Quick Hits

The Babylon Bee is suing the state of California for a new censorship law intended to effectively criminalize the Babylon Bee.

The left is nothing but defunding the police and censoring speech.

The satirical website is part of a coalition that petitioned a California federal court on Tuesday to block AB 587, a 2022 law that requires social media companies to periodically report certain content to the government, including "hate speech" and "disinformation." The plaintiffs claim the bill is a "vehicle" for California Democrats to crack down on speech they find distasteful.

"Those who wield power in the Golden State have been candid about their displeasure with the speech being published on social media platforms," the lawsuit states. "California Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta have both expressed a desire to use state power to chill speech they do not approve of, constitutionally protected expression they refer to with derogatory labels like 'disinformation,' 'hate speech,' and 'extremism.'"

The law enables the attorney general to fine companies for late, incomplete, or misrepresentative reports. But because the policy fails to define vague terms like "misinformation," the plaintiffs claim it gives the attorney general similarly broad enforcement powers and enables the state to censor content.

The plaintiffs also claim that Newsom has signaled the law's true intention.

"California will not stand by as social media is weaponized to spread hate and disinformation that threaten our communities and foundational values as a country," the governor said in a statement when he signed it into law last September.

Parler was just acquired by bigger company, and that bigger company immediately shut Parler down.

At least, the social media platform part of Parler was shut down. They're keeping the web-hosting service going.

On Friday, the digital media company Starboard announced that it had acquired Parler, the conservative social media platform. According to Starboard, the deal went through on Good Friday and it bought Parler for an undisclosed amount.

Following Starboard's announcement on Friday, the company immediately shut down Parler's website. A note on Parler.com(opens in a new tab) reads "no reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more."

To be clear though, this isn't an anti-conservative statement from Starboard. It's strictly business. Starboard's statement goes on to praise former Parler CEO George Farmer for Parler's more recent move into providing alternative IT and cloud services solutions through its former parent company Parlament Technologies.

"We focus on working with groups that are advocating for or otherwise advancing conservative causes or conservative beliefs," Starboard CEO Ryan Coyne told the Daily Caller News Foundation in 2021, back when Starboard was known as Olympic Media.

Gavin Newsom's fascist state of California exacts $1.2 million from a church that defied his lawless mask mandate.

Calvary Chapel in San Jose, Calif., is a large evangelical church that defied state and local orders to mask up during services and maintain "social distancing." Of course, we now know that mask-wearing was about as effective against spreading COVID-19 as wearing a necklace of newt entrails and "social distancing" was a bad joke.

But it's not the science. It's that the church defied authorities. So now Calvary must pay the state of California $1.2 million in fines because they got bureaucrats mad at them.

...

The judge wrote an opinion that was so 2020.

"It should appear clear to all -- regardless of religious affiliation -- that wearing a mask while worshiping one's god and communing with other congregants is a simple, unobtrusive, giving way to protect others while still exercising your right to religious freedom," Superior Court Judge Evette D. Pennypacker wrote in the April 7 ruling imposing the fines.

The judge was doin' the time warp with County Counsel James Williams.

"The county's response to the pandemic, including the health officer's public health orders and enforcement against entities that refused to follow the law, saved thousands of lives and resulted in one of the lowest death rates of any community in the United States," Williams said.

A transgender was prosecuted for full-on exposing his genitals (in whatever form they now take) to women and underaged girls in a changing room at a YWCA. (They keep telling me this never happens, and it keeps on happening.)

The transgender offers this defense: That he's so morbidly obese his great dangling belly conceals his genitals so he was effectively clothed -- in blubber.

Pedro Gonzalez at his Contra substack:

Recently, Darren Glines, a man who identifies as a woman named "Rachel," was charged with three counts of indecent exposure after allegedly stripping naked in front of women and girls at a YMCA in Xenia, Ohio.

Things took an even stranger turn when his defense argued that Glines couldn't have exposed anyone to anything because "the whole genital area was covered by body fat." Glines is morbidly obese.

The case highlights a problem that will not soon abate: the invasion of men identifying as women into female spaces, whether that is the octagon or the locker room where young girls change. If they get away with it, it's typically thanks to state and federal anti-discrimination laws.

The charges against Glines stem from at least three complaints made by people at the facility between 2021 and 2022. Citing court documents, WHIO reported that people had complained about "seeing a naked male in the female's locker room." Court documents also state juvenile girls were present during one of the incidents, according to WDTN.

If you can believe it, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries previously defended Louis Farrkhan's antisemtic statements and conspiracy theories, as well as those of his own hateful uncle.

Well, okay, that's not hard to believe.

What's hard to believe is that CNN bothered to report this.

I didn't realize this -- you know that Black Nationalist/"Afrocentrism" bigot and crank from the nineties, Leonard Jeffries?

Hakeem Jeffies is his nephew.

And the apple hasn't fallen far:

For years, Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has told a similar story: he was off at college and shielded from controversies surrounding his uncle, Black studies professor Leonard Jeffries, who eventually lost his job over incendiary comments about Jewish people. Hakeem Jeffries has said he had only a "vague recollection" of the controversy, saying he couldn't even recall coverage of it in local press.

But a CNN KFile review of material from a 30-year-old college campus incident sharply undermines Jeffries' claims.

While Jeffries was a college student at Binghamton University in upstate New York, the Black Student Union, in which Jeffries was an executive board member, invited his uncle to speak on campus after his inflammatory comments caused an uproar.

And in a previously unreported college editorial, Jeffries defended his uncle along with Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan, writing, "Do you think that a ruling elite would promote individuals who would seek to dismantle their vice like grip on power?" He added that they were unfairly targeted by "White media" for challenging "the longstanding distortion of history."

Leonard Jeffries faced widespread backlash in the early 1990s after comments he made about the involvement of "rich Jews" in the African slave trade and "a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood" of Jewish executives who he said were responsible for denigrating Black Americans in films.

"Dr. Leonard Jeffries and Minister Louis Farrakhan have come under intense fire," wrote Jeffries in February 1992. "Where do you think their interests lie? Dr. Jeffries has challenged the existing white supremist educational system and long standing distortion of history. His reward has been a media lynching complete with character assassinations and inflammatory erroneous accusations."

Jeffries' office maintained his record in public service was one of "bringing communities together" and said he did not share his uncle's views.

Elon Musk: The government-corporate partnership between the Deep State and Twitter included giving the government free peaks at people's private direct messages to other people.

Musk also warned about the danger posed by AI. Tucker Carlson points out that we've always been afraid that AI would defy its human masters and become self-willed -- but what's even more terrifying is that AI remains under human control, but it's servants of The Regime who control it, using it destroy the rest of us.

Note that the FBI has had a long and repulsive history of collecting blackmail information about those it considered its enemies and coercing those enemies with the blackmail material.

And Musk says that Twitter was allowing the government to read citizens' private messages.

David French would call this "jawboning through other means."

posted by Ace at 06:30 PM

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