WEEKLY SOUTHERN ARTS
"Sometime the boogaloo 
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  • Robert & Jimi and the Twenty Seven Blues
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  • Me and Junior Parker
  • The Republican
  • Sweet Home Chicago (The Obama Shakedown)
  • The Ballad of Hunter & Joe
  • The 22-yr-old Bottle Blonde
  • Is It Alright...To Be White?
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  • Lowell George searching for authenticity
  • A Telling Lie
  • Part One: The Monster Is Summoned
  • Like Billy Eckstein Singing to an Empty Club at 1:00 AM on a Saturday Night in 1975.
  • Bent
  • Kelly Joe Phelps
  • Why The Devil Don't Come Around No More
  • Hearing Junior Wells “On Tap'' one more Time
  • Muddy and Me
  • American Youth: The Rise of The New Media
  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Talk About Slavery and Shit
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  • This is Not a Political Article
  • A Tale of Wine and Murder
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  • The Prison Yard Blues
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  • 4 More Poems, 4 More Pictures
  • "Are You Freaking People Insane?"
  • 4 Pictures 4 Poems
  • The Ballad of Carlos Slim
  • Pretending What's in Your Head is True
  • The Cognitive Dissonance of a Faithful Democrat
  • The Human Snakepit
  • George Freeman - Unsung Master of the Jazz Guitar
  • The Price of Milk
  • Suspicious Minds
  • Bill O'Reilly Sexual Predator?
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  • Orwell Revisited
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  • Man Talk, with Donald Trump pt. 2
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  • I Love The Dead
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  • Goodbye Scotty Moore
  • If a Bluebird Plays the Blues Why Can't it Play Free Jazz
  • When David Slew Goliath
  • Why Cream still Matters 50 Years Later
  • Goodbye Lonnie Mack
  • Black Lies Matter, All Lies Matter
  • The Folly of Foibles
  • The Life of an Imaginary Historian
  • Angel: part 7
  • Wayne Cochran "Going Back to Miami"
  • The Last Damned Healthcare Article You'll Ever Need
  • The Gospel According to Mark
  • Angel: part VI
  • Ted Bundy & The Hunt For The Devil
  • Charlie & Clint: Dead & Deader
  • Trayvon & George : An American Hate Story
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  • Garage Band - The 1960's
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  • The Story of Ricky
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  • I Hate the 60's: A Personal Rock Odyssey
  • Crocodiles and Alligators in Florida: Monsters in our Backyard
  • The Legend of Robert Pete Williams
  • Saturday Night At Big Tinys
  • The Case Of The Infinite Monkeys
  • The American Heritage Series
  • The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
  • Blue And Green

              Shadow Banning

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Shadow Banning

The CEO of Twitter, under oath, vehemently denied “Shadow Banning,” which is the act of restricting the reach of certain posts, based on political content, or particular words with a strong political orientation, usually conservative. He did, however, acknowledge that they limit the reach of offensive posts that either violate their terms of service or almost violate them, based on particular words, especially the words their censors find offensive. The words that they find offensive, tend to be politically conservative. But, trust them, this is not political, neither is it Shadow Banning. Even, though, they ban the posts without telling the person who posted, that they’ve been banned, which Twitter does in the shadows. But, again, that isn’t Shadow Banning.

Making things more difficult, Twitter’s rules are broadly and ambiguously written, giving their censors wide latitude, when it comes to censoring. So, outside of literally changing your political affiliation, Conservatives can’t win, which is their true intent.

This practice has been going on now, for the better part of a year, following Hillary’s crushing loss and Trump’s crushing win. It didn’t matter if Hillary raised and spent more money than any candidate in history, trying to get elected. A few million dollars spent on ads by Russians that attacked both liberals and conservatives was deemed a big advantage for Trump, because of the word “Russians,” triggering a Pavlovian response in the carefully conditioned mind of the liberal proletariat.

“My God!” How could poor Hillary hope to compete with Trump under such circumstances? She only had a meager 1.2 billion dollars to spend and the support of all the mainstream press, except FOX News. By comparison, the press gave Trump free airtime, all of it, overwhelmingly negative, but it was free, and that, apparently, was too much for poor little Hillary.

Meanwhile, liberals, on cue, raise the specter of “The Fairness Doctrine,” in an effort to combat unfairness in the media. “The Fairness Doctrine,” is Orwellian doublespeak, the kind of which politicians engage in every minute of every day, and is exactly the opposite of what it claims to be. Talk radio tends towards Conservatism. Liberals have tried mightily, for decades, to infiltrate talk radio but die in the rating's war. This is unfair to liberals, according to liberals, whose notion of unfairness is whenever and wherever they can’t win, on the up and up, So lies and subterfuge become necessary.

The answer to this alleged unfairness, is the usual, “Give the government power to regulate what people hear, so it favor liberals. This applies nowhere else, except, where liberals are losing. For instance, there are zero Republicans in The White House press corps. This is not an indication of unfairness, though. It is the natural order, even if that natural order must be heavily manipulated in an effort to produce the desired outcome.

Similarly, YouTube began a program of demonetizing “Certain” videos, by people who’d been making a pretty decent income for themselves, and YouTube. But no longer. Unfortunately, many of the videos being stripped of their profitability were deemed “Offensive,” by YouTube’s team of ace twenty-somethings, who just happened to be overwhelmingly liberal. There was no correlation between these things, however. And, any inference that bias was involved, would quickly be demonetized, so not dime one could be made, no matter how many hits a particular video got. But, again, no bias was involved. The fact that it was substantially conservative videos that were targeted, was a mere coincidence. And not—we repeat—not, bias!

As if that weren’t enough, Google, who owns YouTube, manipulates its algorithms, choosing to promote certain content. The kind of content that favors Google’s staff of twenty-somethings, preferred political ideology, while restricting ideas they deem offensive. This is not bias, just as none of the other glaring examples of bias are biased. And, should you say otherwise, you will be deemed offensive and restricted or shadow banned, or censored, or demonetized. Which, trust us, isn’t bias.

Newspapers began this process, in some instances, decades ago, as they sought to omit troubling details, about certain kinds of criminals. My hometown newspaper, The Miami Herald, determined that using race as an identifier was politically offensive, and other ways of identifying a criminal could be used; eye color, hair color, height, weight, bushy eyebrows, were fine substitutes when identifying criminals. Their reasoning was simple; the paper began to read like a recruiting tract for the Ku Klux Klan, as bodies of tourists began accumulating in Miami’s inner city, murdered by tall, dark-haired, Brown-eyed males. Of course, that could include Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, as well, thereby deeply muddying the water, rather than clarifying things.

But, hated White supremacists must be kept at bay. Even if they were nowhere to be found, except in the imaginations of liberals, who needed a scapegoat as a substitute for the horrifying policies they’d systematically visited upon poor, inner-city Black Americans, where liberals have ruled, uncontested, for more than a half century.

Liberals, however, are completely unaware of these things, having never really read anything that might challenge their dogma. Instead, they censor, lie, obfuscate, and manipulate, in an effort to bring change. Change that benefits liberal politicians, media oligarchs, and every other kind of oligarch, while they blissfully, mindlessly re-engineer the world in their own image.

May God help us all.

​Mark Magula