As long as it is supported by Democratic politicians and by liberal Hollywood players, censorship is a useful tool to stifle dissent.
—Andrew Breitbart
Quote of the Day
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Category Archives: Free Speech
Quote of the Day
Censorship is the height of vanity.
—Martha Graham
Quote of the Day
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but, unlike charity, it should end there.
—Claire Boothe Luce
Quote of the Day
The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen.
—Tom Smothers
Quote of the Day
You only silence critics when you have something to hide.
—Huma Yusuf
Parler v. AWS
Parler is suing Amazon Web Services alleging violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, breach of contract, and tortuous interference with business. IANAL, but it seems to me that this is exactly the approach that is most likely to be successful against Big Tech. If I read the complaint correctly, Parler is alleging that AWS effectively conspired with Twitter to silence Parler because it would be mutually beneficial for Amazon and Twitter.
Here’s the complaint.
Parler is asking for an injunction requiring AWS to restore their service pending the outcome of the case and for treble damages under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Stay tuned.
Quote of the Day
Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
Quote of the Day
A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind.
—Winston Churchill
The Gostak Distims the Doshes
One of the presuppositions behind truthful communication in Western Civilization is that the language used will have sufficient commonality among the talkers and listeners that both sides of the conversation will have similar understanding of what is being said. That doesn’t seem to a valid basis for approaching what many on the Left are now saying and writing. They are using old words with new and often contradictory meanings as well as using new, ill-defined terms.
Consider the word sedition. It is defined in law as an act or conspiracy to overthrow the government, to prevent it from acting lawfully, or to unlawfully seize government property. Some on the left are now trying to spin using the courts to prevent the government from acting unlawfully as sedition, using the word exactly opposed to is definition in law. It’s hard to follow an argument that is based in the premise that A and not-A are the same thing, particularly for those of us we still think 2+2=4 or can remember when we weren’t at war with EastAsia.
And then there’s all these new pronouns and categories of oppressed people. I keep losing track. I can’t remember if the Gostak is the oppressed or the oppressor or whether its a good to be the distimor or the distimee. Or whether Doshes have come up at all during 2020.
For now, I’m sticking with Standard American English as my primary language rather than the media’s Newsspeak. I’ve lived in America for 73 years now. If new immigrants don’t have to learn a new language, why should I?
UPDATE—The Gostak and the Doshes
Gentle Reader, I don’t know if your doshes are galloons. YMMV.
Quote of the Day
The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.
—John Adams
Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
Gentle Reader, have you ever noticed how bullies think that it’s unfair when they receive a dose of their own medicine? This post about Reiterating Editorial Policy from five years ago today was inspired by whining from Bill Schmalfeldt and his demands that I exercise control over the contents of websites other than Hogewash!.
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This blog is about whatever topics I find interesting, and one of those topics is the First Amendment. Among its provisions, that Amendment prohibits the government from infringing on the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. It does not, however, restrict the editorial policy of this site. The general rules governing the site can be found by clicking on The Fine Print in the menu bar, but I want to reiterate one specific rule not found there: Derogatory comments about the family members of a controversial person who are not themselves a part of the controversy will not be tolerated on Hogewash!—that being said, I have no control over the speech or writings of third parties that is not posted to this site. 
I can advise against certain behaviors and point out that I don’t engage in them myself, but I can’t order anyone to say or not say or to write or not write anything elsewhere.
Bill Schmalfeldt is a deranged cyberstalker. He is a liar. He is someone who is untrustworthy, who fails to live up to his commitments or abide by agreements he has signed. He had the opportunity to make a clean start when he fled from Maryland to Wisconsin. He appears to have wasted that opportunity.
Murum aries attigit.
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Karma is a bitch, and she has puppies.
Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
Brett Kimberlin foolishly thought that he could file bogus LOLsuits that would silence truthful reporting about him and his past and present activities, but his attempt at brass knuckles reputation management were a disaster. And of course, the “reporting” by incompetent PR flacks he recruited only compounded his failure. The TKPOTD from five years ago today dealt with some of the problems with brietbartunmasked dot com.
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I’ve been going over the backups of post that Breitbart Unmasked Bunny Boy Unread has memory-holed in preparation for … well, let’s leave it at I’ve been doing some research.
Here’s another post that has been flushed from the site:
As the Gentle Reader can see from the date and byline, this was a rant by the Cabin Boy™ from when he was trying to overturn the first peace order issued against him. It’s a marvelous bit of vintage Acme legal “reasoning.” He deftly explains why the court should reverse itself, and he only has two minor problems with his story—the facts and the law. The Gentle Reader who has been following the Cabin Boy™ for the past couple of years may remember that Schmalfeldt’s motion to modify the peace order and his petition for a writ of certiorari for an appeal were both denied in October, 2013, and that my petition for an extension of the peace order was granted in December, 2013.
The Gentle Reader may also remember that 57F Osborne has repeatedly promised to follow stories only to drop covering them and memory-hole posts when Team Kimberlin loses at their lawfare. But that’s one of the reasons why this daily feature exists here at Hogewash!.
Stay tuned.
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The BU website hasn’t had any new material posted for almost two years.
Quote of the Day
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
—John F. Kennedy
The House That @jack Built
When I first started using Twitter eight years ago, it was still a more-or-less open platform where I was able to interact with folks of all sorts of political persuasions, but by 2015, it had evolved into a space much less friendly to conservatives. I was one of the first conservatives permanently banned, allegedly because I was engaged in “targeted abuse” of a leftwing political operative. I was also one of the few to have one of my accounts restored when it turned out the allegations against me were false. Twitter appeared to have learned from that episode and became more careful in the way they describe their reasons for lockouts and bans. By being nebulous about their “Rules” they’ve managed to avoid making provably false statements about punished users, protecting the company from defamation claims.
That changed this year. Twitter is now willing to punish users who publish truthful material and to publicly state a false reason for the punishment. The case of the @nypost account lockdown is but one example. Yes, Twitter has now admitted that the Post‘s story was factual and based on documents that weren’t hacked, but as I write this, the @nypost account is still locked.
Based on what I can see, it looks as if Twitter is afraid of the likely changes in the regulatory and legal environments that could come during a second Trump administration, not just for the leftwing causes the company and many of its employees support, but also for the company’s own power in the marketplace. It’s not that Twitter has nothing to lose. It’s more like they feel they have everything to lose and are willing to sacrifice (the stock price tanked after @jack’s testimony this week) to save a failing business model—and their sense of importance and control. They’re all in.
Meanwhile in the Real World (and the part of the Internet that intersects with it), Twitter’s attempts at suppressing truthful reporting on the Hunter Biden story have backfired.
Barbara Streisand and Brett Kimberlin were unavailable for comment.
UPDATE—Twitter has unlocked the @nypost account without requiring the newspaper to take down it tweets to truthful news stories. Also, institutional investors took an aggregate loss somewhere north of 2 billion dollars over this week’s drop in Twitter’s stock price. The Gentle Reader may remember that I have suggested that the market may provide corrective action for the misbehavior of various social media companies faster than any government.
Twitter, Section 230, and Being a Speaker
Twitter’s ham-fisted attempt at censoring the New York Post has blown up in their face. @Jack tweeted this—
I’ve been sued for defamation because of posts here at Hogewash!, and I’ve won all of those suits because the plaintiff was never able to show that anything I wrote was false. The truth or a reasonable opinion based on evidence can’t be the basis for a defamation claim. The plaintiff also tried to claim that I was responsible for the content of remarks made by commenters here at Hogewash!, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides immunity for website publishers from third-party content. Neither this site nor Twitter is responsible for what a third party posts.
However, if Twitter adds “context” to a tweet or comments on it, Twitter will be responsible for what it posts—and could be held responsible for the its statements providing such context or commentary. By making its own comments, by speaking for itself, Twitter should become a speaker unprotected by Section 230 with respect to its own speech. Saying that an article contains hacked information when there is evidence that the information was obtained legally might be the sort of false statement that would trigger a defamation suit.
Twitter needs to keep its users satisfied. It makes money by selling ads, and driving users away with unfair censorship policies isn’t good for business. OTOH, keeping its users happy may make it difficult to operate as a progressive echo chamber, so we may have reached a market-based solution to Twitter’s unfair treatment of a large group of its users, many of whom have been leaving for Gab and Parler. Section 230 may need some legislative tweaking based on lessons learned since it was enacted in 1996, but the market may apply more pressure more quickly to drive Twitter toward better behavior.
Of course, Twitter may think that it is a monopoly that is too big to fail. That’s what America Online AOL thought.
Things are about to get interesting.
Stay tuned.
Quote of the Day
To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker? … To whom would you delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read?
–Christopher Hitchens
Quote of the Day
Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
A Civil Rights Victory
The Washington Free Beacon reports that the City of Los Angeles has been ordered to pay a six-figure award to the National Rifle Association because of a violation of the First Amendment. A federal judge struckdown a city ordinance aimed at punishing prospective contractors with ties to the NRA as an infringement on the rights to free speech and association. He ordered city officials to pay NRA’s attorneys’ fees of $150,000.
California is still part of the United States, so our Constitution is binding on its state and local governments. If it were successfully to secede (as certain folks have threatened), our Bill of Rights would no longer apply there. California’s state constitution is easily amended. How long would such inconvenient civil liberties as free speech be allowed to exist in a polity that keeps electing politicians that pass laws such as the one LA adopted to harass the NRA and its members and associates?
I left California in 1990 because I could see such tyrannical behavior taking hold.
Free Speech v. Cancel Culture
I just read Willam Jacobson’s essay over at Real Clear Politics about his experience with cancel culture at Cornel University. Prof. Jacobson was condemned by colleagues at the Cornell Law School after he committed acts of wrongthink by publishing blog posts criticizing Black Lives Matter. Prof. Jacobson writes:
I offered to publicly debate a student representative and a faculty member of their choice, but that offer was rejected. They don’t want to criticize me. They want to silence criticism of BLM.
While I refuse to be silenced, others are not be able to risk such career pressure.
Although I am the target, students and free expression are the real victims. I have received many emails from students telling me that I have a lot of “quiet” support among students, but that they are afraid to speak up for fear of the professional or social consequences. Cancel culture has created this atmosphere of fear and intimidation.
Read the whole thing.
Sigh. I’m so old that I remember when liberals were in favor of due process and free speech.
Video Credit: Murrow, Edward R., See It Now, CBS, 9 March, 1954.
Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
In April, 2015, Brett Kimberlin filed a malicious series of false complaints with Twitter concerning my (at)wjjhoge account. Twitter responded by suspending that account. When I appealed the suspension, Twitter informed that it was permanent and that I would never get it back. In late June, the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office dismissed the false criminal complaint the Kimberlins had filed against me because there was no evidence to support their accusations. Five years ago today, I was able to publish a post titled As I Was Saying Before I Was Interrupted …
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I received this email from Twitter today.
The Gentle Reader may remember how The Dread Pro-Se Kimberlin and his buddies made much of the suspension of that account. It now appears that Twitter has come to the same conclusion as the Circuit Court for Montgomery County and the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office concerning the truth of Kimberlin’s claims of harassment.
I’m sure this will come as a disappointment to TDPK and his fans. I can offer this deal from Amazon to help soothe their pain.
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I can’t be sure why Twitter decided to reinstate my account, but it’s been suggested to me that their legal department was concerned about being drawn in to any civil matter on the same side as Brett Kimberlin.
Whatever.
I do know that Twitter’s shameful behavior during those months convinced me that they were not a reliable platform. As a result, I became one of the early adopters of Gab and one of Gab’s first investors.
Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
Today is the eighth anniversary of my first blog post about Brett Kimberlin. It was called No Thugs Zone.
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Fellow blogger and Maryland resident Stacy McCain has had to move his family out of the state because of threats related to blogging about Brett Kimberlin. He is not the only blogger suffering abuse from Kimberlin.
Mr. Kimberlin was unwise in choosing to pick a fight with the blogosphere. He is likely to find that, while we don’t always agree with one another, we have each other’s backs when the freedom of the Internet is threatened. Mr. Kimberlin and those who have supported him (I’m looking at you, Ms. Streisand) have bitten off more than they can chew. The pushback is just beginning.
UPDATE–The McCain family is having a ton of unforeseen expenses because of their sudden move. I just hit his tip jar. Why don’t you?
UPDATE 2–Expect more, a lot more, about this on Friday.
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I’m not done with him yet.
You Went Full Karen. Never Go Full Karen.
Mika haz sad …
Quote of the Day
The lesson from the Cold War is, if you give in to totalitarian impulses once, new demands follow… The West prevailed in the Cold War because we stood by our fundamental values and did not appease totalitarian tyrants.
—Flemming Rose
Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
This TKPOTD is from four years ago today. It provides a succinct summary of Brett Kimberlin’s lawfare campaign attempting to use the courts to suppress the First Amendment rights of his critics.
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One of the subjects of interest at this blog is the First Amendment. I got interested in Brett Kimberlin back in 2012 because of the unconstitutional gag order he was granted against Aaron Walker as part of a peace order. That struck me as an attack on Aaron’s First Amendment rights, and I wound up participating in the Everyone Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day blogburst. Because the hearings involved in the Kimberlin cases were within commuting distance of my home, I began attending them and writing about the various Kimberlin-related peace order petitions and lawsuits.
As a result, I became part of the story.
In late July, 2013, Brett Kimberlin filed a false criminal complaint against me accusing me of harassment. The charge was dropped by the Montgomery County State’s Attorney.
In late August, 2013, Brett Kimberlin sued Aaron Walker, Stacy McCain, Ali Akbar, Kimberlin Unmasked, and me in Montgomery County Circuit Court alleging a wide array of torts, including defamation and false light invasion of privacy. In July, 2014, most of that case was dismissed on summary judgment. The next month, Aaron, Stacy, Ali, and I received a directed verdict in our favor when Kimberlin was unable to put on enough evidence to allow the remaining case to go to the jury. Kimberlin appealed to the Court of Special Appeals, and a three-judge panel upheld the Circuit Court’s finding in January, 2016. Kimberlin has asked an rehearing en banc by the entire Court of Special Appeals.
In October, 2013, Brett Kimberlin sued over twenty defendants, including me, in federal court alleging a RICO conspiracy and civil rights claims as well as a laundry list of state law torts. On 17 March, 2015, the federal claims were throw out, except for one claim against Patrick Frey. Kimberlin tried to appeal to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, but he was turned away because the case was still ongoing in the lower court. The remnant portion of the case has been limping along, and discovery finally ended last Friday. Kimberlin has sought to subpoena information from me, but I was not properly served. However, I voluntarily let him have the responsive information that I had. Because he was disappointed with what he received, he filed a motion to have me sanctioned. That motion is still pending.
In March, 2015, Kimberlin filed a false peace order petition against me that alleged I had harassed Mrs. Kimberlin’s elder daughter. On 13 March, 2015, that petition was denied.
The following Monday, 16 March, 2015, Kimberlin filed his second RICO lawsuit, the so-called Team Themis suit, against almost twenty defendants. My name was tacked on the end. (This was great timing; the first RICO suit was dismissed the next day.) That lawsuit was dismissed last week.
On 15 April, 2015, Kimberlin filed another lawsuit in Montgomery County Circuit Court which essentially was the state law claims from his first federal RICO suit alleged against most of the same defendants. Michelle Malkin, Twitchy, Breitbart, Glenn Beck, Mercury Radio Arts, and The Blaze were dismissed from the suit in September, 2015. Aaron Walker was dismissed in January, 2016. Dan Backer, DB Capitol Services, Lee Stranahan, and I were dismissed yesterday. Of the four remaining defendants, Patrick Frey, Ali Akbar, and National Bloggers Club remain unserved, and Mandy Nagy is incompetent to defend herself following a devastating stroke.
Kimberlin appealed the denial of his bogus peace order petition, and his appeal was denied after a hearing in Montgomery County Circuit Court on 14 May, 2015.
A few days later, acting through his wife, Kimberlin filed a false criminal complaint based on the allegations in his peace order petition. In June, 2015, the Montgomery County State’s Attorney dropped the charge for lack of evidence.
So where are the cases now.
The peace orders and criminal charges are done.
The first state lawsuit has failed on appeal, and it’s unlikely that the Court of Special Appeals will bother with an en banc hearing and even more unlikely that the Court of Appeal (Maryland’s highest court) would grant a petition for certiorari and take the case.
The first RICO case isn’t over in the District Court and can’t be appealed until the claim against Patrick Frey is adjudicated there.
The second RICO is in now toast in the District Court. I expect that Kimberlin will file an appeal with the Fourth Circuit in a few days.
The second state lawsuit isn’t over yet either, and it can’t be appealed until the claims against the remaining four defendants are resolved.
So, for now, Patrick Ostronic, my pro bono attorney in the state cases, will be watching the Court of Special Appeals for a decision on an further hearing, and I’m lining up legal resources to deal with the expected appeal in RICO 2. And we shall see how Judge Hazel rules on that sanctions motion. Meanwhile, it’s become abundantly clear that the Rauhauser/Kimberlin strategy of on-the-cheap pro se litigation has backfired.
We’re dealing with people who have likely had no interaction with the court system beyond a traffic ticket; the potential for a pro se litigant to force them into expensive, long distance, lengthy, discovery laden litigation doesn’t seem to cross their minds.
—Neal Rauhauser, quoted by Stacy McCain.
Kimberlin now overlooks at his own risk the potential for a group of defendants, some with excellent legal resources, dedicated to the First Amendment to push back against his lawfare. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll begin to understand the potential costs of taking on dedicated pro se defendants with time and resources.
#Loser
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Loser indeed. Not only did The Dread Deadbeat Pro-Se Kimberlin wind up losing all those cases and their appeals, he wound up having appeals court costs taxed to himself and getting sanctioned for frivolously including me as an appellee in one of the appeals. Oh, and he lost his RICO 3 Lolsuit that he filed agains Breitbart Holdings, Steve Bannon, and a long list of other defendants when it was dismissed sua sponte by the District Court. His LOLsuit against Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley was also dismissed sua sponte, and he lost all the appeals related to those case.
Everything proceeded as I had foreseen.
Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
One of Brett Kimberlin’s recurring bug-a-boos was Team Themis, a commercial intelligence operation run by some companies also engaged in government work. Kimberlin alleged in his Kimberlin v. Hunton & Williams LLP, et al. RICO 2: Electric Boogaloo LOLsuit that Team Themis had be conducting a defamatory dirty operation against him on behalf of the Ul. S. Chamber of Commerce—and that my blogging here at Hogewash! was somehow connected with that operation.
Kimberlin has been griping about Team Themis for years. In fact, when I searched Breitbart Unmasked for references to Team Themis, I found one posted on 20 March, 2012, when the site was only one month old.
The former blogger, Seth L. Allen, then set out on an internet smear campaign to destroy both Brad Friedman and his business partner Brett Kimberlin. I won’t go into detail about either of them in this post, suffice it to say though that there was a larger campaign against both parties started by The U.S. Chamber of Commerce which had been under attack by organizations involved with Mr. Kimberlin, and which ended up in the folding of the HBGary Security firm over planned social media destruction campaigns against both Brad Friedman and his business partner: which HBGary had been competing for in the security sector with Palantir Security and a number of other firms that called themselves Team Themis.
One of the ways that I have thumbed my nose at Kimberlin through the years has been with occasional posts about a NASA mission called THEMIS. Such a post six years ago today resulted in some odd comments to which I responded this way—
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THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) is a mission to investigate what causes auroras in the Earth’s atmosphere. The program is run by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and not by the agency just up the road that forgot to buy both vowels.
I have never had any connection to the program.
UPDATE—I found this attempted comment while taking my morning coffee break.
Of course, the IP address doesn’t belong to Amazon.
Not only that, it’s not actively assigned.
Hi, Neal!
UPDATE—Ooooo! Struck a nerve, have we? This comment just came in attributed to my late mother.
Can you say “desperation”?
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BTW, There are indications that the partnership between Brad Friedman and Brett Kimberlin has been dissolved. They were the co-incorporators of Velvet Revolution US, but since the corporate name was change to Protect Our Elections/EMPR in 2017, Friedman hasn’t appeared to have any connection to the organization. The last IRS filing I’ve found listing Friedman as a Director was for 2015.
Hmmmmm.
