2023 Begins: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

 

  I was going to write Part II of "2022: The Year in Review," but it looks like 2023 is going to be tied into last year so much, I won't need to. Case in point: The whole Mar a Lago raid, and the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Pres. Trump's handling of classified documents, after leaving office. Now, we find out that the Justice Department was alerted to highly classified documents that were illegaly possessed by Pres. Biden, from his tenure as Vice President, on Nov. 2nd, days before the midterm elections. "Nothing to see here, it was nothing like what Trump did" seems to be the media narrative, but who's buying that?

   Besides the suppressing of that info until the new year, we now learn that there were two other places that Biden had confidential documents illegally stored, neither of which was secure. In fact, his son, who was under federal investigation for foreign payments, lived at the location that some of those documents were discovered. I hope that Special Counsel Robert Hur will thoroughly investigate any Hunter Biden connection to the documents.

   Pres. Biden says he was surprised to find out that he had classified documents in his possession. Well, if that's the case, after finding them in three different locations, maybe the FBI needs to search all of his past residences and offices. It couldn't hurt, could it? Also, I heard something on a TV show, tonight. The host said that when the FBI first found the classified material at Mar a Lago, they left it there, and put a padlock on the door. Why didn't they take it back to the National Archives? 

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   Academia continues losing its crusade against the English language in 2023. On the heels of Stanford University's now retracted list of "banned" words, USC has banned the use of the word "field," as if it has some racist origin. It looks as if this will not stand, either. 2022 had a plethora of these battles, and it looks as if that was the year that the tide turned against the "wokesters." Phrases like "chest feeding" and "birthing person" are not being accepted by the majority of people, no matter how hard the left tries to push them

   While the Biden administration still is trying to force men who claim to be women into bathrooms, locker rooms and to compete in women's sports events, this is also facing a growing public pushback. 2023 looks to be a year that America will have to decide if women are legally different from men, and not just a matter of what a person wants to call themselves. Academics, scientists, and other experts have gone a step too far, perhaps, when they try to use government power to force their theories on the real world.

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   A corollary of the "woke" language regimen was the silencing of speech on social media, under the guise of "misinformation," "disinformation," or the catch-all ""missing context." This was an ongoing issue for several years, which came to a head when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022. Once he took the company private, he began exposing the illegal influence the government used to censor the speech of American citizens. 

   People who had been the targets of this censorship had been talking about it for years, while Twitter flat out denied it. Now that Twitter's new owner is exposing the lies, and the government's involvment, the next step is to find out whether this same thing is happening with all of the other big tech social media platforms, and to put an end to it. 

   My personal experience on facebook has been that they have warned me that some of the posts that I, and others share in my "Graffiti Politti on fb" group either go against "community standards," or get labeled as "missing context." In some cases, fb has removed the articles, and sometimes, they have told me to remove the articles, or my group may be "at risk." To my shame, I have removed a few posts, but I have stopped doing that, in the past few months. They also have notified me that my group, which is public, will be less visible in fb searches.

   My personal experience on Blogger, which is owned by Google, has been that they have never contacted me about anything controversial that I've written. I've been blogging since 2004, and I've posted some very controversial things. Google may be hiding them, in their searches, but I can still find all of my posts, and I occasionally share them on my Graffiti Politti on FB group. I'm not sure how easy it is for others to find my blog, of course.

   Perhaps because I'm not a popular, public figure, my opinions haven't gotten wider exposure, or gotten me cancelled, although for every incendiary post I write, I have written at least one post that honestly tries to understand and reach out to my political oponents. The part that you can't make up is that there are a bunch of nitwits out there who have NO interest in listening to the other side, and are intent on just shutting up other views. I doubt that will change in 2023.