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The ADVANCE, January 20, 2021 /Page 6A
(51?e Ahumtce
A free press is not a privilege but
organic necessity in a great society.
—Walter Lippmann
COMMENTARY
out of
CONTEXT
A compilation of quotations on a variety of
issues by national, state and regional writers,
well-known personalities, just plain everyday
people and from various publications
collected by the editors of THE ADVANCE.
Quotes for our Times:
Dennis Prager, nationally syndicated
radio talk-show host and columnist: The
'Good American'.
What the left is doing is announcing —
and enforcing — that conservatives "do
not belong" in our society. The parallels to
1933 are precise. And most good Ameri
cans are keeping silent, just as did most
Germans. Though they do not risk being
beaten up, are Americans in 2021 as afraid
of the American left as Germans in 1933
were of the German fascists? We're about
to find out.
Ben Shapiro, political commentator:
The lies tearing America apart.
Lies are dangerous. And double stan
dards are perhaps the most dangerous
form of lying: They grant the bravery of pu
rity to those most willing to defy decency,
prompting similar spasms of cruelty and
malice from the other side. The solution to
our national crisis of conscience isn't bad-
faith political purges or repetition of tire
some falsehoods about the nature of the
United States. It's truth.
But truth is more a shield than a sword.
And we are now in the age of swords,
wielded aggressively by those with little
principle but an unending sense of their
own moral superiority.
Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant
governor of New York and author: Regu
late social media like public utilities.
In 2017, the high court struck down a
North Carolina law that barred registered
sex offenders from using Facebook, Twit
ter and similar tech platforms. The justices
unanimously ruled that the North Carolina
law deprived sex offenders of their right
to find out what members of their govern
ment are saying and doing. Justice Elena
Kagan called social media "a crucially im
portant channel of political communica
tion."
If sex offenders are guaranteed access
to social media, how can conservatives
be blocked?
Expect the justices to broaden the First
Amendment to limit tech abuses.
The Constitution bars government from
limiting what we see and hear, so why
should five tech companies that no one
elected have that power?
Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., physician and
freelance writer: Will COVID numbers now
shift for Biden’s benefit?
Let's see what happens during a po
tential Biden administration. Once the
pandemic has served its purpose, Demo
crats using COVID as an excuse to finish
fundamentally transforming America, the
rules of the game may change, providing
"proof" that the new rules, ushered in un
der wise Joe Biden, have finally tamed the
COVID beast.
As George Orwell said, "Who controls
the past controls the future. Who controls
the present controls the past." Watch the
past year's COVID tragedy suddenly pivot
to a new and more useful narrative.
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Twitter Deranged Our Politics
„ THE
RICH
LOWRY
COLUMN
Donald Trump was the
president of Twitter.
What radio was to Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and TV was to
Ronald Reagan, communicating
280 characters at a time on a
social media platform that is a
watchword for hyperactive
inanity was to President Trump.
It is symbolically appropriate
that the effective end of his
power after the siege of the U.S.
Capitol has coincided with the
suspension of his Twitter
account.
He may well get impeached
a second time, but for now, the
punishment that really stings is
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
deciding after sitting down with
his woke colleagues that Trump
must pay the ultimate price for
his post-election misinformation
and agitation.
This judgment is as arbitrary
as Dorsey’s worst critics would
expect, and it will be impossible
for Twitter to enforce anything
resembling a consistent line
following its Trump suspension
(the platform didn’t seem
particularly exercised by all of
the voices valorizing last
summer’s riots as an “uprising”).
But there’s no doubting
Dorsey’s power. He has rendered
the president of the United
States practically mute.
Trump remains in the Oval
Office and, in theory, commands
the biggest megaphone on the
planet. He could still make
statements, hold press
conferences, sit down for
interviews or meet with his
cabinet. In his reduced and
isolated state, though, none of
these options are as appealing as
letting his thumbs do his work
for him, one outlandish tweet at
a time.
Now that this avenue is
foreclosed to him, he’s less of a
presence, even as the political
world continues to be obsessed
with him (in particular, the
manner of his exit from office).
It’s not exactly a slow news
environment. Yet, without
Trump’s tweets stirring the pot at
all times of the day, the nation’s
political debate feels a little less
fevered.
Twitter is Exhibit A for
Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that
the medium is the message.
There is plenty of worthy news
coverage and real-time
commentary on Twitter. But
that’s not where the emotional
center of gravity is, as one would
expect of a platform built for
instantaneous, unfiltered
reactions.
It’s this aspect of Twitter that
perfectly matched the president’s
proclivities. He found a natural
home in an environment that
encourages, and often rewards,
snap judgements, insults, soon-
to-be-forgotten
pronouncements, grotesque
oversimplifications and the
spread of false or dubious
information.
Trump wasn’t careful about
what he said anywhere, but he
reserved his most lurid and
poisonous communications for
Twitter. It was the place easiest
for him to, for instance, absurdly
accuse Morning Joe host Joe
Scarborough of murder or insult
the looks of his alleged paramour
Stormy Daniels.
It was a symptom of his
erratic, easily distracted, and
thoughtless governing style that
he used Twitter as a tool of his
administration. He warned
foreign leaders, fired officials and
made pronouncements on
legislation on Twitter, often
leaving allies and his own
government baffled by what was
supposed the line between “just
a tweet” and an official order by
the president of the United
States.
Twitter was an especially
ready forum for airing conspiracy
theories. Asked prior to the
election about his giving
credence to the lunatic idea that
Navy SEAL Team 6 had been
assassinated, Trump shrugged
and said it was only a retweet. In
the wake of his election defeat,
his Twitter feed become a
nonstop source of bad
information dredged up from
the worst corners of the internet.
If Trump was the foremost
offender, Twitter hasn’t done us
any favors in this period of our
national life. It has fed moral
panics and enabled cancellation
mobs. It has exposed journalists
who once made a pretense of
objectivity as rank partisans. It
has enticed once serious people into crowd
pleasing clownishness. It has made
politicians dumber and cruder. It has
distorted political reality for people across
the spectrum.
It, in short, has helped derange our
politics, with the former Tweeter-in-Chief
leading the way.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2020 by King Features Synd., Inc.
GRITTY
Chitlins
Over forty years
ago, during a
construction project
in downtown Atlanta,
I met one of the most
unique and colorful
individuals I’ve ever
known. He was a
retired Atlanta Police
Officer named Sarge,
who was hired to take
care of two inherent problems when
working in downtown Atlanta — traffic and
security.
Since Atlanta in those days didn’t offer
many restaurants with inexpensive lunch
cuisine, the working man usually depended
on a brown bag lunch. One day, as we were
eating and people watching (which most
workers do on a downtown job), Sarge
offered me some of his fried chitlins. I
almost said, “No thank you,” but a spirit of
adventure kicked in and I reluctantly
accepted his offer.
Now, folks, I had heard about chitlins
all my life, but the very thought of eating pig
innards turned me off — however, to my
surprise, those things were very good. Sarge
also gave me a wise old saying: “Eating
chitlins will give you guts.”
Just recently, after making a fresh batch
of “Clyde Harbin’s Special Recipe” barbecue
sauce, I thought about Sarge and his chitlins.
I was trying to think of something unique
that I could enjoy them with. Then I
suddenly remembered Sarge’s chitlins and I
said to myself, “Gosh, if eating chitlins will
give you guts — then a mess of those
critters with my daddy’s barbecue sauce will
have to give you “raw courage”....
(e-mail: slsurveyors@aol.com)
By Bennie Harbin
HI jpcf
COMMENTARY
Blame the Left, Not Trump,
for America’s Crack-Up
After years of bitter
counterinsurgency, the Left
finally has their orange
scalp. And they want many,
many more.
By Matthew Boose
What happened at the Capitol
last week did nothing to change the
Left’s hostile disposition toward
Donald Trump and his base. It has
always seen Trump andhis supporters
as a malignancy that needs to be cut
out of society. It never had any
intention of letting Trump go down
as a legitimate president, neither
does it have any desire to acknowledge
the grievances that fueled his rise in
the first place.
The words “President Trump”
would never have entered the history
books if not for the Left and its
relentless, pathological hatred of
anyone to the right of center. If
America is heading towards civil
strife, it is because the Left — with
the complicity of an opportunistic
establishment — has slowly but
surely nudged half the country into a
corner.
The Left has categorized millions
of ordinary people who just want
decent, honorable lives as “far-right
extremists” and “conspiracy
theorists” who deserve to be silenced,
fired from their jobs, and rendered
socially untouchable. These
“dangerous people,” held in such
contempt by the Left and the ruling
elite, retain such fringe notions as
“nations should have borders” and
“men and women are different.” The
Left has been playing a game of “stop
hitting yourself!” with these people
for years, and in 2016, those people
finally had enough.
It is now four years later and his
supporters have watched the
president they legitimately elected
spend every waking moment in office
fight a war of succession with a
faction of narcissistic psychopaths.
Without a single day of rest, the most
powerful institutions in the country
conspired in a temper tantrum to
overturn the will of the people, all in
the name of “democracy,” simply
because they did not like who the
people had chosen. From day one,
they have treated Trump like a
usurper whose mere election was an
“insurrection,” and they have not
concealed their disgust for his
supporters, whom they regard as
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