Second City Cop is gone

I've been retweeting updates on this from @CWBChicago on this one. This is the latest, and presumably the last:

Update: “Second City Cop” writers say they — and not Google — pulled the plug on their long-running police blog.https://t.co/ZTrMgIoaDF

— CWBChicago (@CWBChicago) January 13, 2021

The CWBChicago blogpost about this is here. The statement issued by the SCC authors is on HeyJackass!, at least for the time being. An excerpt:

Over the weekend, we received information from a contact at Google that internal chat/e-mails led them to believe that certain precautions we had taken over the years had been breached by Google. We had gotten similar warnings from others in the past, and we dealt with or ignored them as the situation warranted. But this one was different.

You may dismiss the SCC authors as paranoid right-wingers -- but former New York Times editor and writer Bari Weiss wrote, just yesterday, of the "takeover and the unimaginable strength of the new powers that have superseded" the "old truths, the old political consensus, ...the old common identity." Borrowing from David Samuels, she dubs this new age the age of machines. She continues (emphasis in original):

Now those machines, operated by people none of us elected, have begun an open war against us.

It’s not that Trump was permanently banned from Twitter. I’d be happy to never hear that voice or see those CAPS again. It’s that Twitter can ban whoever it wants whenever it wants for whatever reason. It’s that all the real town squares have been shuttered and that the only one left is pixelated and controlled by a few oligarchs in Silicon Valley.

We were promised the Internet would be better than democracy. But then it got privatized. Corporations own it. There is no online bill of rights. There is only the frenzy of the mob and fickle choices of a few billionaires.

Look, friends, even Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose disdain for Donald Trump has been open and obvious right from the beginning, thought it "problematic" that Twitter had evicted Trump from its platform.

Even if one exists, however, the SCC authors may have misinterpreted how high they were on anyone's hit list. But they had reason enough to fear for their paychecks if their identities were revealed. Clearly, there will be no tears shed for SCC's demise at City Hall, in the Chief Judge's Office, or by the Sheriff or the State's Attorney or the County Board President.

If they were in danger of being 'outed', I hope they got out in time. SCC has provided a genuine public service over the years, bringing important news to light that otherwise would have remained unseen. They were not journailsts -- but, often, they did work that the newspapers and broadcast media should have done.

Of course, sometimes, SCC just spouted some truly crazy sh*t. They had a point of view. Well, so does Injustice Watch (although a very different point of view, to be sure). You had to read through the point of view, sometimes, to get to the useful information, but there was useful information there. Some mornings they may have made you mad. Some mornings they made me mad, too. And some of the comments were truly frightening. But I will miss SCC. I wish its authors well.