In the age before cable, there was an iconic sci-fi program called The Outer Limits whose opening featured a series of test patterns; flickering screens; and a narrator who solemnly intoned, “Do not attempt to adjust your television set.  We will control all that you see and hear.”  Today, that is a chilling reality as social media giant Facebook censors what fans of social media icons Diamond and Silk, aka Lynette Hardaway and her sister Rochelle Richardson, see and hear from this dynamic pair of black conservative women on Facebook.

Racism is a term too easily bandied about these days, particularly by social progressives seeking to silence conservative thought and opinion which they deemed inherently racist in their chants of “white privilege.”  Yet it is precisely the term liberals would use if, say, Michelle Obama or the likes of Maxine Waters were treated this way, their words censored because they were deemed “unsafe” to the community.”  Indeed, Diamond and Silk themselves haVE raised the possibility that racism might be afoot here:

You are talking about two people here when you say Diamond and Silk.  We are the brand.  So, when you say things like we are ‘not safe’ for the community what are you trying to say?  What are you trying to do?  Are you trying to demonize us into something?  Are you stereotyping us?  What are you trying to do here?  Because this doesn’t feel right.  This here feels like racism.  The left always cries racism.  I see racism right here.

The lamestream media, which now can be said to include Facebook and Twitter, which routinely “shadowbans” conservatives, restricting what they can say and who gets to hear it, treat black conservatives like unicorns, mythical creatures that can’t possibly exist.  Black conservative women are invisible to those who constantly claim that Republicans are racist and sexist.

The reason for censorship of these two black conservative Trump-supporting women should be the first question Mark Zuckerberg gets asked when he testifies before Congress.  As bad as the selling of our personal data is, Zuckerberg’s selling out of the First Amendment is more of a threat to our democracy than any amount of ads he sold to Russians during the 2016 election cycle.

Diamond and Silk have their own list of questions for Zuckerberg, which they included in a post asking for some explanation for their being censored and their posts being restricted:

On Friday, Diamond and Silk posted on their Facebook page that the social media platform labeled their content “unsafe to the community.”

“Diamond And Silk have been corresponding since September 7, 2017, with Facebook (owned by Mark Zuckerberg), about their bias censorship and discrimination against D&S brand page,” they wrote.

“Finally after several emails, chats, phone calls, appeals, beating around the bush, lies, and giving us the run around, Facebook gave us another bogus reason why Millions of people who have liked and/or followed our page no longer receives notification and why our page, post and video reach was reduced by a very large percentage.”  “Here is the reply from Facebook. Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 3:40 PM: ‘The Policy team has came to the conclusion that your content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community.'” …

1. What is unsafe about two Blk-women supporting the President Donald J. Trump?

2. Our FB page has been created since December 2014, when exactly did the content and the brand become unsafe to the community?

3. When you say “community” are you referring to the Millions who liked and followed our page?

4. What content on our page was in violation?

5. If our content and brand was so unsafe to the community, why is the option for us to boost our content and spend money with FB to enhance our brand page still available? Maybe FB should give us a refund since FB censored our reach.

6. Lastly, didn’t FB violate their own policy when FB stopped sending notifications to the Millions of people who liked and followed our brand page?

Okay, Kamala Harris and Maxine Waters, let’s see you rise to the defense of these two black women.  Oh, but wait…they’re not supporters of Hillary Clinton.  They want to re-elect and not impeach 45.  They are not yelling “fire” in the crowded theater.  Rather, they are shouting truth in a world of deception; lies; and, yes, fake news.  They are exploding the stereotypes imposed on black conservatives and black conservative women by those who say they compose stereotypes.

What exactly does being “unsafe to the community” mean?  Have Diamond and Silk jeopardized the safe spaces liberal like to hide in when confronted with ideas that threaten their groupthink?  Is Zuckerberg trying to transform Facebook into one big safe space for liberals?  If so, he should say so, not pass of Facebook as a forum for the free exchange of ideas.

Yes, it is his sandbox we play in, but it is our sandbox, too.  Time was when the gatekeepers of three major TV networks and two major national newspapers sought to control what we see and hear.  Then cable news and social media showed us the men behind the curtain and shattered their monopoly on news and information.  But then, as people became more reliant on social media for news and information, liberals like Zuckerberg saw an opening, a means to re-impose their control of what many see and hear.

Zuckerberg needs to answer their questions:

They posed several questions to Facebook management, including, “What is unsafe about two Blk-women supporting the President Donald J. Trump?” …

What is the objection?  What is it about them exactly that makes them “unsafe” to the “community”?

“They gave us no rationale,” said Richardson on Fox and Friends Sunday morning.  “The only thing they told us was that it was unsafe for the community,” she said.  “We are two women of color,” she added, pointing out that she and her sister “don’t sell drugs” or belong to a gang.

“It’s offensive, it’s appalling!” Richardson exclaimed.  She posed a question for Facebook.  “Why are you censoring two women of color – two black women?” she asked.  “Why are you not allowing our … followers and likes to view our content because YOU deem it unsafe and you can’t even give us an explanation as to why?”

Selling our private information is a threat to our privacy.  Censoring the free flow of information is a threat to our democracy.  The Russians aren’t interfering in our democracy.  Mark Zuckerberg is.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.

See also:  Mueller, FBI, DOJ go thermonuclear in efforts to bring down Trump

                 The raid on Trump’s lawyer: the pretext

In the absence of any public statements from Robert Mueller’s team or the FBI or DOJ – just leaks to pet media outlets – we can only speculate as to the motives for a thermonuclear escalation of tactics being used against President Trump, in the effort to reverse the presidential election of 2016. They have extended the fishing expedition to include seizure of protected communications between the president and his lawyers, now in the hands of the FBI, the same agency that has been stonewalling Congressional investigation  into its behavior in launching the surveillance of the Trump campaign on charges of collusion with Russia. It should be noted that no evidence whatsoever of such collusion has been developed and made public, which has to be a deep embarrassment at a minimum.

Update: President Trump was negotiating conditions for his interview with the special counsel that were restrictive as to what could be asked. Perhaps Mueller determined that it was unlikley to be productive. This raid now virtually precludes such an interview being agreed to. This will enable Mueller to seek a grand jury subpoena, which would lead to free questioning of the president with no counsel present. Trump can be expected to delcine to honor such a subpoena, which would set off a constitutional criss, and help along the impeachment movement. 

Michael Cohen

Now, the FBI that is embarrassed and potentially criminally liable for its behavior in the FISA warrant application, has free rein to examine the private and legally protected communications  between Trump and his lawyer, and fish for further lines of inquiry, even if legally constrained from using evidence that is legally protected.  The president and the public are supposed to trust that a separate group if FBI agents specially trained in examining protected attorney-client communications will fully safeguard the interests of the president and his counsel.

“Trust us,” the FBI says, even as its stonewalls Congressional inquiries into its own potentially criminal behavior investigating the president.

Timing is everything here. The long-awaited DOJ Inspector General’s report is coming any day now. We don’t know what it will say, but in all likelihood, it will move the national conversation in a direction unfriendly to the interests of the Deep State.  

A friend who lives in a wealthy suburban New York neighborhood deeply hostile to Trump emails a telling vignette on the public being targeted by this raid:

I was sitting at the train station watching CNN with people declaring even the Republican Congress has to consider impeachment at this point, blah, blah, blah. The one thing I would think is that anything found re Trump can’t be used against him because of attorney-client privilege but that doesn’t mean they won’t make it public and destroy him that way. If only leftists cheering this on understood what it means more broadly. 

 There is an election is 4-plus months, in which control of the House of Representatives and the Senate is at stake. Even if the evidence developed out of the raid is thrown out of court in any resulting prosecution, that is irrelevant. What is important is the ammunition to be developed and leaked to pet media outlets that can be used to sway voters to elect an impeachment Congress.

My strong suspicion that, having failed to find anything related to his mandate, Robert Mueller is baiting the president to fire him. By stepping over the line and fishing for evidence in confidential and privileged attorney-client relations, he is misbehaving, but doing so through a cut-out, the US Attorney in New York. He wants the firestorm that would result to,push control of Congress into Democrat hands.

The news that FBI agents have raided the law offices and residence of Donald Trump’s personal counsel Michael Cohen and seized protected lawyer-client communications was first leaked yesterday to the Deep State favorite New York Times, with the legal rationale parceled out subsequently to the Washington Post yesterday.  The raid was conducted under the auspices of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a Trump appointee, following a criminal referral from Mueller’s team.  That is a nice touch, insulating Mueller from direct responsibility by outsourcing to a Trump appointee.

Make no mistake: seizing the protected communications of a president of the United States with his lawyer is a thermonuclear approach to a legal investigation.  Cohen has been cooperating with the investigation of Special Counsel Mueller, so it is difficult to understand why this extraordinary step was applied to a sitting president’s attorney.  Former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing appeared on Lou Dobbs’s Fox Business program last night and eviscerated the decision to make the raid:

“Mueller and his gang have weaponized the criminalized justice system,” attorney Victoria Toensing said Monday during an interview with FOX Business’ Lou Dobbs.  “These no-knock raids that were done on his personal lawyer’s house and offices, those kind of tactics are reserved for dope dealers and terrorists.” …

Joseph diGenova said Mueller is using “in terrorem” tactics, using the grand jury to intimidate people and influence Trump’s conduct. Moreover, the special counsel, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray are conducting an investigation designed to take down the president of the United States, diGenova says.

“Mueller, Ray and Rosenstein are anti-Trumpers,” diGenova said.  “This is not a good faith federal investigation.  It is designed to embarrass the president, and I believe they have determined that they want to take him down.”

The contrast with the kid glove treatment afforded to Hillary Clinton in the investigation of her classified email scandal – handing out immunity to her aides in return for nothing – could not be greater.  Is it a coincidence that this thermonuclear escalation on the part of the Deep State is taking place as that Clinton exoneration is undergoing scrutiny?

The virulence and inflexibility of illegal immigration activists and their Democratic Party allies, as well as their refusal to answer the simple question of whether the U.S. should have any borders or say-so on who gets into the country, does come across as an … ideology.

Which is why a seminal essay on the matter by Victor Davis Hanson, who is close to ground zero of what illegal immigration actually means in Central California, is so well worth reading.

Hanson shows the scope very well in his opener here:

Illegal immigration has become so deeply embedded for so long within contemporary power politics, demography, and cultural change, so charged with accusations of racism, nativism, and xenophobia, that we have forgotten its intrinsic contradictions.

We saw a glimpse of reality with the recent “caravan” of Central Americans. With a strong wink and nod from their Mexican hosts, the travelers assumed an intrinsic right to march northward into the United States. Had they done so, they would have confirmed the impression, advanced during the last administration, that the border is porous and that a sovereign United States and its citizenry have scant legal right to secure it.

And then elaborates on the scope and implications of this new ideological addition.

Illegal immigration activists / Credit: Fibonacci Blue, via Flickr

He’s circling what the real problem is as illegals take front and center in the U.S. public debate.

He does point out that elites of Latin countries do indeed benefit from shipping millions of their least educated and least productive people to El Norte to take care of, and then benefitting from their cash remittances shipped back to home, turning burdensome people who are otherwise likely to revolt against them into fountains of cash.

There are other beneficiaries worth noting and both are ominous as well.

One is the cartels and drug dealers who take migrant money to smuggle people into the U.S. for a tidy profit. The recent surge of migrants into the U.S. after an initial dropoff, noted in this Federalist piece, would suggest that. Smugglers profit from illegals and they don’t like their money cut off. Make no mistake, they are playing a role in encouraging illegal immigration for profit’s sake. As Hanson notes, there are massive contradictions involved, including in this aspect of the illegal immigration transaction. How is it that someone who is supposedly fleeing gangs can go up to the gang that is supposedly bothering him or her, hand them $6,000 or $10,000 for the smuggling journey, and then set up shop in a Central American neighborhood brimming with more gangs and their violence? This doesn’t sound like someone really serious about fleeing from gangs. Yet the gang flight argument is always used as an ideological ground for the U.S. admitting more illegals.

Here’s another contradiction based on ideology. The Central American countries the biggest waves of illegals are fleeing are all officially democratic countries.These are recognized democracies and people have the right to vote and the right to vote for change. Yet the claims from the open borders lobby are that the illegals they support are only migrating north because they are fleeing oppression? What’s really going on is that these voters sell their votes for bags of beans and believe every populist promise about Bad Gringo being the source of all their poverty and ills instead of their local elites. They then vote socialists into power, dislike the result, and head to El Norte for the free stuff they had expected earlier in the home country which never materialized. It’s never brought up in the press that the countries being fled from are democracies with rights to vote. 

Don’t think there isn’t an explicitly ideological basis for that. At an illegal immigrant protest I attended in Murrieta, Calif., I got a chance to listen to the other side in the matter, a pro-illegal immigrant activist leader, who was an older guy covered with gang tats on his arms and who told me he had been a former Salvadoran communist guerrilla. Why was he advocating for illegal immigration to the land of the hated yanqui imperialista? He calmly explained to me that it was part of the ideology: To punish gringo by shipping millions and millions of illegal migrants to the U.S. from places the U.S. had unfairly colonialized (his logic, not mine). It was to force the U.S. to atone for its errors. Hence, the ease with which he supported illegal immigration.

There is an ideology from illegal immigration and it’s a multi-headed hydra of contradictions. What it isn’t is one set of laws for everyone to obey. That makes it a threat to democracy and don’t think a former Salvadoran guerrilla wouldn’t know what he was talking about in the matter of destroying a democracy.