I missed this story back in June, but it is no less shocking for only hearing of it now—I did so thanks to Powerline.
Gina McCarthy is the National Climate Adviser, the head of a new White House office established by Biden and his handlers. Under President Obama, she was the head of the EPA.
Gina McCarthy on June 9 called on social media companies to ban content, especially from certain “individuals,” that is critical of her theory of the do-ability of the green “transition,” during a segment on Axios’ “The Infodemic Age.”
“We need the tech companies to really jump in,” she said.
Gina McCarthy is traitor.
She called for private corporations to systematically commit pre-publication censorship against a specified set of persons she disagrees with, and against a specified set of ideas and claims. Such action is explicitly banned by the First Amendment for any level of government, as just about every graduate from an American high-school civics class understands.
And as anyone who has been observing our society for the last five years understands, a model of future governance that rests upon speech-restrictions, with the federal govt working hand-in-hand with social media to police thought, is a terrible one.
She has not retracted her statement.
If you don’t like the word “traitor,” yes, I get it. The U.S. Constitution strictly limits the legal definition of treason. And for good reasons.
Would you prefer “Apostate from the Principles of Liberal Democracy?” “Traitor in the Extra-Constitutional Sense of the Term?” “Turncoat from Liberalism?” “Democracy-Enemy?” “Poisonous Bunch-back’d Toad?”
It’s honestly hard to find a good substitute term.
She has betrayed the basic American commitment to the free speech of fellow citizens. She is not merely my political opponent, but my enemy, even if legally speaking, she is a citizen of the same republic I am citizen of. And to those of you reading this who are American citizens, if you believe in our republic, if you meant it when you pledged allegiance to it, she is your enemy too.
Gina McCarthy wants a new regime, wherein we will still sometimes vote on issues, but only after the government has scrubbed the information environment, with the help of corporations we depend upon for many of our basic needs and interactions, of all facts and voices and ideas it dislikes.
So I do think “traitor” fits the bill well enough, and may be used with propriety by those who understand one another’s strict loyalty to the entire Constitution, including its definition of treason. When we call her that, we’re not calling for her to be put on trial for the crime of treason.
Now looking beyond Ms. McCarthy, is it an impeachment-worthy offense to not immediately correct the record when one of your officers suggests the White House is demanding that private corporations censor Americans?
Yes.
Any decision by a future GOP majority in the House of Representatives to impeach President Joseph Biden will also be a tactical one, of course, but add this one to the ten or so other grounds.
And let me say this to GOP representatives and party operatives: start showing spine. The ridiculous decision we learned of today, for example, to host your 2024 Convention in Milwaukee, of all places, suggests that too many of you still have contempt for your base. And that you refuse to get yourself based in the reality of how close our republic has come in recent years to the very brink.
Traitor to Free Speech Gina McCarthy must be fired. Afterwards, any university or for-profit corporation that hires her must be deprived of all federal favors/funds it is legal to deprive the entity of via legislative or executive action, and ditto for state funds/favors in GOP-controlled ones. You must demand her firing and social ostracism. Over and over. Get in the White House’s face on this, day after day. She must not be regarded as merely another one of our “political opponents.” She is not a sincere official who made one mistake. She is the declared enemy of our entire way of life.
Now I am aware that Gina McCarthy was simply thinking, “Well, if Biden’s handlers can have the White House demand the social media corporations censor in the areas of a) Covid-19 information and policy, and b) the disputes about November 2020, then why not in the area of environmental policy?”
Seems logical.
At least, it seems so if you forget that there is this thing called the Constitution, with something called the First Amendment in there, and that your own guys and gals, Biden’s handlers, put this line about uniting around what Americans hold in common right smack in the middle of his Inaugural Address. I guess that’s easy to forget when WH spokesperson Jen Psaki said these words, as noted in the complaint memorandum of this very important court case, probably to eventually be known as Missouri & Louisiana v. Biden:
We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff…. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation…. We engage with them regularly and they certainly understand what our asks are.
Yes, Jen Psaki said that. In the name of Biden (and his handlers). That’s basic evidence for the case.
For she, also, is a Traitor to the First Amendment.
As he is, and they are.
Go to my last link, and see the Powerline details—they also quote and link Legal Insurrection—for why this case, even if its final outcome is not favorable, will at the very least begin to reveal what those vile “asks” to subvert and get around the First Amendment have been, since expedited discovery has been granted. Quoting Powerline’s John Hinderaker, who in turn quotes the judge’s discovery order:
The plaintiff states [MO & LA] can serve document requests and interrogatories on the government agencies, as well as social media companies subject to Rule 45 subpoenas, “seeking the identity of federal officials who have been and are communicating with social-media platforms about disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, and/or any censorship or suppression of speech on social media, including the nature and content of those communications.”
It’s going to be appalling stuff.
But let’s not forget the key precedent for this entire Biden WH pattern: the social media companies’ willingness to suppress speech about Covid-19. They did this at the request of once-respected medical associations—it led to tens-of-thousands, likely millions, of future instances of social media censorship, continuing to this day with respect to the widespread vax-harms, but the Day of Infamy, April 27, 2020, showed us how deep the betrayal of the Spirit of the First Amendment by the tech companies would go—they removed a viral video by Bakersfield doctors Erickson and Massihi that questioned lockdown policies. It was a day that shocked me to my core.
That sin set the stage for many others. And we all got so used to it, didn’t we? Here I am, still giving you youttube videos to watch, and that company (Alphabet, owner of youtube and Google) is still attaching its little “Get your Covid-19 information from the CDC” tags to these videos.
And what was the response or push-back of the Trump Administration, and of the GOP members of Congress?
My recollection is that there was none.
So why wouldn’t Gina McCarthy think in 2022 that it would be fine for her to demand social media censorship about what can and cannot be said about climate policy?
BTW, it was under her leadership that the EPA attempted to make several egregiously unconstitutional power grabs. So we know she’d be the last one to think to herself, “Gee, if I poison the nation’s trust environment and its constitutional ecosystem, won’t that make it all the more difficult to accomplish lasting good for the natural environment?” Or, “In modern times, aren’t despotic governments the ones that most despoil the land and waters?”
She’s a traitor. There can be no “America the Beautiful” without there actually being an America, that is, a society that treasures Free Speech and the old Constitution that protects it. Nor can there be any environmental movement without that freedom—or at least, not in the long run.
But no more time thinking about elderly elites who proved in 2020-22 to be traitors to everything they had seemed to espouse. There have been rumors since April, anyhow, that she may be stepping down soon from her Climate Advisor post.
Let’s instead think about some fresh faces, like Lisa Martine Jenkins, who wrote the Protocol story on McCarthy’s treacherous demand to the tech companies. Did she at any point in her story consider the possible issue of whether this defied the First Amendment, if not “by the letter,” at least, by the standards of most Americans, “by the spirit?” Bother to seek comment from anyone who might think so? Nope. She wrote a story in which McCarthy’s call seemed to be the only possible one to make.
Or how about her Protocol co-worker Brian Kahn, who wrote this on May 7:
A post by Media Research Center TV, a right-wing media watchdog, does have a fact-checking label for falsely claiming, "American energy independence has been lost under Joe Biden and the policies of the left." But it was still shared 29,000 times, reflecting the reality that even with moderation, misinformation is still pinging across Facebook.
It is obvious what Kahn is calling upon facebook to do.
So Lisa Martine Jenkins and Brian Kahn are also traitors, in their small-time way, to the First Amendment.
And I say it will be fair for conservative and moderate Americans, if we get decisively past this season of insanity in our politics, to remember that. To, yes, by a method as organized, as fair, and as schooled-by-the-mistakes/injustices-of-the-50s-red-scare as it can be, to blacklist Lisa Martine Jenkins and Brian Kahn from all respectable employment we control. We have every reason to believe they’d do the same to us, were the shoe on the other foot, and for the purpose of entrenching despotism in America, whereas our purpose would be the opposite. They and their like need to know: some political actions and writings, the ones typical through much of American history, are signs that you disagree with your fellow citizens about policy, and while we hope you display a track-record of good judgments on that we leave you free to say and do what you want, ready to tolerate many things we deplore in that, but, there is a certain special class of political actions and writings that are moves to deprive us of our guaranteed freedoms and to torpedo our Constitution. Do those, and you become our enemy. If it is impractical to convict you of a crime, it remains our prerogative to shun you and impede your power and prestige at every turn.
Are you or were you ever a member of those we rightly label Traitors to the First Amendment?
That will be a fair question to ask in the years of the Reckoning to come.
I’m not talking about punishing people for having taken a stand we disagree with on tough First Amendment issues—i.e., stuff like, “Should they have let the Nazis march in Skokie?” or “Should we permit flag-burning?”—no. I’m saying that Gina McCarthy, Lisa Martine Jenkins and Brian Kahn had every reason to know that what they were so casually calling for was nothing less than a massive sidelining of the First Amendment. Their passion for good environmental policy provides no excuse for a total neglect of the constitutional basics, and a total contempt for the rights of those they should have regarded as their fellow Americans.
Unless they repent, we have every right to regard them as traitors.
That fact matters most, but notice also, they will win no lasting gains for the environment in exchange for their apostasy from democracy.
Maybe their side will “win,” and our nation will stumble down into civil war or totalitarian despotism.
Maybe—although I think it’s extremely unlikely given fundamental degree of the betrayals of 2020-2022—we’ll just bumble along as “50-50 America,” ever kicking the can of disaster down the road…
Or maybe, a Reckoning is coming. In which the likes of Jenkins and Kahn might, quite rightly, find themselves excluded from many jobs and social sets in the recovering society, and from chances to promote prudent environmentalism, because they’re on a list.
Whatever you think of that, both as a sketch of what might be possible, and as a matter of principle—
—How, Carl, can you recommend, sometime in the near-future, punitive blacklist departures from the spirit of the First in order to better protect it for the long term? will surely be the objection of some to this last part of my essay.—
—we can all agree that Gina McCarthy must be fired immediately.
That Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai must announce his companies’ immediate refusal to heed such directives as hers.
That meta/fb president Mark Zuckerberg must announce his companies’ immediate refusal to heed such directives as hers.
And so on.
Our society was dazed and confused by the Covid situation, and only weeks after the shameful de-platforming of the Bakersfield doctors, George Floyd was killed on camera. Our society has been staggering and reeling ever since—but our tech overlords and other sundry elites need to understand: enough of us have regained our equilibrium, we see the situation clearly enough, and we have had it. You come to no new understanding with us, make no return to classic American democracy, and you will see how it goes. We see what Gina McCarthy is, and what she represents. We see that if she is not repudiated, that the censorship she has tried to force in the policy area of her expertise will be tried in every single one.
“Such action is explicitly banned by the First Amendment for any level of government, as just about every graduate from an American high-school civics class understands.” - Unfortunately these days it seems very few students take Civics class. And it’s probably safe to say the most informed people around are the many new citizens who are required to study the Constitution and actually understand its value and necessity. McCarthy looks young enough to be someone who may have foregone the citizenship learning and opted for gender studies instead.
Fire her? Isn't destroying American freedom why they're all hired? If anything, she has a bonus and a promotion coming.