Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Censorship


The Twitchy article demonstrates the old-fashioned bias conservatives are long used to.  There is no declaration that one side is forbidden a platform, but only one side is being told, and reporters are not very curious what the other side even might be. It self-reinforces.  One just convinces oneself that these supposed examples of bias are nearly always unfounded, so it’s not worth one’s time to even go over and check them out.  Everyone knows that.  The conservative press is always railing about small things and making mountains out of molehills.Of course the same or worse didn't occur under Obama. Don't be silly.

The other piece is something more modern, a more explicit censorship. The conservative press reports many examples of this sort of thing, relating it to a relatively small group of angry people, mostly younger, who viciously mob those they disagree with, and see nothing wrong with this.  They are aided by a larger number of people who never or only occasionally participate in this mobbing and direct censorship but agree with the activists enough to quietly approve. It is the same private-actor argument by the big companies that is used by small cake-bakers. This seems to include people working in positions of power in social media.  I have no sense of the numbers of either group, only that they are greater than in any of the three generations before them, and perhaps more.  Even in the HUAC and blacklist eras people could publish books and magazines, give speeches and concerts, and cut records, even if they were denied the “public airwaves.”

Conservatives have claimed for years that the first kind of censorship is just as effective as the second, and just as evil.  I wonder if we are going to find out if that is really true.

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