The Purge is a movie that has become a cult classic since its release in 2013.
A mix of SF and Horror, the basic plot of the movie is that a family in 2022 LA has to survive the one night of the year when all crime is allowed with no consequences:
In 2014, the New Founding Fathers of America, a totalitarian political party, are voted into office following an economic collapse. They pass a law sanctioning an annual “Purge”: for 12 hours each year all crime, including murder, arson, theft and rape, is legal during the period, except against government officials, and all emergency services are unavailable until 7 am. By 2022, the United States has become virtually crime-free and the unemployment rate has dropped to 1%.
My favourite parody of the movie is from the animated series Rick and Morty, “Look Who’s Purging Now” (the series itself is a parody of Back To The Future and its two main characters, Doc and Marty).
But let’s get back to reality. A couple of months ago I bookmarked a post by science writer Robert Zimmerman, which I felt was OTT pessimism, The Coming Purge:
Expect all Republicans and any fair-minded Democrats to be removed from the bureaucracy in the next four years, replaced by rapid partisan leftist progressives. Not only will the goal be to quickly consolidate their power, they will want to remove any questioning eyes as they reshape the laws to that end, sometimes illegally or inappropriately. Elections will be made less fair and easier to fake. Dissent will become more difficult, and carry worse consequences. Regulations will be honed to encourage their power, and to hobble their opponents.
It’s no longer over the top, starting with the removal of President Trump’s accounts from FaceTwat and extending to tens of thousands of followers of well-known Right-Wing voices:
There has been considerable talk about how this is all fine because of private property rights and “violating terms of service”, but it’s obvious that there is a political motivation and a bigotry at work here that’s no different than if it were aimed against religions or races, except those would be illegal:
Big Tech did not remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s accounts when she called for “uprisings” against the Trump administration. Facebook and Twitter did not target Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she claimed that allegedly marginalized groups have “no choice but to riot.” These platforms did not act against Kamala Harris when she said the riots “should not” stop.
As that article points out, the likes of the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Centre) have already been weaponised against the Right, to the extent of labelling anti-abortion groups as “hate groups”. The SPLC has problems itself with decades-old racial discrimination and sexual harassment. When this blew up a few years ago one of the outcomes was former employees coming forward to expose the con of exaggerating hate to bilk donors. But no matter to the likes of Joe Biden who, in a CNN town hall in October 2019, called for a kind of terror watchlist (to which the SLPC would provide “information”) to monitor organisations that oppose same-sex marriage and transgender identity. Given the double standards already applied between the Antifa/BLM riots and the Capitol Building incident by the Democrat Party, nobody should be surprised if “hate groups” soon morph into “Domestic Terrorists”.
And if you think that is an exaggeration you could listen to a person with actual experience dealing with such things, Russian dissident politician Alexey Navalny:
“This precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world,” he warned. “In Russia as well. Every time when they need to silence someone, they will say: ‘this is just common practice, even Trump got blocked on Twitter.”
He also pointed out the same double standard noted above for the likes of Pelosi, except that in his case:
“I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn’t ban anyone (not that I ask for it). Among the people who have Twitter accounts are cold-blooded murderers (Putin or Maduro) and liars and thieves (Medvedev). For many years, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have been used as a base for Putin’s ‘troll factory’ and similar groups from other authoritarian countries,”
The Silicon Valley giants had already done a dry run early in 2020 for a different event:
Before long, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg could be seen warning that the social media giant would delete any protests against the lockdown, YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki declaring that any videos that contradicted WHO would be deleted, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates speculating about immunity passports.
But as bad as it may be for public folk like these it is the effects on the small-fry further down the food chain that are worse, like one of my go-to sites for Chicago-news-behind-the-scenes, Second City Cop. The inside information those two cops got fed by other working CPD cops was incredible. That link is actually to the WayBack Machine because as you can see they noted the purge and made the following prediction on Jan 9th:
Better view that video before it gets taken down. They’ll be coming after the blog shortly. Count on it.
And sure enough, on Jan 10 they were gone. All I could find was this statement released on a related news blog, Chicago Contrarian:
Over the weekend, we received information from a contact at Google that internal chat/e-mails led them to believe that certain precautions we had taken over the years had been breached by Google. We had gotten similar warnings from others in the past, and we dealt with or ignored them as the situation warranted. But this one was different. And this one – on the heels of Big Tech’s wholesale attack on the President, Parler and center-right to right-leaning authors, politicians and voices – pointed to a countdown that had far less time than we had thought. Most likely, far less time than you think, too. The blacklisting has begun, even if you won’t see it.
Even when it’s right in their faces.
At least the Second City cops were not going to be financially punished via social media, but radio host Robert Pratt certainly was as the purge has begun to extend far beyond the simple removal of Right Wing voices from Social Media:
Without warning the marketing heads of the corporation that manages the radio stations that air the conservative Pratt on Texas radio show for the past fifteen years announced today they were cancelling the program, despite its profitable status and high ratings.
Or how about this neonatal nurse and her business:
Cara Dumaplin, who for years has run very successful website called Taking Care of Babies, is now considered a “racist” and “hater” because she and her husband committed the unforgivable act of donating to the campaign of Donald Trump.
Luckily this guy was retired :
Elroy Stern, the 73-year-old Vietnam War veteran from Hustisford was working at his home Saturday when he was approached by three deputies from the Dodge County Sheriff’s Department. He said he got the sense he was being questioned as some kind of suspected domestic terrorist or insurrectionist, descriptors used by liberal politicians and news outlets in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. It appears he was, according a copy of the incident report obtained by Empower Wisconsin under the state’s open records law.
Lt. Robbie Weinfurter on Saturday afternoon was informed by an individual who “wanted to remain anonymous” that “Stern was trying to encrypt his phone and was planning on attending the Presidential Inauguration at the Wisconsin State Capitol with two other people”.
And? None of that is illegal. In the recent past a cop who got a phone call like that would have told the caller to shove it, but thanks to the screams about Right Wing Domestic Terrorism, faithfully echoed by a willing MSM, the cops are now obliged to investigate this crap. So Stern was then subject to questioning on his property in the presence of three sheriff’s deputies, about his integrity, patriotism, and his beliefs about the America he fought for so many years ago. All because some anonymous snitch felt that the elderly veteran concerned about election integrity who attends peaceful rallies was a threat.
Luckily the cops have not yet gone full Stasi, at least at the local level, but it’s early days in the Harris-Biden Administration and they have plenty of supporters like that snitch and one Arthur Chu:
The following effort won’t save any of us either, and it will start biting the Left on the bum as well:
There would be no end to what could be censored. Trans-sceptical feminists, already victims of Silicon Valley’s woke purges, would be completely wiped out on the basis that some idiot might interpret their intellectual, non-bigoted critiques of gender fluidity as an instruction to bash a trans person.
Which is why there has long been a clear distinction between actual “incitement to violence” by a speaker – versus the actions of people who merely think that what a speaker says is an instruction to take violent action and who then make the choice of their own volition, as did Bernie Bro, James T Hodgkinson, when he opened fire on Republican Congressman in 2017.
On this basis the White Album should be banned, given its songs ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Piggies’ were ‘mobilised by different audiences’ to terrible ends — the killings carried out by Charles Manson’s Family. Catcher in the Rye? Censor it. Don’t you remember how it ‘mobilised’ Mark David Chapman to kill John Lennon? As for the Bible, the Koran and any number of political texts and anthems — the risks of ‘mobilisation’ that they pose are clearly too great, so, to be on the safe side, let’s scrub those too.
And in fact the hits against the Left have already started – albeit in a small way compared to what’s hitting the US Right Wing – with Britain’s Socialist Workers Party being ripped off Facebook:
The party’s own page was removed and so were the pages of dozens of SWP activists. The SWP described FB’s actions as a ‘silencing of political activists’. They’re right. This was a unilateral act of ideological censorship carried out by the capitalist elites of Silicon Valley against a perfectly legal party based in the UK. It demonstrated the terrifying power of the Big Tech oligarchy, which clearly has no respect whatsoever for borders, territory or democratically made national laws and feels that it can reach into any nation state it chooses and switch off the oxygen of publicity to any party, group or individual it disapproves of.
It should be noted that these dickheads have been front-and-centre on the whole De-Platforming, Blacklisting bullshit in Britain in the last decade, so watching them get a dose of their own medicine has been hilarious to watch, especially with all their subsequent squealing.
What’s more, the ideological justifications that the SWP and other leftists have put forward for these acts of censorship – the idea that ‘hateful’ speech must be suppressed, the idea that offensive ideas are wounding, the nasty patrician notion that minority groups need to be protected from difficult discussion by the authorities – have helped to shape the broader, off-campus culture of censorship...
… all of this has been influenced by the modern left’s cultivation of a new form of therapeutic, paternalistic censorship that is designed to protect allegedly vulnerable individuals from the hurtful ideologies of right-wingers, critics of Islam, ‘transphobes’, etc etc.
I doubt they’ve learned anything, especially since their pages have since been restored on Facebook, an act of grace that will not be extended to voices on the Right.
Admittedly much the same could be said for the hard-line, private-sector-rules Right Wing. As this article pointed out to these idiots:
To be frank, anyone still defending big tech is part of the problem. You are going to “muh private company” yourself until every semblance of freedom is lost on these monopolistic “public squares.” And while some may be naive enough to think the ban monster isn’t coming for them, the next four years are going to get worse. Twitter, Facebook, etc. have no fear anymore. Trump is gone. The GOP lost the Senate and no longer control the committees. It’s a free for all, and everyone except those who are in hock with social media monetarily (i.e. The Dispatch crew) are vulnerable.
Instead of regulation or the “free market”, maybe the best idea is to pass a law allowing ordinary citizens to do whatever we want to the social media companies and their shitty management and employees for 12 hours once a year with no legal consequences.
No Minister 