Supporting government censorship of speech really ought to be a permanent foul

Some journalists are not only more professional and have greater integrity than the average journalist, they can also be very explicit.  Very explicit.  Matt Taibi being an example.  He has had a lot of courage in bucking the rising censorship and authoritarianism of the traditional mainstream media.  

For example, from Amy Klobuchar, You Suck by Matt Taibbi.  The subheading is The Minnesota Senator asks Amazon to censor Substack and Rumble. How much more of this can we take? That is all  reasonably clear.  Censorship sucks and Klobuchar is a fan of government censorship of freedom of speech.  I was somewhat interested in Klobuchar as a possible national stage politician many years ago when she was just emerging.  But once the spotlight shone on her, she turned out to be just one more of the legion of unaccomplished and ethically unmoored has-beens who so litter the halls of political power.

Minnesota Senator and Hindenburg presidential candidacy Amy Klobuchar sent a letter (h/t ReclaimTheNet.org) to Jeff Bezos demanding that he enjoin Alexa from citing “unvetted sources,” specifically Substack and Rumble. No hell is hot enough for this person.

Referring to a Washington Post story complaining that Alexa cited Substack, she wrote: “When asked about the 2020 presidential election, it appears that some answers were provided by contributors instead of verified news sources.”

Amy Klobuchar is the absolute fave of the national media consensus. They love her so much, they speak in italics. “Oh, my God. She’s great. And funny, too!” gushed a cameraman to me in Winterset, Iowa, birthplace of John Wayne, four years ago. He was standing astride an AMY AMY AMY banner in a diner packed with press admirers, who are legion, everywhere. The “funny” legend came courtesy mostly of one joke she repeated everywhere she went, over and over, clinging to the one time Donald Trump bothered to mention her, tweeting about her looking like a “Snow woman.” Funny Amy’s retort?

“I wonder how your hair would fare in a blizzard,” she’d say, in a nasal voice, laugh-snorting at her own joke. In my time following her I heard the joke about five times. By the last I was ready to drive a railroad spike through my foot:

National press tried endlessly to sell the public on “funny” Amy, always emphasizing her geographic origin, as if she were the media’s running mate. The New York Times, in an interview over “dumplings” in which Klobuchar talked about how she thinks about “her own humor and power,” described her act as a “clean, ‘aw, shucks’ approach that conveys her own background as a Midwesterner.” The paper noted: Klobuchar could remember many times when people laughed at her jokes! “She laughs easily… and can recall dozens of her successful zingers.”

NPR did a segment on how “Amy Klobuchar Turns To Humor To Distinguish Herself Among Candidates,” with Mary Louise Kelly abasing herself with the intro, “In the 24-person Democratic presidential field, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has distinguished herself as a comedian.” U.S. News and World Report went with, “How Amy Klobuchar’s Humor Sets Her Apart,” and claimed her ability to “savagely deploy a zinger” would be a “critical element in taking on Donald Trump” (!). Barack Obama gushed that Al Franken was now Minnesota’s “second-funniest Senator,” while the hometown Minnesota Post went with “Amy Klobuchar is Hilarious,” adding — this is real — the following deck:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Amy Klobuchar can legislate, but can she tell a joke? The answer is a resounding “yes” — as in bring-down-the-house, my-stomach-hurts-from-laughing, “yes.”

Yes, they went with hilarious, for starters. It wasn’t just that campaign journalism requires every angle be done to death, killed over and over like Jason Vorhees, but that the press really thought Amy was the best choice, a truth that emerged in the New York Times all-time cop-out co-endorsement of her and Elizabeth Warren. Saying “May the best woman win,” the paper wrote that Klobuchar would be able to “connect” to voters’ “lived experiences,” especially “in the middle of the country,” as:

The senator talks, often with self-deprecating humor, about growing up the daughter of two union workers, her Uncle Dick’s deer stand, her father’s struggles with alcoholism…

In case it’s been forgotten, here’s how voters — Democratic Party voters — responded to a candidacy with such enthusiastic backing of media establishment. Amy Klobuchar got 12.2% in Iowa and 19.7% in New Hampshire (where her third-place finish, five points behind. winner Bernie Sanders, was hailed by the New York Times as the “big surprise”). Then came Nevada, where she had a volleyball-style setup for victory in the form of a shameful last-minute dirty trick. “Intelligence community” leaks led to the Times headline, “Russia Is Said to Be Interfering to Aid Sanders in Democratic Primaries.” Even with her lead opponent official denounced as Putin’s favorite, she got 7.3%, a distant fifth behind Warren (11.5%) Pete Buttigieg (17.3%), Joe Biden (18.9%), and Sanders (40.5%).

Some primary numbers that followed: 3.1, 31., 2.2, 1.4, 1.2, 5.6 (her home state!), 2.3, 2.2, 2.1, 3.4, 1.3, 0.6, 0.2, 0.7, 0.2, 0.4, etc. “At Least Amy Klobuchar Has Retired Her Twilight Jokes,” quipped New York. “Despite a strong third-place finish in New Hampshire,” lamented the New York Times when she dropped out, adding that Klobuchar “ultimately could not compete with better-funded rivals.” The paper moved on to the burning question of what she would do with all seven of her delegates.

Now this person, whose “humor” persona was surely cooked up in part to soften a rep for throwing things at aides, who scored roughly John Blutarsky’s grade-point average with the backing of the national media establishment, who managed less than 6% of Democratic voters in her own state, has the gall to push one of the world’s biggest media distributors to disallow voluntary access to “contributors instead of verified news sources.” Klobuchar wants Jeff Bezos to make sure Amazon’s home surveillance robots don’t spit out even occasional answers from a wider pool of real human beings, including thousands of independent contributors. The information landscape must be a pure monopoly of “verified news sources.”

It astonishes me that there are politicians out there who think that running on a platform for censorship is a viable strategy.  It boggles the mind.  

It reminds me of the mainstream media's waning love affair with Kamala Harris.  They still do their puff pieces, just many fewer than three or four years ago.  There is a similar disconnect between the MSM's hagiography and Harris (and Klobuchar's) actual electoral success with her own party's voters.  The less the Democratic Party base votes for them, the more enamored the mainstream media seem to become.  It is an odd, not to say unseemly, dynamic.