Facebook
X
LinkdIn
Copy Link
Eric Adams had no idea what drill rap was until just last week when his son introduced him to it. Now he’s convinced it’s the reason for rising rates of lethal firearm crimes in New York City.
As crime spirals to new highs in urban areas nationwide, Democratic mayors, who have controlled these cities for decades, are looking for any excuse that doesn’t implicate their policies or those of their predecessors. That’s why Mayor Adams has turned his attention to the presence of an aggressive form of hip-hop on YouTube.
Adams threatened to pull social media companies into the principal’s office and “sit down with them and state that, ‘you have a civic and corporate responsibility.’” He went on to use the example of banning Donald Trump from Twitter to demonstrate the kind of success that can stop murder in New York City. “I mean, we pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing, yet we are allowing…displaying of guns, violence — we are allowing it to stay on these sites because look at the victims.”
Adams’s Tipper Gore drag act follows a weeks-long outrage cycle over Joe Rogan, which saw the Biden administration call for Spotify to take action against his podcast for spreading what they call “disinformation” — a new favorite term among our overlords.
Both White House press secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Spotify to do more to censor Rogan, although they danced carefully around the suggestion of pulling him from the platform completely. Spotify is a private company — and any government-coerced threat of silencing is censorship and a violation of the First Amendment. Much like Adams in New York, Psaki has not dealt with the Biden administration’s own confusing messages on Covid-19 and is instead blaming platforms and podcasters for her boss’s own failings.
This censoriousness has developed into an alarming new trend on the left and in corners of progressive media. CNN has reporters who regularly call for, or at the very least encourage, the deplatforming of radio hosts and even sponsors of their rival network Fox News. CNN’s junior media reporter and the Salacious B. Crumb to Brian Stelter’s Jabba, Oliver Darcy, set out on a crusade to deplatform InfoWars’s Alex Jones. The irony is that Darcy himself used to be a leading media advocate of free speech online and on campus. Yet CNN has made it a personal mission to take on Rogan and encourage the same kind of censorship measures that are coming from the White House. Anything to move on from Zuckergate…
This pattern will continue, with calls to deplatform those who question the far left’s climate alarmism, gun violence, and Critical Race Theory, so that those like Adams and Biden can find scapegoats for their own failures of governance. Student protesters who stopped everyone from Milo Yiannopoulos to Ben Shapiro to Charles Murray from speaking on college campuses have now entered the mainstream and are permeating the media as well.
The problem will not go to go away on its own, even if we stand up and declare unwavering support for the First Amendment. It must be proactively ridiculed and defeated. The sudden need to promote censorship as a policy solution needs to become a nonstarter at the voting booth.
