Arsonist takes the fire chief’s seat: Rep. Jan Schakowsky to co-chair hearings on big tech censorship – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

On Thursday, joint committees of the U.S. House will hold yet more hearings intended to browbeat technology platforms into more political censorship under the pretext that they permit hateful, incendiary content. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Chicago) will co-chair the hearings.

That’s like letting an arsonist sit in the fire chief’s seat. Schakowsky is among the last people who should be running hearings on inciting hatred and violence.

March 11, 2016. That day in Chicago, I submit, went a long way toward legitimizing political violence, contributing significantly to the wave of political violence we have seen since.  On that day, violence, which was provoked deliberately, succeeded, leading to cancellation of a rally to be held that evening for then-candidate Donald Trump. Jan Schakowsky and her husband, Robert Creamer, were part of it.

I saw the warm-up earlier that evening myself, which was bad enough. There, Schakowsky led an organized group of protesters in front of the Palmer House in Chicago, where a dinner was being held that included a range of GOP state and national figures. Protesters blocked the entrance to the Palmer House, yelling “bigot” and much uglier personal insults at dinner attendees. When they blocked traffic on Monroe Street, one vehicle seemed to threaten to hit the protesters.

I wrote about it here and here at the time. The protesters were rabid, hateful and incendiary. There’s no doubt in my mind that the protesters intended to incite violence, though that came later.

It was at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Trump was scheduled to speak later, that things got much uglier and made national headlines. Fights and violence, deliberately provoked, caused the event to be scuttled. But as the Chicago Sun-Times’ Mark Brown, no friend of Trump, wrote at the time, Trump supporters “weren’t the ugly ones on this night.”

What we learned afterward is what was most disturbing. Video tapes secretly recorded purport to show Democratic campaign operatives describing how they enlisted people to start fights with Trump supporters. I say “purport” but watch the tape yourselves if you have any doubt. The central person in the recordings is Scott Foval. He is portrayed in the footage as boasting about his connections and claiming to have arranged for people, including some who are mentally ill, to incite violence at Trump rallies, as the Associated Press summarized it.

Foval said he created messaging for the planted protesters that would lead Trump supporters “to punch you.” “You can message to draw them out, and draw them out to punch you,” Foval is shown on a video as saying. “It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherf–ker,” Foval says. “We’re starting anarchy here.”

And who hired Foval? Creamer, Schakowsky’s husband. His “DNC contract called for him to stage Democratic events outside Trump rallies, and he hired Foval as a subcontractor,” according to the A.P. Creamer also appears in the video itself.

It would be difficult to believe that Schakowsky was not aware of the full plan for the night, which was clearly conceived ahead of time to provoke violence and hatred.

Creamer denied any wrongdoing but “stepped back” from his role in the Clinton campaign after the videos were published. Foval was fired.

Creamer has a long, sordid history, described in part by the Chicago Tribune. He was sentenced in 2006 to five months in prison for purposely floating bad checks. Then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Ferguson, according to the Tribune, said Creamer “stole money from banks,” more than $2.5 million, that amounted to unintended, interest-free loans. He is widely regarded as an acolyte of radical political strategist Saul Alinsky, as described here in the National Review.

But you have to hand it to him. These words that he wrote, quoted in the National Review, seem to summarize perfectly a strategy that has been accomplished with the assistance of corporate media:

In general our strategic goal with people who have become conservative activists is not to convert them—that isn’t going to happen. It is to demoralize them—to ‘deactivate’ them…. [A] way to demoralize conservative activists is to surround them with the echo chamber of our positions and assumptions. We need to make them feel that they are not mainstream, to make them feel isolated… We must isolate them ideologically…[and] use the progressive echo chamber.

And now Jan Schakowsky will take the national stage to tell tech companies what we should and should not be reading.

None of this is to say that other people and forces didn’t open the way for the political violence we’ve seen across the nation in the last few years. Countless politicians and media figures stood silent, and often expressly approved that violence. Blame Trump, too, at least partially, for the Capitol incursion on January 6. And nothing excuses the conduct of violent protesters themselves.

But the fact is that March 11, 2016 in Chicago was somewhat of a turning point. Planned violence worked to shut down a political event. Unbelievably, it went mostly unpunished. No criminal charges were ever filed against the instigators. Schakowsky brushed the whole affair off. The light turned green. Creamer is apparently back at the political game. His LinkedIn bio shows him as a partner at Democracy Partner, the same outfit he was with in 2016.

Jan Schakowsky has no business running hearings on what tech companies should publish.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.