More on God given rights and private companies. Even if he intends to support free speech on Twitter*, Elon Musk is wrong about other companies.

Just like how it is critical to label the people who censor their political opponents as actual fascists, it's critical to push back on the "private companies can do this" myth.

In my post last night I made this same point to some extent, but given Elon Musk’s actions with Twitter more commentary is in order. Musk’s tweet above shows that even more clearly. While Musk himself has expressed many times now how critical free speech is, and he’s done much already to make that happen on Twitter, the comment he makes above is horribly false. Past SCOTUS decisions be damned.

There is no way that the founding fathers of this country would have envisioned private companies working to effectively nullify parts of the Bill Of Rights for certain people who happened to disagree with a certain political party, and/or disagreed with certain wealthy or powerful individuals. Nor would they have ever allowed it if they had somehow envisioned it happening.

And in fact even today there are protections for other rights spelled out just in the 1st amendment. Can any private company that is not itself a religious institution discriminate based on religion? Even if it doesn’t involve hiring and firing, no they can’t. Can a business open to the public restrict the ability of certain groups to assemble? (In numbers which do not create safety hazards, of course, and assuming that they are patronizing the business and not just taking up space.)

Consider a group of interracial couples, perhaps 6 couples in all, that go to a restaurant that is open to the public, and the owner is a democrat KKK type that is really against interracial couples. Can the owner refuse to serve them or even to let them in the door because his restaurant is a private company?? By all means tell me if you know where this might be legal or would even be tolerated.

Now in something I just read someone made the point that a restaurant or other private business open to the public could prohibit people from screaming profanities, which would technically be a form of restricting speech. Obviously that is a special case, but most businesses open to the public would not tolerate any kind of obnoxious disturbance, and the Bill Of Rights is not intended to allow any one person’s rights to infringe on those of others. But are examples like that even remotely equivalent to an online platform/public square like Twitter, Fascistbook, Instagram, YouTube or similar?? No they are not.

Online no one can scream in your face. And on those platforms individual users can also block other accounts that they find annoying, disagreeable, etc., such that any given user can choose to view the content that they are interested in. Throw in the intent of the Section 230 protections that shield online platforms from illegal content that might make its way in, and it’s clear that even modern day the idea is for a platform to be just like a public square where people are free to engage in any legal speech they like. If a company wishes to be a publisher, then that company can publish exactly what they like and not publish anything that they do not like. That is exactly what many companies do now, but those companies do not claim to be platforms and those companies are not open to all members of the public.

There is no reason for anyone to be able to silence the legal speech of others on any online platform, whether it is the government or whether it is the private owners/employees of that platform. There is absolutely no way that the founding fathers would have allowed the left wing fascist censoring that has gone on for several years now at least on the largest platforms. If they could have foreseen the technological advancements of the past 50+ years allowing for online speech, or if they could have foreseen the actions of left wing tyrants even without online platforms, they would have reworded most of the Bill Of Rights to make sure that left wing tyrants would have been prevented from engaging in their fascist behaviors via private companies.

Change my mind…..but be sure to include your arguments on how a group of men about 240 years ago, who were all about spelling out freedoms and who stated how “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”, would have agreed that certain wealthy men could curtail the rights of others simply because they had enough wealth and power to control the public square of any given time period. Don’t even bother telling me about bogus SCOTUS decisions over the years that have generally been decided by people who don’t give a damn about the original intent of the founders, and who in fact often hate this country and are otherwise aligned with other left wing fascists working to destroy this country.

The legal challenges to the 2020 election, where the “judicial review” didn’t allow eyewitness testimony in any cases (except maybe one case long after fraudulent winners had been installed into office), and where other evidence was not allowed to be presented in open court in any case either, show clearly that courts should NEVER have the authority to override original intent for the Constitution or for any other law that conforms to the original intent of the founders.

* I put the asterisk in the title because Musk has qualified/limited his commitment to free speech, and thus far Conservatives are still being censored on Twitter. I have been locked out for a week as have many others recently, and I have yet to see where any of the prominent and distinguished expert doctors that have told the truth on Corona and the “vaccines” have been restored in this past week since the Elon Musk poll that was supposedly the trigger to reinstate those accounts was taken. So Trump and a handful of others getting reinstated is great, and releasing “The Twitter Files” is great, but there is a LONG way to go to get Twitter to a place where it meets the intent of the founders of this country.