It’s not a smart threat, it’s not a terribly plausible threat, but it’s a threat: Don’t you dare to report on people who have a corrupt patron-client relationship with California Democrats.
You won’t find the words “Nick Shirley” in the new Democrat-passed California law that the Republican Assemblyman Carl DeMaio dubbed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” and the horrible spokescreatures for the state’s reptilian governor are riding that fact pretty hard.
But they’re lying by omission and misdirection, an act they perform with the regularity of breathing. It’s still more or less the Stop Nick Shirley Act, and it’s designed to create a special class of privileged people with extra privacy rights: “Privacy for immigration support services providers.”
You can read the thing, which purportedly makes it illegal to “knowingly publicly post or publicly display, disclose, or distribute on the internet the personal information or image of any designated immigration support services provider, employee, or volunteer, or other individuals residing at the same home address.” So you can engage in independent journalism, and you can investigate anybody you want. You just can’t ever mention their names.
Trying to turn a ludicrous premise into something that a judge won’t laugh out of court, the bill adds a bunch of language about intent: The person posting the name of an NGO grifter has to intend to be mean and hurtful, boo hoo. It’s pathetic, it’s a First Amendment nightmare, and (as we’ve said before) it’s not going to work.
But even if it’s not going to work, it’s going to work. An unenforceable law that you can get the judge to throw out of court when they charge you with it is still a punishment delivered in the form of a process. It’s not a smart threat, it’s not a terribly plausible threat, but it’s a threat: Don’t you dare to report on people who have a corrupt patron-client relationship with California Democrats.
They do this kind of thing because, to put this as charitably as I can say it, they’re the scum of the earth: slack-jawed, appetite-driven, consumed by their soulless, mindless, morally and intellectually empty grift. California Democrats can’t do anything. If you gave them sliced bread and a toaster that you plugged in to give them a head start, it’s still an open question if they could figure out how to make a real piece of toast. They’re greedy, stupid, and worthless at best, and the Stop Nick Shirley Act was introduced by a legislator-thing that advertises its stupidity through the beady eyes on its slack-jawed face.