and execution of Russian POWs, with at least one high ranking commander bragging about these executions in social media. The position of the Tochka rocket booster that detached during flight just before it landed on the train station certainly and undeniably demonstrates the direction the missile arrived from: the Ukrainian side (false flag to gain NATO sympathy, 50 dead ethnically Russian civilians). Timelines, body decomposition, and photographic evidence of the massacre in Bucha firmly determines those deaths as having occurred well after the Russian withdrawal, reprisals by the Azov battalion against Russian “collaborators” (apparently, anyone who accepted food from the “occupiers”). The “mass graves” of which there is so much talk were casualties–both civilian and military–which occurred in the sustained fighting in that suburb over the last two months, most likely from Ukrainian artillery, since the Russians were positioned between the suburb and the Ukrainian forces. Thus, the Ukrainians were firing towards the city, and the Russians away.

Then there are the interviews with citizens of Mariupol, where unspeakable crimes against ordinary civilians are being described, such as the purposeful and indiscriminate shelling of entire neighborhoods, the locking of civilians in basements while the Ukrainian forces set up firing positions in the house above, the takeover of an old folks’ home where a firing position was established on the roof and all of the residents were locked up on the first floor–then fired upon with artillery once the Ukrainians were forced to retreat–which seems to have been a pretty common maneuver, since it has been described by several witnesses from different neighborhoods. All of these tactics and war crimes are totally consistent with actions of the Ukrainian military against Donbass civilians going back to 2014.

There have already been several mass surrenders of what appear to be two or three thousand Ukrainian troops in Mariupol. The Azov battalion is, along with its foreign advisers, holed up underground in the Azovstal steel works, which they (apparently) had earlier transformed into a command base. Russian forces have sealed them in, cut off their water, and rumors have it that fire trucks, cement trucks, and anything that can carry water are being brought in with the aim of flooding the ventilation system with water until the personnel inside finally decide to surrender–or not. It’s up to them, after all.

What makes matters worse is Putin’s artificial timetable of a major victory in the Donbas by 9 May…

The Russian forces have already achieved that victory in Mariupol, and the mayor of that city has been told to begin preparations for a military parade on May 9th. That is the first of the five major cities the Russian Federation plans on liberating: Mariupol, Kharkhiv, Dniepro, Odessa, and Kiev, perhaps in that order. Kadyrov unequivocally affirmed in an interview today that the Russian federation would definitely take the fight into Kiev.

The plan, apparently, is to liberate everything east of the Dnieper and turn that over to DPR and LPR control. There is some debate whether the Russian forces will continue their advance into western Ukraine; the people who I have read tend to be divided on that based on their interpretation of what Russia means by “denazification.” Some think that such a thing can be negotiated and legally enshrined without capturing the main players and putting them on trial, while others believe that actual prosecution and trials are a necessity. I don’t know enough about the situation to have any real opinion, but my WAG would be that yes, Russia likely will fight into the West until it gets a full surrender, whereupon it will hunt down the war criminals, Nazi leaders, and Nazi funders it has identified, dictate the terms of a new constitution, and guarantee a few more cultural reforms are promulgated (textbooks, for instance).

The West Needs World War III

USAWatchdog |  The West needs World War III.  They just need it.  The real problem here is they went to negative interest rates in 2014 in Europe.  They have been unable to stimulate the economy, and Keynesian economics have completely failed. . . . I would say this is mismanagement of government on a global scale.  The problem is that central banks have no control over the economy.  Add to this, this type of inflation is substantially different than a speculative boom.  This inflation is based upon shortages.  These morons with covid . . . with lockdowns, ended up destroying the supply chains. . . . Things that are there, I buy extra of because next time it might be gone.  So, everybody is increasing their hoarding. . . . So, what we have with Europe, with its negative interest rates, they have wiped out all the pension funds.  They need 8% to break even, not negative rates.  There is not a pension fund in Europe that is solvent at this stage of the game. . . . The European government is collapsing.  If they end up defaulting, you are going to have millions of people down there with pitch forks storming the parliament.  So, to avoid that, they need war. . . . The Biden Administration has deliberately destroyed the world economy.”

If there is war in Europe, the “U.S. dollar will get stronger initially and not weaker” according to Armstrong.  Armstrong also says, “This is all deliberate.  There is no return to normal here.  Unfortunately, this is where we are headed.”

Armstrong contends, war in Europe could break out in a couple of weeks, and the EU and NATO are pushing this.  Armstrong says, “They want Russia to do something. . . . This thing with Russia is the same thing all over again.  Unfortunately, we are headed for war.”

Armstrong also talks in detail about the following subjects:  Digital currency and why the Deep State is pushing so hard for it; gold, silver, food and just about everything going way up in price because of shortages.  Armstrong recommends that people “stockpile two years of food.”  Armstrong has other tips for what the common man needs to stock up on; Armstrong also says President Trump is the only President he knew that cared about U.S. soldiers dying in combat.  This is why Trump wanted to bring the troops home, and the Deep State warmongers hated him for it.  Armstrong also gives his predictions on who wins the midterm election this coming November.  Will it matter which party comes out on top?

In closing, Armstrong says, “We are not getting back to normal.  The system is crumbling from within, and it’s just like the fall of Rome, basically.   (There is much more in the nearly 1 hour interview.)

Not Much Longer Now....,

rutherford |   The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.

Essentially, the U.S. government is funding its very existence with a credit card.

In 2021, we paid more than $562 billion in interest on that public debt, which according to journalist Rob Garver, “is more than the annual budget of every individual federal agency except for the Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services (which manages the Medicare and Medicaid government health insurance programs), and the Department of Defense.”

According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”

Clearly, the national debt isn’t going away anytime soon, especially not with government spending on the rise and interest payments making up such a large chunk of the budget.

Still, the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.

Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

We’re not living the American dream. We’re living a financial nightmare.

In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

The Economics Of The Russian Victory

thecradle |  Sergey Glazyev is a man living right in the eye of our current geopolitical and geo-economic hurricane. One of the most influential economists in the world, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a former adviser to the Kremlin from 2012 to 2019, for the past three years he has helmed Moscow’s uber strategic portfolio as Minister in Charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

Glazyev’s recent intellectual production has been nothing short of transformative, epitomized by his essay Sanctions and Sovereignty and an extensive discussion of the new, emerging geo-economic paradigm in an interview to a Russian business magazine.

In another of his recent essays, Glazyev comments on how “I grew up in Zaporozhye, near which heavy fighting is now taking place in order to destroy the Ukrainian Nazis, who never existed in my small Motherland. I studied at a Ukrainian school and I know Ukrainian literature and language well, which from a scientific point of view is a dialect of Russian. I did not notice anything Russophobic in Ukrainian culture. In the 17 years of my life in Zaporozhye, I have never met a single Banderist.”

Glazyev was gracious to take some time from his packed schedule to provide detailed answers to a first series of questions in what we expect to become a running conversation, especially focused to the Global South. This is his first interview with a foreign publication since the start of Operation Z. Many thanks to Alexey Subottin for the Russian-English translation.

The Cradle: You are at the forefront of a game-changing geo-economic development: the design of a new monetary/financial system via an association between the EAEU and China, bypassing the US dollar, with a draft soon to be concluded. Could you possibly advance some of the features of this system – which is certainly not a Bretton Woods III – but seems to be a clear alternative to the Washington consensus and very close to the necessities of the Global South?

Glazyev: In a bout of Russophobic hysteria, the ruling elite of the United States played its last “trump ace” in the hybrid war against Russia. Having “frozen” Russian foreign exchange reserves in custody accounts of western central banks, financial regulators of the US, EU, and the UK undermined the status of the dollar, euro, and pound as global reserve currencies. This step sharply accelerated the ongoing dismantling of the dollar-based economic world order.

Over a decade ago, my colleagues at the Astana Economic Forum and I proposed to transition to a new global economic system based on a new synthetic trading currency based on an index of currencies of participating countries. Later, we proposed to expand the underlying currency basket by adding around twenty exchange-traded commodities. A monetary unit based on such an expanded basket was mathematically modeled and demonstrated a high degree of resilience and stability.

At around the same time, we proposed to create a wide international coalition of resistance in the hybrid war for global dominance that the financial and power elite of the US unleashed on the countries that remained outside of its control. My book The Last World War: the USA to Move and Lose, published in 2016, scientifically explained the nature of this coming war and argued for its inevitability – a conclusion based on objective laws of long-term economic development. Based on the same objective laws, the book argued the inevitability of the defeat of the old dominant power.

Currently, the US is fighting to maintain its dominance, but just as Britain previously, which provoked two world wars but was unable to keep its empire and its central position in the world due to the obsolescence of its colonial economic system, it is destined to fail. The British colonial economic system based on slave labor was overtaken by structurally more efficient economic systems of the US and the USSR. Both the US and the USSR were more efficient at managing human capital in vertically integrated systems, which split the world into their zones of influence. A transition to a new world economic order started after the disintegration of the USSR. This transition is now reaching its conclusion with the imminent disintegration of the dollar-based global economic system, which provided the foundation of the United States global dominance.

You Had Just One Job!!!

businessinsider |  The Russian warship that was confirmed as sunk on Thursday may have been carrying a holy relic when it went down.

The Moskva, a missile cruiser that was the flagship of Russia's Black Sea fleet, sank on Thursday following an explosion onboard, Russian state media reported.

Claim that after the sinking of Flagship Moskva, the commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Admiral Igor Osipov, was violently arrested.
Needs to be confirmed. https://t.co/thVNdhRBdd

— Anders Åslund (@anders_aslund) April 14, 2022

A news report from 2020 has given rise to the question of whether the vessel sank with a Christian relic —  a piece of the "true cross" — onboard.

The Russian Orthodox Church announced in February 2020 that the relic had been delivered to the then-commander of the Black Sea fleet, Vice Admiral Igor Osipov, and was at the fleet's headquarters, ready to deliver it to the ship "shortly," the state-run Tass news agency reported at the time. 

The relic in question is a fragment of wood just millimeters large that, according to believers, is a piece of the cross on which Christ was crucified, Tass said. That fragment is embedded in a 19th-century metal cross which is itself kept in a reliquary, according to the outlet. 

The Moskva had a chapel onboard where sailors could pray, Sergiy Khalyuta, archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church's Sevastopol District, told Tass. He said the fragment was to be transferred at the request of its owner, an anonymous collector.

Insider was unable to establish when the relic was finally transferred to the Moskva or if it was onboard at the time of the vessel's sinking. The Russian embassy in London did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The sinking of the Moskva, a prized flagship, is a major blow to Russian morale, Western officials said.

A Little Spring Housekeeping Underway In The Kremlin

dailymail |  A top FSB intelligence official has been moved to a high security jail in Moscow as Vladimir Putin purges his secret services over the botched Ukraine invasion, say reports.

Col-General Sergei Beseda, 68, head of the 5th Service of the Federal Security Service (FSB), was previously under house arrest.

He has now been placed in pre-trial detention in notorious Lefortovo Prison, suggesting he will face major charges for intelligence failings, it is claimed.

Beseda’s case is being investigated by the Military Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee, said Russian intelligence expert Andrei Soldatov, who revealed the Lefortovo move.

Beseda, in charge of FSB intelligence and political subversion in the ex-USSR, had been on a trip to Ukraine shortly before he was detained.

Putin is said to fear that moles leaked invasion plans to the West, and Beseda was detained along with his deputy Anatoly Bolyukh, but had been held under house arrest until now. The current status of Bolyukh is unclear.

The Russian leader had been convinced by secret services briefings that his troops would be welcomed by many Ukrainians, and achieve a speedy victory. In reality they have faced implacable opposition.

Lefortovo jail notoriously held political prisoners in the Soviet era and is routinely used to incarcerate suspected traitors.

Last month Putin also fired the deputy head of the Russian national guard.

Beseda had been a longtime trusted Putin secret services official, and was in his role as head of the 5th service of the FSB since 2009.

Russia has not confirmed his arrest or detention in Lefortovo.

 

Gleichschaltung: The System Of Totalitarian Control And Coordination Of All Aspects Of Western Society

wikipedia |  The Nazis used the word Gleichschaltung for the process of successively establishing a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society and societies occupied by Nazi Germany. It has been variously translated as "co-ordination",^[2][3][4] "Nazification of state and society",^[5] "synchronization'", and "bringing into line",^[5] but English texts often use the untranslated German word to convey its unique historical meaning. In their seminal work on National Socialist vernacular, Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich, historians Robert Michael and Karin Doerr define Gleichschaltung as: "Consolidation. All of the German Volk’s social, political, and cultural organizations to be controlled and run according to Nazi ideology and policy. All opposition to be eliminated."^[6]

The Nazis were able to put Gleichschaltung into effect due to the legal measures taken by the government during the 20 months following 30 January 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.^[7]

One day after the Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933, President of Germany Paul von Hindenburg, acting at Hitler's request and on the basis of the emergency powers in article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, issued the Reichstag Fire Decree. This decree suspended most citizen rights provided for by the constitution and thus allowed for the arrest of political adversaries, mostly Communists, and for terrorizing of other electors by the Sturmabteilung (SA) (Nazi paramilitary branch) before the upcoming election.^[8]

In this atmosphere the general election of the Reichstag took place on 5 March 1933.^[9] The Nazis had hoped to win an outright majority and push aside their coalition partners, the German National People's Party. However, the Nazis won only 43.9 percent of the vote, well short of a majority.^[10] Nevertheless, though the Party did not receive enough votes to amend the federal constitution, the disaffection with the Weimar government's attempt at democracy was palpable and violence followed. SA units stormed the Social Democrats' headquarters in Königsberg, destroying the premises, even beating Communist Reichstag deputy Walter Schütz to death.^[11] Other non-Nazi party officials were attacked by the SA in Wuppertal, Cologne, Braunschweig, Chemnitz, and elsewhere throughout Germany, in a series of violent acts that continued to escalate through the summer of 1933; meanwhile the SA's membership grew to some two-million members.^[12]

One of the most important steps towards Gleichschaltung of German society was the introduction of the "Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda" under Joseph Goebbels in March 1933 and the subsequent steps taken by the Propaganda Ministry to assume full control of the press and all means of social communication. This included oversight of newspapers, magazines, films, books, public meetings and ceremonies, foreign press relations, theater, art and music, radio, and television.^[23] To this end, Goebbels said:

[T]he secret of propaganda [is to] permeate the person it aims to grasp, without his even noticing that he is being permeated. Of course propaganda has a purpose, but the purpose must be concealed with such cleverness and virtuosity that the person on whom this purpose is to be carried out doesn't notice it at all.^[24]

This was also the purpose of "co-ordination": to ensure that every aspect of the lives of German citizens was permeated with the ideas and prejudices of the Nazis. From March to July 1933 and continuing afterwards, the Nazi Party systematically eliminated or co-opted non-Nazi organizations that could potentially influence people. Those critical of Hitler and the Nazis were suppressed, intimidated or murdered.^[7]

Every national voluntary association, and every local club, was brought under Nazi control, from industrial and agricultural pressure groups to sports associations, football clubs, male voice choirs, women's organizations—in short, the whole fabric of associational life was Nazified. Rival, politically oriented clubs or societies were merged into a single Nazi body. Existing leaders of voluntary associations were either unceremoniously ousted, or knuckled under of their own accord. Many organizations expelled leftish or liberal members and declared their allegiance to the new state and its institutions. The whole process ... went on all over Germany. ... By the end, virtually the only non-Nazi associations left were the army and the Churches with their lay organizations.^[25]

For example, in 1934, the government founded the Deutscher Reichsbund für Leibesübungen, later the Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen, as the official sports governing body. All other German sport associations gradually lost their freedom and were coopted into it.^[26] Besides sports, another more important part of the "co-ordination" effort was the purging of the civil service, both at the Federal and state level. Top Federal civil servants—the State Secretaries—were largely replaced if they weren't sympathetic to the Nazi program, as were the equivalent bureaucrats in the states, but Nazification took place at every level. Civil servants rushed to join the Nazi Party, fearing that if they did not they would lose their jobs. At the local level, mayors and councils were terrorized by Nazi stormtroopers of the SA and SS into resigning or following orders to replace officials and workers at local public institutions who were Jewish or belonged to other political parties.^[27]

 

Scott Ritter Permanently Banished From Twitter

consortiumnews |  One of my reasons for joining Twitter was to contribute to the overall process of engaging in responsible debate, dialogue, and discussion about issues of importance in my life and the lives of others, in order to empower people with knowledge and information they might not otherwise have access to, so that those who participate in such interaction, myself included, could hold those whom we elect to higher office accountable for what they do in our name.

Land of the free pic.twitter.com/3bzYAW7h6R

— Wyatt Reed (@wyattreed13) April 13, 2022

To me, such an exercise is the essence of democracy and, for better or for worse, Twitter had become the primary social media platform I used to engage in this activity.

From my perspective, credibility is the key to a good Twitter relationship. I follow experts on a variety of topics because I view them as genuine specialists in their respective fields (I also follow several dog and cat accounts because, frankly speaking, dogs and cats make me laugh.) People follow me, I assume, for similar reasons. Often I find myself in in-depth exchanges with people who follow me, or people I follow, where reasoned fact-based discourse proves beneficial to both parties, as well as to those who are following the dialogue.

Before my Twitter account was suspended, I had close to 95,000 “followers.” I’d like to believe that the majority of these followed me because of the integrity and expertise I brought to the discussion.

Having someone hijack my identity and seek to resurrect my suspended account by appealing to those who had previously followed me can only be damaging to whatever “brand” I had possessed that managed to attract a following that was pushing 100,000. When one speaks of injury, one cannot ignore the fact that reputations can be injured just as much as the physical body.

Indeed, while a body can heal itself, reputations cannot. The fact that Twitter has facilitated the wrongful impersonation of me and my Twitter account makes it a party to whatever damage has been accrued due to this activity.

It is not as though Twitter can, or ever will, be held accountable for such actions. Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA), holds that internet platforms that host third-party content — think of tweets on Twitter—are not (with few exceptions) liable for what those third parties post or do.

Like the issue of Freedom of Speech, the concept of holding Twitter accountable for facilitating the fraudulent misappropriation of a Twitter user’s online identity is a legal bridge too far. Twitter, it seems, is a law unto itself.

My Twitter War came to an end today when I received an email from Twitter Support proclaiming that “Your account has been suspended and will not be restored because it was found to be violating the Twitter Terms of Service, specifically the Twitter Rules against participating in targeted abuse,” adding that “In order to ensure that people feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs on our platform, we do not tolerate abusive behavior. This includes inciting other people to engage in the targeted harassment of someone.”

This ruling, it seems, is not appealable.

At some point in time, the U.S. people, and those they  elect to higher office to represent their interests, need to bring Twitter in line with the ideals and values Americans collectively espouse when it comes to issues like free speech and online identity protection.

If Twitter is to be absolved of any responsibility for the content of ideas expressed on its platform, then it should be treated as a free speech empowerment zone and prohibited from interfering with speech that otherwise would be protected by law.

The U.S. Constitution assumes that society will govern itself when deciding the weight that should be put behind the words expressed by its citizens. Thus, in a nation that has outlawed slavery and racial discrimination, organizations like the Klu Klux Klan are allowed to demonstrate and give voice to their odious ideology.

America is a literal battlefield of ideas, and society is better for it. Giving voice to hateful thought allows society to rally against it and ultimately defeat it by confronting it and destroying it through the power of informed debate, discussion, and dialogue; censoring hateful speech does not defeat it, but rather drives it underground, where it can fester and grow in the alternative universe created because of censorship.

In many ways, my Twitter Wars represent a struggle for the future of America. If Twitter and other social media platforms are permitted to operate in a manner that does not reflect the ideals and values of the nation, and yet is permitted to mainstream itself so that the platform controls the manner in which the American people interact when it comes to consuming information and ideas, then the nation will lose touch with what it stands for, including the basic precepts of freedom of speech that define us as a people.

Mainstreaming censorship is never a good idea, and yet by giving Twitter a free hand to do just that, the American people are sowing the seeds of their own demise.