Big tech silences conservative voices as House concerned with pronouns

Published Jan. 19, 2020

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and chairman of the House Rules Committee Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., announced a resolution recently intended to “honor all gender identities” by modifying pronouns in the House rules and references to family relations, such as father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, as reported by the Daily Caller. These words would be changed to “parent, child, sibling, spouse, or parent-in-law,” the resolution said.

The announcement said that hereafter “pronouns and familial relationships in the House rules [will] be gender-neutral,” and removes references to gender, “to ensure we are inclusive of all Members, Delegates, Resident Commissioners and their families – including those who are nonbinary.” 

“Nonbinary” is the term that is applied to those who see themselves as neither female nor male. The changes also mandate that extended family members, such as an aunt or uncle, would be referred to as “child’s parent.”

Not long after announcing these critically important changes in allowable language, Pelosi’s Twitter profile still reads: “Speaker of the House, focused on strengthening America’s middle class and creating jobs; mother, grandmother, dark chocolate connoisseur.”

Given the COVID pandemic, which we are told has taken the lives of nearly 400,000 Americans; the new impeachment effort of Congressional Democrats days before President Donald Trump’s term ends; the riot at the Capitol two weeks ago; and the inauguration of the new president coming up tomorrow, one might expect there to be much more important things for the House of Representatives to busy itself with than a politically correct remaking of acceptable gender language in the House. If so, one would be wrong.

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Tech giants Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Google have grown too big for their britches. Protected from repercussions of what participants post on their sites by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, these platforms have rushed past these protections into the unprotected land of publishers, just as are newspapers and magazines.

Problems arose when people and other platforms were shut down or otherwise punished by these Big Tech firms. They turned out to be primarily, or perhaps entirely, those expressing conservative ideas.

Having had their voices silenced by Twitter, some users then migrated to a new platform named “Parler.” These mistreated users were then followed by millions of others who were angered by the censorious stuffed-shirts of Twitter.

Similar actions have been taken by Facebook and Internet site host Amazon AWS and search engine and Web host Google. Parler has since been banished by Amazon for having dared to allow free speech.

By their actions of selectively deciding who can post on their site, or who can have a site hosted by them, these platforms have abandoned the protections of Section 230, and become publishers. They are not the nation’s Internet babysitters; they are not in charge of protecting the masses from ideas that do not fit the narrow range of thought they find acceptable.

These harmful acts are not immune to negative consequences. Twitter has been punished for suspending President Donald Trump’s accounts.

Politico Daily reported that “Twitter’s stock price fell by 12 percent and erased $5 billion from its market capitalization after choosing to delete an account that had about 88 million followers. The stock dropped as low as $45.17 per share,” from its high of $52.44.

The report added that “the stock fell after people saw the decision as one that was politically motivated and a way to silence a major conservative voice among the public. This also erodes interest in social media platforms that look to censor free speech.” 

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President- elect Joe Biden deserves congratulations and the admiration of us all. He masterfully engineered and operated a plan to get himself elected in November, overcoming great odds. Biden’s win is truly historic.

As someone not leading the pack when the nomination race began, he managed to get the nomination. And then the really surprising win occurred.

His incumbent opponent, President Donald Trump, earned 74,111,419 votes, which was 11,126,594 more votes than he got in the 2016 election. Incumbents usually win a second term, and the last time one did not was George H.W. Bush in 1992. An incumbent losing has only occurred 4 other times in the last 100 years.

Biden’s vote total of 81,009,468 was the most ever for a presidential election, and roughly 18 million more votes than Barack Obama, a very popular Democrat, received in 2012.

In winning election, Biden beat the odds to win over an incumbent president, and at the same time increase the number of people who voted by a significant number.

In 2012 more than 129 million voted. In 2016, 137.5 million people voted, six percent more than four years earlier. And in 2020, there were more than 159 million voters, and the number of voters increased by nearly 16 percent. Wow!

He also won despite losing most bellwether counties, and significant Democrat losses down ballot. 

And, Biden was able to win even though officials in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin broke their own state laws and breached the terms of the U.S. Constitution governing elections when they changed election procedures improperly.

This election is certainly one for the books.