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Libertarian: Good Riddance, Social-Media Censors
“A new era is dawning at Meta,” declares Reason’s Robby Soave of news “that third-party fact-checking organizations” will lose “the power to suppress disfavored speech on Facebook.”
The change is “wildly positive,” but “some in the government and mainstream media will balk.
“What unites legacy media institutions with politically motivated speech hunters in government is growing frustration over their own loss of control with respect to guardrails of acceptable speech.”
Fact is, “the US is a driver of tech innovation because its government protects free speech.”
We need to keep those protections, “so that the US can continue to be the most prosperous and technologically advanced country in the world.”
Editor: My Rude Facebook ‘Fact-check’ Awakening
Mark Zuckerberg getting rid of Facebook’s fact-checking department is “too little, too late,” scoffs The Free Press’ Margi Conklin.
“Back in February 2020, when I was the Sunday editor of the New York Post, China expert Steven Mosher pitched” a story arguing COVID “likely leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
It took off online until Facebook fact-checkers “flagged the piece as ‘false information.’ ”
Danielle E. Anderson, “who advised Facebook to censor the piece,” had “a major conflict of interest” as she’d “regularly worked with researchers” at the Wuhan lab.
“Legacy media outlets parrot[ed] the wet market theory, turning the idea of a lab leak into a ‘conspiracy theory.’ ”
“Seeing Big Tech censorship of the American media in real time . . . chilled me to my bones.”
From the left: Feds Still Hiding Russiagate Facts
In 2017, the FBI began probing Donald Trump’s alleged connections to Russian intelligence, notes Racket’s Matt Taibbi.
“Either the FBI had evidence to start such an investigation . . . or it didn’t.”
In a delayed response to a RealClearInvestigations Freedom of Information request, the FBI has now redacted precisely that information.
“This is not a small issue. The FBI opening an investigation into a presidential candidate on the thinnest of pretexts, then continuing it despite repeated dead ends” and “opening a second probe into a sitting president after their Director was fired” all speak to a “law enforcement agency that was coloring way outside its lines, involving itself in unprecedented political interference. Whoever takes over the Bureau needs to unredact these and many other pages.”
Conservative: The Worst of Jimmy Carter
“On July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter gave what came to be known as his ‘malaise’ speech,” recalls the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.
Amid soaring inflation, gas shortages and “the disastrous international consequences of Carter’s presidency — the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the humiliating Iranian hostage ordeal, and the even more humiliating failed American hostage rescue attempt,” by July 1979, “the nation was in a deep, Carter-induced funk. And Carter’s reaction was to . . . blame the nation.”
“The country’s ‘true problem,’ Carter declared, was a ‘crisis of confidence’ . . . ‘too many of us tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.’ ”
In fact, sighs York, he’d “embraced the idea that America was in an ‘age of limits’ ” so “Americans needed to learn to get by with less.”
Luckily for America, Ronald Reagan soon proved Carter wrong about that.
Liberal: To Win, Dems Must Change
As Democrats assess “what went wrong in the 2024 election and what they need to change,” The Wall Street Journal’s William A. Galston points out that Kamala Harris “failed to win over a small but vital share of the electorate, which was disproportionately younger, male, Hispanic and non-college-educated.”
Trump won the swing states “with a message strong enough to overcome the Harris campaign’s edge in funds and organization.”
Americans without college degrees “made up 57% of all voters nationally. If Democrats wish to rebuild their national majority, they can’t continue to give ground in this crucial portion of the electorate.”
Dems need a “new economic agenda” that delivers “tangible improvements in their lives within the span of a single presidential term” for working-class voters.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board