It appears just reporting claims that the 2020 election was stolen, without supporting those claims, is enough for YouTube to ban a video.
YouTube has informed Consortium News that it has removed an episode of CN Live! for violating its policy on “spam, deceptive practices and scams.”
YouTube also suspended CN Live! for a week. Its notice said:
“Your content was removed due to a violation of our Community Guidelines. Your channel now has 1 strike. You won’t be able to do things like upload, post, or live stream for 1 week. A second strike will prevent you from publishing content for 2 weeks.”
The live episode, which aired on Jan. 14, was about voter suppression in the Jan. 5 Senate runoff elections in Georgia. It featured journalist Greg Palast as a live guest and also showed a clip from Palast’s film on the issue. 
The clip begins with a scene of Trump supporters claiming voter fraud in the November election. The clip and the live discussion with Palast went on to refute that claim, reporting instead that voter suppression by Republicans had instead taken place in Georgia.
YouTube said that Consortium News had violated this policy:
“Spam, deceptive practices and scams
Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election is not allowed on YouTube.”
It appears that just reporting on claims that the 2020 election was stolen, without supporting those claims, is enough for either a YouTube algorithm or human reviewer to banish a video. It appears likely that only the first minute of the video was viewed and an incorrect assessment was made.
Under pressure from Democratic lawmakers, social media companies have been removing content that Democrats do not agree with, in particular claims that the election was fraudulent. That the CN Live! episode said the opposite and was not recognized by YouTube is the latest example of out-of-control policing of protected speech at the behest of government. “This amounts to an attack on journalism,” said CN Editor Joe Lauria. “You cannot be punished for reporting all sides of a story.”
Consortium News has appealed YouTube’s decision. It reads:
“We are appealing your decision to remove this video & suspend us for a week. We can show the decision was made in error. Our video does not in any way support the claim the 2020 election was stolen. In fact it does the opposite. The video opens with a scene of Trump supporters making that claim, but as a journalism organization we were merely reporting, and not supporting that. The rest of the video debunks it, explaining that Republicans were engaging in voter suppression, which is totally different from voter fraud. Viewing the video beyond the first 1m19s, (where a woman calls Trump’s claims “ridiculous”) will show we reject those claims & that your decision was mistaken. Clearly an algorithm or a human reviewer saw only the first minute of the video and made an incorrect assessment.”
Media censorship has gotten out-of-hand. Freedom of speech and press freedom are severely threatened. YouTube must reinstate CN Live! immediately and apologize for such mistaken behaviour.
Sorry Greg Palast is not the last word in Election Integrity. When you fail to investigate the entire process, the election systems, you have not done your job. Greg Palast suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome and can’t accept there may have been irregularities in our voting system. This is not sound strange or crazy for people covering this issue for over 20 years.
And who said he was? The point is that the video in which he spoke to us should not have been taken down, first because the video did not violate their standards, i.e. it did not “advance false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election,” and second, YouTube should not be engaged in removing or blocking videos, as it is a social media platform, not a publication, like Consortium News, for instance, which does not provide a social media platform.
“This amounts to an attack on journalism,” said CN Editor Joe Lauria. “You cannot be punished for reporting all sides of a story.”
The point is ““You cannot be punished — by government — for reporting all sides of a story.”
The speech-limiting propensity and actions of corporations (YT/Google) are not subject to the obligations of the 1st amendment toward their clients. (As if government regards the Bill of Rights as anything but a trivial nuisance.)
There will need to be some deep congressional throats to reveal, what I presume, until proven otherwise, is a “public-private conspiracy” to throttle “Wrong Speak” by corporations upon orders of the government. Maybe the evidence is in plain view in the testimony of various high-info-tech CEO’s who are periodically publicly berated (ostensibly) in congressional hearings to distract from the actual relationship? (I couldn’t possibly watch the Kabuki dance of these worms.)
The Dems immediately seized upon the 06Jan storming of the Capitol to expand its Russia-gate hysteria (hypocritically, about fraudulent elections!!!, as below) to an era of insurrectionists under every bed — and on every social media platform. They’re hardly stupid but certainly vicious and realize they need all methods to suppress the dissent that a Biden administration must, and has already, created.
First they came for their own party’s “leftists” … next target: FOX News!!!
I think that after four years (and millions of taxpayer dollars) 0f Democrats claiming that “Russia stole” the 2016 election, people are tired of such claims. By 2016, it had already become habit for the party that loses, to claim fraud. The Russiagate theme/Mueller investigation took things to a dangerous degree, gravely damaging years of diplomatic progress. And as it turned out, there is no legitimacy to the claims. In the end, we learned that many Americans have no idea 0f how presidential elections w0rk (electoral college process, etc.).
DH Fabian,
We do know that presidential elections are stolen, no matter who wins, and no one with the power to investigate will be allowed to do so.
Every avenue will be blocked to prevent the truth about the elections to be revealed and no one will be permitted to discuss the legitimacy of elections with the public.
The truth has been decided for us, no questions will be taken, especially if they were not submitted prior to the press conference.
Just remember, you are lucky to be on your own.
Don’t expect the government to help, you deadbeat. Social Security is an entitlement. Here today, gone tomorrow. Call your congress person and see where that gets you.
YouTube is disgusting. They are the real fascists, censoring voices evoking the slightest hint of dissent or at variance with the totalitarian narrative flowing out of Washington. The American Hitler will not come from the right. She/he will come from the ranks of the DNC.
This type of AI action can signal what can go wrong and may signal what certain groups will be able to control with the unregulated actions
You do realize that even if you were supporting the view that the election was fraudulent, you should still not be censored?
It’a called the first amendment.
As I said elsewhere:
Apparently, we all must show our “wokeness” by not protesting the censorship by the “woke” no matter how far they go.
How about doing the following experiment? After the suspension has passed, redo the video, but start witgh a 1.5 minute intro stating that the claims of a stolen election are false. Then add on the original video.
There’s really no “appealing to the better angels of our nature” here, the old paradigms have and will continue to be ruthlessly excised.
The gloves of the tech-giants (along with their Darpa and 3-Letter Spook Agency backers are off. We are here. Now.
Another well-contrived plan and manifestation of the Great Reset, methinks.
No time remaining for cognitive dissonance about this, it is well underway, and much like Stephen King’s ‘The Langoliers,’ it is gobbling up the past and the present with malice aforethought. Amorality is the new facilitator for the 21st century. ‘Fairness’ is not included in the new dictionary. I think ‘antitrust’ is another 20th century word destined for extinction. We waited too long. The billionaires have got us (and the world) by the short hairs.
Much better to get a video / livestream account at Rokfin.com and for personal comms Panquake.com for likely secure (so far) future comms. I’ll not speak of Rokfin being a go-to in the future, however.
The techies’ modus operandi is to throw $20 billion or so at anybody who presumes to compete with them and so will subsume any snot-nosed upstart.
A much nicer ‘muscle’ applied than the way the old Mafia goombahs did their work with that gem: “Let me make you an offer you can’t refuse.” That said, I’ll stand for Panquake holding out for much longer than any other entity so exposed to such unimaginable entreaties of wealth gone wild.
Good luck. Your voice is not only needed, it is essential.
I think this liberal “Cancel Culture” is gaining momentum and will only lead to more hate in the coming months.
Your video opened by quoting Trump’s claims, at on of his rallys. This by itself would have involved violation of Terms of Service (apparently). the idea being, to counter the spread of such claims. Fine. (leaving aside the crucial question of censorship, at all.)
However, the live discussion that followed explicitly countered the claims made by Trump. So, logically, it’s promoting the values claimed by YouTube.
This is clearly one of those situations where you’re damned if you do, an damned if you don’t, support Trump. How very Trumpian. Irony lives! Hooray!
This is like the “riot” on Jan 6 which has been selectively featured and explained as if it were the most terrible crime in the USA’s history! To show what “really” went on is necessary, as your article did for the “stolen election”.
The present Dem. takedown of any material that goes against their official line is dangerous, and it is interesting to compare recent events with the 2016 election and its aftermath- limitless manifestations of disbelief and refusal to accept the results which did not please the anti- Trumpers.
This is ridiculous. It supports what Glen Greenwald was warning against in a recent Youtube video–the censorship these online media outlets impose–even on those clips originating from the Left.
And the Left and all those “Politically Correct” monitors share some of the blame for this.
This is beyond terrifying!
All alternative news orgs should get away from Youtube and start something else, or find something else.
What aboug suing Youtube as a monopoly organization?
You have the right to assert that the elction was stolen, or that fraud existed. All avenues to investigate this issue have been cut off.
Yet if someone states an opinion, you have the right to report it. The idea of “fact checking” one’s way to “the truth” is absurd, and totalitarian.
Youtube and google must be stopped. They are monsters.
Meanwhile what about Bitchute? Just get off Google/youtube.
Here’s a simple anti-trust case to make against Youtube: they are currently autodeleting posts in video comment sections that include the “Fediverse”. The Fediverse is a decentralized federation of various media platforms that includes PeerTube, a direct competitor to Youtube.
Bitchute is ultimately the same sort of centralized operation as Youtube and can’t be relied upon when their power is threatened. I can’t substantiate this with any sort of source, but I have leftist friends who have claimed that Bitchute outright censors communist/anarchist videos. Consortium News would be wise to host their stuff on a decentralized, federated platform that can resist censorship by virtue of no one party exercising monopoly control over the community.
It seems likely, based on the rapidity with which a militantly anti-Trump comment of mine ended up putting me into “Facebook jail” last year, that these “smart” algorithms can be very stupid. Or it may have been a ham-fisted human response against Consortium News. Either way, these types of responses have become all too common, and the remedy of no longer uploading to YouTube, with its massive reach, isn’t a satisfactory remedy. I hope you can contact an actual human being there, one who can recognize and rectify an obviously bad move.
So you are claiming to be ideologically supportive of the censors, and so should be allowed to agree with them? Give me a break.
This is the acid test for me. When the websites I follow are de-platformed from YouTube, then I know they are legitimate truth-seekers and truth-tellers. Congratulations Consortium News. And thank you!
Which is precisely why I – as an observer from outside the US – believe there is substance to Trump’s claim of an election stolen.
From here it looks like a putsch conducted in coordinated manner by the DNC, McMedia and the various puppeteers in the background, ranging from a psychopathic Clinton to a spiteful Kissinger (remember how Trump fired that old reptile towards the end?? Probably not, because hardly anyone wrote about it, and so hardly anyone took notice, even though this was an event worthy of a peace nobel prize!!!) to ‘Big Tech’ and Wall Street and on to NATO/Deep State structures national and international.
I write this not because of any warm feelings towards Trump or the Republicans, but because the stench of rotten fish is so overwhelming!! .. American democracy has been ended by convincing everyone it has been ..restored.
It’s all frigging PR agency psychology games and manipulations these days. Let’s hope the inevitable reaction of the people, who have been systematically lied to, will not turn out to mirror the immoral insanity of the putschists, as that could turn grim indeed.
Can you sue the b*****s ? Though as you exist on donations it might be hard to prove a $$ loss.
Expect much more information suppression from a Democratic party more authoritarian than Trump ever dreamed to be.
Wow. Saying the Democrats are MORE authoritarian than Trump is a bit over the top, considering all the times he infamously egged on his rallying mobs to physically attack dissenting demonstrators and journalists just doing their job. Many of those instances are well-documented, on YouTube, no mockery intended.
As a European observer I can assure you the neoliberalcon neoDemocrats come across far more authoritarian and more racist than Trump ever was. And I’m not even talking about Syria. Or the unbelievable push to define dissent as “domestic terrorism”. Not even Ghaddafi ever went that far! That is literally Goebbels-tier policy leading only one way.. to tyranny.
Time for America to clean up the mess, confront all those cognitive dissonances head-on, and start founding and voting for third and fourth and fifth parties, as the two old ones are all too obviously 100% both run by the mafia.
Forcing corporations to censor people is not authoritarian? Turning DC into a police state is not authoritarian? Preventing discussions about Election integrity is not authoritarian?
Yes the Democrats have shown themselves to be more authoritarian than Trump.
Stop rooting for a team.
Google used the same rational to censor a Paul Jay video critiquing the capital riot recently. Consortium News should seriously think about using PeerTube to host their videos in the future. It’s a censorship-resistant decentralized federation of many independent instances that “follow” each other through their search engine. By making a federated community network, it is easy for someone to simply move to another instance if the one they’re currently using ever starts censoring, and in doing so provides a strong incentive against any one instance doing that because nobody can assert monopoly control over the network.
Thanks for the info.
Eff YouTube. Use BitChute or another platform – we’ll all follow the move. You and CN deserve better.
Poor Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, George Carlin, H.L. Mencken, Art Buchwald, et al, who poked fun at establishment figures and policies and who provided incisive political knowledge and humor to the American citizen. They would have difficulty publishing today. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and other media behemoths are nothing but mega-capitalist franchises. Don’t like what they are doing? No problem…do not support them. If they object to certain postings, they should not have mounted them in the first place. There are, for better or worse, precedent legal decisions for what determines the olde traditional precepts of libel and slander. In all this heated hurly-burly, what has happened to libel and slander? I have yet to see or read one article on the topic. I feel certain the carrion class shysters in DC and Wall Street are breathlessly awaiting a resurgence of the libel/slander clientele. And there are many, many alternative electronic sites that will disseminate materials unpalatable to the digital tyrants who want to control what Americans read, see, and hear.
Twain was censored for writing The War Prayer, during the Wilsonian censorship era, when the Espionage Act to suppress dissent was birthed – that favorite against whistleblowers and journalists favored by Barack Obama and allies.
YouTube, Twitter, FB have been de-platforming and censoring sites that digs deeper than the corporate media sound bites and corporate media narrative even when the sites expose the false narrative…like the Russia Hoax narative that was recklessly published on YouTube, Twitter, and FB with out being de-platformed or censored. YouTube, Twitter, FB are Publishers and NOT behaving as Common Carriers. Their status need to be changed to reflect their editorial behavior.
To CN Live: Get on Rokfin.
The Democrats have asked the social media moguls to act as censors of speech which is offensive to the establishment. Glenn Greenwald has written a good article on this. Since the government cannot directly act as censor, it is doing so via threats masked as “requests” to the social media companies. However, the outrage does not stop there. The Democrats have now demanded that Fox News and other conservative media be banned outright. This is truly outrageous conduct for which the Dems need to be called to account. I do not watch Fox News or other so-called “conservative” media but I am unalterably opposed to big brother acting as censor of any legal content. This is a serious breach of our 1st amendment rights, as is the continuing prosecution/persecution of Julian Assange. By the way, I assume you noticed that two of the most prominent members of the so-called “progressive wing” of the Democratic Party (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ro Khanna) made their own requests, via social media, for censorship by the social media moguls. Apparently, the standard for considering oneself a “progressive” is now a very low bar. The Dems need to be called to account for these outrages.
Correct. Denying freedom of speech to conservatives opens the door even wider to denying freedom of speech to leftist, antiwar, and anti-establishment sites. The majority of these people who call themselves “progressive” are anything but. If they support the Democratic party they are the establishment. They support capitalism, which puts them forever on the opposite side of the street from anything truly progressive. The only time speech should be curtailed is when it actively promotes violence or other crimes against humanity, like Donald Trump’s calls for violent insurrection in the Capitol. Particularly if this incitement comes from a member of the government! Otherwise, let there be argument online. Everyone would learn something.
It appears CN is engaging in the same behaviour in this very thread. I just posted an innocuous comment regarding equating the collaboration of Democratic Party interests and Big Tech with “ fascism “ and the comment, after moderation was “ disappeared”. You have my email address. Perhaps an explanation would be nice. It’s never nice to be unfairly memory holed is it. Signed , a long time fan.
We are in no way engaging in the same behavior. Consortium News is not a social media platform like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, which publishes whatever a users posts. We are a publication, which is totally different. Everyday we get submissions from writers. As all publications do, we apply editorial standards to decide what we will accept for publication. Do you suggest we accept everything and dilute the quality of the publication for our readers? Of course not. It is not “censorship” to apply editorial standards, using the decades of experience in journalism of our editors. That’s why they were hired. So if we reject many writers’ submissions to appear on our pages why shouldn’t we apply the same standards to comments? Like all serious publications we moderate every comment and publish the ones deemed worthy of publication. Automatically accepting every submitted article or comment would make us a social media platform, which we are not. Posting a comment here is in no way the same as posting a Tweet or a Facebook post even though many people seem to think that it is.
The fascist establishment cannot tolerate any challenge to its disinformatioan and propaganda. It would be a terrible thing if the truth got out.
Joe Goebbels would be proud.
I have experience with these companies and censorship, I think they always prefer taking people down a) gradually to make it seem more legitimate and b) without showing the real problem they have with your content or organization.
Having Consortium News reinstated doesn’t make everything well again. Just the fact that social media platforms have become the new all powerful Ministry of Truth, doing the state’s dirty work, is leading us all down a slippery slope to totalitarianism.
In A Corporatist System Of Government, Corporate Censorship Is State Censorship – Caitlin Johnstone.
We never said that it would. You are just assuming that.
I hope you’re mirroring everything over to BitChute
America the kool-aid served to you by YouTube!
When civilizations are actively censoring and begin to ban satire and humour it is a huge indication the such a civilization is in danger of complete breakdown or moving into some type of dictorial regime from either the far left or far right or perhaps in the case of the US a regime of wealthy oligarchy that rules as slave owners.
This is what happens when you allow what is functionally a monopoly to exist. People should have considered the possibility for abuse before they happily participated in decentralizing the internet through social media sites. A free internet is possible but currently corporate and state control and influence is increasing.
YouTube is a privately-owned company which has no public duty to free speech. The Left has to understand this; the solution is public ownership to run it for the public good, not for profit, as is the case with Google and all social media . I don’t really blame YouTube for behaving in the only way that a capitalist corporation can behave.
@James Simpson, YouTube doesn’t exist as a person, and neither is it merely doing what it has to do to survive. It’s people who are making these decisions, and they most certainly are to blame!
When a private capitalist company, in this case a social media company that regulates political speech in one direction , in favour of one political entity, the Democratic Party, the ruling government, that’s better known as fascism. Is that ok with you? It sure sounds that way.
Thank you, Philip Reed.
This the way fascism is in fact coming to the USA. Menawhile those imposing these fascistic steps are themselves accusing their victims of being fascists.
In unmasking this whole sorry charade, Donald Trump has actually accomplished a great deal of value for this country, and the world.
I can’t wait for him to return to the political scene and start tearing through a few more china shops.
This is where Trump Derangement Syndrome has landed the USA. With openly professed cabals influencing elections, no discussion of those elections possible, and silencing of views of political opposition.
I think it’s a little more complicated than that. A new paradigm has formed, that has yet to be grasped and parsed at any intellectual scale, in which these particular private companies that effectively control the world’s communication system are enmeshed into various parts of the national government, surreptitious and not, to such a degree that they are not capable of being correctly characterized simply as private interests hosting whichever speech they want or do not want to host.
There is also the issue, which Glenn Greenwald has begun to point out on his Substack feed, that there are First Amendment implications that arise not only out of this incestuous relationship but also out of the independent factor, which would obtain regardless of this relationship, of Congress periodically hauling private CEOs before its various committees and browbeating them into removing the speech it doesn’t like from its platforms. Congress cannot do indirectly what it cannot do directly.
James, now there you go again (me imitating President Reagan).
You know that isn’t true and has been discussed many times. BoobTube has made itself a public forum and by policing content has made itself a publisher.
Youtube is responding to threats of (further) Federal legislation. It’s doing government censorship.
I don’t know that public ownership is the solution. I’m inclined to think of platform as a limited resource that’s controlled by a narrow interest, resembling Rockefeller’s old grip on petroleum, the latter of which anti-trust law broke, and which was succeeded by a less narrow, but private, group of interests.
Privatization’s ubiquity is not a good argument for not having public ownership.
Demoplicans could scream four years long that Trump stole Hillary’s presidency by colluding with the Russians. But all of a sudden it is verboten to even mention that any fraud whatsoever could have happened in the 2020 elections?
It’s out of control. I was banned by FB for three days for posting a WSWS article reporting on the debunking of the Wuhan virus conspiracy theory. Democracy Now is banning that, too. But DN long ago made its peace with the mainstream.
You are right about Democracy Now, but am happy to say today there were two clips clearly showing the deep racism of Alexei Navalny who has been help up as the poster boy to unseat Putin (not going to happen). He’s a sleazy opportunist.
YouTube probably would have cut that. All speech is protected by the first amendment, unless it causes great harm (child pornography).
Stop using you tube , there are plenty good alternatives. Google and face book are going to continue to try and crush your type of reporting. They don’t give 2 shits about journalism .
Paul Jay also had a video pulled and cannot advertise theanalysis.news on youtube anymore because he questioned why the capitol police were so understaffed on 1/6/21, which is apparently an egregious violation of google ad policies. Jay has been the lone voice asking this question, with the exception of Aaron Mate on a Rising segment yesterday. Welcome to the technofeudal police state y’all.
I use youtube (and NONE of the “social media or even google apart from youtube) because I cannot find an alternative. I was really annoyed to have to sign up and be spied on. I use an adblock and also have linux/firefox to do my best to escape, and get no spam/viruses etc. It really is an uphill battle.
Techno-Totalitarianism. The oligarchy can make a mockery of the Bill of Rights because “the law” says corporations have free speech and the rights of a human being. The oligarchy can legally censor anyone for any reason. They have Congress/POTUS/SCOTUS bought and paid for.
And most folks think we have a “free market”, we live in the “land of the free” we have liberty and justice and all that…
“There’s a sucker born every minute” as the old quote goes…
Actually I was going to recommend this earlier, but better late than never: CN should publish its videos on alternate platforms such as Vimeo, Rokfin or – in the foreseeable future – Panquake.
These days, Big Tech is not content just to hoover up virtually all private data of citizens, who insouciantly permit this to happen, but is setting itself up as the final inquisitor and arbiter of “truth” and permitted speech. It recently even shut down an American president, albeit an unpopular one in his last days, with attendant risks to free speech and democracy. Alternative media are next in line for elimination, being now directly in the rifle crosshairs of Big Tech and its political friends.
Clearly controlling Big Tech and its monopolistic practices needs to be very high on the political agenda (but for sure won’t be under the current administration).
But, in the meantime, citizens and responsible organizations like CN need to take matters into their own hands and simply leave Big Tech platforms. (I’m not saying that CNLive! shouldn’t have a Youtube presence, but rather that this shouldn’t be the only or primary presence, especially considering that the censorship noose is becoming tighter by the day.)
It won’t be high on any capitalist agenda.
Yes. Now that there’s an “MSM” in the Internet, let’s swim away from it. Takes steps, whenever possible, to get away from them.
If it’s a pre-recorded video (as opposed to live stream), how about just posting it on your website? You don’t need any special service for that.
I actually recommend Consortium News set up their personal PeerTube instance if they really want to go that route. The bandwidth requirements of personal hosting can be a big financial drain for anyone whose video content gets a lot of views, but PeerTube alleviates this with a peer-to-peer system that lets people viewing the same video at the same time torrent chunks of the video to each other. It’s perfect for a news org because that kind of temporal clustering of media consumption is most common for news.
Agree.
“ albeit an unpopular one in his last days”. Says who? Not 74 million voters. So by your own admission “ this administration “ will do nothing to abate this unacceptable censorship. So why did you presumably vote for them? They are the obvious perpetrators of this kind of censorship. Tell me honestly have Republicans in any way attempted to stifle free speech ? You know the answer. Time to wake up as to who are the real authoritarians are.
I didn’t vote for them. I would have voted third party had there been a serious third party candidate this time round. So I instead went fishing.
It was a Republican administration which turned peaceful protests into violent police actions….although don’t put it past the Ds either, as they no longer represent the people.
Exactly! And this primary presence should preferably be based some place where Washington and Silicon Valley do not have so much influence. And mirrored on some other platform.
Panquake is attempting to reinvent the wheel of Twitter clones by ignoring Mastodon and Gnu Social, it’s not trying to be video host. A real censorship-resistant decentralized federation analog to Youtube is PeerTube.
You may well be right about Panquake – I had thought this site had more ambitious goals, but it looks from its website to be just a new Twitter clone. I just checked out PeerTube – but its content is a really mixed bag, I’m not sure its an appropriate platform for a serious news site. But the main point is that there needs to be an alternative to Youtube. Perhaps Joe Lauria should discuss this with Bill Binney, who is a co-founder of Panquake.
It must go too far before it can be stopped. That is how politics swings between extremes.
Agreed and that is why polarization is such a huge problem and the times we are all in now together are so precarious. If you think it out, that is why we have to do away with the “2-Party-Monopoly” in DC. I’m pretty sure the only way this will happen is with either a Constitutional Convention or a full-fledged revolution. If the latter occurs, folks will quickly stop throwing around words like “insurrection” without really appreciating the meaning. If there is a real insurrection it won’t be no freaking kabuki theatre, and no offense meant to the kabuki artform when I say that, but real leadership is not based on theatrics.
~
I pray for peace and I’m ready for a fight!
BK
@Mark Thomason: when did politics in the USA or UK swing to the left? Given that capitalism has been the fundamental creed of all governments in those countries for the last 150 years, perhaps you could explain your belief.
In moderate years, a male public figure would appear in a jacket of collar, lapels and buttons, and the width of lapels, as well as the number of unbuttoned button holes were somewhat variable.
Now you can see ostensibly responsible personages in a collarless shirt and no jacket! Sartorial spectrum gets wider and wider. Perhaps opinions will be more variable as well…
On the contrary… diversity is being used as cover for totalitarian intent. Expect wider sartorial displays, narrower opinions and diminishing tolerance for dissent.