Amid a sustained, full-fledged assault on the First Amendment, we’re at a dangerous crossroads in America.
If you drive around with an “I’m with Her” sticker on your car you’re safe. Those that are “woke” and don’t like Donald Trump are permitted to do and say whatever they want on almost any platform – LinkedIn to Facebook, Twitter.
But if you mention the wrong thing – election fraud, the futility of wearing masks, the dangers of experimental covid19 injections, the Democrat Party’s segregationist legacy, anything Google wants to be filtered out of its search engine or any speech that modern leftists don’t want to hear– it’s only a matter of time before you will be banned, targeted, slandered, abused or terminated.
Even listening to conservative talk radio is now a thought crime.
After relying on Lyft to earn a living for nearly a decade, a Lyft driver’s account was permanently suspended for audaciously listening to “racist” former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke’s commentary on the radio last week.
As Clarke guest-hosted WISN’s “The Mark Belling Late Afternoon Show” on Thursday evening, the passenger who sat in Lyft driver Ryan Alexander’s backseat became irate.
While sitting in Alexander’s car from 6:28 pm to 6:34 pm, the passenger listened to Clarke’s assessment of Black Lives Matter and concluded her driver is an enemy that must be silenced.
“If Black lives mattered, if this Marxist movement truly cared about Black life, they would be every single day protesting in front of abortion clinics all across America that kill more Black babies than any other demographic,” Clarke argued during the broadcast. “That is a fact. In 2014 in New York City, more Black babies were aborted than were born for heaven’s sakes, so don’t tell me that Black lives matter. When 83 percent of the homicide victims are Black and 83 percent of the perpetrators are Black, don’t tell me that Black lives matter because they didn’t get the memo apparently.”
As Clarke railed against the hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter, the passenger called the former sheriff “trash,” “slammed the door to my car when she got out, and specifically referenced abortion which Clarke did talk about briefly while she was in the car,” Ryan explained in an email to WISN host Dan O’Donnell.
Alexander continued driving for Lyft following the passenger’s xenophobic outburst, until Friday evening when he discovered Lyft suspended his account.
The following morning, a Lyft representative confirmed Alexander was terminated for being “racist.”
“This happened Saturday morning when I got a call from a Lyft employee named Sebastian who told me they had gotten a complaint that I was listening to racist talk radio. The complaint specifically cited the host had mentioned abortion rates in the Black community, and that African-American communities were the problem in the country,” he explained in the email.
Alexander maintains nothing Clarke said was racist in nature against pushed back against the allegations asserted by the Lyft representative.
“I told him that it was simply untrue, I was listening to a local news talk station and the host said nothing that was remotely racist. Immediately after this, maybe two minutes into the conversation, I was given the final decision that my account would be permanently deactivated,” he continued. “As I tried to get clarification on why it quickly became obvious that that decision had been made prior to talking to me and that the phone call was simply a formality. I made repeated attempts over probably the next 10 minutes to get some explanation on how Lyft arrived at this decision but was simply told that the customer service rep, Sebastian, would not engage in any discussion or debate and that the decision was final.
“The only other thing that they would add is that they had gotten one previous complaint about the radio. Again, this was over the course of 11,000 trips and the two complaints were enough to justify a permanent ban. The prior complaint was too vague for me to know exactly what it was in reference to. But since I primarily listen to WISN while driving.”
Alexander then received an email from Lyft warning, “Safety is our top priority here and we take these matters seriously. In accordance with our Terms of Service, your account will stay deactivated and you won’t be able to re-apply with a new account.”
WISN host Chris O’Donnell sent an email to [email protected] requesting comment on Alexander’s deactivation, but the company has yet to respond.
“Is Mr. Alexander’s account accurate? Does Lyft consider mainstream conservative talk radio programming to be racist in nature? Does Lyft support the termination of driver accounts simply for listening to mainstream conservative talk radio programming?” the email inquires. “Is listening to mainstream conservative talk radio programming somehow against Lyft’s terms of service? Does Lyft have a comment on Mr. Alexander’s allegations?”
Lyft’s “terms of service” evidently dictates what radio programming is allowed in drivers’ vehicles, a microcosm for how the left wants to deal with any political opposition.
While freedoms expressed in the First Amendment protect us from totalitarianism, half of Americans don’t know what the freedoms in the First Amendment are and twenty-six percent of Americans don’t have any idea even what the Bill of Rights is, according to a recent study.
Lyft’s retaliation against the driver for listening to “racist” Sheriff Clarke, an African-American man, comes days after the Los Angelos Times, in defiance of all common sense and logic, deemed California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder “the face of white supremacy.”
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