Blogger Banned from FaceBook After Sharing Instapundit Permalinks on Dubious Fact-Checkers in a… Private Messenger Conversation (!)

The day after the 2020 election, I was banned from Facebook — for the very first time, if I am not mistaken (and for God knows how long) — for sharing a handful of Instapundit permalinks in… private messages (PMs)!

That's right, it wasn't anything that I posted for the public on my wall, it was a personal conversation on Messenger between myself and one other person in which I shared two or three permalinks linking to posts around the internet (casting a modicum of doubt about the supposed neutrality of fact-checkers).

[Update: Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking this story; If anybody knows a way to contact FaceBook and ask them to speed up my recovery, that would be highly appreciated…]

On Wednesday, a lefty friend contacts me after seeing me during the night being interviewed on several French TV news shows for the Republican viewpoint during election night (France is five or six hours ahead, so my interviewing started at… 3 in the morning). An anti-Trumper, he made a bunch of snide remarks, asking, why would Donald Trump mention the Supreme Court instead of simply trusting the process and counting every single vote?

I reply by sending him Ed Driscoll's permalink of the video in which Joe Biden says that "we have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics" (italics mine).

He replied by sending me a Snopes webpage where Dan MacGuill had (yes) fact-checked the news report, calling it, invariably, "False" — but that's an entirely different story.

At that point, I thought he should know a little about fact checkers, so I did a search for "fact check" on Instapundit, and PM'd him the permalink about a fact-checker denying that Biden ever eulogized a KKK Grand Wizard' (since the person he was eulogizing turned out to be a KKK 'Exalted Cyclops').

I was about to PM a second instalink (regarding fact-checkers being nowhere to be found when whoppers are made by Democrats like Kamala Harris) when suddenly I started getting all these messages that my account had been shut down.

Strangely, for someone who has been trying to gather all the articles telling the truth about the bogus 1619 Project (see the list in the second half of this post), I was shut down at 4:19pm, or, in military parlance, at 1619 hours.

What happened? Was it the Joe Biden video? Was it the KKK post? Who did it? The computer? Or a FaceBook fact-checker a Facebook Drama Queen? And when will my account be restored?

Your guess is as good as mine…

Related: Evidence of Fraud in 2020 Election? A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign …

• A coup? On election night, we watched states call for Biden before votes were counted, while states that Trump has a solid lead in, stopped counting 

• Donald Trump Is One Tough Dragon to Slay

Evidence of Fraud in 2020 Election? A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign

Note: The following post originally appeared eight years ago, in April 2012, as that year's elections were moving forward, under the same title except for one word — the year…

Evidence of Fraud in 2008 Election? A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign

In some ways the most dangerous kind of politician is a man who is good at PR and nothing else

writes Paul Johnson in his monumental History of the American People.

No, he was not talking about the current occupant [Barack Obama] of the White House (his book was written in 1999, after all — before Obama had even published his (first) autobiography), but about John F Kennedy, and I am speaking as a former Kennedy devotee and Camelot maniac. (Yes, even if the book was written before 911 and even the George W Bush presidency, it is a must-read — as you will see below.)

I was coaxed into pulling Paul Johnson's masterpiece from my shelves again, as I read Instapundit's review of the PJMedia piece on what the Wikileaks memos say about the 2008 election, getting increasingly angry as I read through the J Christian Adams original.

What we do know is this: First, that people in the McCain campaign thought they had evidence of election tampering that cost McCain the election. Second, that McCain thought it best for the country to do nothing about it, in part because of fears of mob violence.

Interestingly, Glenn Reynolds calls his link to J Christian Adams' article "Bad Call." That turns out to be entirely appropriate, in view of the fact that Bernie Marcus recently pointed out (video) that

the Republicans play the rules of … golf. In golf, if you miss a putt or you touch the ball, you call a shot on yourself. We're playing the game of golf. The Democrats are playing ice hockey. It's a killer game. And that's the difference in politics.

This brings to mind uncounted parallels with the 1960 election, rarely if ever disclosed in mainstream history books, and which I only learned through Paul Johnson's History of the American People, the reading of which sometimes made my eyes pop out as previously-undisclosed facts (of the unpalatable sort) were revealed.

As I re-read part of the book this morning, it turns out that there are many more parallels than you would at first assume.

Just consider:

By all historical standards, Nixon should have been an American media hero. He was a natural candidate for laurels in the grand old tradition of self-help, of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. He came from nowhere.

Think of John McCain, who should have been — and who was! — an American hero for other reasons, linked to dramatic combat, horrific jail conditions (with — very — violent wardens, of a decidedly racist bent), and the ever-present risk of death in a foreign country. (In France, while both of Obama's autobiographies became best-sellers, McCain's autobiography, with its full life (written past the age of 60) and with all the drama of its war "adventures", was not even translated.)

Yet, from start to finish, the media, especially the 'quality' press, distrusted [Nixon], consistently denigrated him, and sought to destroy him, indeed in a sense did destroy him. At every crisis in his career — except the last — he had to appeal above the heads of the media to the great mass of the ordinary American people, the 'silent majority' as he called them.

When I first read Paul Johnson's book, incidentally, I remember thinking, But of course! What has always been described as an unsavory character trait in Richard Mulhouse Nixon — his alleged paranoia — turns out perhaps not to have been so paranoid at all and to have been provoked by those who claimed to be innocent bystanders, if not the actual entirely-innocent victims of "Tricky Dick"… (If only for Paul Johnson's description of Watergate — which he likens, persuasively, to a witch hunt — you must read A History of the American People.)

[2020 update: and cannot similar lines be written about Donald Trump?]

By contrast, the media did everything in its power to build up and sustain the beatific myth of John F. Kennedy, throughout his life and long after his death, until it finally collapsed in ruins under the weight of incontrovertible evidence. The media protected him, suppressed what it knew to be the truth about him, and if necessary lied about him, on a scale which it had never done even for Franklin Roosevelt.

C'mon. Don't tell me that I really need to point out the parallels here with Barack Hussein Obama, the anointed One come to save America and Americans from their own demons.

And this was all the more surprising because Kennedy had most of the characteristics of an American anti-hero. … the running theme of the Kennedy family [was] how to turn money into political power … Maximum use was made of Jack's war career in all his campaigns. … Old Joe set about making Kennedy first a congressman, then a senator, then president. This train of events is worth studying because it shows the extent to which money paved the way to political power in mid-20th-century America …

Again: need I really point out the parallels with Obama, and his war-chest(s), along with his billion-dollar campaigns and his spending sprees? At this point of the book, Paul Johnson brings an interesting aside:

As Tip O'Neill put it: …

'I'd have to say that [Jack] was only nominally a Democrat. He was a Kennedy, which more than family affiliation. It quickly developed into an entire political party, with its own people, its own approach and its own strategies.'

The man who got it right at the time was the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. He grasped the important point that electing a Kennedy was not so much giving office to an individual as handing over power to a family business, a clan, almost a milieu, with a set of attitudes about how office was to be acquired and used which at no point coincided with the American ethic. Having paid his first visit after Kennedy's election as President, Macmillan was asked on his return what it was like in Kennedy's Washington.

'Oh,' said he, 'it's rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable North Italian city.'

But let's get back to the election of 1960 (as you read the few next parts, remember all the nasty things you have heard through the years about Tricky Dick).

Nixon had deliberately decided to keep Catholicism out of the campaign, and succeeded in doing so. The day after the result, he said to his aide Pete Flanigan:

'Pete, here's one thing we can be satisfied about. The campaign has laid to rest for ever the issue of a candidate's religion in presidential politics. Bad for me, perhaps, but good for America.'

In fact, Kennedy's catholicism won him the election … In the Northern industrial states, where the margins were very close, the swing of the Catholic vote to a Catholic candidate made all the difference.

Think of McCain opining that the election of a black man was good for America — which it undoubtedly was. But regarding America's alleged nightmarish racism, note that it was precisely Barack Obama's race that won him, or that helped win him, the election — as much among minorities as among liberal whites pining to demonstrate their status as "good" whites.

Unfortunately, there is a more ominous parallel between 1960 and 2008 (although not necessarily in the states specifically mentioned), which should overshadow Nixon's (and McCain's) satisfaction with the (respective) result(s), along with pride in his (in their) countrymen. Indeed, why be satisfied with a result (and why be proud of your country) if the result was the product of cheating?

This was a crooked election, especially in Texas and Illinois, two states notorious for fraud, and both of which Kennedy won. In Texas, which gave its twenty-four college votes to Kennedy, by a margin of 46,000 votes (out of 2.3 million), one expert made the calculation that

'a minimum of 100,000 votes for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket simply were non-existent.'

… (in one polling station, where only 4,895 voters were registered, 6,138 votes were counted as cast)

Then again, perhaps there does turn out to be a parallel between 1960 and 2008 in regards to one of the states mentioned: …

In Illinois, Nixon carried 93 of the state's 102 counties, yet lost the state by 8,858 votes. This was entirely due to an enormous Democratic turnout in Chicago, under the control of the notorious Democratic city boss and mayor, Richard Daley. Daley gave Kennedy the Windy City by the astonishing margin of 450,000 votes, and the evidence was overwhelming that fraud was committed on a large scale in Kennedy's favor.

An interesting side-note:

The mafia played an important part in this fraud. Afterwards, its boss Giancana often boasted to Judith Campbell, the mistress he shared with the President, 'Listen, honey, if it wasn't for me your boyfriend wouldn't even be in the White House.'

I don't suppose the mafia helped Obama in 2008; however — No, I wouldn't want to call into question the honesty and the civility of members of ACORN and of the Black Panthers (for fear of being labeled a racist, natch).

While reading History of the American People the first time, I remember thinking: it can't be possible that the MSM history books wouldn't mention this, so probably the fraud was tiny, and/or hard to prove, and not worth mentioning, so perhaps Paul Johnson is exaggerating, if ever so slightly. Then I came to this part:

If Nixon, instead of Kennedy, had carried Texas and Illinois, the shift in electoral votes would have given him the presidency, and the evidence of electoral fraud makes it clear that Kennedy's overall 112,803 vote plurality was a myth: Nixon probably won overall by about 250,000 votes. Evidence of fraud in the two states was so blatant that a number of senior figures, including Eisenhower, urged Nixon to make a formal legal challenge to the result. But Nixon declined. … A legal challenge … would have produced a 'constitutional nightmare' and worked heavily against the national interest.

Doesn't this sound like the Wikileaks memo stating that "McCain felt the crowds assembled in support of Obama and such would be detrimental to our country and it would do our nation no good for this to drag out like last go around" — Bernie Marcus's dependable, mature golf player acting responsibly to prevent the ice hockey players from going berserk?

Just as interesting is the passage preceding the story of the 1960 election, which explains the downplaying of the Republican candidate while the extolling of the Democrat's alleged virtues. As you read the following passage, think also of all the ways that Rupert Murdoch has been demonized over the years, as has his Fox News network.

We come now to an important structural change in America. America had always been, from the earliest time, a democratic society, in that men (and indeed women) paid little attention to formal rank, even where it existed. Every man felt he had the right to shake hands with every other man, even the President … But this democratic spirit was balanced by the tribute of respect to those who, for one reason or another — experience, learning, position, wealth, office, or personality — had earned the title of 'boss.' The balance struck between egalitarianism and deference was one of the most remarkable characteristics of America, and one of its great strengths.

The Sixties brought a change. In the space of a decade, the word 'boss' passed almost out of the language, certainly out of universal usage. Deference itself deferred to a new spirit of hostility to authority. It became the fashion to challenge long-established hierarchies, to revolt against them or to ignore them. Nowhere was this spirit more manifest than in the media …

The gradual but cumulatively almost complete transfer of opinion-forming power from the owners and commercial managers of TV stations to the program-makers and presenters was one of the great new facts of life, unheard of before the 1950s, axiomatic by the end of the 1960s. And it was gradually paralleled by a similar shift in the newspaper world, especially on the great dailies and magazines of the East Coast, where political power, with few exceptions, passed from proprietors and major stockholders to editors and writers. Owners like Hearst and McCormick (of the Chicago Tribune), Pulitzer and Henry Luce (of Time-Life), who had once decided the political line of their publications in considerable detail, moved out of the picture and their places were taken by the working journalists. Since the latter tended to be overwhelmingly liberal in their views, this was not just a political but a cultural change of considerable importance. Indeed it is likely that nothing did more to cut America loose from its traditional moorings.

… The change could be seen in 1960, in the way the East Coast media (the New York Times and Washington Post, Time and Newsweek), handled the contest between Nixon and Kennedy.

The final word?

There is a sense in which Kennedy, who loved to use words like 'bearing,' 'results,' and 'in,' was a professional sportsman, a political huckster, and a propagandist rather than a serious statesman

Related: From November 2008: Stealing the Election: The 1960 and the 2008 Contests Compared

• I knew Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon was a friend of mine, and you, Barack are no Richard Nixon (thanks to Instapundit)

• The Watergate Cover-Up Trial: Justice Denied? (thanks to Instapundit)

There were real crimes and real criminals. But newly found documents suggest a denial of due process of law to the defendants, a move that did the Constitution no favors.

A coup? On election night, we watched states call for Biden before votes were counted, while states that Trump has a solid lead in, stopped counting

It's good to have friends, because when you are looking at trying to figure out a situation, they can help you along…

Sarah Hoyt of Vote as if your life depended on it! fame:

OKAY, I’M SICK AND TIRED OF THIS AND I WANT TO CALL IT OUT RIGHT NOW:

I don’t want to hear a word about Trump’s tone. I don’t want to hear a word about how he crossed a line.

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR A WORD.

Listen to me: On one side we have the left, who is running a barely alive candidate, and a woman with all the appeal of week-old fish and no accomplishments she can point to.

Add to this they almost didn’t run a campaign, AND went to the point of not having offices in most cities. 

For months now, I’ve been looking at this and going “They have a coup planned. The fix is in.” And everyone told me oh, no, I was seeing things.

Tonight we watched states called for Biden before votes were counted, while states that Trump has a solid lead in, stop counting.

And if you need help seeing what’s before your eyes, the left has for weeks now claimed Trump was going to attempt a coup. How many years have you known they accuse you of what they’re doing? What are you? Stupid?

Look, they are tainted by the previous failed coups, tainted by (most if not all of them) accepting money from Xi, and FYI China ALWAYS arranges for extra compromise for security, honeypots being their favorite, tainted even by association with Epstein. A second Trump term means a good chance that they go down hard and don’t get up again.

ALL OF THEM from the left politicians to the so called “tech lords” are fighting for their lives. 

They’re cornered rats. There’s nothing they won’t do.

And all we have against them is Trump.

Stop calling Trump names.  Put on your big boy or girl pants.

They’re fighting for their lives.  And we are too. Because — look at Venezuela — socialism kills.

Matthew Vadum:

Joe Biden maxes out at about 250 electoral votes, short of the 270 needed to win. Unless Donald Trump loses states in which he is now leading, Trump wins. So it’s not over but it’s looking bad for Biden. 🙂

 … Joe Biden is finished. He just doesn’t realize it yet. Trump appears to have won but the media won’t call the various red states for days. Republicans have every reason to feel good. Now they must prepare for the Democrats’ legal challenges and attempts to steal the election in places like North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Be patient. We’ve got this.

 … The TV pundits are lying to you. Donald Trump is the tentative unofficial winner as of right now. They are refusing to call states Trump has obviously won such as Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia in order to stall on behalf of Joe Biden. The only way Biden can win is if he can flip back the states AP has called for Trump and the states Trump is now leading in. It is almost a mathematical impossibility for Biden to get the 270 electoral votes he needs, absent fairy dust. 

Eber Haddad: 

Le scénario cauchemardesque des élections est en train de se passer sous nos yeux. J’avais parlé de fraudes et c’est exactement ce qui s’est passé toute la soirée. A 80% des suffrages exprimés ils n’ont pas donné la Floride gagnante pour le candidat Républicain, pareil avec le Texas mais ont donné l’Arizona gagnant pour les Démocrates avec seulement 71% des suffrages exprimés. La volonté de manipuler les résultats tout au long de la soirée était flagrante. Il est resté les états litigieux pour essayer de gagner ces élections par avocats interposés. Trump n’est pas du genre à se laisser faire et cela peut traîner encore des semaines voire des mois. 

 

Les Démocrates ont fait plus fort que le litige Gore-Bush en 2000 qui ne se cantonnait qu’à la Floride, aujourd’hui c’est bien plus compliqué puisqu’il va s’agir de 5 à 6 états au minimum. 

 

Les Démocrates qui ont fait circuler des sondages bidons qui ne se sont aucunement matérialisés, 11 à 12% d’avance pour Biden, la Floride perdue pour les Républicains, etc... ont essayé de frauder en amont et tentent maintenant de le faire en aval. Trump avait prevu ce scénario dès l’été et avait tenté d’y résister. 

 

Où est passée la fameuse vague bleue prévue par tous les instituts de sondages ? 

 

Cette histoire est loin d’être terminée. Je reviendrai plus tard sur les détails. À présent cette élection va faire l’objet de multiples procédures légales et les résultats sont loin d’être publiés.

And, finally, Fausta: 

 

Donald Trump Is One Tough Dragon to Slay

 • What the heck, how come he's still movin'?!

The take of Le Monde's Plantu on the USA's 2020 elections shows Joe Biden as a frustrated Saint George trying to slay the Donald Trump dragon…

Ils sont américains, pro-Trump, et vivent en France…

La chaîne France 24 a fait un reportage sur des Américains pro-Trump qui vivent en France

Ils vivent depuis des années en France où le président américain Donald Trump est très impopulaire et où leurs opinions conservatrices sont loin d’être majoritaires. Refus de l’État providence, contrôle de l’immigration, tensions avec l’Europe… À quelques jours de l’élection présidentielle qui opposera Donald Trump à Joe Biden, les Américains pro-républicains résidant à Paris expliquent pourquoi l’actuel locataire de la Maison Blanche a leurs faveurs.

Adieu Charaid: Sean Connery 1930-2020; and What Nobody Knows About James Bond

Good-Bye, Sean Connery — the most charismatic actor who ever lived; here are three of the Scottish star's best movies of all time…

The Man Who Would Be King

The Wind and the Lion

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

 

In that perspectivwe, here is as good a place as any to present: 

What nobody knows about James Bond

 

I added the following tidbit to the IMDb's trivia section for Dr. No:

In the very first Bond movie, Dr. No (1962), two other people - both of them Bond girls - introduce themselves "the Bond way." On the Caribbean beach, Ursula Andress gives her name as "Ryder [...] Honey Ryder"; and, in the casino at the very beginning - before Sean Connery has uttered more than a handful of words in the movie - Eunice Gayson presents herself as "Trench, Sylvia Trench." 

 

When Connery then replies "Bond, James Bond", it is to poke sweet fun at the young lady, by mimicking her cadence. 

 

It is extremely likely, therefore, that, at the time, there was never any intention of ever having 007 use that exact type of presentation again. 

A Few Remarks to BluElephants, Republicans Who Are Urging People to Vote for the Democrat Party

It seems that a couple of days from now, a number of Republicans are voting for the Democrat party out of disgust for the failings, real or alleged, of Donald J Trump. 

Not only that, but the #AngryBluElephants, who want to #TakeBackTheGOP, are requesting that the rest of the population #TurnBlueNovember3, and in that spirit have been circulating memes like the one above, holding OrangeManBad responsible for the death toll caused by the Coronavirus.

To one Republican elected official's anger (who was a dorm mate of mine in college and who regrets the time of Ronald Reagan), my reaction on his wall has been as follows:

Thank God that (with the help of the mainstream media), people are managing to figure out who is to blame for the virus in America.

Just a couple of questions: 

 • When looking for the party responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans (as well as tens of thousands of Chinese, Europeans, etc…) at the "hands" of the Coronavirus, how come no news outlet ever seems to mention… China? 

 • Speaking of which: in compiling Trump's allegedly sorry record in fighting the Wuhan virus, how come no news outlet ever mentions that, like it or not, the very first steps taken against the virus were Trump's outright ban of flights from China? Steps widely ridiculed and demonized (as xenophobic and racist) by the media and in Europe, by the likes of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi (who promptly set up in a photo-op in San Francisco's Chinatown), and by such luminaries as the Italian politician who organized a "Hug a Chinese Tourist" movement.

 • Do you remember the media's predictions in March, of two million deaths caused by Covid-19 in the U.S. before the end of the year? Would it be fair, some wag might say, to at least consider the viewpoint that the actual 220,000 toll means that Trump has… saved nearly 1,800,000 American lives?! 

• And, more generally: a perennial with leftists is that (they love to repeat endlessly that) they are tolerant and considerate and (exceedingly) polite and, last but not least, and open to debate and discussion… 

Why, then, is it that they like so much to shut conversation down? 

 ••••••••••

This comment was not to the liking of the elected Republican official or to his wife (a charming woman, incidentally, whom he met at our college), who asked who I was to stand up for Donald Trump and why I did not believe Bill Gates when the Microsoft honcho denounced Trump's handling of the virus.

My answer:  

I’m not standing up for Donald Trump, nor for Joe Biden; I am not standing against either of them, either (or for or against Bill Gates, for that matter) 

I am standing up (as best I can) for facts and the truth — in whatever direction they will lead me 

All I am saying is that for every criticism of the Republican, you can find a criticism of a Democrat; or of a foreigner 

If Trump can be criticized for halting the plane flights (Bill Gates criticisms which I disagree with, but that’s not the point), shouldn’t at least some opprobrium be directed at, say, Nancy Pelosi for telling people to go visit Chinatown or at the Italian mayors whose response was it to institute (get this) a Hug-a-Chinese-tourist policy? (the appalling public service (sic) videos are on YouTube!) 

You speak of the “well-documented” policies of Donald Trump…

Whatever the case with policy failings, general or detailed, real or alleged, the fact remains that Europeans didn’t react until weeks afterwards and few media outlets, American or European, seem to make much of that. Why isn’t that well-documented? And why does that not deserve any criticism? 

It’s very strange that people living abroad are always allowed to think ill of the USA 🇺🇸 — antagonism which is supposed to reveal a deep dark truth about America — but when they are skeptical of the PC view and have something positive to say, they are told — by Americans and by their respective fellow countrymen alike — to mind their own business.

In that perspective, you seem to be forgetting that “the second-rate actor”, Ronald Reagan, was just as criticized and protested against in the 1980s as DT is now, by (outraged) Americans and foreigners alike, and for the same reasons…

People, American or foreign, are allowed to think that a Republican’s policy towards the Soviet Union (in the 1980s) or China 🇨🇳 (now) might be better than the PC fairy tale about how we can all live together if leaders only speak to each other, all the while ignoring how the same foreign leaders are really treating the West, stealthily, as well as their own people — i.e., shabbily is the softest word that comes to mind

If Foreigners (as well as Americans living abroad) have the right to criticize and protest the occupant of the White House, whoever is in the Oval Office, certainly they have the right to support same president as well, or to simply issue reservations… 

In that perspective, it is telling that while protestors in America were burning the American flag, protestors in Hong Kong were waving the Stars and Stripes while singing the Star-Spangled Banner… 

Does a protestor from Hong Kong, 🇭🇰 Xinjiang, or Tibet, i.e., not from the USA and living abroad — just like a person from the USSR or Eastern Europe in the 1980s — likewise have no right to praise Washington’s less conciliatory policy towards Beijing or Moscow — or, for that matter, any other of the president's policies (not excluding his vow that America will never be a socialist nation, leading the economic locomotive of the world to follow in the footsteps of, say, Venezuela, Russia, or… China)?

Those might be things to ponder over…