So how did this happen? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others unilaterally decided to kick the president of the United States off their platforms and terminate his social media relationship with as many as 80 million Americans. It seems to most Americans that this is a violation of former Pres. Trump’s right to freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Unfortunately, our Constitution offers no such protection. Generally, your speech in only protected in public spaces, not private property. As you have likely heard, many people refer to social media companies as private corporations that can do whatever they want on their platforms. This is true. It is also true that in 1996 Congress passed the law called the Communications Decency Act or the CDA. It says: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of — (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.” This act gives companies like Twitter the absolute right to police any content that any person, including the president of the United States, posts on their platform. The courts in the United States have broadly interpreted the law to provide maximum discretion to these companies to decide what their users can post on their platform.
When you sign up for Twitter, you must press a button agreeing to the terms of service (“TOS”). Social media platforms constantly update their TOS to decide exactly what you or former Pres. Trump can or cannot say on social media. First, you can talk about election interference’s, then they decide that you cannot. First you can complain about the origins of the Covid-19 virus, next if you mention it on social media, they shut you down. Examples like this go on and on. Will this end? It likely will not until Congress or the courts change the law. Right now, there are several lawsuits challenging how social media companies use their TOS to interpret their authority under the CDA. We can hope that a more conservative court would temper the way the social media companies use the law. Time will tell.
In the interim, I think we can rest assured that none of the currently existing major social media companies will allow former Pres. Trump to reengage on their social media platforms. The beautiful thing about this is that eventually another platform, be it Parler, Gab or another, will be able to open and provide social media interaction that allows former presidents and other prominent people to post their views on politics and current events without censorship. It may take a few months or a year to get there, but eventually the fact that large social media companies have censored a former U.S. president will result in greater competition. We have already seen companies such as Twitter and Facebook lose value on the stock market. Once a competing company establishes a large presence, there will be real competition. We then can regain much of our right to hear what our leaders have to say.
Todd McMurtry is a nationally known attorney. His practice focuses on defamation, social media law, professional malpractice, and business disputes. You can follow him on Twitter @ToddMcMurtry.
Where have I been? What is the “Marcus Carey Perspective”? Where are we going, and where are we now? These questions and more are answered as I discuss what Donald Trump owes America right now and how the democrats may have unwittingly given him the chance of a lifetime.
The Republican Party of Kentucky was asked by several voting members of its central committee to urge Mitch McConnell to stand behind Donald Trump in the second impeachment trial. The party overwhelmingly rejected that request.
Trump won 118 of Kentucky’s 120 counties in 2020. He received 62% of the popular vote. McConnell received 58%.
Cut off from directly communicating with his supporters by the censorship imposed by Twitter and Facebook Trump is now at the mercy of media influence over public opinion.
McConnell’s recent remarks in advance of the senate trial indicate that he has pre-judged Trumps responsibility for the actions of a few rioters who sought to confront Congress and secure a pubic vetting of the legitimacy of the November election in several states. A handful of the protesters did property damage to the Capitol and after Capitol security seemed to have stood down, gained access to areas of the public building usually off limits to visitors.
McConnell recently expressed what seemed to some to be his pre-judgement that Trump “provoked” the violence of a few (though speaking to millions). McConnell’s comments expressed his agreement with the allegation contained in Article 1 of the house impeachment document.
Over the years McConnell has exercised a great deal of control over the Kentucky state party apparatus which operates out of a building in Frankfort which bears his name.
But in a state which showed such strong support for Trump, McConnell’s public statements in advance of the senate trial (due to begin on February 8th) have left many republicans wondering who he speaks for.
The motion before the RPK to urge McConnell to support Donald Trump was soundly defeated. That result will be used to suggest that Ky republicans have abandoned Trump. It will certainly be used to show that McConnell’s control over the party apparatus is stronger than ever. But are either of these impressions true?
Kentucky republican voters will likely not accept or react favorably toward either narrative unless party leadership explains the committee vote in a way which does not slap them in their face on either account.
Failure to do so could have repercussions in the near future as the RPK is about to enter that period during which party reorganization takes place.
Beginning at the precinct level and having impact all the way to the next national presidential nominating convention four years from now, Kentucky republicans get the first and last word on who runs the party, to whom it listens and for whom it speaks.
Traditionally this process has been controlled from the top down with little grass roots participation. But as 2021 arrived and draconian top down censorship, crackdowns and turncoat politics seem to have been absorbed into the GOP a quiet, peaceful, process driven revolution seems to be building.
And what those in power fear most is being watched very carefully. It’s not the fringe, they only make headlines.
What the establishment fears most is the organization of, the collective power of, and the determination of grass roots Americans.
As Colonel was in his last days I was able to tell him that I was going to build a library in his honor. I like to think that he heard and understood me and was able to make his way to heaven knowing that his legacy would live on, and he would be “a voice to and for a generation,” as he always strived to be.
A week after his passing, Becky Oldham had found and bought at auction the perfect place to build the library: a vacant lot behind the Oldham County Clerk’s Office.
When Ron and I married we spent a good deal of time focusing our Sunday studies on the Old and New Testaments particularly as the basis for American law. I, in fact, gave Ron as a lawyer, a Bible early on and suggested he read it as a law book with special consideration to commandments, statutes, precepts, judgments, and ordinances.
One commentator we routinely checked in with on Sunday was Adam Clarke (1762 – 26 August 1832). Clarke began as a poorly educated man from Northern Ireland but became a renowned Methodist theologian and biblical scholar. He spent 40 years as one remarkably dedicated and skilled mind through the Bible and he wrote his commentary. Clarke’s was buoyed by his extensive scholarship on early Christian fathers, and then the Oriental writers in the Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, and other Eastern tongues, and this scope provided a most illuminating context for his commentary on the Scriptures.
Dr. Adam Clarke meeting with the priests of Buddha
As a young US Marine, Ron Ray went to Vietnam to fight communism, a man – centered government, and to uphold his oath as an officer to defend America against all enemies “foreign and domestic.” And like Adam Clarke, Ron spent 40 years dedicated to seriously collecting a library of over 10,000 books.
The books contain the organic utterances upon which the historic foundations of American government is built and the numerous accounts in the mouths of many witnesses recorded from before the nation’s founding to the present day.
US Marine Ron Ray advising the South Vietnamese Marines (1967-68)
Ron’s combined legal training, experience, public service, and scholarship allowed him for over 30 years to weaponize his growing collection of books to reach civilian, military, and church leaders, public officials, and others in positions of authority and trust to arm them with carefully crafted cases to meet the challenges they faced upholding America’s founding principles.
Today with the advent of the internet and now the destruction of historic monuments and eradication of books and literature, the ability to study and research from true and honest sources is quickly fading. Yet books remain the only unchangeable and secure source to be left to students and scholars of the future.
The collection eventually outgrew our family home and now more than ever the books need a physical location for Colonel Ray’s library. In July 2020, property for a library was secured as Ron passed away from injuries sustained in Vietnam. A vacant lot in Oldham’s County’s seat of LaGrange, Kentucky, right behind the courthouse is where we plan to build the library to house Colonel Ray’s collection.
Establishing this library gives future generations access to the Colonel’s collection of largely out of print volumes on history and government.
There exists today a digital archive of the Colonel’s publications, timely history-based press releases, educational briefings, media appearances, and ephemera.
It is our duty to leave our children and grandchildren the necessary information tools they will need to continue to protect and preserve America’s freedoms so many have previously fought and sacrificed to uphold. We are proud to announce drawings of the library will be available soon. Kentucky Architect John Stewart learned of the library project and volunteered his nearly three decades of work experience and his talented team of professionals to concept and design “The Colonel Ronald D. Ray Library of American History.” At the end of my 40 years of working alongside the Colonel and then carrying on by securing his book collection would be a fitting tribute to all those whose lives are dedicated living lives to advancing the Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven.
Architect John Stewart, Founder and President of Encompass Develop, Design and Construct.
The lessons of Vietnam struck the young US Marine Ron Ray like coin newly minted by sorrow and fury: Sorrow for the many who gave their lives and fury at being lied to during the war and lied about after the war. Upon returning home, Ron took up the study of law to bring order to the chaos of war. He carried home with him invisible wounds that crippled him as sure as a missing arm or leg, but his war injuries didn’t deter him.
He spent his post-Vietnam life remembering those Kentuckians who gave their last full measure of devotion by building the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial and for over 50 years he amassed a carefully chosen collection of books to remember. The collection covers the foundation of America through the 20th century. The books are written by witnesses to the domestic and foreign threats and represent a highly perishable time capsule especially in today’s world of clicking for truth and history.
Big Tech is on the march to erase or recast the history accessed by clicking, but today the Ronald D. Ray Library of American History seeks to fill the void no matter what becomes of our collective virtual reality.
Communist philosopher Antonio Gramsi declared that the truth is revolutionary. Domination of the narrative, he declared:
…is maintained through ideological or cultural means. It is usually achieved through social institutions which allow those in power to strongly influence the values, norms, ideas, expectations, world view and behavior of the rest of society.
Colonel Ray fought a Marxists-supported enemy on the ground in Vietnam and stood against that same radical Marxist agenda upon returning home.
The Colonel often said, “facts are stubborn things,” and used history to defend our “one nation under God” drawn from his expansive teaching library and mobilized by his fighting archive.
Employing his extensive library and archive, Colonel Ray stood up to a Federal judge in Kentucky who, because of the Declaration of Independence’s references to Almighty God, declared it was a religious document, not a state document.
A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about…
President Woodrow Wilson, 1913
Relentless attacks upon America’s first principles came through the courts, the education system, medicine, and even the churches. Colonel Ray was warned by the writings of Armenian-American journalist, news media critic and commentator, university professor and author Ben Bagdikian, that a media monopoly of international companies controls all print and broadcast.
. . . Today, with six mega-corporations with interlocking interests in world government controlling all information given to the people, journalism has ceased to fulfill its role as the guardian of individual liberties and the watchdog of government and corporate abuse. It is overwhelmingly documented as the guardian of one-world democratic socialism.
Add to that information monolith, Big Tech’s tyranny and the ability to mold entire nations by dominating the narrative is Gramsi’s dream realized.
In the upheaval of the domestic war, Colonel Ray discovered the coordinated and well-planned generational war. Early in the 1950s, giant tax-exempt foundations gained power and influence to turn societal values, norms, ideas from a national to a single world view.
In 1954, B. Carroll Reese headed a congressional committee to examine their actions. It was clear then that their goals were treasonous. The Committee reported:
It seems to this Committee that there is a strong tendency on the part of many social scientists whose research is favored by the major foundations toward the concept that there are no absolutes, that everything is indeterminate, that no standards of conduct, morals, ethics and governments are to be deemed inviolate, that everything, including basic moral law, is subject to change and that it is the part of the social scientists to take no principle for granted as a premise in social or juridical reasoning, however fundamental it may heretofore have been deemed to be under our Judeo-Christian moral system.
Then in November 1967, American History was suppressed in American schools, a decades long political objective of the ACLU, the NEA and others. This event was reported in the NEA Journal’s “The New Social Studies.” Their official periodical commented on the shift of educational emphasis, since federal funds first flowed into education in 1965:
probably the most obvious change occurring in the social studies curriculum is a breaking away from the traditional dominance of history, geography, and civics. Materials from the behavioral sciences ….sociology, social psychology….are being incorporated into both elementary and secondary school programs.
On October 12, 2002, Pulitzer Prize winning historian and author David McCullough spoke at the National Book Fair at the Smithsonian Institute:
We are raising a generation of ‘historical illiterates. This historical ignorance is dangerous. We face a foe today who believes in enforced ignorance—we don’t.”
And so, we are compelled by current events to preserve the lifetime collection of one who loved history, understood its power, and used it to hold back the forces that continue to attack our American way of life.
The result of the removal of history from schools has resulted in a radicalized and ignorant generation who has easily bought the Marxist ideal proffered, ignorant of their own history and without ever hearing the end of the story. One only needs to browse the Black Book of Communism to see the array of powerful leaders who executed millions of their own people in countries that fell under their rule.
Not surprisingly, nearly 35 years later in 2001, a survey commissioned by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation found:
One in five American teenagers didn’t know from what country America declared its independence.
Nearly one in four didn’t know who fought the Civil War.
Thirteen percent thought the Civil War was between the United States and England. No wonder the siren song of Marxism has appealed to so many.
For twenty-five years, newspapers and magazines moved away from reporting on the nation’s newsmakers and world affairs to reporting on celebrities. In 1997, the Project for Excellence in Journalism studied 6,020 stories from sixteen news outlets spanning 20 years.
One of their most striking findings was that only 8% of the stories on the prime-time news magazines concern the combined areas of education, economics, foreign affairs, the military, national security, politics or social welfare issues. Today, Time and Newsweek most often have cover stories in the area of consumer and health news and celebrity entertainment.
History calls us to rededicate ourselves to the noble and ever unfinished work that President Lincoln described as he stood on the blood-soaked ground of Gettysburg:
…that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
The loss of liberties is the price paid for forgetting the past, but sadder yet is watching younger generations click for limited and prepackaged news and information in search of a context for an advancing lawlessness. Just as young King Josiah rent his clothes, when he learned of the law and was preserved, it is hoped this book collection gathered by one who loved liberty and understood the battle, both foreign and domestic, will provide that context and ultimately an exodus.
It was only days after the end of the Civil War when Abraham Lincoln stood on the steps of the capitol for his second inaugural address. Plots to murder him abounded. John Wilkes Booth had slipped out of the assembled crowd and made his way behind Lincoln to the platform where he was arrested.
In the years since Lincoln was first elected his mail was filled with threats on his life. He remarked that at first he was concerned, but as the mail continued to be filled with one threat after another he said “Oh there’s nothing like getting used to things.”
That didn’t stop the threats. And the hatred eventually ended his life just weeks after his second inaugural address. But Lincoln understood the importance of standing tall. His entire first term was consumed by the bloodiest battles in our nation’s history. The number of Americans who died in the Civil war alone is nearly equal to the deaths in all other wars combined.
Yet under threat from day one, until the day he died, Lincoln took precautions but never showed weakness. Joe Biden on the other hand will arrive in office behind barbed wire, with the District Of Columbia virtually closed to the public. His speech will be much like his rallies, crowdless. His parade will be a virtual gathering on the Internet. The capitol is quartering troops. Armed military will be stationed everywhere. And the world will be watching.
The only courage Joe Biden will show would be better described as gall. His presidency does not arrive on the shoulders of a supportive nation. His claim to victory further divides our nation thanks to the refusal of Congress and the Senate to publicly air any investigation into claims of irregularity. Biden’s oath of office will be taken under the taint of his refusal to deride burgeoning censorship, crackdowns on his opposition and violent rhetoric from his most vocal supporters who continue to call for retribution against conservatives.
Lincoln on the other hand reached out to his opposition. His own words, his actions and his courage established a clear intent to heal our nation after years of bloodshed and destruction.
The contrasts are stark. They are disturbing. Biden strikes the pose of a president who fears his countrymen, who despises his opposition and who will not lead a nation, but will lead only one ideology.
The world is watching and what they will see will be determined by who they are. Our allies will find reason to worry about the future security of the world. Our enemies will salivate over the opportunities this will provide for them to do us harm.
You can’t always trust what you read and see on social media. I went to Washington DC on January 5 and 6, 2021, to witness Trump’s last gathering in a city I know very well and, then more from a sense of curiosity, to see how it would be portrayed in the media.
I didn’t realize going to the Capitol to attend a lawful assembly would allow me in a small way to approach my husband’s post-Vietnam malaise. A young Ron Ray volunteered to serve our nation and did so honorably and with distinction in Vietnam, but upon returning home he was spat upon, in uniform, by a stranger in the airport.
The media was hellbent on dividing the American people over Vietnam, a war “against communism,” I might add. Their target became the military, America’s sons and daughters who were dying in staggering numbers eventually reaching 58,000+, a number only to grow later with war-related maladies. The hate-filled animus the media propagated lasted over a decade only beginning to resolve when President Ronald Reagan officially welcomed the vets home and declared Vietnam a “noble cause.” Still Vietnam vets stood together to manage the corporate shame, going so far as to fund and build their own memorials.
Today, in a very small way, I understand Ron’s unrelenting sorrow for being wrongly shamed for the acts of a few and/or for doing what national leaders sent them to do. More recently, police officers who serve their cities and states only to be repeatedly painted as racists by a media bent on dividing us from our neighbors when our national security in no small part depends upon the ennobling command “to love one another.”
As a responsible citizen and as a witness, causing no trouble and joined by hundreds of thousands of other fullhearted Americans on the Ellipse in Washington on a cold January day, I am being painted by the media with the same brush used for the few provocateurs who entered the Capitol building. No one knows who those few hundred invaders are, but with each passing day the media’s rush to judgment, vitriol and indiscriminate shame rise to a stunning new level.
Schooled by Peter Braestrup’s The Big Story and journalist Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly, Ron’s distrust of media was a constant starting when Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” broadcast his CBS report from the safe side of the Perfume River in Hue, Vietnam, after the Tet Offensive.
Ron heard Cronkite’s report on Tet in real-time for he was there. He knew Tet, a massive and bitterly fought battle at the Vietnamese New Year against the communist North Vietnam forces was a decisive victory for South Vietnam. However, Cronkite declared Tet a “defeat.”
Cronkite’s big lie clearly gave aid and comfort to the communist enemy and often is cited in histories as the turning point in the war. It wouldn’t be long before America conceded to the communists and left the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves as the hope for freedom collapsed. Later, smugly and safely close to death, Cronkite proudly disclosed he was a secret proponent for “one world” governance.
Upon returning home, Ron found solace and fellowship in the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), whose life was animated and defined by his dealings with communism in his homeland. Of the media, he said:
Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask; by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, delivered June 8, 1978, at Harvard University
Though I haven’t always agreed with Trump’s public persona, platforms are more important than speeches and style. Bottom line Trump is the embodiment of a raw independent Americanism that is impossible to enfold into a single world government, but he is much hated by utopians, who see the planet in peril and the world without nations.
I walked the massive crowd the morning of January 6, 2021, all around the 54-acre park known as the Ellipse and the Washington Monument. Tens of thousands of people came from all over the country and they looked like me–just there to witness history on a decisive day, when many of us knew that previous national icons and notions are likely to change from that day forward.
The preview of what is in the offing has been demonstrated all summer as public memorials and statues were cast down by people, who likely don’t know or care about the why and how of those historical mementos placed to remind us where we have been so we might know where we are going. Without a historical compass, one simply walks in circles over the Earth in their time. As President Wilson said:
A nation that does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do.
President Woodrow Wilson, What is Progress, 1913
I returned home and began to watch the news feeds. There was no coverage of the massive number of regular Americans who came to the Ellipse, of the singing and praying, the sense of cordiality and fellowship amid a sea of flags. There were blue Trump flags, American flags, Gadsden “Don’t tread on me” flags but there were no Rebel flags as I walked the grounds. True to form, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the only flag image on an international news feed covering the assembly as that of a man, who appeared to be inside the capitol, carrying a Rebel flag!
This year we were alerted to cyber invasion by Social Dilemma the documentary that “explores the rise of social media and…its exploitation and manipulation of its users for financial gain through surveillance capitalism and data mining.” For the first time in history, Big Tech, by artifice with their omnipotent computer presence has gathered intelligence on individual Americans allowing a separate tailor-made news feeds to be designed. Each of us has our “truths” delivered by click and this has most effectively served to divide us as a nation.
The division goes beyond holding differing solutions to common problems, which has always occupied those who vigorously seek common ground, compromise and ultimately solutions. It goes to molding and then transforming us as a people into something unrecognizable especially to those who believe in the eternal unchangeable truths.
I write because I am saddened by the reigning media demonization of all who came to our Capitol city as capitol crashers, occupiers, and – yes – worst of all, racists. My motivation was to make the pilgrimage to DC drawn from a deep love of country and the American people, for all those who want to become independent, live at liberty in this “one nation under God” (not man) and aid their fellowman at home and across this World.
I have fought to remain independent and not interdependent with other nations – to not be blended into something unrecognizable from the history that once powerfully joined a diverse mix of people in one place based on the idea that every human being was valuable no matter how wanting, and that through hard work and industry we could live a life free of tyranny.
I will always appreciate Trump despite the unrelenting bullying he received in our name and for our nation. As for me, I will miss having a voice among reasonable people who appreciate arguing the point in a thoughtful informed discourse to get at the truth no matter how elusive.
I concede to the new transformed nation, as the next generation takes on leadership, but one last time I wanted to come to the place that once allowed a small person like me a voice. For this time forward, I, like Solzhenitsyn, will resolve to live my life with integrity and I invite those of you who still long for liberty to join me: Let your credo be this: “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
Here’s what super computers are doing with your brain. First, every place you go collects data on you. Not just your IP address, or your email name, or your credit card info, but little things like how long you linger when looking at photos to measure how you respond to various colors, images and placement on the page.
Where you shop, what you are looking for, what part of the country you are in, your gender, your age, your level of education, you groups, your affiliations, your language, your interests, your opinions, and most importantly, your reaction to stimuli placed in front of you that you don’t even know is bait are small parts of the millions of datapoints which have been and continue to be collected about you every minute of every day.
How do I know these things? Fist, they are well documented. Second, before AI and algorithms we did similar things in the political world but on a much more rudimentary scale.
We studied your age, your voting history, your memberships at places like the NRA, Right To Life, charity groups etc. We studied your addresses over time, we studied every bit of data we could get in order to design a message and the delivery method (direct mail, robo call, personal visit etc.) that seemed to work with you. And we processed all of this with human brains. It was all we had.
Now the dems in collusion with the mainstream media, social media and big tech, are gathering tiny bits about you from every thing they can capture, building a model of how you think and then tailoring a message and the delivery system they will use to shape your thoughts, and control your behavior. But this time they are using artificial intelligence, powerful computers and algorithms to control what you see, how you react and in the final analysis, what you think and what you do with what you think.
Don’t for one minute believe that the messages being pumped out, repeated, echoed and driven home regarding Trump, the riot at the capitol, and the future of this country aren’t carefully prepared to shape your opinions and direct your actions. It’s how they find and motivate the crazies to act when they need them to. And it’s how they shape your reactions to the planned outcome they designed.
So if you think Trump’s speech that day incited the riot at the capitol you have been manipulated. How can I be so sure? Consider this.
The FBI has admitted that it was warned about the riot the day before Trump’s speech. Think for yourself a minute. How can a speech incite a riot that was planned and discovered the day before the speech was given? How can a speech incite a riot that was already underway before the speech was concluded? How can a speech which was addressed to tens of thousands of peaceful attendees a mile and a half from the capitol incite violence from people who were already at the capitol and couldn’t hear it? And how can a speech which specifically called for a peaceful demonstration be dubbed “inciting violence”?
You have a brain. Use it. Don’t let the AI folks calculate your thoughts for you. The first freedom we need to be fighting for is the freedom of our thoughts. When we become objects of manipulation, we become slaves. The battle we are engaged in is the battle for the salvation of free thought. And this is where freedom lives.
