1. The Communications Decency Act was passed through a Republican controlled legislature by a combination of Republicans and decidedly more conservative Democrats such as Bill Clinton (see “third way democrats”). It was not a leftist idea.
In addition, Section 230 is the piece that *protected* service providers from liability for content posted by users. This is what allowed controversial content to be posted and left up on sites like YouTube despite the restrictions the CDA imposed.
The current administration, Republican top to bottom, recently passed SESTA (sadly with a lot of support from the Democrats as well) which again seeks to hold providers like YouTube legally responsible for user posted content. Again, this is anything but a leftist idea.
2. In the US it is largely the far left and, as you said, Libertarians who support decriminalization of drugs. We are also the groups who in general honestly support freedom of speech for everyone.
The owners of some of these big tech companies may be well on the left on social issues, but when it comes down to company policy, legislation, etc. they are much more “conservative” - really “corporatist” is a better description. They do what they do, whether it’s good or bad for us, for money and not ideology.
3. The trump administration (like almost the entire Republican Party and most of the Democratic Party today) is of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. All you have to do to see that is examine their record over the last year. If they’ve helped the rest of us in any significant way, it was probably an accident or a temporary PR move.
For example, most of us got very small and temporary tax cuts while the top 1% and corporations got huge and permanent cuts leaving about an extra 2 Trillion dollar hole in the budget over the next 10 years (which they will attempt to extract from the rest of us in a variety of ways).
Our individual rights are also being further curtailed through bills such as SESTA while the deregulation that’s occurring largely allows (once again) the wealthiest people and corporations to exploit our resources for their own personal profit while passing on enormous costs (monetary and otherwise) to the rest of us.
I know we have different ideas on politics (I’m pretty far to the left), but I follow this stuff pretty closely and both the right and far left here are significantly different from what you describe...like I said, our media is largely not trustworthy right now so please take what you hear from them with a grain - hell, maybe a shaker of salt.
I hope I didn’t just
but I want people to realize that the only way the current administration is going to make things any easier for us is if it makes them and/or their friends a lot of money, and if they’re not too afraid their constituents will vote them out for supporting it. A far left administration on the other hand...
If you think I’m wrong, look at the left-leaning states who have legalized and the right-leaning states who have not. Also look at what people in this administration have said so far.
Once it passed in California though, it was pretty much over. It’s only a matter of time (probably a few years at most) before we’re done with complete prohibition, at least of this plant. Censorship on the other hand...so far that’s a never-ending struggle.
I hope that’s all I have to say about this...it’s not what I come to this forum for...if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I hope you look into these issues more, but for now can we just agree to disagree on the politicians and agree to agree on censorship and cannabis legalization?
We see hope in different places, but here’s to hope anyway.
