Which vision to you choose?

By public law, Congress has directed the president by proclamation to annually designate the first Thursday in May as a "National Day of Prayer." This year President Joe Biden became the first known president to issue the required proclamation without mentioning God in it. Was that omission a mere oversight? Is there a God? If not, why pray? Without God, is there any objective good? Or is all "good" relative?

Two Americans have had diametrically opposed views on these matters. Read their words. You decide which road America should take.

American #1 was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

"But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

"We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.

"We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

"We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.

"We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.

"We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.

"I have a dream that one day ... the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi ... will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

"I have a dream that one day down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

"I have a dream that one day ... the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together."

American #2 is Saul Alinski, who has become the Apostle of the Left.

"What follows is for those who want to change the world — from what it is, to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the "Haves" on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the "Have-Nots" on how to take it away."

"In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people. ... This means revolution."

"An organizer ... does not have a fixed truth—truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. ... We live in a world where 'good' is a value dependent on whether we want it. ... The Haves want to keep; the Have-Nots want to get."

"Life and how you live it is the story of 'means' and 'ends.' The 'end' is what you want, and the 'means' is how you get it. ... The man of action views the issue of 'means' and 'ends' in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem. He thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of 'ends' only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work."

"[The Have Nots] hate the establishment of the Haves with its arrogant opulence, its police, its courts, and its churches. Justice, morality, law, and order, are mere words when used by the Haves, which justify and secure their status quo."

"One does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both
with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must
always be for the latter.

"Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual's personal salvation. He who sacrafices the mass good for his personal conscience ... doesn't care enough for people to be 'corrupted' for them.”

"It is a world ... where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles."

"A leader ... must assume that his cause is 100 percent positive, and that the opposition's is 100 per cent negative."

Which dream is yours? Is there a God? Has he told us what is "good?" Or is "good" "relative?"


Does whatever we "want" become "good?"


What do you choose? Brotherhood? Hatred? Personal corruption for the mass salvation? Do the ends justify the means? Is the opposition always 100% wrong?

First Published in the Moline Dispatch and Rock Island Argus on May 21, 2021

Copyright 2021

John Donald O'Shea 

A warning from Justice Thomas

When he was in office, former-President Trump made great use of his Twitter account. Twitter's rules allow the user who generates the original message to manually block others from republishing it or responding to it.


Trump blocked several users from interacting with his Twitter account. They sued. The Second Circuit held that Trump's comment threads were "public forums" and he violated the First Amendment by using his control of the Twitter account to block the plaintiffs from accessing his comment threads.


On April 5, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed to hear an appeal from the U.S. Court of Appeals from the Second Circuit. Then, in a two-sentence order, vacated the judgment of the Court of Appeals, and directed it to dismiss the case as moot because Trump no longer is president. But what is most interesting about the Supreme Court's two-sentence order, was that Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurring opinion. It sets out what Thomas feels were important issues not considered by the Court of Appeals.


Thomas' concurrence appears to be either a shot across the bow of Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon, or a GPS showing the issues the court wants raised in future cases against the giant digital platforms — or both.


Thomas begins by noting that under its terms of service, Twitter can remove any person from its platform — including the president of the United States — "at any time for any or no reason." But that while Trump blocked several people from interacting with his messages, Twitter permanently removed Trump's account from its platform.

"The disparity between Twitter’s control and Mr. Trump’s control is stark, to say the least. Mr. Trump blocked several people from interacting with his messages. Twitter barred Mr. Trump not only from interacting with a few users, but removed him from the entire platform, thus barring all Twitter users from interacting with his messages."

But if the lower court was correct in holding that Trump could not block certain people from interacting with his Twitter comments because he used Twitter as a public forum, then by what right did Twitter have to bar the president from using that same public forum, and everybody from interacting?


Thomas notes the lower court gave no consideration to that First Amendment issue.


Thomas next opines that the court will soon have no choice but to address how existing legal doctrines apply to "highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure, such as digital platforms." He then discusses other important related issues not raised or dealt with by the Second Circuit.



He begins by noting that First Amendment considerations do not normally apply when free speech is stifled by a private party. But he then points out that two classes of private businesses have traditionally been subject to special regulation: "common carriers" and "places of public accommodation." Regulation of those two classes of businesses is traditionally justified either because the private business possesses "substantial market power" or "holds itself out as a common carrier."



The justice then notes that there are clear historical precedents for regulating transportation and communications networks as if they were common carriers. The comparison between the traditional communication networks and today's digital networks is obvious.

"In many ways, digital platforms that hold themselves out to the public resemble traditional common carriers. Though digital instead of physical, they are at bottom communications networks, and they 'carry' information from one user to another."

Given the fact that Facebook has three billion users, and Google Search has a 90% market share, he concludes that "these companies have a substantial market share and no comparable competitors. He notes that one man controls Facebook and two control Google.

"Google is the gatekeeper between that user and the speech of others 90% of the time. It can suppress content by deindexing or downlisting a search result or by steering users away from certain content by manually altering autocomplete results. Facebook and Twitter can greatly narrow a person’s information flow through similar means." 

Thomas further notes even if digital platforms are found not to be "common carriers," legislatures might still be able to treat digital platforms like "places of public accommodation." And he warns, "The similarities between some digital platforms and common carriers or places of public accommodation may give legislators strong arguments for similarly regulating digital platforms."


Finally, he notes that Congress has already given the digital platforms special "immunity from certain types of suits, but it has not imposed corresponding responsibilities, like nondiscrimination, that would matter here."


The digital platforms obtained that immunity from suit by holding themselves out before Congress to be "common carriers."


Free speech in America includes disfavored speech.


Thomas seems to be warning the digital platforms to limit their speech censorship to those few categories of speech that the court has held to be beyond the pale of First Amendment free speech, lest the court intervene.

First Published in the Moline Dispatch and Rock Island Argus on May 7, 2021

Copyright 2021

John Donald O'Shea