Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Report from Louisiana: Dispatch from the Facebook Hoosgow

Posted: March 14, 2022 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – My husband has made it a whole week without getting tossed into the Facebook hoosgow.

He never wanted to be on the social media platform at all, but years ago, when Facebook was still sort of fun, I made an account for him so he could keep up with friends and family “back home.” He loved it at first because he was connecting with old classmates and distant family members. He joined the Facebook group for his tiny, rural hometown, and they shared old photos and memories. It was all so harmless.

Then politics reared its ugly head and Facebook became the liberal, curated, censored wasteland that it is today. He is adamantly outspoken and incapable of holding back his opinions when it comes to liberal policies and corrupt politics.

And so he has of late been spending time in the Facebook Prison. The first time it was only 24-hours and supervised probation upon his release. He gleefully celebrated his release with yet another post about “Chillary Hinton” and a “chewicide” hotline, in an attempt to get around the evil censors, and he got three days in solitary. Again, supervised probation upon release but a much longer period.

He is unrepentant. He is incensed about gasoline prices, as are we all, and freely sharing his thoughts on the policies of the current administration regarding drilling and energy. He refuses to be silenced and the more the censors threaten him and try to hold him down, he is more and more vocal.

It’s hard not to respect that!

I suggested he give up social media for Lent, even though we aren’t Catholic. He’s a much happier person when he isn’t scrolling through pictures of rising gas prices, pictures of empty grocery shelves, and posts about politics.

It’s only a matter of time until they catch up with him again. His last three posts included accusing MSNBC pundits of taking hallucinogens, a photo of the White House Press Secretary as Pinocchio, and a meme about the Vice-President that said, “…if you gave her a penny for her thoughts, you’ll get change back.”

They’ll get him for those.

Meanwhile, I’ll just be over here minding my own business and posting pictures of my lunch. It’s much safer.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and at Medium; she is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

Report from Louisiana: Chasing Chickens and Facebook Jail

Posted: March 7, 2022 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By: Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – It’s been a strange week. It started out with the Courir de Mardi Gras in Church Point, LA and ended in Facebook jail. Twice.

Let me explain.

We spend about five weeks a year – all throughout the year – in south Louisiana, specifically in Cajun country. New Orleans is quite another thing altogether but that’s not at all where we were. Cajun country is that mostly flat, prairie land around and including the Atchafalaya Basin. Stunningly beautiful, it is filled with the warmest, friendliest, happiest people I’ve met anywhere.

A few years ago on one of our trips, we met a couple in a bar on the Atchafalaya swamp who invited us to the Courir de Mardi Gras in Church Point, LA where they live. This is not the New Orleans kind of Mardi Gras that people think of. This festivity dates back literally hundreds of years to the very origins of the Cajun people themselves.

Well, Covid happened before we could take our new friends up on this invitation and a couple of years went by, but this year, we did it. And I’ve never seen anything like it. It was fabulous! What I love is how steeped in tradition it all is, and how utterly wild and fun it was to see.

We arrived as instructed, by 7:00 a.m. “because they going to close the roads!” As friends and family began to arrive, some still drunk from the night before, someone fired up a huge griddle on a table under the carport, and within minutes ham, eggs, and bacon were sizzling, biscuits appeared and someone opened the first beer of the day by 7:45.

The highlight of the day for me was the actual courir; only the men are allowed to participate in the chicken chase and they must be costumed and masked at all times. The costumes are traditional in nature with bright, multicolor scraps of fabric sewn all over them, conical hats, and masks of mesh and decorated with eyes, long noses, and grins. Everyone is unrecognizable.

We went to the first stop of the day; a lovely Acadian style home on a large piece of property. The spectators lined up in front of the house to watch. Soon, the costumed participants began to arrive en masse – on trailers, on horses, on foot, whooping, yelling, carrying cans of beer. After being granted permission to enter the gate by the homeowner, they lined up facing the house some distance away from the spectators. At the signal, they all let out shouts and yells and ran full steam ahead toward the spectators and began the chicken chase. It was hilarious as they fell, tripped, crawled on the ground, crawled between the legs of everyone standing by, untied our shoes, took our shoes, and scratched their palms in a silent request for money.

When you show empty pockets, the guys will flop down on the ground in mock tears. “I gotta make a gumbo!”

And that’s the point of the chicken chase, of course. By the end of the day the community shares a communal gumbo after several more stops of chicken chasing, a long parade through the country with floats, beads, and lots of horses. So many horses and costumed riders I’ve never seen before.

Our friends took us out onto the parade route in the middle of the country where we cooked boudin, pork steaks, hot dogs, and boudin stuffed jalapenos wrapped in bacon. One ice chest after another appeared, all filled with Jello shots of every imaginable color and flavor.

It was absolutely the wildest, most fabulous event I’ve ever seen in my life and I can’t believe I have lived in Louisiana this many years and never been to a courir de Mardi Gras before. It is absolutely the only way to celebrate Mardi Gras in my mind. It was amazing.

And so as much fun as all that was, it’s taken us a full week to recover. We are no spring chickens any more and all this debauchery leaves me wiped out.

And then my husband gets thrown in Facebook jail.

Ha! Well, it was only a matter of time. He’s a very vocal conservative and after being unable to speak his opinions freely for so many years due to his civil service career, once he retired, he felt perfect freedom to voice his disgust at this administration on Facebook. He was vocal during the last Democratic administration too – both terms of it. But, to be fair, he also uses social media to share corny jokes and to keep up with family. He has a love/hate relationship with Facebook.

So, like I said, it was only a matter of time until he got thrown in the Facebook Gulag. He got 24-hours for sharing a meme about a certain Arkansas presidential wife.  He was incensed! But, he promised to behave and decided that from now on he’d only share a joke of the day and get off of Facebook.

That was working out pretty well until the Facebook algorithms went back to a year ago and threw him right back into the Gulag for some meme he shared twelve months ago.

Now that he’s on their radar he’ll never get out and of course this is what they want. They want conservatives to give up and hush up.

So much for free speech, right? Toe the party line or be silenced.

Maybe we’ll just unplug and move to south Louisiana, get a houseboat, live on the swamp. Chase chickens at Mardi Gras, eat crawfish until we explode, boudin, and charbroiled oysters. Sounds a lot better than Facebook jail.

I’m doing hard time in FaceBook Jail

Posted: February 10, 2022 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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Up until this week I had never spent any time in FaceBook jail.  That was a fact I bore with considerable shame.  Most of my right leaning friends have been there multiple times.  I continuously post the same type of stuff that gets them sent to the FaceBook gulag, often much worse. 

I have long been jealous of those who have earned badges of honor for having become political prisoners, held incommunicado by the tyrannical regime of misfits who run what I frequently call FascistBook.  I have constantly upped my game, to no avail. 

My shame for not being sentenced to FaceBook jail was becoming unbearable.  I had no idea what I was doing wrong.  I kept comparing what I was posting versus those who paid a price for posting the truth.  I so saw no difference, yet I was denied the honor of earning a FaceBook jail campaign ribbon.

That all changed this past Tuesday when I saw the little box at the top left corner of my wall.  In the center of that box was the words account restricted.  That little box meant that I had finally earned my badge of honor.  I did celebrate when I saw this.  I celebrated by having a second pint of my homebrewed India Pale Ale.

I am no stranger to censorship by socialist media.  Well over a year ago I earned the coveted lifetime ban by Twitter.  They took away my 12,000 followers along with all my posting privileges.  My crime was that I constantly posted the truth.  I posted stuff that contradicted official progressive narrative.  That is exactly what earned my current 90 day stay in FaceBook Jail.

My stay in FaceBook jail is proof that that company is nothing but a mob of petty tyrants who believe that freedom of speech only applies to those who parrot the official progressive narrative on every single issue.  That goes against everything the United States of America stands for.  It is the type of behavior that is commonplace in tyrannical dictatorships.

When I saw the account restricted box I clicked on it and received a listing of the offences that led to my 90 day stint in jail. They were a listing of every single one of the phony fact checks FascistBook has hit me with.  That was an exceptionally lengthy list.  I constantly earn them because I post the truth whenever I encounter it.  When I get hit with a fact check I challenge it by attaching one of series of photos to it.  One of the photos reads “lets start calling fact checking what it is, Censorship.”  Another photo reads “George Orwell called them Thought Police, FaceBook calls them fact checkers.”

FaceBook sentenced me to a 90 day stay in jail because I post the truth about the Wuhan Flu, the carnage caused by the covid vaccines, the failures of lockdowns, mask mandates, the theft of the election from President Trump, and so much more.

I will not let my stay in FaceBook jail silence me in the slightest.  I will not change my posting habits at all.

The military still doesn’t understand social media

Posted: October 2, 2021 by ng36b in crime, war
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The debate concerning Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, the Marine Corps officer that openly criticized the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the Afghanistan withdrawal, continues to prove my title point. For those of you not following it, here are the basic details:

  • Lt. Col. Scheller produced a video where he expressed outrage over the suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed 13 service members, as well as the withdrawal from Afghanistan in general
  • He was relieved of command (he was in charge of the Infantry Training Battalion in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina) pretty soon after. He tendered his resignation after that.
  • The details here get murky, but at some point he was ordered to go to mental health screening. He then continued to post videos and content, despite being ordered not to.
  • The military placed him in pre-trial confinement, and he is scheduled for an Article 32 hearing next week.

For those that don’t know, and Article 32 hearing is where a military prosecutors argues before a judge about what charges a service member will face. The defense will argue against those charges, and the judge will send the prosecutor a letter saying what charges he thinks there is enough evidence to meet probable cause. Pre-trial confinement simply means the defendant sits in a jail cell until the Article 32 hearing, at which point the judge will recommend whether they remain there or not before trial.

Because of how the military chose to handle this case, its going to stay in the news for a long time. Plenty of other officers have resigned in protest, but they have pretty much all dropped out of the news. Unfortunately, the military services will take a black eye on the Scheller case, even if they win. People have already pulled this into the political arena, and once something is political, it tends to stick around. That’s a no-win situation for either side, because already people are making connections to Lt. Col. Vindman (remember him!?!) and his very different treatment.

Nobody wins here…except Lt. Col. Scheller. I’ll make my prediction here: Lt. Col. Scheller comes out of this with a military retirement and a nonsense charge on his record, and a subsequent request removes even that.

First, everyone is going to be glued to the news about his Article 32 hearing. The prosecutor has a pretty easy job here, since Scheller posted everything online. Open and shut right? Wrong. Any good defense attorney is going to fight tooth and nail to pick apart the arguments. Was Scheller really ordered to stop posting online, or was it a suggestion? Was the order in writing? Was it official? Was it done via official methods? It’s the defense attorney’s job to cast doubt into the charges.

Ultimately, some charges are going to get preferred, meaning Scheller will get charged with something. Likely, it’ll be Article 92 (failure to obey a lawful order) that will be the main and hardest charge to fight. The defense attorney’s next job is to drag this case out. Everyone that would sit on a court martial for Scheller right now is senior to him and likely angry over how he posted on social media. The defense is going to want time to pass, and lots of it. So we’ll see a lot of discovery requests and a lot of motions. We won’t have a court martial until summer of 2022. A good defense attorney will work hard to have it drop out of the news.

By that point, even if Scheller is found guilty of something, it’s unlikely he’ll be dismissed from service. Instead, he’ll then go to a Board of Inquiry (BOI) to determine if he should stay in the Marine Corps. That process might wrap up by the end of 2022. He should be at 18 years in the Marine Corps, and thus so close to retirement the BOI will likely recommend retention until 20 years. The Marine Corps certainly won’t promote him, but if he wants, he can finish serving and then leave. Granted, this assumes he wants to stay, since he could simply resign and walk out. But by pushing for a court martial, we almost guarantee that Scheller will get a chance to retire.

Now, what could the military have done differently? Simple: accept his resignation immediately, put him on terminal leave, issue him a Letter of Instruction and call it a day. Then, when Scheller makes statements about Afghanistan, let him talk. If you’re smart and issue detailed, written orders, Scheller will probably incriminate himself multiple times, and as any police officer will tell you, once someone starts talking, it’s only a matter of time before that person says something incriminating. Once you have a massive body of evidence, then you can release a statement that says something like this:

“Lt. Col. Scheller announced his resignation from the Marine Corps, and the Marine Corps accepted it and issued him a timeline so that he could quickly turnover and transition to civilian life. The Marine Corps supported him, like we support all our Marines, and tried to ensure Lt. Col. Scheller could transition without issue or delay. Unfortunately, instead of following these instructions to prepare himself for civilian life, Lt. Col. Scheller continued to engage in activity that violates the UCMJ, despite repeated written orders to the contrary. Because of his actions, we are now pursuing charges via the Court Martial system.”

Now, people will still cry foul, and anyone that wanted to use Scheller as a political weapon against the Biden administration is still going to do that. But the people in the middle, the ones that normally want folks to follow the law and don’t like politics in general, those people will read the above statement and think “Sheesh, what was Scheller thinking?” It’s a simple way of shifting blame. You don’t have to argue his points, and you won’t win by doing that. People don’t trust our generals and admirals (doesn’t help when they have hostile work environments), and trying to argue about the finer points of Afghanistan isn’t a winning plan. Instead, you deal with people like Scheller by giving them exactly what they want. From a prosecution point of view, Scheller is golden material, because he will literally write your case for you.

Now, I’m not saying the Marine Corps, or Scheller, are wrong. Maybe the Marine’s have a good reason to push charges and put him in pre-trial confinement. They have more information than I do. But pre-trial confinement over social media posts will get conflated with “punishment over mean tweets,” and you couldn’t have written a more political talking point if you tried. I’m also not saying Scheller is wrong. Many of his points are valid, which is why the greater danger is all the service members that will leave over the next 4 years as fallout from this and other decisions.

Watch Scheller’s case over the next year and let’s see how my prediction plays out. And remember, nothing I say should be construed as official positions or policy of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. I’m just a poor author writing about my personal opinions, so you should buy my book from Amazon to help me out.

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