Before we begin, WokeTheNormies feels it is necessary to note that we do not agree with everything Alex Jones stands for or has said. WokeTheNormies does in fact support the right of gay and transgender frogs to gender transition via Atrazine. LGBTQF (“F” for frogs!) lives matter!
With that said, as you doubtlessly already know, a mass censorship purge by Leftist-dominated Silicon Valley corporations initiated a sweeping 3AM social media ban of Alex Jones and InfoWars from their websites – Youtube, Facebook, Spotify, Instagram, Apple, and even LinkedIn got in on the banhammer action.
This is abhorrent, and overt censorship. But what’s even worse than these bans is the fracturing of opinions on the Right of our supposed allies regarding Alex Jones’ rights and the ability of these social media corporations (which hold de facto monopolies on the 21st digital equivalent of the public square) to ban users they simply do not like, regardless of if they actually violated their rules.
Here are the popular takes, in order from most-viewers or greatest social reach (a little subjective, and possible inaccurate, WTN admits) to least:
–Fox News: Mostly quiet on the normie Western front. Judge Andrew Napolitano supposedly threw the dog a bone, but FOX didn’t bite.
–CNN: They’re cheering, of course. Remember when CNN threatened to doxx a reddit user and it was dubbed #CNNBlackmail? Same people.
–MSNBC: Frothing at the mouth.
–Democrat Senators on Twitter: ‘What conservative or Right-wing dissident can we ban next?’
–Ben Shapiro (Daily Wire): Expected virtue-signal “Alex Jones has said bad things” (granted, he has). But, seems to dislike social media companies’ bias against conservatives and Right-wing people and their unequal treatment of the Left who often go far beyond what they would tolerate of any Right-wing speaker (see: Candace Owens banned from Twitter for her emulation of Sarah Jeong’s racist tweets. And no, we don’t put “racist” in quotes because it’s pretty obvious they were racist tweets by Sarah Jeong).
–Sargon of Akkad: Leading the Fifth Division of the #WokeArmy #MemeWarriors (of course), he flanks the Left from behind with his coarse and abrupt rebuttal: “Let the man speak”. (We’re paraphrasing, of course). Sargon is extra-woke on the topic of deplatforming, censorship, Orwellian thought control and policing as he had experienced it first-hand, so naturally he defends even the most obtuse of characters such as Jones (and rightfully so).
–Philip DeFranco: Pathetic betrayer of the First Amendment. Capitulation is his middle name. The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one. Claims to “leave it to the audience to decide”, but his opinion is obvious: if you say something deemed offensive by someone somewhere, you shouldn’t have the right to say it. But, as Philip DeFranco would say, that’s just our opinion. You should watch his video for yourself to decide.
–Michael Knowles (Daily Wire): Subdued #FreeSpeechDefender. Rebuked the censorship, and defends Jones’/Infowars’ right to speak absurdities. If men can’t be arbiters of truth for themselves, then who gets to decide for them? Definitely a greater defender of the #FirstAmendment than Shapiro’s take came across as.
–Matt Walsh (Daily Wire): Seems concerned about #FreeSpeech, but took no issue in Ep. 78 entitled “The War on ‘Hate Speech’ is a War on Conservative Speech” with the fact that social media companies have “monopolies” (and he even explicitly acknowledged them as such) on the modern digital public square. He even insinuated that if Alex Jones wanted to have just as effective a reach as he had on Facebook or Youtube, that he could simply “click” and post to a different website with orders-of-magnitude fewer users.
Walsh fails to understand that it is the user presence on these social media platforms that makes them a de-facto public square. When over 1,000,000,000 people use a website for social interaction, listening to and exchanging ideas with other people, for hours and hours every day of every week for years, that qualifies them as the quintessential definition of a public square. If people are prevented from peacefully espousing or discussing ideas in the public square, that is a core element of censorship, and while Walsh’s prerogative seemed invested (and for good reason, on principle) in protecting private property rights, the fact of the matter is that if the whole world were to be privately owned, then any such monopoly could go far beyond merely censoring people’s speech. We have to drawn the line with monopolies when it gets to the point where no one is allowed to dissent from the powerful – whether that power be codified in law or in dollars. Government monopolies are bad, and so are extreme corporate monopolies.
*Please keep in mind these are parodical and comedic versions of these commentators’ opinions, for satirical/comedic purposes. We do not guarantee these to be truthful representations of their opinions or statements and do disclaim any assertion to have represented them as accurate or factual. As a reasonable person, you should watch their videos for yourself to be your own judge of their opinions.*
Here’s our take:
As a prefatory remark, we find it pertinent to note that the 1st Amendment asserts two fundamental rights with regards to free speech: that neither the “freedom of speech” nor the ability to articulate “a redress of grievances” can be abridged in a public square, and in a landmark Supreme Court case last year, SCOTUS determined that social media companies do in fact act as a modern-day “public square”, because that’s where people congregate to listen and exchange ideas .
The 1st Amendment declares a right to redress one’s grievances. One cannot have his grievances redressed if his audience is unwilling or unable via top-down involuntary censorship to hear him. This is why, no matter how absurd someone’s desires or claims are, the People have a right to lobby Congress to change laws; and similarly, no matter how hateful or ridiculous someone’s march may be about in the public square (such as an nude LGBT march in San Francisco composed of completely naked men in the streets with children onlooking from the sidewalk, or Neo-Nazis rallying to support love of white people, etc.), people have a right to peaceably assemble and to redress their grievances in the public square (though many will debate endlessly about the legality of public nudity or “hate speech” being Constitutional rights, we merely passingly mention these kinds of events as being legal in 2018 America, not to assert these as timeless, eternal, or universally-acknowledged rights). These social media corporations have evinced de-facto monopolies on the internet public square.
Anyone who would conflate all social media companies as interchangeable and equivalent in their public reach is intellectually dishonest. One cannot simply stop posting publicly on Facebook with its 1B+ users and begin to use an obscure website with less than 50 users and call it equivalent. That’s like the difference between shouting in a Port-a-Potty with the door closed and being on a stage with a microphone and 100,000 people in front of you. The two scenarios are not equal.
That’s because of the clustering effect . When people begin to congregate in large population groups around an epicenter (in this case, Facebook, Youtube, Spotify, etc.), due to the duration and quantity of people there, it becomes the de facto public square. And in SCOTUS’ ruling last year about a man barred by law from going on social media, in a record 9-0 ruling, all of the justices Left, Right, and center concurred that a man cannot be prevented from using social media because that’s where the People are . Just like there are laws to protect us from Trusts and Monopolies, there should be Anti-Trust laws to protect the right to speak and also to be heard in the public square. These social media companies are monopolies.
This doesn’t even factor in other considerations in the legal case surrounding the violation of Alex Jones’ rights; the 1st Amendment is just one component. There’s also 14th Amendment considerations, election law violations, conspiracy laws, among others. Essentially, the fact that so many of these companies decided to do this all simultaneously within a 12-hour period smacks of obvious deliberate premeditated conspiracy to deprive Jones of his 1st Amendment rights. With the LinkedIn case for example, he literally never even uploaded anything to the website yet was banned without cause nonetheless. A clear violation of his right to speak and contract with others. On the election laws, we are coming to the 2018 Midterm elections, and InfoWars was credited by the New York Times as having influenced numerous voters throughout the country in assisting Donald trump’s election; taking down InfoWars enures to the benefit of his political opposition via preventing dissemination of his speech. The 14th Amendment violation would be the unequal treatment of “hate speech” by people like Sarah Jeong, #ANTIFA, and #BLM who openly proclaim hatred of white people yet there is a double standard in the fair and equal treatment under the purportedly ‘neutral’ enforcement of such rules and bylaws. Finally, keep in mind Facebook never said it was “fake news” as the reason for his ban, they said it was for hate speech . That’s a red flag right there, and likely to be used as a pretext to set the stage to ban anyone who criticizes Islam, feminism, BLM, ANTIFA, questions scientific debate about climate change, etc. Alex Jones is the canary in the coal mine and we all know it.
All of those externalities and tangential concerns aside, the simple fact is on 1st Amendment grounds alone Alex Jones’ rights are being violated because he is being conspiratorially excluded from the 21st century digital equivalent of the public square by social media corporations in violation of Anti-Trust laws that have in just a matter of a few years rendered vast monopolies on the public citizenry’s time and thought dissemination.
Alex Jones’ ban was a violation of his rights, and he has a right to speak.
DISCLAIMER: All of the preceding information is satire and fictional. WokeTheNormies.com is a news and political satire web publication, which may or may not use real names, often in semi-real or mostly fictitious ways. All news articles on WokeTheNormies.com are fiction, and presumably fake news. Any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental, except for all references to politicians or celebrities or public figures, in which case our caricatures thereof may be based on real people, but are still based almost entirely in fiction. WokeTheNormies.com is intended for a mature, intelligent, and discerning audience.