See, earlier, by Charles Johnson: A Twitter Road To Redemption? My Open Letter to @Jack and @JoeRogan

Congress addressed tech censorship in two very different hearings last week. One was a totalitarian threat to Americans’ freedoms—and one hinted at how they can be protected.

The Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee hosted a hearing on “white nationalism” clearly designed to agitate for more censorship. Democrats and Hate “experts” a.k.a. CultMarx Enforcers both questioned tech representatives on why their companies don’t censor enough “hateful” content. The Enforcers also wanted the government to aid in the crackdown on “white nationalism.” The tech reps insisted they are doing all they can to censor content that e.g. the Anti-Defamation League doesn’t like.

Only one man strongly defended free speech at the hearing: Republican California Rep. Tom McClintock. He noted that tech oligopolists frequently practice censorship and political bias and asked whether stringent hate speech rules would be used solely to suppress controversial opinions.

The other hearing was less depressing: the GOP-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee looked at the problem of tech censorship and what can be done to address it.

Chairman Ted Cruz (R.-TX) offered three solutions:

• Amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 to specifically require tech platforms be politically neutral
• Use antitrust law against tech monopolies
• Prosecute specific instances of fraud and censorship—for example, the censorship of Unplanned, a pro-life film. Both Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz demanded to know why the tech giant censored the film. No surprise, they didn't get a straight answer. ['Unplanned' anti-abortion film subject of Senate hearing on censorship of conservative speech, by Jennifer Harper, The Washington Times, April 9, 2019] 

Hilariously, Cruz asked Twitter’s representative, Carlos Monje Jr., whether the platform considers itself a neutral political forum and why it censored a pro-life quote from Mother Theresa:

Earlier by Ann Coulter: Hail President Javanka!

Even after Trump won the presidency, Jared Kushner was embarrassed by his father-in-law, according to Vicky Ward's terrific new book, Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

In a speech to hundreds of New York bankers and businessmen on December 16, 2016, Jared admitted that Trump was "easy to hate from afar." But not to worry, he said, Trump wouldn't be keeping his campaign promises—especially on immigration.

One banker who heard the speech was appalled, shocked by Jared's arrogance in thinking he could "control" the president.

Joke's on him. Turns out Jared was right. He does control Trump.

And what a blessing that's been.

It was Jared's idea to fire FBI Director James Comey. If Trump hadn't followed that advice, there would have been no independent counsel.

It was also Jared and Ivanka's idea to hire Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. (Ivanka was adamant, saying Flynn gets "anything he wants.")

If Trump hadn't hired Manafort and Flynn, the independent counsel investigation would have been over in about a week.

It’s fitting that it is happening to Dan Crenshaw. The freshman representative from Texas, a former Navy SEAL, has defended America’s endless foreign interventions on the grounds that “we go there so they don’t come here”. [Why guys like me go to places like Syria, by Dan Crenshaw, Washington Post, December 21, 2018] Yet now Crenshaw finds himself accused of inciting violence and promoting Islamophobia after sharing a video in which Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is of Somali descent, summarizes the September 11 terrorist attacks as “some people did something” during a March 23 speech before the Council [Ilhan Omar accuses Dan Crenshaw of ‘dangerous incitement for questioning her 9/11 comments, by Dominick Mastrangelo, Washington Examiner, April 10, 2019]. Perhaps Crenshaw will learn the truth—it’s pointless to go “there” because “they” are already here.

Ilhan Omar was not outright defending or excusing the September 11 attacks of course, though she can justifiably be accused of belittling them. Her comments focused on the alleged backlash and restrictions on civil liberties that descended on Muslims following the September 11 attacks. [Why isn’t Dan Crenshaw following his own advice with Ilhan Omar? By Wardah Khalid, Houston Chronicle, April 15, 2019]

In context, her statement was:

Far too long, we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen, and frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties. 

[Read the transcript of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s speech, Tampa Bay Times, April 15, 2019]

But this doesn’t really make it better. The entire passage, and the entire speech, is one long complaint that America is not doing enough for her religious group.

I have been a Chase Bank customer for years. Who knows how much longer it'll be? Will the company's thought police come for me next? How about you? If you are a non-leftist who does business with the financial giant owned by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., you need to ask questions and get answers.

On Tuesday, investigative journalist James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas team released a disturbing new video on the runaround that Chase officials gave Texas conservative entrepreneur Enrique Tarrio about his canceled account. Big business may very well be enabling America's very own version of the Chinese social credit system in which political dissent is flagged, shunned, punished and eradicated.

First, some background:

Tarrio is a young, peaceful, Afro-Cuban freethinker and chairman of the Proud Boys organization. In February 2019, the Texas Trump supporter received a letter from Chase Bank informing him that "after careful consideration," the financial institution could "no longer support" his banking account. The notice followed a hit piece against minorities who support the president by The Daily Beast, a reliable echo chamber for the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center smear machine.

Tarrio was subsequently kicked off Chase's payment processor, which he used to sell patriotic and pro-Trump T-shirts. Next, he was deplatformed from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Airbnb, FirstData, Square, Stripe and PayPal before losing his bank accounts. When I asked on Twitter in February why we can't have just one financial institution that doesn't cave to social justice warriors, the official Chase Twitter account tweeted me back:

"Hi Michelle, this article is inaccurate. We did not close his personal account. We do not close accounts based on political affiliation."

I pointed out that Chase's letter clearly stated that the company had closed his account. "So if not for political reasons," I asked, "why, 'after careful consideration,' did you close his account?" The social media manager of Chase's corporate Twitter account, previously so eager to spill the tea, replied: "For privacy reasons, we can't say more."

See earlier: Finland At 100—Frozen By Fear, Dragged To A Multicultural Grave

For a while on Sunday night, it seemed that the immigration-patriot Finns Party, led by the Slavic languages scholar Dr Jussi Halla-Aho, was actually going to come joint-first in the country’s parliamentary elections. Ultimately, it took 17.5% of the vote and 39 sears, compared to 17.7% and 40 seats for Social Democratic Party.

Immigration patriotism is on a roll in Scandinavia (see here and here.) But nobody expected the Finns Party (Finnish name Perussuomalaiset—often translated as True Finns, although The Finns Party is now its official English-language name) to do so well, let alone to very nearly win. Even the notoriously cerebral and inscrutable Halla-Aho, long dismissed as a far-right fanatic who’d lead his party to electoral oblivion, couldn’t help but beam from ear-to-ear.

And if it were not for a careerist split from the Finns Party in 2017, due to Halla-Aho’s election as party leader, the Finns Party would have won the election. The “Blue Reform” splitters took an (albeit humiliating) 1% of the vote and all lost their seats, falling below the threshold to get into parliament.

The infamously emotionless Finns are feeling emotional and they’ve registered this at the ballot box. Almost equal numbers are livid about immigration on the one hand and the country’s collapsing welfare state on the other. The ascent of the SDP and the Finns Party, and the relegation of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s Centre Party to a distant fourth with 13.8% of the vote and 31 seats, reflect two scandals that have shaken the snowy nation of 5.5 million.