The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

How @CNN and Other #FakeNews Media Are Now Working to Silence Dissent

Posted on | August 11, 2018 | 2 Comments

 

Headline at Ace of Spades HQ:

Journalists or Activists? CNN,
Which Admitted They Were Responsible
for Getting Alex Jones Deplatformed from
YouTube, Apple, and FaceBook, Now Admits
It’s Also Pressuring Twitter to Deplatform Him

This is shameful. When I was working for The Washington Times, we did not seek to prevent the distribution of The Washington Post, nor during my years as a correspondent for The American Spectator have we ever sought to silence any competing publication. Yet CNN and other so-called “mainstream” media operations are now actively engaged in a smear campaign intended to “de-platform” alternative voices online.

It is now considered de rigueur to stipulate, before protesting against such social-media bans, that one does not like the banned person or agree with everything he says or does. People did this when Twitter suspended my @rsmccain account, which annoyed me to no end, because Twitter never even bothered to specify what had precipitated this banishment. I’d been on Twitter for seven years and had tens of thousands of followers, none of whom saw anything in my TL that would justify this suspension. Yet when I got banned, several journalists who wrote about this incident felt the need to describe me as “controversial” or whatever in the process of lamenting this evidence that commissars of the Thought Police had obtained hegemonic authority at Twitter.

Why? Isn’t it obvious that these journalists wanted to convey the idea that I must be a special case, “controversial” in some way that made me different from other accounts which had not been banned?

The fact of the matter was (a) that I was simply more effective than some others in calling attention to obstreperous leftists on Twitter, and (b) that I had made influential enemies as a result of this.

Keep in mind that I was hate-listed by the SPLC long before it became routine for them to traffic in such dangerous libel. Circa 1999, the SPLC decided that “neo-Confederates” were a menace and, because I had then just recently been hired by The Washington Times, my name got mentioned in their account due to my previous association with the League of South. Now, it is a mistake to get down in tall grass discussing all the so-called “evidence” involved in the kind of smear campaigns the Left pursues against its chosen enemies. However, after more than a decade of being an independent blogger, don’t you think that if I were a “white supremacist” (as the SPLC has called me), that I would have published something that would suffice as proof of this?

Nothing of the kind ever happened, however, and when Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs tried to revive this “white supremacist” nonsense in September 2009, he made himself an object of ridicule and has long since departed into irrelevant obscurity: “Charles Who?”

Vindicating myself in l’affaire de LGF had the effect of making me a target for the Left during the Tea Party era leading up to the 2010 election, in large measure because leftists are incapable of admitting when they’re wrong. If the SPLC has called me a “white supremacist,” the leftist believes, I must be a very bad person, and this belief becomes the premise for further “investigation” of my allegedly hateful opinions.

So I was continually monitored by the Left all during the many ensuing years, as I ping-ponged around the country doing campaign-trail coverage and occasionally engaging in conflicts with personalities like Neal Rauhauser, Brett Kimberlin and Barrett Brown. Some readers may recall, for example, how the Kate Hunt case in 2013 involved covering the swarm of #FreeKate lunatics who thought there ought to be a lesbian loophole in Florida’s age-of-consent laws, so that she could get a free pass for diddling a 14-year-old. When you cover stories like that in Gonzo mode, you may acquire particularly obnoxious and persistent enemies.

 

All of this is by way of offering the most likely explanation of why, in February 2016, my @rsmccain Twitter account was permanently suspended for “participating in targeted abuse,” even though no one could say (a) who was “targeted”; (b) what kind of “abuse” they had suffered; or (c) how I was “participating” in this harmful activity.

Having accumulated many enemies, who on prior occasions had called on others to “block and report” my account, there was probably quite a large file of complaints about me at Twitter by the time someone — Anita Sarkeesian, perhaps — reported one of my tweets as “abuse.”

When my banishment made headlines in February 2016, various writers (including conservative journalists I consider friends) felt obligated to describe me as “controversial” or to otherwise indicate that, somehow, in some sense, I might have done something to deserve my fate. And this is why I deplore the habit of people who, in opposing the suppression of someone like Alex Jones, feel an obligation to characterize him in a negative way, as if he is a special case in some way substantially different from those who are not (yet) de-platformed.

Is Alex Jones more “racist” than, say, Jordan Peterson or Charles Murray? Is Alex Jones a “conspiracy theorist” in a way that, say, Jim Hoft or Pamela Geller are not? Is Alex Jones more “controversial” than, say, Glenn Reynolds or Rush Limbaugh? Do you see my point here?

There are many reasons I should include disclaimers to “distance” myself, as they say, from Alex Jones. He was a 9/11 “Truther” back in the day, and personally I have a hard time forgiving him for siccing a mob of his supporters on Michelle Malkin at the 2008 DNC in Denver. Yet this is not why Alex Jones is being de-platformed now. Rather, CNN and others on the Left are seeking to silence Alex Jones because he has been effective in calling attention to various facts that the Left desperately seeks to conceal from the general public. Please go read the entirely of the Ace of Spades post about this and ask yourself: “Who’s next?”

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

P.S.: Click here to buy that “Fake News: Enemies of the People” T-shirt.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please remember that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Category: Ace of Spades, CNN

Comments

2 Responses to “How @CNN and Other #FakeNews Media Are Now Working to Silence Dissent”

  1. Enemy Of The People – Small Dead Animals
    August 12th, 2018 @ 12:18 am

    […] But read it all.  […]

  2. News of the Week (August 12th, 2018) | The Political Hat
    August 12th, 2018 @ 8:04 pm

    […] How @CNN and Other #FakeNews Media Are Now Working to Silence Dissent This is shameful. When I was working for The Washington Times, we did not seek to prevent the distribution of The Washington Post, nor during my years as a correspondent for The American Spectator have we ever sought to silence any competing publication. Yet CNN and other so-called “mainstream” media operations are now actively engaged in a smear campaign intended to “de-platform” alternative voices online. […]