“TWO OUTRAGES!”

2 PARAGRAPHS 4 LIBERTY: #301

As some of you know, in 2004 I wrote a musical entitled “Americans All,” which was meant to help mentor our students. As such, the show posed issues like “You show me your friends, I’ll show you your future,” which means that if you hang around with young people who ditch school, talk back to teachers and smoke marijuana, and who will probably not be successful in their lives, the same result will probably come your way as well. But the opposite is also true. So a condensed version was performed during one assembly class period by Irvine High School at several middle schools, and was well received. And the full-length version was performed by Vanguard University of Southern California and was also well received. Eventually I put the DVD of both performances on my website at www.JudgeJimGray.com. And now I have found that YouTube has censored my website by removing the video of the Irvine High School performance! So if you go to the site today and try to see that show, you will find the message that “Video Unavailable. The video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.” Why?? What is anti-social and harmful about my show?? Yes, there is a song sung about Muslim culture, but is that wrong? It also has songs about Hispanic and Jewish cultures. What’s going on? And the Vanguard show is still there. . . . Consistency? So how can I contact YouTube and get some answers and redress? Actually I have no idea. Of course this is a private company and can do what it wishes. But I am truly outraged and will do my best for redress!

In addition, last week Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported that, after the January 6 breaking and entering into the U.S. Capitol, federal authorities approached the Bank of America and requested credit and debit card information of its customers that showed if they had either purchased items in Washington DC in the days after the break-in, or had purchased airline tickets to or stayed in hotels in DC during that time. And the B of A cooperated and provided those authorities financial information on 211 of its customers who met those “thresholds of interest,” without any warrant or knowledge or consent of those customers! A second outrage!

Many people have come to our country after having fled governments that engage in this type of censorship and spying. And now most of them are deeply alarmed that our government is doing the same things as those governments from which they fled! Do any of these actions disturb you? If they don’t, they should. As I have reported before in these columns, the delegates to our 1787 Constitutional Convention argued, bickered and fought about many issues. But THE thing that all 55 delegates agreed upon was that THE most important function of government was protecting our freedoms and liberties from the encroachment of government! (The second most important was keeping us safe.) As such, I believe they would be deeply disappointed with us for allowing actions like these to take place upon our shores! Please join me in trying to reverse this trend!

Slogan for the week from a friend of mine: “Stand Up! Stand For! Stand Together!”