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Move over, Hester: Speaker Mikey's in town...

Remember Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan society in his novel, The Scarlet Letter?  Poor Hester Prynne violated the laws of the church, which meant that she broke society’s laws, too.  At the beginning of the novel, the reader joins Hester as she leaves the safety of the town prison and makes her way back into the society that jailed her.  Reading the book for the first time in the 11th grade, I had a hard time understanding how, in a free society, the religion of one group could also form its judicial system.  That makes the laws of God the same thing as the laws of man.   Separation of church and state was also an 11th grade U.S. history lesson, so we students figured no more Hesters could be jailed for breaking the laws of her religion .  Or so we thought.  We fought a war 250 years ago to separate the colonies from a king who was not only ruler of the government but leader of the church.  A quick walk through British history shows what a mess that ideal leads to:  remember Henry VIII
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Defund Fox !

 I have been relishing the news about Dominion v Fox News and the embarrassing and revelatory details from the depositions of Fox News personalities and corporate executives.  

What's even better is that Smartmatic has filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News that is even bigger (2.7 billion vs 1.6 billion for Dominion).  And the punitive damages could be much higher.

The Dominion trial starts in mid-April and an unknown date for Smartmatic. 

There are many pending lawsuits against various right wing purveyors of disinformation but that is not the focus of this post.

I wanted to do something to help defund Fox and here it is.

I first heard about this nonprofit group, Check My Ads, in an NPR article that has a method of draining Fox and other online disinformation sites of online advertising revenue.   

It works like this - company XYZ makes educational toys for children and wants to advertise their products on the web.  The ads are distributed to millions of websites by other companies called ad exchanges.  Company XYZ is often unaware of where their ads end up.  The ad exchanges do have rules for the kind of websites that where ads are posted.

For instance, company XYZ would not want to sully their wholesome company image by having their ads for children's education toys run on Neo-Nazi websites.  In addition, the ad exchange may not know that they are sending the ads to an objectionable site that violates the ad exchange rules.

For instance, an ad exchange may have a policy against sending ads to websites that publish disinformation.  The ad exchange does not follow Fox News enough to make the determination that Fox News violates their policy.

So, Check My Ads provides information to their users to write emails to the ad exchanges that a particular website (like Fox News) is in violation of the rules and has been successful in persuading these ad exchanges to drop ad sales to the likes of Charlie Kirk, Glenn Beck, Steve Bannon and others.

So I signed up and have received several emails from them with instructions and the information needed to write my emails.

Pretty simple, huh ! And it appears to be safe.  No advertising, spam or other unwanted consequences for me.

Will it take a while ? I am sure it will but the more people that do it the less revenue will be available for these democracy busting disinformation sites.

So let's DEFUND FOX !  Sign up at Check My Ads.

Bonus and just for fun - here is the status of the numerous lawsuits against Fox News and related right wing personalities at Forbes.






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