Twitter’s “shadow ban” controversy

Last summer, the Vice website reported that some Twitter users were being “shadow banned” – meaning that while the users themselves could see their tweets online, nobody else could. The targets of this ban were, it appeared, mostly conservatives. Among them were several members of Congress, Republican Party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, and a spokesman for Donald Trump, Jr.

“Type in the names of McDaniel, conservative members of Congress like Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz, and Trump Jr.’s spokesman Andrew Surabian, for example,” noted Vice, “and Twitter’s drop-down search bar does not show their profiles.”

Soon after the Vice article appeared, President Trump tweeted about the alleged shadow banning. James O’Keefe of Project Veritas released a video in which a Twitter engineer confirmed the charge.

But Twitter denied it. In Britain, the Bible of the left, the Guardian, presented the whole thing as a right-wing conspiracy theory – “the latest iteration of an idea, bubbling away since the last election, that conservatives are being silenced by social media companies.”

To be sure, the Guardian acknowledged, Twitter had made changes in its algorithms that make “badly behaved users…less visible on the site.” Does this mean that in the Twitterverse, writing critically about Communism and bloodthirsty dictators amounts to bad behavior?

In any event, the bottom line from Jack Dorsey’s corporate headquarters was clear. “We do not shadow ban,” a Twitter spokesperson told the Guardian. And the Guardian bought it.

So, with few if any exceptions, did the rest of the left-wing media on both sides of the Atlantic.

At the website called The Verge, one Casey Newton called the very idea that Twitter was shadow banning “infuriating” and “very dumb.” Twitter “is in no way doing” this, insisted Newton.

At The Next Web, one Bryan Clark agreed that Twitter couldn’t possibly be banning conservatives because “Dorsey, by all accounts, is a smart man” and a smart man wouldn’t do such a thing. The proposition that Twitter was silencing conservatives, wrote Clark, was part of “the Republican war on truth.”

At New York Magazine, Brian Feldman dismissed the shadow-ban charged as fantasy of “the conspiracy-minded.” If prominent conservatives were having trouble with social media, he suggested, it might be because they were more likely than their left-wing counterparts to interact with fringe accounts…if not actually spread falsehoods and sensationalized outrage.”

Even Vice, in an update, wrote that “Twitter appears to have adjusted its platform overnight to no longer limit the visibility of some prominent Republicans in its search results.”

Jack Dorsey on Capitol Hill last September

One thing you might be able to say of Twitter is that as of last summer they still had a degree of plausible deniability. No more.

Since then, the Twitter bans have only accelerated – and, if anything, have seemed less and less justifiable.

On September 5, 2018, Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey told the House Energy and Commerce Committee that Twitter doesn’t “consider political viewpoints, perspectives, or party affiliation in any of our policies or enforcement decisions….Impartiality is our guiding principle.”

The very next day, Twitter permanently suspended conservative TV host Alex Jones (Infowars).

In October, Twitter permanently banned the conservative comic and pundit Gavin McInnes, supposedly for his association with the Proud Boys, a racially diverse, non-violent group that opposes identity politics and has been falsely tagged as racist and violent.

Meanwhile, as we noted earlier this week, local Antifa groups that are genuinely dangerous have been allowed to keep their Twitter accounts.

In November, conservative activist Laura Loomer was permanently banned for tweeting the following: “Isn’t it ironic how the twitter moment used to celebrate ‘women, LGBTQ, and minorities’ is a picture of Ilhan Omar? Ilhan is pro Sharia Ilhan is pro-FGM Under Sharia, homosexuals are oppressed & killed. Women are abused & forced to wear the hijab. Ilhan is anti Jewish.” Every word was true.

Of course, Omar, the new Muslim Congresswoman from Minnesota who has already been forced by House colleagues to apologize for vile tweets about Jews, still retains her Twitter account.

Yet on September 14, 2018, Slate fiercely defended Twitter from charges of bias, insisting that “conservative users…have been misleadingly accusing the platform of shadow banning and removing accounts to suppress their viewpoints.”

Posted on June 25, 2019June 5, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

Twitter’s double standards

Two weeks ago we reported here that we’ve been banned from Twitter and been given no coherent reason for it. Last week we served up a list of prominent people with strong opinions who’ve also been banned for reasons that remain obscure.

To compare this list of people – each of whom had a great many followers and whose views fall well within the mainstream of American and Western opinion – to a roster of people who’ve kept their Twitter accounts is…what shall we say? Is it puzzling? Or is it illuminating?

Take the British activist and journalist Tommy Robinson, who in addition to being kicked off of Twitter last year was removed from Facebook recently – one day, in fact, after his BBC exposé Panodrama was posted there.

Robinson is a vigorous critic of Islamic ideology. But he is no bigot. He consistently makes distinctions between an ideology that calls for the murder of Jews, gays, and apostates and hundreds of millions of people who, while calling themselves Muslims, somehow managing to distance themselves from those monstrous teachings.

Robinson’s allies, colleagues, and supporters, moreover, come from a wide range of backgrounds. His closest friends include black Caribbeans and gay people. In any event – and here’s the big point – he doesn’t have anything remotely resembling the comprehensive record of hate that has been compiled by, say, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Farrakhan, as everyone knows, has described Jews as “satanic.” He has called them “termites.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a black scholar who heads the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard, has characterized a book by Farrakhan as “the bible of new anti-Semitism.” Of all the most famous people in America, Farrakhan is one of the vilest.

Yet although Facebook banned him in May, he still has a Twitter account that has never been even temporarily suspended.

He’s far from alone. Also still tweeting away is Linda Sarsour, who claims to be a feminist but is a bosom buddy of Farrakhan, a constant wearer of hijab, and a passionate supporter of sharia law.

Also still on Twitter is BAMN, the violence-prone Trotskyite organization that both the FBI and the Defense Department consider to be a terrorist group. BAMN was behind the riot that prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at Berkeley in 2017. But while Twitter has banned Yiannopoulos, who never encouraged violence in his life, BAMN is a blue-check member (a status reserved for public figures and established organizations).

Also surviving perfectly well on Twitter, thank you very much, is that gang of vandals and thugs known as New York City Antifa. Ditto Sarah Jeong, the New York Times board member who gained notoriety last year for her prodigious use of Twitter to savage white people. And the list goes on.

Of course, allowing some perfectly horrible people to stay on Twitter is defensible. Cuba’s dictator, Raúl Castro, and dictator-in-waiting, Miguel Díaz-Canel, have blue-check accounts. But fine – it’s useful to know what’s on their nefarious minds.

Some Twitter bans are arguably defensible, too. The service has banned a number of groups and individuals on the right that practice and encourage violence. Yet at the same time it’s left any number of violent, hate-spewing users on the left entirely untouched. And that’s where the question of inequality comes in.

More next week.

Posted on June 18, 2019June 2, 2019 by usefulstooges 3

Ilhan’s friends

On April 30, outside the Capitol in Washington, D.C., a group of protesters consisting largely of black women held a rally based on a false premise: that Ilhan Omar, the hijab-wearing Muslim Democrat who was elected to Congress last November from a district that includes Minneapolis and some of its suburbs, is the victim of racism and sexism on the part of President Trump, most of right-wing America, and even a few members of her own party. In fact, as we discussed on Tuesday, Omar is a virulent anti-Semite who, ever since her election, has been digging herself a deeper and deeper hole by saying in public what she thinks about Jews. Other prominent Muslims who have also been inculcated with hatred of the Jews do a better job of hiding their bigotry; in a perverse way, perhaps Omar deserves a degree of credit for being incapable of dissembling on the subject. In any event, she is no victim; a refugee from Somalia, she found refuge in America, a country that she routinely disses almost as viciously as she disses Jews, and managed to become one of the first two Muslim women in Congress, a status that has made her an instant star on the left. Of course the topsy-turvy notion of the Jew-baiting Omar as a victim is typical of our time, when a violent group like Antifa can be described in the mainstream media as peaceful and anti-fascist and when every act of jihadist terror brings another round of media hand-wringing over the possibility of anti-Muslim backlash by evil “Islamophobes.”

But back to the rally. One banner described it as “Black Women in Defense of Ilhan Omar.” Another banner read “Black Women in Defense of Progressive Women in Congress.” Those progressive women, of course, include not only Omar but her fellow Muslim, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Only on the American left in the second decade of the twenty-first century can devout Muslims, one of whom wears a symbol of female subservience, be hailed as “progressive.” The other high-profile progressive Congresswoman, of course, is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former New York bartender who hates capitalism, hates ICE, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, sent the Senate a “green new deal” that was so wacky that absolutely nobody voted for it, and posted a video on social media in which she reported on her baffled encounter, in her new Washington, D.C., home, with a gizmo in her kitchen sink that made a scary sound when you flipped a switch. (She had never seen or heard of a garbage disposal before.) Also, although not a Muslim, she hates Israel almost as much as Omar and Tlaib do.

Anyway, the rally. One speaker described it as a gathering of “professors and labor leaders and artists and organizers.” Plus a whole lot of members of Black Lives Matter. The goal, explained one woman, was to “defend the right of black women to speak about and act upon what happens to black women in this country.” In particular, the idea was to stand up to Trump and the GOP, who had “put a hit out on Ilhan Omar,” who was described as a victim of “white supremacist violence” and of “racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, sexist, vitriol” on the part of white nationalists. But the protesters were also there to fight “Islamophobia” and to express solidarity with “trans people,” “black and brown people in the sex trades,” prisoners, migrants, and “our sisters and brothers in Palestine.” Attendees were told that the current crisis in Venezuela is the result of American foreign policy. They were also fed the revisionist version of Angela Davis’s criminal history, in which this felon is magically transformed into a victim. These were people for whom reciting chants like “let my people go” and “we aren’t going anywhere” and “hands off Ilhan” and listing the same dozen or so identity groups over and over again seemed to be a substitute for actual thought. America itself, of course, was depicted as an Evil Empire, a dystopia in which every problem ailing black women is the fault of racism and misogyny on the part of white people who are still, if only symbolically, “lynching” and “whipping” them. You would never have guessed that there exists any such thing as jihadist terror or black-on-black violence. All in all, a staggering display of ignorance, rage, willful refusal to face up to uncomfortable facts, and a claustrophobic, counterproductive fixation on group-identity labels.

Posted on June 13, 2019May 31, 2019 by usefulstooges 3

Yvette Felarca, anti-fascist heroine?

Doubtless, from one perspective, we have devoted more attention to Yvette Felarca on this site than she deserves. She’s just one local activist, after all, who’s far from an international figure or a woman of great power. Nonetheless, she is the near-perfect example of a certain type that is a preoccupation of this blog: an almost thoroughly clueless tool, brainwashed to a fare-thee-well by totalitarian ideology and driven to violence by her utter fanaticism.

As we’ve explained before, Felarca is a teacher at a Berkeley, California, middle school. She is also a leading member of BAMN, short for “The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary,” founded in 1995 as a front group for a Trotskyist party called the Revolutionary Workers League. Based in California, BAMN has participated in actions that range from blocking highway traffic to outright acts of violence; it was a gang of BAMN thugs that, in February 2017, stirred up the ruckus that prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from giving a presentation at UC Berkeley. Both the FBI and the Defense Department consider BAMN a terrorist group. As for Felarca, she is a diehard true believer who considers any critic or opponent a genocidal Nazi and who seems capable of committing any atrocity in cold blood in the name of the Communist cause.

Over the years, Felarca has run up quite a record. In 2016 she led a demonstration in Sacramento that has been described in some media as a rally and in others as a riot. When her pupils’ parents got wind of her extracurricular activities, they tried to get her fired. But it takes more than that for the public school system in the city widely known as “Berserkeley” to dismiss a teacher. “We don’t have any authority or business to judge what an employee does in her off time,” a spokesman for the Berkeley Unified School District told the media before sending her back into the classroom. Next thing you know, there she was closing down the Milo event, ordering around a bunch of hoods who broke windows, threw fireworks and Molotov cocktails, and beat innocent citizens with fists and poles.

After the Milo fracas, Felarca was arrested, and gave an interview to Tucker Carlson in which it became utterly clear to viewers just what a fanatic she is. Still, she kept her job.

Delusions of grandeur: Trump’s most famous enemy?

On this past December 19 came the latest update on Felarca’s radical journey. As it happens, her antics in Sacramento in 2016 resulted in charges of felony assault and misdemeanor inciting a riot. Now described as an associate not only of BAMN but also of Antifa – of course she is the sort of woman who makes sure to keep up with progress on the “progressive” front – Felarca has finally had to answer in court for her behavior on that day. In a vain attempt to get the charges against her dismissed, she has accused her accusers of engineering a “political witch hunt,” suggested that the video evidence against her was fabricated, argued that her prosecution is motivated by racism and by politics, and claimed that she has been victimized because she’s “the most publicly known opponent of Donald Trump in the state of California.”

These arguments, alas, haven’t saved her from a judicial reckoning. “Two judges so far have failed to dismiss the case against her stemming from the 2016 riot,” reported the Daily Caller, “and in October, a judge dismissed her lawsuit meant to block conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch from obtaining emails regarding her involvement with both Antifa and BAMN.” She was scheduled for a hearing on December 18, but the judge delayed it until this coming January 22. Irked at the judge for not simply dismissing the charges against Felarca, Mark Reichel, a prominent attorney who is representing one of Felarca’s Antifa/BAMN cohorts, accused the Sacramento County district attorney of “selectively prosecuting people that fought fascists.” Reichel actually added: “We used to call them heroes in World War II.” Yes, you read that correctly: he was comparing Felarca, a savage Commie nut of the first water, to the Allied soldiers who risked their lives to defeat the Third Reich.

This is the way these people think. And this is precisely why Felarca is so worth paying attention to. And it’s why we’ll make sure to see what happens when she has her day in court on January 22.

Posted on January 1, 2019December 23, 2018 by usefulstooges 5

Defending Antifa at Queen’s University

On September 23, David Menzies of Canada’s Rebel Media introduced the world to yet another idiot professor of whose existence it had previously been innocent. Cynthia Levine-Rasky, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, had written a letter to the editor to Toronto’s cooler-than-thou alternative weekly, Now, which was basically a billet doux to Antifa. “Many people,” she wrote, “are critical of the anti-fascist activists who protest white nationalist rallies….But they are taking risks that the rest of us will not.” They “mask up because white nationalists photograph and film them so they can identify them and attack them online and otherwise. Many anti-fascist protestors are young people with a lot to lose, including their jobs, their housing, their health, their future. We need to stop labelling these front-line activists since surely all of us are against white supremacy.”

Where to start? With the fact that “white nationalist rallies” of any significant size in North America are a fever dream of the far left, whose savviest members know very well that “white nationalism” is a chimera, even if a good many of the white, upper-middle-class college students and trust-fund malingerers who make up most of Antifa actually seem to believe, on some childlike, unreflecting level, that they are at war with millions of rabid racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, etc. Second, the conduct of Antifa makes it clear that they, and nobody else, are the major fascist phenomenon in North America today. They are not fighting fascists. They are fighting conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, moderates, you name it – anyone who may happen to disagree with their radical lockstep boilerplate. They “mask up” because they do not have the courage of their convictions. If they really were brave, they wouldn’t give a toss about losing their jobs or housing. Their convictions are play convictions. They may think they are valiant fighters against capitalism, but they are sunlight warriors, summertime Spartacuses, playpen rebels, gathering en masse to smash the windows of Starbucks branches at which they may well later turn up, maskless, to order a cafe latte grande.

Of course the argument that North America in 2018 is rife with white supremacism is based largely on a single event – the clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 between motley crews of rightist and leftist activists. Yes, some of the rightists who were there were extremists – some were even neo-Nazis or members of the Ku Klux Klan. Some of the leftists, in the same way, were Stalinists, Maoists, anarchists. Neither extreme is attractive. Neither is conducive to individual freedom and intellectual diversity. But one thing is clear. The extreme right in America today is an extremely minimal and marginal phenomenon. The KKK’s heyday is long past. The neo-Nazis are not about to take over the U.S. By contrast, the radical left is thriving. Only Clinton-level political machinations prevented a socialist, Bernie Sanders, from winning the Democratic Party 2016 nomination for president of the United States.

But Levine-Rasky doesn’t buy this. In a recent article, she argued that white supremacists are a clear and present danger, and noted that white supremacism was certainly a real power earlier in the history of the U.S. and Canada. She pointed out, for example, the onetime popularity of eugenics programs, which aggressive promoted birth control as a means of keeping down the reproduction of nonwhites. She’s right to indicate that this sort of thinking was indeed widespread back in the day. What she neatly omits to mention is that eugenics, as preached by Margaret Sanger and others, was an integral part not of conservative political programs but, rather, of the progressive movement that led to the formation of the modern American welfare state. The determination of progressives to make use of modern science to limit the number of black babies was rooted in the very same totalitarian urge to control and restrict that undergirds today’s Antifa movement.

Levine-Rasky makes a big deal out of the fact that Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, subscribed to this kind of thinking, but she omits to even admit that leftist heroes Wilson and FDR were far more worried about “polluting” of white America with the blood of other “races” than Teddy Roosevelt was. It should be recalled that Wilson, despite his image as a liberal-minded academic intellectual, was a vicious segregationist, while FDR locked up Japanese-Americans during World War II and refused to allow Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany into the U.S. In American today, the progressive obsession with group identity that made possible Wilson’s and FDR’s ugliest policies still exists not in today’s GOP but in the party of Obama and the Clintons – but you would never know that from Cynthia Levine-Rasky.

Posted on October 11, 2018October 5, 2018 by usefulstooges 1

Useful Stooges

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Tag: Antifa

Ilhan’s friends

Yvette Felarca, anti-fascist heroine?