This lesson will be short (but nonetheless important), as I was giving lessons on Twitter and have shut down my account there (with about a thousand followers), as well as my Facebook account, because of these platforms’ meddling in politics and political censorship, which I find unacceptable. Jan 11, 2021

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I am amazed at how readily some Americans will surrender all forms of freedoms so long as the invasion comes not from government but big corporations, as if the latter could treat individuals as trash and no redress existed.

(My goal in the previous lessons was to show that means of redress exist, even without a new statute or constitutional amendment: See Invasive Moderation Parts 1-3, in Lessons 4-6.)

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However Broad the Daylight

When in 1929 intellectual and candidate José Vasconcelos contested election results in Mexico he made a call to insurrection and, the insurrection failing, left the country. – How can accepting a new governement after claims of electoral fraud be consistent with democracy?

Was the people given a satisfactory coverage of how the fraud claim was answered? Each point of the claim should have been addressed one by one and there should exist at the date of today a formal document refuting all the claim’s points. Does it exist?

To say that courts decided is not enough, if it turns out the courts made answers completely in the abstract, i.e. making a general statement that does not deal at all with the points as presented as they sometimes do albeit they have to deal with particular cases.

One may call violence at the Capitol disgraceful but I fail to perceive that the claim of electoral fraud was addressed with due concern rather than disregarded from the beginning as “same antics.” It’s not the way these things should be handled.

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Seeing that the U.S. president was not preparing for an armed insurrection even though he kept crying foul, the once evoked martial law would have been his duty in the circumstance. He is letting an illegitimate government take charge.

I can’t say that the evidence supporting the claim seems conclusive to me but also I’m not quite familiar with U.S. electoral law (I swear to change this before the next presidential election). However the counterspeech strikes me as so light-minded –though aggressive– that I am in doubt. President Trump makes precise –not vague– accusations, such as that in states X and Y electoral law was changed before the election without the approval of state legislatures as required by the constitutions of these states. It should be easy to prove that right or wrong. So?

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As each state has its own electoral law, the number even of Americans who have a fair picture of the electoral process is quite small. Add the tortious invasion of politicians’ speech by oligopolistic internet business, and you’ve got ideal conditions for massive fraud in my book.

“Tortious invasion,” yea, regardless of unhinged platform lobbyists ranting about their right to decide what speech they convey. These lunatics will make East Berliners regret the Wall if no one stops them. They’ve got no right which would be the end of free speech.

Let me tell you more about the platforms’ tortious practices. When French authorities for instance ask them to remove content, they remove it, explaining “The tweet was against the law of the country.” This is disingenuous, for removal is censorship and there is no censorship in France: People can be prosecuted for speech but there’s no “censorship,” the government cannot force one to remove or recant content even if the person is prosecuted for the content. This is called “la loi de 1881.”

Please note that Twitter complies with French authorities’ repressive –and illegal!– hubris even though “Twitter has no offices nor employees within France, so it is unclear how a French court could sanction Twitter.” (Wkpd: Censorship of Twitter)

And this is government censorship: Twitter has reestablished governement censorship in France, it acts on governement’s order, not –or not only– on courts’ injunction.

But as Twitter might be prosecuted according to that law, not as author but as publisher, they remove content as soon as asked, even though, as stressed above, “it is unclear how a French court could sanction Twitter.” – They remove not only what they don’t like but also, and around the world above all, anything repressive governments ask them. Pathetic.

These trustlike platforms incorporated in America are pathetic because they align themselves on the repressive practices of repressive governments around the world instead of the American spirit of the laws.

Not only does Twitter drift from the American spirit of the laws, thus corrupting Americans toward degenerate subserviency, not only does it de facto reestablish government censorship in countries like France, but also, whereas it is blocked in Communist China, it allows thousands of wumao trolls from same Communist China to spread their slavish propaganda. To say that they are a threat to American national security is an understatement.

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The Business of Looking the Other Way

“More than 90 percent of federal employees [are] covered by the civil service or other type of merit-based system.” (Middle Tennessee State University’s First Amendment Encyclopedia: Political Patronage) They’re the people who will look the other way in presence of fraud.

The reduction of political patronage has not diminished civil servants’ dependency on political machines in the least, only now they depend not on one machine all the time but on all machines alternately.

I don’t know whether these “unpatronaged” functionaries should be called the Deep State or rather the soft belly of the state, a mass of discarded citizens whose constitutional rights are about the same as those of the furniture in their offices. That these functionaries live under the U.S. Constitution makes no difference, they would be living the same life in Communist China, in the same way as their office furniture would be as good in Beijing as it is in Capitol Building.

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Twitter account deactivated on Jan 9, 2021.