GOV/MIL Leftists Call For New "Secret Police" Force To Spy On Trump Supporters (AN ABSOLUTELY MUST-READ THREAD)

[marsh]

House Democrats Against Free Speech, by Debra J. Saunders

WASHINGTON — Democratic House members are using the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot and the coronavirus pandemic in a scary effort to censor conservatives — and get Big Media to do their dirty work for them.

www.creators.com

House Democrats Against Free Speech

By Debra J. Saunders
February 28, 2021 4 min read

WASHINGTON — Democratic House members are using the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot and the coronavirus pandemic in a scary effort to censor conservatives — and get Big Media to do their dirty work for them.

Remember when the left believed in more speech as the solution to bad speech? Those days are gone.

On Monday, Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, both California Democrats, sent letters to CEOs for cable providers, satellite providers and other platforms to voice their issues with conservative news outlets Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network.

The letters asked executives of such giants as AT&T, Comcast, Amazon and Verizon what they are doing to "reduce the spread of disinformation, including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels your company disseminates to millions of Americans."

And the letters asked the CEOs if they plan on carrying the three conservative networks beyond "any contract renewal date." Hint. Hint.

"The letter is not just chilling; it's positively glacial," George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley warned during Wednesday testimony before a House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.

No surprise, in their crusade to combat "misinformation," the letter's authors swam in murky waters.

To make their point, Eshoo and McNerney wrote, "One popular television show aired a segment about OANN last April that included a dire warning: 'the kind of misinformation (OANN) is spewing right now could end up getting people killed." The popular show? "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver," hosted by a comedian.

The letter also cited Media Matters — a left-wing propaganda group — as an authoritative source, accusing Fox of broadcasting what it called "misinformation" 253 times over a five-day period. An example: "Fox pushed for school re-openings 34 times despite public health concerns."

It's not good when those who pose as enemies of misinformation cannot distinguish between fact twisting and unwelcome opinion. Weak thinkers with lazy arguments are not the people you want determining who gets on cable TV or the internet.

The Democrats' focus on conservative media only overlooks the fact that every news organization makes mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes involve simple error. Others involve honest mistakes facilitated by bias. Others are the result of bad judgment. After all the bogus stories on Trump campaign collusion with Russia in 2016, Democrats should know that discretion is the better part of valor.

At the hearing, Eshoo took issue with critics who said that the letters violated The First Amendment.

"The First Amendment, my friends, starts with four words, 'Congress shall make no laws,'" Eshoo said. And how dare anyone question the probity of House members "asking questions."

Actually, that's five words, congresswoman. And if the letters merely asked questions, no one would raise an eyebrow.

"Making a statement and putting a question mark at the end of it, doesn't change the import of the statements," Turley testified. The House Democrats' questions sent "a rather audible statement."

"What if you succeed?" Turley asked. Voters would lose access to Fox News, the most watched news network last year because House Democrats decided they could decide what other people read or watch.

They're book burners, and they don't even know it. Or they just don't care.

 

[marsh]

Big Tech tyranny has conservative news outlets scared to report the news

At least three times during CPAC, the excellent coverage from Right Side Broadcasting Network was interrupted by disclaimers, breaking away

noqreport.com

Big Tech tyranny has conservative news outlets scared to report the news
News outlets are self-censoring. Why? Because they don't want to be canceled.
by JD Rucker
March 1, 2021




At least three times during CPAC, the excellent coverage from Right Side Broadcasting Network was interrupted by disclaimers, breaking away from speeches, and even muting of interviewees. This wasn’t due to them not believing in the message. They self-censored because two topics that are taboo on Big Tech, YouTube in particular, were being discussed.

Before we detail what all went down, let’s be clear about something. I do not blame RSBN for doing what they did. This is a growing business that many people depend on. It’s not just the excellent livestreaming coverage of events pertinent to conservatives, but also families who work at the network. YouTube tyranny is a real thing so discussions of voter fraud or vaccines are surefire ways to get channels banned. I know. Our Freedom First Network channel was hit with strikes over… wait for it… talking about Covid-19 and laying out facts about massive, widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Now, our channel is gone.

RSBN’s biggest source of viewership and income is YouTube by far. Many of us were caught flat-footed when the Big Tech purge of conservatives began. Censorship is not the fault of the censored. We hop on our high horse and say Newsmax should have told Dominion Voting Systems where to shove their lawsuit or RSBM should just move to Rumble, but it’s easier to be bold when it isn’t our own livelihood or the livelihoods of our employees that are on the line.

Okay, that’s my prerequisite anti-rant. Now, let’s look at what was censored. Mike Lindell from MyPillow had his mic muted during an interview. And before you make the assumption as I did that he was probably talking about voter fraud, guess again. He was panning vaccines and face masks this time.

My Pillow CEO supposedly ‘Censored’ over controversial vaccine conspiracy comments but the truth as to why is more troubling

As for voter fraud, RSBM cut away from a panel claiming voter fraud happened. They didn’t do so because they don’t believe it. They did so because of the lawsuits that are popping up against media organizations who allow such claims to be made, plus the aforementioned YouTube problem. Initially, I was peeved by this move, but over the last couple of days I’ve realized my anger towards RSBN was completely misguided. Is self-censoring acceptable if it will save jobs? As ugly of a choice as it is to make, the answer is yes. It’s YouTube and Dominion and Facebook and Google and Democrats and mainstream media and everyone else who is forcing this issue who need to receive our wrath, not the networks who are unfortunately dependent on one or more of these venues that hate us.

We got into this mess because the vast majority of conservatives never though the banhammer would come down on us so hard. We thought that was for the fringe. Guess what? If you’re a conservative, you’re now considered the fringe by Big Tech.

 

[marsh]

Gen Z Conservative

The views and perspectives of a conservative college student on a wide variety of topics that interest young conservatives and conservatives of all ages.

genzconservative.com

What Is Liberty? The Right to Do What You Ought



Our answer to “What Is Liberty?” Is Wrong. It’s Not the Right to Do What You Want, It’s the Right to Do What You Ought

A major issue in American politics is the concept of liberty. We bicker over which party- Democrat, Republican, or Libertarian- is truly the party that supports liberty, whether certain policies would enhance or detract from individual liberty, and why America has gradually become a less free country. All of those arguments are good ones to have and are about important topics, but they often lack the proper grounding, which is a correct answer to the “what is liberty?” question.

That question, “what is liberty?,” needs to be answered and understood by society before our other arguments can proceed. In fact, I think our inability to properly answer it is what is behind most of our arguments and misunderstandings. Were we as a society to develop a proper answer to it, I think we might be able to have more substantive policy debates and settle issues in a more complete way, rather than just continue to bicker and temporarily change direction with executive orders.

So, what’s my answer to the “what is liberty?” question? Liberty is, as Michael Knowles frequently says in his podcast, the right to do what you ought, the discipline to do good even when doing so is difficult. It is not the right to do whatever you want and chase after a hedonistic lifestyle.

That difference is what differentiates liberty from libertinism. Libertinism is the idea that traditional sexual, religious, or moral norms don’t matter and that it is okay to live a lifestyle unbound by traditional morality. That is what was behind the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s, is behind the push for gay marriage today, is responsible for the massive increase in out of wedlock births that Charles Murray describes in Coming Apart, is behind the push for drug legalization, and is generally responsible for American society degenerating into one that is amoral and focused on pleasure and immediate gratification rather than responsible living.

Unfortunately, both the Democrats and Libertarians would answer the “what is liberty?” question with an answer that describes libertinism rather than true liberty. They are far too focused on permitting individuals to follow whatever twisted pleasures and sickening depravities they might like rather than on good outcomes for both individuals and society.

Conservatives, traditional ones, at least, understand that libertinism is not liberty. That’s why they typically stand against drug legalization, have pushed back against a host of changes to social and public policy such as legalizing abortion or gay marriage, have fought against increases to the welfare state, and generally focus on families and productivity in the way described by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism rather than letting individuals chase after whatever irresponsible lifestyle choices or depraved proclivities they might think they prefer.

The fact is, as Hayek once said, responsibility is the necessary other side of liberty. A society or individual cannot truly be free if passions are the central focus rather than responsibility because being a slave to one’s passions is no better than being a slave to the state.

Take, for example, developments from our current lives. Are single mothers better off because they chased sexual pleasure rather than behaving responsibly? No. Nor are they free. Are drug addicts better off or freer because they’re addicted to heroin, constantly stoned, or always chasing after their next pain pill? No. They’re slaves to their passions.

What about those who live lifestyles of sloth, are they free or better off? No. Welfare recipients and those that don’t work are often unhappy and unhealthy wards of the state. Finally, what about the obese, has their gluttonous nature made them free or happy? No. Like the drug addicts, they’re slaves to their passions and suffer accordingly.

And that’s where conservatives differ from libertarians and liberals. To a libertarian or progressive, it might not be a good thing that someone is addicted to heroin, obese, or a single parent, but it is a good thing that they have the “freedom” to do so; their shallow conception of the answer to “what is liberty?” shows their lack of understanding about why liberty is the right to do what you ought rather than what you want.

The Founding Fathers understood that. They set Americans free by establishing a constitutional republic, yet knew it would only last so long as Americans remained a morally upright people that focused on doing what they ought rather than what a desire for base pleasure pushed them toward.

Their recognition of the true nature of liberty is evident in quotations from the time. When someone asked what type of government the convention had established, Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Similarly, Adams remarked that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The Founding Fathers had the proper answer to “what is liberty?” They knew it was the right to do what you ought rather than the ability to do what your sinful instincts might tell you to do.

Conservatives must relearn that narrative and start pushing for it. A lifestyle of liberty is not one that prioritizes pre-marital sex, drug use, sloth, gluttony, and a general shunning of religious or social mores. That is a libertine lifestyle. A lifestyle of liberty is instead one that you would expect of a person with traditional values. Wait until marriage to have kids.

Don’t use drugs or overeat. Exercise frequently. Save your money and invest it responsibly. Act with dignity and respect others. Have good manners. Read widely and constantly learn.

Doing so will help you live a better life and will also show you know the answer to “what is liberty?”

Not only is that a recipe for a healthier, happier life, it is also the basic recipe for success in America. As Ben Shapiro said, all success takes is making a few simple life choices. You might not become fabulously wealthy, but you will be able to live a happy life and support a family.

And that happiness is from what true freedom stems. It liberates you from your passions and from chance. We don’t need to be saints; no one can live a life free of sin. But we do need to have values to live fulfilling lives (the “happiness” portion of the Declaration of Independence comes from the Ancient Greek concept of happiness coming from fulfillment). By saving, you’re relatively free from worrying about unemployment or an economic downturn. By waiting until marriage, you’re free from worry about out-of-wedlock births. By avoiding drug use, you’re free from being a slave to the next high.

That is, therefore, why liberty is the right to do what you ought. In societies without liberty, such as the Soviet Union or Mao’s China, people were not free to live as they thought they should. Their work was determined by the state, their ability to feed their families depended on ideological conformity rather than hard work, and traditional morals were thrown out by totalitarian, revolutionary officials. The result was that the lives of most people in those societies lacked fulfillment and they were deeply unhappy, as shown by the suicide epidemic in Soviet bloc nations like East Germany.

The US, however, did empower people to live the lives they ought to live (before America’s cultural revolution in the 60s, at least). Family life was prized and cherished, individual achievement was cheered, and society enforced semi-rigid moral beliefs that turned people toward morally upright lifestyles and away from chasing hedonistic living.

That is the sort of lifestyle conservatives should champion because it is the answer to “what is liberty?” It is the right to live the life you know you ought to live in the same manner that our forefathers did.

By: Gen Z Conservative
https://www.ilovemyfreedoms.com/free-red-2a-1791-hat?affiliate_id=2987262
_______________________________

[COMMENT:

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In Powell v. Com. of Pennsylvania, 127 U.S. 678 (1888), Justice Field in his dissenting opinion gave a classical definition of the notion of "liberty":

"It is the clause declaring that no state shall 'deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law,' which applies to the present case. This provision is found in the constitutions of nearly all the states, and was designed to prevent the arbitrary deprivation of life and liberty, and the arbitrary spoliation of property. As I said on a former occasion, it means that neither can be taken, or the enjoyment thereof impaired, except in the course of the regular administration of the law in the established tribunals. It has always been supposed to secure to every person the essential conditions for the pursuit of happiness, and is therefore not to be construed in a narrow or restricted sense. Ex parte Virginia, 100 U.S. 366. By 'liberty,' as thus used, is meant something more than freedom from physical restraint or imprisonment. It means freedom, not merely to go wherever one may choose, but to do such acts as he may judge best for his interest not inconsistent with the equal rights of others; that is, to follow such pursuits as may be best adapted to his faculties, and which will give to him the highest enjoyment...." ]

 

[marsh]

https://archive.fo/O7gkQ#selection-103.15-689.61

OPINION Academic Freedom Is Withering
Surveys of faculty opinion show the growing extent of political discrimination and cancel culture.

By Eric Kaufmann
Feb. 28, 2021 12:06 pm ET

ILLUSTRATION: CHAD CROWE

Academic freedom is in crisis on American campuses. Last year, the National Association of Scholars recorded 65 instances of professors being disciplined or fired for protected speech, a fivefold increase from the year before. Yet many of academia’s defenders brush aside worries about dismissal campaigns and the lack of ideological diversity as little more than a collection of anecdotes cherry-picked to feed a right-wing moral panic.

My new report for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology gives the lie to these claims. Based on eight comprehensive surveys of academic and graduate-student opinion across the U.S., Canada and Britain, it buttresses the findings of numerous studies to provide hard data on the absence of viewpoint diversity and presence of discrimination against conservative and gender-critical scholars. High-profile activist excesses are mere symptoms of a much wider problem of progressive authoritarianism. Roughly 1 in 3 conservative academics and graduate students has been disciplined or threatened with disciplinary action. A progressive monoculture empowers radical activist staff and students to violate the freedom of political minorities like conservatives or “gender-critical” feminists, who believe in the biological basis of womanhood—all in the name of emotional safety or social justice.

Political discrimination is pervasive: 4 in 10 American academics indicated in a survey this summer that they would not hire a known Trump supporter for a job. In Canada, the share is 45%, while in Britain, 1 in 3 academics wouldn’t hire a Brexit supporter. Between one-fifth and half of academics and graduate students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning grant applications, journal submissions and promotion cases. On a four-person panel, this virtually guarantees that a conservative will face discrimination.

Meanwhile, only 28% of American academics say they would be comfortable sitting with a gender-critical scholar over lunch, less even than the 41% who would sit with a Trump-voting colleague. Somehow this has become acceptable in a way it never would be for a person from a religious, as opposed to political, minority.

Some 75% of American and British conservative academics in social sciences and humanities say their departments offer a hostile climate for their beliefs. Nearly 4 in 10 American centrist faculty concur. This produces a chilling effect that results in self-censorship: I found that merely 9% of Trump-supporting academics say they would feel comfortable expressing their political beliefs to a colleague. Their progressive counterparts admit as much, with only 14% of all U.S. academics saying a Trump supporter would feel comfortable expressing his beliefs. In Britain, only 18% of Brexit-supporting academics would feel comfortable sharing their views, even though 52% of the British electorate supported Brexit.

Fully 7 in 10 conservative American academics say they self-censor in their teaching, research or academic discussions. Conservative scholars shy away from asking questions that go against the progressive consensus out of fear for their careers. This chilly climate is picked up by conservative and centrist students, which in turn influences the pipeline of who continues on to graduate school and the professoriate.

I find that conservative master’s students in social sciences and humanities fields are significantly more likely than other master’s students to believe their beliefs don’t fit in academia. Conservatives who think their politics wouldn’t fit are significantly less likely than others to be interested in pursuing an academic career. This isn’t about money.

Conservative master’s students are no more likely than progressive students to say that pay is a factor discouraging them from going into academia. In effect, there is a feedback loop: Low viewpoint diversity reproduces the hostile climate that sustains the progressive monoculture that has developed in many faculties over the past four decades.

The result of this hostile environment is conformity to a culture that is out of alignment with the nation’s. As in previous studies, I find a low level of political diversity, with only 5% of American scholars in the social sciences and humanities identifying as conservative. In the U.S. and Canada, academics on the left outnumber those on the right by a ratio of 14 to 1.

Many academics, most of whom are not radicals, are aware of the problem. A positive sign is that only 1 in 10 academics support “canceling” controversial right-wing professors by firing them from their jobs. But younger academics are twice as likely to endorse a dismissal campaign as older faculty. Doctoral candidates are around three times as likely, suggesting the problem of political intolerance is likely to get worse. More conservatives on the faculty would increase resistance to censorship, making it more difficult for progressive intolerance to succeed.

While some counsel a hands-off approach to the problem, the laissez-faire strategy has failed for nearly four decades. My new report shows why: Few academics want to cancel their controversial colleagues, but a growing minority discriminates against them and isn’t actively opposed to their cancellation. This helps explain why there isn’t enough internal pressure to protect academic freedom. The problem is now spilling off campus.

At this point, only a proactive approach can work, such as the policies recently announced in Britain, in which public universities are to be audited and potentially fined for academic freedom violations each year by the government. In the U.S., state or federal authorities must regulate public universities to ensure they protect the First Amendment rights of staff and students and don’t discriminate against political minorities. Unless reforms come from outside the academy, universities will continue to be monocultures in which conservative ideas aren’t given a fair hearing.

 

[marsh]

Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship

CSPI Report No. 2 Note: This is the Executive Summary. To read in PDF, click here. For the full report click here. Main Findings This study is the first of its kind to investigate authoritarianism and political discrimination in academia, relying on survey responses from both the perpetrators...

cspicenter.org

Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship
March 1, 2021 by Eric Kaufmann

CSPI Report No. 2
Note: This is the Executive Summary. To read in PDF, click here. For the full report

https://cspicenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/AcademicFreedom.pdf

Main Findings

• This study is the first of its kind to investigate authoritarianism and political discrimination in academia, relying on survey responses from both the perpetrators and targets of discrimination.
• Across three Anglophone countries, a significant portion of academics discriminate against conservatives in hiring, promotion, grants and publications. Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter, and 1 in 3 British academics would not hire a Brexit supporter.
• Gender-critical feminist scholars appear to experience even more discrimination than conservatives. Only 28% of American and Canadian academics would feel comfortable having lunch with someone who opposes the idea of transwomen accessing women’s shelters.
• Most professors do not back cancel culture in its most authoritarian forms. Only 1 in 10 academics supports firing controversial professors. Nonetheless, while most do not back cancellation, many are not opposed to it, remaining non-committal.
• Right-leaning academics experience a high level of institutional authoritarianism and peer pressure. In the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views while 70% of conservative academics report a hostile departmental climate for their beliefs.
• In the social sciences and humanities, over 9 in 10 Trump-supporting academics and 8 in 10 Brexit-supporting academics say they would not feel comfortable expressing their views to a colleague. More than half of North American and British conservative academics admit self-censoring in research and teaching.
• Younger academics and PhD students, especially in the United States, are significantly more willing than older academics to support dismissing controversial scholars from their posts, indicating that the problem of progressive authoritarianism is likely to get worse in the coming years.
• A hostile climate plays a part in deterring conservative graduate students from pursuing careers in academia. Conservative and liberal graduate students differ far more in their perceptions of whether their politics fit academia than they do on questions related to how well academia pays, the isolating nature of the work, and other aspects of the profession.
• One policy option is for government to proactively apply the law to universities, instituting sanctions for institutions that repeatedly breach individuals’ academic freedom while opening up a means for plaintiffs to appeal around their universities to a regulatory ombudsman. While this report makes no policy recommendations, this approach has been largely adopted by the British government.

High profile incidents of campus illiberalism are often brushed off as spirited exceptions to the rule that academic freedom is safe. Recent examples include the mob violence directed against Charles Murray at Middlebury State College and Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State University. Progressive critics view the free speech debate–on campus and more generally–as overblown, a moral panic concocted by the right.[1] In universities, many don’t experience a threat to their ability to teach and research, so they wonder what the problem is.

This report seeks to cut away from the headlines to explore large-scale survey data for the US, Canada, and the UK. Its unique contribution is providing robust quantitative analysis that reveals the nature and extent of punishment for speech and political discrimination from the perspectives of both perpetrators and victims. Few academics favor dismissal campaigns, but a significant minority admit to discriminating against conservatives, and a near-majority seem to do so when a “list method,” designed to get around social desirability bias, is used to elicit responses. From the perspective of the small minority of right-leaning academics, we see the consequences of this behavior, with most saying they experience a hostile climate in their departments and that they self-censor in their teaching and research. According to our surveys, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students in the United States say they have been threatened with disciplinary action for their beliefs.

While even one episode of intolerance of free speech should raise concern, it is important in science to be able to generalize findings to a wider population. This report begins with high-profile de-platformings and dismissals. But it soon moves beneath the surface to expose what are far more pervasive threats to academic freedom stemming from fears of a) cancellation–threats to one’s job or reputation, and b) political discrimination. These I dichotomize as hard and soft authoritarianism.

Support for Hard Authoritarianism in Academia

Hard authoritarianism entails no-platforming, dismissal campaigns, social media mob attacks, open letters, and formal complaints and disciplinary action, and stems mainly from a subgroup of illiberal far-left activist staff and students. I find that only a small minority of academic staff are protagonists. Figure 1 shows support for cancellation across five surveys and five hypothetical scenarios involving controversial academics. Across most questions, support for dismissal among academics is under 10%, though it is somewhat higher among PhD students.

Figure 1. Note: Excludes STEM academics. Labels refer to hypothetical scenarios in which respondents are asked whether they would support a campaign to dismiss a staff member who found the respective conclusions in their research. Brackets denote sample size.
Though few academics endorse cancellation, a significantly larger group are cross-pressured between their left and liberal commitments and thus unwilling to speak out against those who seek to silence free expression. In terms of those targeted, a significant minority of right-leaning academics and doctoral students have experienced hard authoritarianism.

Soft Authoritarianism: Self-Censorship and Discrimination

Soft authoritarianism involves a quieter but still insidious form of illiberalism that punishes those with conservative or otherwise non-conforming views in more mundane ways, damaging their careers and quality of workplace life. Those with dissenting views suffer from discrimination in terms of hiring, promotion, grant applications, publishing, the allocation of teaching and research tasks, workplace civility and social inclusion. This report includes surveys from both the potential perpetrators and victims of soft authoritarianism.

These surveys establish the share of academics who prioritize progressive values over academic freedom (a figure that varies depending on the nature of the question), and how conservative scholars perceive their experiences and the academic climate in their departments.

I find that left and right, academics and non-academics, discriminate against each other at similar rates. The big difference on campus is the heavy leftward skew among staff at virtually all universities, and among students–especially at elite institutions. Political discrimination against conservatives and other intellectual minorities, such as gender-critical feminists (who accept a biological definition of sex), implicates between a third and a half of academics. Perpetrators of discrimination include not only a near-majority on the far left but also some center-left and even centrist staff. Using a concealed list technique reveals that 1 in 3 British academics would discriminate against a known Brexit supporter while 40% of American academics and 45% of Canadian academics would discriminate against a known Trump supporter.

The share who openly admit to political discrimination is only about a third to half the revealed (actual) total, but even limiting ourselves to unabashed discrimination, as Figure 2 does, indicates that over 20% of academics and around 30% of doctoral students openly admit that they would discriminate against a right-leaning grant bid. If we account for concealment, this means that between a third and half of assessors are politically biased, resulting in an open conservative facing an at least 80% chance of being discriminated against on a four-person panel chosen at random. By contrast, discrimination against left-leaning bids, papers or promotions is largely counterbalanced by political discrimination in favor of them.

Figure 2. Note: Includes STEM academics. Based on a direct question rather than a concealed list technique.

Unsurprisingly, right-leaning academics understand that they are part of a minority that faces structural barriers. Cancellation and political discrimination are leading a majority of them to report that their departments are hostile climates for their political beliefs, as seen in Figure 3.

(see Exec. Summary here: Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship )

 

[marsh]

Little-Known Civil Rights Law Could Bring Big Tech to Its Knees

An existing Seattle law could provide grounds to sue Amazon, Facebook, Apple and other big tech companies if they engage in political censorship.

mindmatters.ai

LITTLE-KNOWN CIVIL RIGHTS LAW COULD BRING BIG TECH TO ITS KNEES
Many tech giants have considerable assets and many employees in Seattle's jurisdiction

JOHN G. WEST FEBRUARY 16, 2021

SEATTLE—As state and federal lawmakers consider drafting new legislation to counter big tech censorship of dissenting political voices, few seem to realize that an anti-discrimination law already on the books could spell big trouble for big tech companies that engage in political censorship.

Ironically, the law was enacted by one of the most politically progressive cities in the country: Seattle.

Unlike most political jurisdictions in the United States, Seattle expressly forbids discrimination on the basis of “political ideology.” Seattle defines political ideology expansively as

any idea or belief, or coordinated body of ideas or beliefs, relating to the purpose, conduct, organization, function or basis of government and related institutions and activities, whether or not characteristic of any political party or group. This term includes membership in a political party or group and includes conduct, reasonably related to political ideology, which does not interfere with job performance.

Seattle’s sweeping ban on discrimination based on political ideology doesn’t just apply to employment or public accommodations. It also includes a “Fair Contracting Practices Ordinance” banning discrimination in contracting.

This is important because contracting includes almost anything a business does when interacting with consumers and other businesses. Whenever a business sells a product or a service to customers, it is contracting with those customers to provide something.
The potential reach of Seattle’s law is breathtaking. An attorney asked by Mind Matters News to review the law explains that

the definition of a “contract” covered by the ordinance means “any agreement to perform a service or provide goods that entails a legally binding obligation, where such contract is executed within, or intended to be wholly or partly performed within The City of Seattle.” A “contractor” means “any business enterprise” excluding landlords that are “contracting to do business within the city.” And the definition of “contractor” includes “vendors[] and suppliers selling or furnishing materials, equipment, goods or services.”

A person doesn’t necessarily have to live in Seattle or even Washington State in order to file legal action under the law. The attorney asked to review the ordinance for Mind Matters News adds:

a “person” entitled to protection under the ordinance includes one or more individuals or business entities. This definition does not impose any residency requirement. If a person enters into a contract with a business enterprise doing business in the City and the contract is performed at least in part within the City then the ordinance applies.

There are two ways individuals or groups can raise a complaint under Seattle’s anti-discrimination contracting ordinance: They can file an administrative complaint, or they can file a lawsuit. Unlike some civil rights laws, Seattle’s fair contracting ordinance does not require someone to file an administrative complaint before filing a lawsuit. They can file a lawsuit immediately.

The Seattle anti-discrimination law packs a punch. According to the attorney retained to analyze the law, the ordinance authorizes remedies available under Washington State law, and state law authorizes “actual damages plus the costs of bringing the suit… plus remedies authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Federal Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988.” Those remedies include “injunctive relief, orders requiring affirmative action, and punitive damages.”

Damages requested under the law could be severe. The attorney says: “Although the administrative process appears to limit pain and suffering damages to $10,000, there is no similar limit on causes of action filed in court… Additionally, the ordinance makes expressly clear that damage awards for humiliation and mental suffering are not subject to the ordinance’s limits for the administrative process.”

Seattle’s fair contracting ordinance could spell big trouble in particular for Amazon.com.
Amazon is headquartered in Seattle, and so there is little question that the Seattle law applies to it with full force. In the words of the attorney retained by Mind Matters News, “under the ordinance… any individual or business entity who is allegedly harmed by an unfair contracting practice by Amazon most likely would have a cause of action in a court of law against Amazon.”

Amazon landed in hot water last month when its Amazon Web Services (AWS) company dropped web hosting services for Parler, the conservative social media platform. Amazon said it canceled the services because Parler hosted “content… that encourages and incites violence against others, and… Parler is unable or unwilling to promptly identify and remove this content, which is a violation of our terms of service.”

Parler claimed otherwise, arguing in federal court that such content violated its community guidelines and that it did act to remove the content. Parler’s federal lawsuit against Amazon faces an uphill battle because its agreement with Amazon Web Services explicitly grants Amazon the right to cancel its service for any reason without notice.

But Seattle’s anti-discrimination law would seem to supply Parler with another basis to sue Amazon in Washington State court.

Under Seattle’s fair contracting law, Amazon could still impose politically neutral standards on businesses it contracts with to provide web services. For example, Amazon.com could decide it doesn’t want to provide hosting services for any websites that include violent, sexually explicit, profane, or abusive material.

But under the Seattle law, Amazon’s standards would have to be applied impartially to all websites regardless of their political ideology. In other words, Amazon could cancel its contract with Parler for hosting “content… that encourages and incites violence against others,” but only if Amazon applied this standard in the same way to everyone without regard to political ideology. Amazon could not discriminate by adopting one standard for politically conservative customers and another for politically progressive customers.

In one of its court filings, Parler suggests that Amazon may have done just that. Parler alleges that the Amazon Web Services representative assigned to it “repeatedly asked” whether President Donald Trump “had joined or would join Parler now that he was blocked by Twitter and Facebook.” In a separate court declaration, former Parler CEO John Matze claimed that this Amazon representative was “a Joe Biden supporter” and that “it was only after Twitter announced its intention to terminate Trump from its platform that AWS expressed any concern about Parler’s compliance with its agreement.”

If Amazon’s actions against Parler were due in part to Parler’s political orientation, then those actions could constitute unlawful discrimination under Seattle law. It doesn’t matter if Amazon had a non-political reason for its policies if it applied its policies more strictly against Parler because of its political orientation.

There is more. In December 2020, it was announced that Twitter would begin using Amazon Web Services. Twitter has been accused of not adequately policing violent content on its own platform, especially violent content from the political left. If Amazon Web Services treats Twitter more leniently than Parler, it could provide evidence that its actions against Parler were discriminatory.

Amazon’s potential liability goes far beyond its web hosting services.

Amazon also runs a self-publishing platform that enables authors and groups to publish their own paperback or Kindle books for sale on Amazon. Last year, Amazon’s self-publishing platform initially rejected a Kindle booklet by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson that criticized government policies related to COVID-19. After an outcry, Amazon reversed its decision, claiming it had been a mistake.

If Amazon hadn’t reversed itself, the company might well have faced liability under Seattle’s fair contracting law. Recall that the Seattle law defines “political ideology” as “any idea or belief… relating to the purpose, conduct, organization, function or basis of government and related institutions and activities, whether or not characteristic of any political party or group.” (emphasis added) Beliefs about public health policies relating to COVID-19 would certainly seem to qualify for protection under the Seattle law.

Given how many things Amazon sells, its potential liability under the fair contracting law could be considerable. It’s not hard to come up with other cases where the law might apply. According to published reports, Amazon banned the sale of a pro-Trump coffee brand on its platform, initially rejected a film by noted black conservative Shelby Steele (the film was later allowed), censored a film critical of “fake news” by conservative Mike Cernovich, and canceled a conservative publisher’s ad campaign for a book about transgenderism and public policy. While Amazon might be able to justify some of these decisions on non-political grounds, they at least raise the question of whether Amazon is discriminating based on political ideology.

However, Amazon isn’t the only big company that could be targeted under the Seattle law.
Other tech giants, notably Facebook and Apple, have physical offices and employees in Seattle. In fact, Apple has plans to expand its workforce to 2,000 employees in Seattle, and Facebook is currently advertising more than 450 open positions in Seattle. Any company with a physical presence and employees in Seattle is potentially subject to the provisions of Seattle’s anti-discrimination law, although suing a company whose main base of operations is in another state would pose some extra hurdles.

In recent years, the United States Supreme Court has made it more difficult for state courts to exercise what is known as “general personal jurisdiction” over companies that are headquartered elsewhere. Even so, there are ways to get around those restrictions by demonstrating what is known as “specific personal jurisdiction.”

Basically, the greater the presence an outside company has in Seattle, and the more connected the alleged discrimination is to Seattle, the more likely a case can be brought where the Seattle anti-discrimination law will apply. According to the attorney retained by Mind Matters News:

The following combined factors would make it likely that Washington State courts would have specific personal jurisdiction over a Seattle anti-discrimination claim involving an out-of-state big tech company: (1) the physical presence of offices, network resources, and employees in Washington; (2) a contract for online services such as advertisements that are in some way targeted to the Seattle area; and (3) the big tech company’s intentional act in cancelling that specific contract giving rise to the discrimination complaint.

Consider the case of Facebook. Although headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Facebook has more than 3,000 employees in the Seattle area, multiple office buildings in Seattle itself, and more than 1.1 million user accounts within a 10-mile radius of Seattle, not to mention more than 5.1 million user accounts in all of Washington State. Facebook sells advertisers access to its Seattle and Washington users.

Let’s say a politically conservative group tries to reach a Seattle audience by purchasing advertising through Facebook, but is turned down. It might well have a cause of action against Facebook if the tech company continues to sell ads to politically progressive groups. Google, which also has a Seattle presence, and which also sells ads that reach a Seattle audience, would face the same situation. The attorney retained by Mind Matters News explains:

A contract between a person in Seattle (or person merely in Washington State) and Facebook or Google for online ads targeted to Seattle that is subsequently canceled on account of political ideology would seem to fit all three key facts just identified. The jurisdictional claim would be even stronger if personnel in the Seattle office were directly involved in the discriminatory action. But this isn’t strictly necessary. Rather, the discriminatory action by the out-of-state big tech company must be related to their contacts with Washington—or related to the type of business they are conducting in Washington. Nor is it strictly necessary for the plaintiff to be from Seattle or in Washington, since the jurisdictional inquiry is concerned with the state where the defendant’s action is directed. But having a Seattle or a Washington resident would appear to be helpful since that would make the transaction more specific to Washington and thereby constitute one of the defendant out-of-state big tech companies’ minimum contacts with Washington.

Apple is another big tech firm that could be subject to the Seattle law. Although headquartered in Cupertino, California, Apple not only has a growing Seattle workforce (and a new Seattle office complex boasting more than 600,000 square feet of space), its Seattle offices apparently include employees working for the Apple Media Products Commerce Engineering team, which “manages purchases from all iOS products, including Apps, Music, and Subscriptions.”

This means that Apple’s operations in Seattle have a direct tie to the operation of its App Store, which has long been accused of banning apps based on political ideology. In 2010, Apple banned an app that advocated the “sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as a union of husband and wife, and the freedom of conscience and religion.” In 2017, it banned a pro-life app, and it has banned the apps for conservative social media platforms Gab and Parler.

Any app developer located in Seattle whose app is rejected by Apple due to political ideology may well have grounds to sue Apple under the Seattle law.

Financial service companies could also face liability under Seattle’s fair contracting practices ordinance. For example, if a financial services company operating in Seattle denies a group online credit card processing services based on the group’s political ideology, the financial services company could be opening itself up to a lawsuit. If actually headquartered in Seattle, the company could likely be sued by any of its customers regardless of their location. If the company only operates within Seattle but isn’t headquartered there, the company could still be subject to lawsuits from Seattle or Washington State residents.

Out-of-state tech companies may try to preempt lawsuits based on Seattle civil rights laws by requiring all their vendors and customers to agree to litigate any disputes in the tech companies’ home states.

But the attorney consulted by Mind Matters News says that this gambit would likely fail.

The attorney notes that the Seattle law’s “discrimination claims are authorized by the Washington Law Against Discrimination (WLAD), and WLAD claims cannot be waived by contract. According to case law, it would defeat the public policy of the State of Washington to treat a WLAD claim as waived by the choice of law clause of a contract. It would seem to follow that anti-discrimination claims that are authorized by WLAD would similarly be backed by the public policy of Washington and be non-waivable.”

It remains to be seen whether anyone will actually use Seattle’s fair contracting ordinance to take on big tech censorship.

But if they do, Seattle could soon become ground zero in the battle against big tech.

 

[marsh]

John Brennan: "I'm Increasingly Embarrassed to be a White Male These Days" (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit | by Cristina Laila

Former CIA Director and architect of Spygate John Brennan went all in with the anti-white message being pushed by the left during an appearance on MSNBC Monday.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

John Brennan: “I’m Increasingly Embarrassed to be a White Male These Days” (VIDEO)
By Cristina Laila
Published March 1, 2021 at 7:13pm

Former CIA Director and architect of Spygate John Brennan went all in with the anti-white message being pushed by the left during an appearance on MSNBC Monday.

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace asked former Democrat Senator Claire McCaskill (MO) about CPAC’s mostly white male audience (gasp) complaining about “cancel culture.”

McCaskill replied, “Because they want to be the victims, not the perpetrators. I have never seen so many whiny white men calling themselves victims as I saw over the weekend at CPAC. These are all people that think they have a huge grievance from a position of significant privilege.”

Brennan piled on and trashed white males: “I’m increasingly embarrassed to be a white male these days,” prompting MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace to laugh.

Pathetic.
WATCH:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1366498703452872704

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1366498703452872704
.58 min

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWOo7AEFwJo
7:08 min

Glenn is FIRED UP about the left canceling Dr. Seuss: ‘THIS IS FASCISM!’
•Mar 2, 2021


Glenn Beck
Glenn can’t help but wonder, ‘WHAT IS WRONG WITH US?’ When is this nation going to WAKE UP? Because the left’s latest move — canceling 6 Dr. Seuss books due to ‘hurtful and wrong’ illustrations — takes America one step closer to complete INSANITY. Glenn argues that deleting books is the perfect example of fascism, so, when will we finally realize it?

 

[marsh]

Confessions of a Trump Republican | RealClearPolitics

Over at MSNBC, they are calling those who think like me Dead-Enders, people who will follow Donald Trump into the bunker and die with him. Its...

www.realclearpolitics.com

Confessions of a Trump Republican
COMMENTARY
.
By Frank Miele
March 01, 2021
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Over at MSNBC, they are calling those who think like me “Dead-Enders,” people who will follow Donald Trump into the bunker and die with him. It’s supposed to be an insult. That’s all right. I’ve been called worse -- domestic terrorist, white supremacist, racist. None of those slurs are accurate, but they sure do hurt.

Which is the point.

My smart-beyond-her-ninth-grade-education mother warned me about the power of political name-calling a long time ago. Back in the 1960s when I was a precocious ninth-grader myself, my mom told me never to join the Students for a Democratic Society, a left-wing antiwar group that kept sending me mail asking for a donation. If you do send them money, my mom said, then you are going to have a target on your back. Sometime, maybe years later, powerful people will come after you, call you a communist, and try to punish you.

She knew all about name-calling because she had lived through the Red Scare of the 1950s. People lost their careers for joining the wrong group, for attending the wrong rally -- for having the wrong beliefs. Lives were ruined. Blacklists kept people in fear. It was hard to believe for a young man like me who loved his country that there would ever come a time again when Americans could be marginalized and have their livelihoods threatened just for taking a political stand.

But here we are again. Today, you can’t be a Trump conservative or, heaven forbid, a Trump Republican without having not just your patriotism questioned, but your very sanity.

Over on CNN, folks like me are targeted as the Republicans trying to “roll back your right to vote.” John King, who was once a real journalist, should know better. But there he is, telling the useful idiots who watch CNN that defending against election fraud is somehow an attack on voting rights. This kind of loose talk legitimizes attacks on people like me since he states as a fact that we are working to undermine democracy.

Although I used to watch CNN and MSNBC on a regular basis, it’s pointless now unless I want to find out exactly how the left is gaslighting the American public. There is no news anymore; there is just the 24/7 propaganda war aimed at conservatives. King says that Republicans around the country are only working to reform the voting process because of what he calls “the big Trump lie about massive 2020 fraud.”

Talk about a big lie! The most tiresome one promoted by the Fake News Media these days is that Donald Trump is some sort of political Svengali who has a magic power over certain naive voters or mindless jackal Republican officials and can manipulate them into doing his will.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Trump is not a leader in the traditional sense of inspiring his supporters to believe as he does, but rather someone who gains his strength and power from his ability to reflect the beliefs of those whom he leads. If you want to know why I am a Trump Republican, it is because only Trump has consistently and effectively put into words the values and beliefs I was armed with long before he appeared on the scene. He hasn’t always been able to effectuate those values in policy changes, but I’m willing to forgive him his failures because he -- like me -- has been the victim of cultural and political elites who despise him. They have proven they would stop at nothing to bring him to his knees, so it was no surprise to me that they rigged the election against him by changing voting rules and then blamed him for the chaos that resulted.

The canard of the second Trump impeachment was that the 45th U.S. president had incited an insurrection against the government of the United States by promoting the supposedly “baseless” conspiracy theory that Democrats had stolen the election. That presumes that his rather lackluster speech at the Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6 had the capacity to inspire a rebellion, which it didn’t, but more importantly it deprives those who recklessly entered the U.S. Capitol of their agency and responsibility in breaking the law. It also assumes that people like me who studied the evidence and concluded that there was indeed fraud in the 2020 vote are dupes of the Great and Powerful Oz, er, Trump.

That mistake has been repeated throughout Trump’s candidacy and presidency -- over-estimating Trump’s persuasiveness and under-estimating the savvy of his audience. It wasn’t Trump who shaped the conservative movement in America, but rather the conservative movement that shaped Trump like Pygmalion into the political embodiment of heartland American values: free speech, law and order, good jobs, secure borders, equality but not equity.

If some fair-minded historian wants to make an honest attempt at writing the story of the Trump movement, that is where they should begin -- with the understanding that Trump was called into being by necessity. His genius, if you will, was recognizing the spirit of the times and riding it into the White House.

As one of the earliest media supporters of Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2015, I had the good fortune to play a minor role in catalyzing the marriage between Trump’s dynamic personality and what remained of the Tea Party movement that had nearly fizzled out since 2010. It was not by accident that the first three collections of my columns were published under the general title of “Why We Needed Trump.” There was never any doubt in my mind that no one besides Donald Trump could galvanize the untapped potential of the forgotten men and women of America and overthrow the corrupt governing system that eventually became known as “the Swamp.”

It turned out that he didn’t do it. The Swamp was bigger and dirtier than anyone suspected, but you know what? So far, the Swamp hasn’t won completely, It hasn’t vanquished Trump and it hasn’t convinced the Deplorables to go away and hide. The Russia hoax? He beat it. Ukraine impeachment sham? He beat it. Impeachment 2.0? He beat it. Yep, the Democrats are right. He’s a fighter. He doesn’t just curl up and surrender like Liz Cheney and Mitch McConnell and Ben Sasse and Nikki Haley.

If you want to know why I’m a Dead-Ender, a Trump Republican to the end, it’s this: No one else will fight like hell for the country I grew up in, the country I believe in, and the country that my forefathers died for. Trump may not be perfect; neither am I. But he damn sure didn’t have to hypnotize me or manipulate me or mislead me to get me on his side. I’ll confess: He had me at “Make America Great Again.”

 

[marsh]

Dinesh D'Souza on the New Kind of Socialism ⋆ Politicrossing

There’s a new socialism in town. Its foundations are more cultural than economic.

politicrossing.com

Dinesh D’Souza on the New Kind of Socialism

There’s a new socialism in town. Its foundations are more cultural than economic.

March 2, 2021

In this brand new PragerU Video, Dinesh D’Souza makes the case that there is a new kind of socialism that is less economic and more cultural. Watch the video below or below the video is the transcript!

Here is the script of the video:

There’s a new socialism in town. I call it identity socialism.

The old socialism, the kind Karl Marx dreamed up, was all about the working class, the sort of blue-collar worker who, ironically, voted for President Trump. But today’s socialist couldn’t care less about the guy in the hardhat. He had his chance at revolution and blew it. Today’s socialist is all about race, gender, and transgender rights. Class is an afterthought.

To understand this is to understand the Left’s takeover of the college campus and all the ills that takeover has spawned: from MeToo to Black Lives Matter to girls competing against biological boys. But campus culture has now metastasized into the culture of the whole society. As liberal writer Andrew Sullivan has put it: “We all live on campus now.”

Identity socialism is first and foremost about division. Not just class division, but now race division, gender division, transgender division. Blacks and Latinos are in, whites are out. Women are in, men are out. Gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, transgenders are in; heterosexuals are out. Illegals are in, native-born citizens are out.

One may think this is all part of the politics of inclusion, but to think that is to get only half the picture. The point, for the left, is not merely to include but also to exclude.

So, where did this identity socialism come from? Meet Herbert Marcuse.

Born in Berlin in 1898, Marcuse fled Germany at the dawn of the Nazi era. After stints at Columbia, Harvard, and Brandeis, Marcuse moved to California, where he joined the University of California at San Diego in 1965. You’d think that living in a paradise like Southern California with all the comforts and privileges of academic life, might have softened Marcuse’s Marx-like hatred of capitalism. But it was not to be. If anything, the more he prospered the more he wanted to bring the system down.

He had a problem, however. A big one. Socialism didn’t work in America. Life was too good. The working class in the US didn’t aspire to overthrow the existing order, they aspired to own a home. How could you foment revolution without revolutionaries? Classic Marxism had no answer for this. But almost a hundred years after Marx, Marcuse did. The answer was college students. They would be the recruits for what he termed the Great Refusal—the repudiation and overthrow of free-market capitalism.

Conditions were perfect. The students of the sixties were already living in what was in effect a socialist commune—a university campus. Rather than being grateful to their parents for providing them with this opportunity to learn and study, they were restless and bored. Most importantly they were looking for “meaning,” a form of self-fulfillment that went beyond material gratification.

Of course, as with all successful social movements, timing was critical. Here Marcuse was very fortunate. The sixties was the decade of the Vietnam War. Students faced the prospect of being drafted. Thus, they had selfish reasons to oppose the conflict. Marcuse and his acolytes turned this selfishness into righteousness by teaching the students that they weren’t draft-dodgers; they were noble resisters who were part of a global struggle for social justice.

Marcuse portrayed Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong as a kind of Third World proletariat, fighting to free themselves from American Imperialism. This represented a transposition of Marxist categories. The new working class were the Vietnamese “freedom fighters.” The evil capitalists were American soldiers serving on behalf of the American government.

 

[marsh]

If You Liked Common Core, You're Going To Love Joe Biden's Civics

We have just the perfect solution for American kids' deep ignorance about their nation's founding principles, system of government, and history.

thefederalist.com

If You Liked Common Core, You’re Going To Love Joe Biden’s Anti-American Civics Project

We have just the perfect solution for American kids' deep ignorance about their nation's founding principles, system of government, and history. It's making them into political activists!

By Joy Pullmann
MARCH 2, 2021

It’s deja vu all over again. A coalition of government- and billionaire-funded nonprofits has a “bipartisan” plan for national curriculum goals, this time concerning U.S. history and government. Today this “state-led” coalition is releasing a major report they hope will get the attention of the Biden administration and state governors to “collaboratively” enact their vision nationwide.

Remember, these sorts of national plans are supported by people on the right and left, so there can be no need for further investigation or any public questioning. The experts have got this problem all figured out. Your children and the nation’s future are in their hands. Trust them, these are experts under whose leadership the nation’s civic and historical knowledge not only hasn’t improved but may be at the worst point in possibly all of American history, because of — oops, I mean in spite of their best efforts!

More than 300 “leading scholars” have spent 17 months putting together a “roadmap” for “what and how to teach integrated K-12 history and civics for today’s learners.” It’s a “cross-ideological conversation about civic learning and history at a time when our country needs it the most,” so don’t worry your pretty little heads about anything and let the experts sort it out! What could go wrong?

What, you heard that the Smithsonian is saturating its exhibits and materials with social-justice saturated fake history and forking over good taxpayer money for racist propaganda, and therefore you’re a bit concerned about their involvement in this project? What’s wrong with you, the Smithsonian is an old and venerable American institution! Republican senators are putting billions of dollars behind its promotion of cultural Marxism!

Did we mention this project is also bipartisan? The education secretaries for Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama are all on board, of course. They presided over a massive decline in U.S. education quality and increase in bureaucracy, so you know it’s a good idea!

The DC uniparty has just the perfect solution for American kids’ dangerous ignorance about their nation’s founding principles, system of government, and history. It’s making them into political activists! It’s called “action civics.” Isn’t that exciting? Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were big fans. Remember them? So are Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, those models of respect for the U.S. Constitution!

No, kids don’t need to know anything to lobby their local, state, and national governments, that would ruin the effect. Everyone knows learning is boring! What’s fun is action! Action civics! You know, like the nation saw in the past year or so, all those refreshing young people protesting in the streets for racial justice.

That’s the kind of civic entrepreneurship we’re looking for, not the boring conventional entrepreneurship these civic entrepreneurs destroyed to the tune of an estimated $2 billion. That’s old news, just like the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Didn’t you hear those were written by slaveowners like George Washington to keep black people in chains?

No, what we want is democracy. That’s why this project is called Educating for American Democracy. Out with that old constitutional republic stuff, it’s so racist. RAY-CIST. What’s new and hip is a living constitution, just like RBG fought for. The Educating for American Democracy Project has a brilliant new report, see, all about why the nation’s dearth of civic knowledge demands a solution from “cooperative federalism,” just like Common Core was the obvious solution to the nation’s shamefully poor-quality math and English education!

Even though this initiative is being created in almost exactly the same way the Common Core rules for math and English were created, this is nothing at all like Common Core. For one thing, it was created by committees of unelected participants funded partially by government and partially by private organizations not subject to transparency laws like open meetings and open records requests. Wait, that’s just like Common Core.

But this is NOT, let me repeat, NOT a national curriculum at all. It’s only a set of guidelines, lesson plans, curriculum design frameworks, and stuff like that — just like Common Core. Um, I mean… This is just like Common Core but it’s totally NOT AT ALL LIKE COMMON CORE. Just trust me, brand-name Republicans are involved. Just like with Common Core!

Why would anyone on the right oppose this — almost every single committee for this project includes the one conservative guy we could find to put his name on this thing so we could introduce him to Republicans nervous about this idea. Okay, actually, it’s maybe 10 conservatives out of more than 300. They’re not really always comfortable identifying themselves, not sure why, especially since they are paid to be “cross-partisan,” just like those super-useful Never Trumpers we rent out for special events at a great discount.

Regardless, 10 conservatives would never get steamrolled on a project like this, right? Just ask the five genuine subject-area experts who signed onto the Common Core project and then retracted their support after it in no way resembled defensible curriculum requirements. They weren’t used and then discarded in a cynical attempt to hide this project’s flaws under the veneer of “transpartisanship” until it was too late. No way. Lefties never do that to conservatives. Ever.

No way action civics will get into place in states and then this project will be cited as the reason for far-left curriculum like that already happening in Massachusetts under the test run for this national project. That was touted as “bipartisan,” too, and run by the many of same people and organizations that are about to boost this national project.

Too bad, conservatives, you kicked at Leftist Lucy’s football again, ha! Thanks for playing! We love this game. Kick again, please! We’re counting on it.

I mean, Common Core was foisted on states by the Obama administration in exchange for federal funds. Joe Biden was there when that happened, and he would never govern like Obama, now, would he? No way, he’s way more aggressive than Obama was! And he yanked that divisive 1776 Commission Report on his first day in office, so you know his U.S. Department of Education supports what is best for children, not all that jingoistic “loving your country” crap!

Unity in hating America, that’s the goal here, and we’ve almost achieved it. We just need a bit more tinkering, okay, we haven’t got the formula quite right yet, those insurrectionist Trump voters are clouding Republican senators’ view a bit too much still. We’ve almost trained some to swat them away like gnats. John Cornyn, for sure. Just a few more years of cranked-up indoctrination combined with open borders in Texas, and Beto can finally replace him.

So for the sake of unity, just go along with reinforcing public schools as leftist indoctrination factories. Sing kumbaya with us and none of your precious little public school funds will get threatened. You wouldn’t want anything to happen to that money, would you? It’s for the children. And civics. Conservatives like civics, right? Pay no attention to all the leftists behind the curtain.

 

[marsh]

California Releases Video Pushing Partnership with Microsoft to Collect Biometric Data From Children, Enforce Vaccine Mandates - Big League Politics

The Orwellian Nightmare is manifesting itself.

bigleaguepolitics.com

California Releases Video Pushing Partnership with Microsoft to Collect Biometric Data From Children, Enforce Vaccine Mandates

The Orwellian Nightmare is manifesting itself.

Mar 2, 2021
By
Shane Trejo

take our poll - story continues below


A video released by California contains propaganda meant to cajole state residents into accepting digital health IDs for children as necessary to reopen schools.

“There’s never been anything like this virus in our lifetime. Often, it’s hard to see the effects it’s having on our children,” the propaganda video states.

A kid’s voice is used to tug at the heartstrings of the viewer so they are more likely to comply with absurd mandates. California then introduced their new partnership with Microsoft, giving a massive globalist corporation access to a treasure trove of the biometric data from children – an apparent violation of the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution – under the guise of safety.

“Each week, you can schedule your free on-campus COVID test. The results are displayed in your daily pass, and, if you choose to take your test off campus, you can post your results in your daily pass,” the video states.

“And, the moment vaccinations are available, you’ll simply be able to schedule yours through your daily pass. But the real magic is your daily health check. Just answer a few simple health questions everyday, and like magic, your entrance ticket appears,” the video adds.

The video then shows children being forced to comply with these invasive checks to be able to go to school, with folksy-sounding music in the backdrop to make the process of subjugation seem quaint and fun. A cheap emotional appeal involving children was placed at the end of the video to influence viewers broken by the cruelty of the scamdemic.

“So, how did it go?” the father asks the daughter in the video after picking her up from school.

“Dad, I have to admit I was scared at first, but then I felt so safe. It was so good to be back. Thanks for keeping me safe. I love you so much,” the daughter says in response.
The video can be seen here:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1366507394541387779

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1366507394541387779
1:58 min

Big League Politics has reported on the technological nightmares that are being inflicted on society by bureaucrats, scientists, communists, and other privileged elites at war with civilization and humanity:

The coronavirus pandemic is being used to escalate the push for Big Brother, and tech corporations are salivating at the opportunity to help enforce social distancing edicts with terrifying innovations.

The Intercept has reported on the push to slap FitBit-style bracelets onto people in order to track them and coerce their behavior. AiRISTA Flow, a tech firm based out of Maryland, is marketing bracelets that would beep whenever a person comes within six feet of another individual in the workplace.

“When people come within six feet of each other for a period of time,” the company wrote in a press release about their creepy and invasive device, “the device makes an audible chirp and a record of the contact is made in the AiRISTA Flow software system.”

The technology would also allow employers to track every violation of social distancing edicts committed by their workers. The workers could then be reprimanded, or even fired, based off of the information gathered by the device.
The Redpoint Positioning Corporation is developing similar technology to turn employers into quarantine enforcement brigades. They have announced that they are working on modifying “cutting-edge technology … already used by leading companies worldwide in third-party logistics, auto manufacturing, mine operation” to be used in the enforcement of social distancing edicts. They plan on tagging people and products in the workplace to allow employers to institute Draconian restrictions on the freedom of movement.

“If social distancing parameters, such as a 1- or 2-meter radius, are violated between workers, the tag alarm will alert them to the hazard,” Redpoint wrote in their press release.

“If an infection does occur, historical data from the system will allow for highly accurate contact tracing, as records can show the individuals who were near the infected party,” they added.

Israeli surveillance firm SuperCom is repackaging services that are used on criminals to enforce home confinement on ordinary people in the workplace. They are calling their service “PureCare,” and it is described as a “state-of-the-art solution for quarantine and isolation monitoring to aid government efforts in containing and limiting the reach of infectious diseases.” They claim it is “a non-intrusive patient friendly system that constantly tracks patient location within buildings, vehicles and outside.”

They noted in their press release that they have experienced a sharp increase in “government agencies looking to restrict the spread of COVID-19 among their general population” and anticipate “additional potential industry demand for electronic monitoring services coming from the incarcerated American population.”

SuperCom talks in a cavalier fashion about how their technology will be used to treat ordinary law-abiding citizens like criminals. They released a promotional video on YouTube boasting that the exact same type of technology used to track and control convicts will be used on regular people.

If these psychotic proposals are not defeated and the forces behind them not swiftly brought to justice, society could be on the cusp of the permanent realization of Aldous Huxley’s dark vision outlined in his 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World.

 

[marsh]

REPORT: Arizona Education Department Provides ‘Equity Toolkit’ That Shows Racism Starts At 3 Months Old

Arizona reportedly created an “equity toolkit” that includes an infographic that shows how racism develops in children as young as three-months old.

dailycaller.com

REPORT: Arizona Education Department Provides ‘Equity Toolkit’ That Shows Racism Starts At 3 Months Old

(Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
MARLO SAFICULTURE REPORTER
March 02, 20214:12 PM ET

The Arizona Department of Education reportedly created an “equity toolkit” that includes an infographic that shows how racism develops in children as young as three-months old, and recommended readings that suggest that white people are “ignorant, color-blind, and racist,” Discovery Institute scholar Christopher Rufo reported.

The toolkit shows a spectrum of children from birth to ages over six, with the title “They’re not too young to talk about race!” It cites a study that shows at birth, “babies look equally at faces of all races. At 3 months, babies look more at faces that match the race of their caregivers.”



By 30 months old, children use race to choose playmates, and at ages 4 and 5, “expressions of racial prejudice often peak.”

“By five, Black and Latinx children in research settings show no preference toward their own groups compared to Whites; White children at this age remain strongly biased in favor of whiteness,” the graphic says, citing a 2008 study.

The document encourages adults to talk to children about race instead of letting children “draw their own conclusions based on what they see.”

“Silence about race reinforces racism,” the document says.

Specifically, white parents are urged to address “anti-racism” with their children before they can even speak, or their children will learn racism “from the world around them,” a document entitled “How White Parents Can Talk To Their Kids About Race” explains. Parents are encouraged to demonstrate “anti-racist” attitudes with children within months of their birth.



Another recommended reading, entitled “What White Children Need to Know About Race,” says white students can “change racism” by “seeing themselves in a larger radicalized context” that precludes them from experiencing disadvantages that people of color face, Rufo reported.



The document also cites a book by Beverly Daniel Tatum that says there are “only three ways to be white: ignorant, color-blind, and racist.” Because these options may prevent people from wanting to identify as white, there need to be an “antiracist white identity.”

An additional recommended reading claims that white people use terms like “the race card, black-on-black crime, reverse racism, and colorblindness” to “alleviate some of their white fragility.”

“These are made-up terms that some white people use to feel better about themselves,” the article, entitled “You Can Have A Black Friend, Partner, Or Child And Still Be Racist,” says.



The article claims that relations with colored people do not “give you a one-way ticket out of Racism Town” and that unless white people are changing their racist behaviors, they are proving that “white people cannot stand not to be at the center of every single conversation, policy, and action.”

The Arizona Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Numerous public schools across the country have reportedly offered trainings with similar “antiracist” messaging, often requiring students or teachers to participate, Rufo has previously reported.

In February, whistleblower documents revealed Buffalo Public Schools in New York reportedly required its kindergarten students to participate in a lesson on “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” which involved showing images of black children who have died.

In the district’s middle school, students are reportedly taught that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism” and “white elites” play an outsized role in perpetuating racism, making them especially important to hold accountable.

At R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School, part of the Cupertino Union School District in San Jose, Calif., third-grade students were reportedly told to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities in order to understand “power and privilege.” At Cherokee Middle School, which is part of the Springfield Public Schools in Missouri, teachers were told to identify themselves on an “oppression spectrum,” and then watched a video of “George Floyd’s last words.”

 

[marsh]

Exclusive: Unreleased Federal Report Concludes ‘No Evidence' that Free Speech Online ‘Causes Hate Crimes'

Freedom of speech on the internet did not lead to a rise in "hate crimes," according to a report sent from the U.S. Department of Commerce to Congress in January — a report that has yet to appear on any government website.

www.breitbart.com

Exclusive: Unreleased Federal Report Concludes ‘No Evidence’ that Free Speech Online ‘Causes Hate Crimes’
2,243

Keira Burton/Pexel
ALLUM BOKHARI3 Mar 20211,373

Freedom of speech on the internet did not lead to a rise in “hate crimes,” according to a report sent from the U.S. Department of Commerce to Congress in January — a report that has yet to appear on any government website.

Breitbart News has obtained a copy of the report, which is published in full below. But sources close to the government say they are baffled as to why it wasn’t released publicly after being sent to Congress.

The report was prepared by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is responsible for advising the President on all matters related to telecommunication and the internet.

It was drafted to revise the findings of a previous report from NTIA in 1993 titled The Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes. Although it was prepared under the Trump administration, the request to revise the report came from the 116th Congress, which was controlled by a 35-seat Democrat majority in the House and only a slim Republican majority in the Senate.

The 1993 report is still publicly available on the web. But the latest revision to its findings is not.

Sources who were close to the drafting and approval process suspect that bureaucrats and establishment politicians with a vested interest in the “hate crimes” panic are trying to suppress it, because its conclusions challenge popular media narratives alleging a rise in internet-inspired hate crimes.

“Reports like this are typically made public,” said a source who worked closely with the NTIA on the report. “I don’t know why this report isn’t up on a government website yet. It’s already been submitted to Congress, it’s not a private thing anymore. I suspect the Civil Rights Division might have something to do with it.”

According to the source, who formerly worked in the Trump administration, the updated report was bitterly opposed by the Civil Rights Division, which is the part of the DoJ responsible for prosecuting hate crimes.

The Civil Rights Division, said the source, is also at the forefront of “efforts to drum up hysteria” over white nationalist extremism in the U.S. Despite its opposition, however, the report was approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and sent to Congress.
But the report does not publicly appear on any website. No one in Congress has mentioned it. And the press has not reported on its findings — until now.

READ THE FULL REPORT HERE.
NTIA Hate Crimes Report January 2021 scribd doc on website



The report bluntly states that there is no evidence of a causal relationship between the growth in internet usage and hate crimes, pointing out that there is not even any correlation, as media allegations about a surge in hate crimes over the past five years are not supported by the Justice Department’s crime statistics.
From the report:

The evidence does not show that during last decade, a time of expansive growth of electronic communications, particularly on the Internet and mobile devices as well as social media, there has been a rise in hate crime incidents. [emphasis ours]

The report also warns that efforts to clamp down on online communications over unfounded concerns about “hate crimes” will undermine First Amendment values.
From the report:

We caution that efforts to control or monitor online speech, even for the worthy goal of reducing crime, present serious First Amendment concerns and runs counter to our nation’s dedication to free expression. To quote President Barack Obama, “The strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression; it is more speech.”

The report also criticizes academic “extremism” researchers for failing to back up their assertions of a causal link between online hate speech and real-world hate crime.
From the report:

…this research, and much like it, fails to demonstrate any causal relationship between increased social media use and increased violence. This research does not present even comprehensive descriptive data correlating increased hate speech on social media with increased hate crimes.

Finally, the report issues a blistering condemnation of Silicon Valley companies for using the “hate speech” panic to undermine freedom of expression on their platforms.
From the report:

Clay Neff reported that tech leaders have recognized that relying on human teams alone to review content will not be enough and that artificial intelligence will have to play a significant role. That said, there are, of course, significant policy and practical limitations to reliance on automated content moderation. Interestingly, much of this technology is being developed from approaches pioneered by the Chinese Communist Party to stifle political discussion and dissent.

Given that all the major social media platforms have rules against hate speech and, in fact, employ sophisticated algorithmic artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to enforce these often vague and contradictory rules in a manner also used by tyrannous regimes, it is appropriate to ask what they gain from it. Certainly, as this Report shows, the platforms have no reasonable expectation that their censorship will end hate crimes or even diminish it, as no empirical evidence exists linking increased hate speech with hate crimes.

Further, this censorship poses real dangers to our political system. Under the hate speech prohibitions and other censorship rules, the platforms have removed content that many consider seriously engaged with pressing political and social issues.

Breitbart News has reached out to the NTIA and the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division for comment.

 

[marsh]

Turner Classic Movies Starts "Reframed Classics" to Look at "Problematic" Classic Movies ⋆ Politicrossing

In other words, take a look under the hood and tell you where they are bad and how you are bad for liking them.

politicrossing.com

Turner Classic Movies Starts “Reframed Classics” to Look at “Problematic” Classic Movies

In other words, take a look under the hood and tell you where they are bad and how you are bad for liking them.

March 3, 2021

If you thought cancel culture might be waning, you are incorrect. Seems like the left just has to keep after anything and everything that was good in our country in the past. Take classic movies for example…

According to NBC Connecticut:

“Loving classic films can be a fraught pastime. Just consider the cultural firestorm over “Gone With the Wind” this past summer. No one knows this better than the film lovers at Turner Classic Movies who daily are confronted with the complicated reality that many of old Hollywood’s most celebrated films are also often a kitchen sink of stereotypes. This summer, amid the Black Lives Matter protests, the channel’s programmers and hosts decided to do something about it.

“The result is a new series, “ Reframed Classics,” which promises wide-ranging discussions about 18 culturally significant films from the 1920s through the 1960s that also have problematic aspects, from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and Mickey Rooney’s performance as Mr. Yunioshi to Fred Astaire’s blackface routine in “Swing Time.” It kicks off Thursday at 8 p.m. ET with none other than “Gone With the Wind.”

“We know millions of people love these films,” said TCM host Jacqueline Stewart, who is participating in many of the conversations. “We’re not saying this is how you should feel about ‘Pyscho’ or this is how you should feel about ‘Gone with the Wind.’ We’re just trying to model ways of having longer and deeper conversations and not just cutting it off to ‘I love this movie. I hate this movie.’ There’s so much space in between.”

So they are going to take a look at old movies that tens of millions – perhaps hundreds of millions – of people have loved over the years and “revisit” them. In other words, take a look under the hood and tell you where they are bad and how you are bad for liking them.
Along with Gone with the Wind, Psycho and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, here are some of the other movies in the left’s sights:

Swing Time
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Gunga Din
The Searchers
My Fair Lady
Stagecoach
Woman of the Year
The Children’s Hour

NBC Connectucut reports:

“For “Psycho,” which will be airing on March 25, the hosts talk about transgender identity in the film and the implications of equating gender fluidity and dressing in women’s clothes with mental illness and violence. It also sparks a bigger conversation about sexuality in Alfred Hitchcock films.”

Is this just reading into something that doesn’t exist? Is it a waste of time? Should we look at these old movies and see anything other than the perspectives of people from another time? Or should we cancel them?

According to the host, she wants to have people discuss rather than cancel the movies. We’ll see:

The goal of “Reframed Classics” is to help give audiences the tools to discuss films from a different era and not just dismiss or cancel them. And Stewart, for her part, doesn’t believe that you can simply remove problematic films from the culture.

“I think there’s something to be learned from any work of art,” Stewart said. “They’re all historical artifacts that tell us a lot about the industry in which they were made, the cultures that they were speaking to.”

 

[marsh]

CVFC PAC: The US Armed Forces Is Becoming a Woke Institution

redstate.com

CVFC PAC: The US Armed Forces Is Becoming a Woke Institution
By Stu Cvrk | Mar 03, 2021 11:00 AM ET

AP Photo/Evan Vucci
This is an editorial from the Combat Veterans for Congress Political Action Committee that the great risk of the US military being subverted from within through cultural Marxist personnel policies. It is posted here with permission of the author. CVFC PAC supports the election of US military combat veterans to the US Senate and House of Representatives. Their cause is righteous, and generous donations are welcome at the links at the end. Note: I am on the PAC’s board of directors in the capacity of Director of Congressional and Public Relations. The editorial begins:

The United States is defined by values, not by race, or ethnicity – and those values apply in spades to the US military!

The priorities of the Biden-Harris Administration are similar to those of the Obama-Biden Administration, especially in regards to the US military. Unlike the President Bush and President Trump’s “War on Terror,” which pursued radical Islamic terrorists like Al-Qaida, ISIS, The Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, Hezbollah, etc., Biden and Harris’s new “War on Terror” is aimed at homegrown “extremists” – especially among veterans and members of the US military.

Yet, Biden and Harris have no interest whatsoever in apprehending and jailing known ultra-violent revolutionary Marxist domestic terrorists like ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter, who spent much of 2020 leading violent riots, perpetrating arson, creating $2 billion in destruction, looting businesses, putting over 2000 police officers in hospitals, torching thousands of police cruisers, and killing hundreds of residents in 200+ Democrat-controlled sanctuary cities.

This new “War on Terror” is a renewal of the Obama-era attacks on US military personnel and veterans while also pursuing the vilification and the assault on law enforcement officers. In 2008, Obama forced the retirement of 200+ conservative flag and general officers. Then Obama established a special screening board for colonels and captains that were in the zone for promotion to flag or general officer. In 2008, and over the previous 231 years, the US armed forces had never had such a screening board to determine if colonels and captains were “politically correct” enough to be allowed to go up before flag and general officer promotion boards.

That type of uncalled for screening went on for 8 straight years, resulting in the elimination of thousands of highly qualified combat-tested conservative officers and replacing them instead with “politically correct” flag and general officers acceptable to Obama. Obama established new and dangerous rules of engagement, had transgender personnel recruited into the military, depleted military ammunition inventories, and allowed Communist China to overtake the US naval shipbuilding program while falling behind in replacing vital combat aircraft. Today, Communist China has a larger navy than the US Navy, and Biden, Harris, and Obama (behind the scenes) will happily watch Communist China’s military outgrow the US military.

The socialist Democrat Party revealed that 80% of members of the US armed forces voted for President Donald Trump. Biden, Harris, and Obama are overly concerned about the conservative and white members who make-up of the backbone of the US military. The attack on the make-up of rank-and-file US military personnel has begun in earnest, commencing the removal conservative white elements from its ranks in much the same manners that conservative flag and general officers were screened out of the US military.

For the past 4 years, law enforcement officers were demeaned, targeted, and attacked by the foot soldiers of the socialist Democrat Party, i.e., ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists. About 50 police officers were killed in premeditated ambushes over the last 4 years in the riots in 200+ Democrat-controlled sanctuary cities where over 2000 police officers were hospitalized. Here is Biden’s view of police officers, veterans, and the military personnel:

View: https://youtu.be/BhAD8iNopdk
1:02 min

Now, it is the active-duty military, reserve components, and National Guard who must be targeted because Americans are being told by the leftist mainstream media, and Big Tech that the US military not only has “systemic racists” and “white supremist” elements within its ranks, but more importantly the existing make-up of the military did not vote for Biden and Harris. And that must be changed at all costs! On January 29th, Biden’s transgender executive order was issued, changing the Trump administration’s restriction on recruiting transgender personnel. Secretary of Defense Austin then issued a military-wide order specifying that the previous DoD restrictions on transgenderism would be lifted. Any exceptions or objections to fully supporting transgenderism, including the conscience religious clauses previously allowed that conflicted with Biden and Obama’s transgender policies are no longer be permitted, regardless of the consequences. Are Christians who oppose transgenderism based on their religious conviction going to be accused of “extremism” and booted from the US Military? If so, that would be a violation the First Amendment’s guarantee “freedom of religion” for all Americans.

Military women will be most immediately and negatively affected by Biden’s directive.

Personal privacy is rare enough in the US armed forces because of close living quarters, but Biden is ordering women to share their private facilities with biological males who are claiming to be transgender women, and this will be very destructive to good order, discipline, and morale.

The previous DoD regulation that personnel with gender dysphoria who join the US military will not be permitted to obtain sex reassignment surgery must remain in effect! Military hospitals are already overtaxed with many serious combat-related surgeries often delayed because of lack of capacity, and the number of therapists who deal with the heavy combat-related PTSD and related military family treatment makes transgender therapy for sex reassignment surgeries unsustainable. Sex reassignment surgery to complete multiple genitals, breasts, and facial surgeries typically take over two years of constant hospitalization at a cost in of more than $100,000, and a transgender patient would be off-duty for over 2 years, with the period of enlistment shortly over afterward. In the past, the medical costs for 994 military personnel diagnosed with gender dysphoria increased by 300% and required 30,000 mental health visits – an unacceptable cost for 994 personnel.

Biden, Harris, and Obama are having the FBI dig into social media accounts of anyone who went to Washington, DC, on January 6th to hear the speech of President Trump at the Washington Monument (a massive administrative undertaking costing millions of dollars). …. The Biden administration has since been trying to cast those military personnel as “systemic racists” and “white supremacists” in the eyes of Americans.

When the White House was under attack by violent mobs in 2020, led by Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA, and seriously injuring Secret Service Agents and US Park Police, DOD objected to providing military protection. Considering the reluctance by DOD to provide that security, something seemed terribly wrong with the deployment of 26,000 National Guard troops to Washington, DC, for the inauguration, and the establishment of Pelosi’s “Great Wall” topped with concertina wire. Pelosi turned the Capitol Hill complex into a militarized no man’s zone, patrolled by more armed troops than are currently deployed collectively in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, as shown in this video:

View: https://youtu.be/JaQU7yljBr8
7:08 min

The question remains: why are thousands of armed National Guard personnel remaining in DC into March? Biden, Harris, and Obama are turning the Republic into a totalitarian state with lockdowns, closing hundreds of thousands of small businesses, with no group meetings, no church gatherings, and no children allowed to go to school. But they are fine with a walled no-go zone in DC while allowing liquor stores, marijuana stores, gambling casinos, and strip joints to operate, as well as thousands of violent Antifa and Black Lives Matter looters to riot in the streets with no rioting restrictions in 200+ sanctuary cities across the country.

A more sobering question never asked by the leftist mainstream media, nor explained to the American people by the Biden Administration, was what was the “threat” that required 26,000 armed troops to be deployed to DC in the first place? The Biden Administration never identified what the “threat assessment” was all about! The governors of Blue states, where there were ongoing riots over the past 12 months, very seldom mobilized the National Guard to restore order like Pelosi did in DC. Those governors could have easily identified that the rioters were ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists torching thousands of police cruisers, taking over police precincts, injuring over 2000 police officers, and committing arson. For over one year, FBI Director Wray issued no orders for the FBI in 200+ sanctuary cities to protect police officers, to arrest thousands of Domestic Terrorists, prosecute, and incarcerate them as appropriate.

Amid continuing riots by ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter, a general order was issued by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, directing that all members of the US armed forces must complete a 60-day stand down to address “extremism in the ranks.” Austin, Biden, and Harris (under the stealth directions of Obama) are falsely accusing the 2+ million service members of harboring “extremists and white supremacists” in their ranks! Defaming the US military and creating instability and worry among career members of the US armed forces is unprecedented, unnecessary, divisive, and a dangerous practice because it will destabilize unit cohesion and negatively impact readiness and combat effectiveness.

The Biden Administration continues to state they intend to end “systemic racism” in the US armed forces. Systemic Racism” simply does not exist in US armed forces or in the United States like it exists in Communist China, in the radical Islamic terrorist state of Iran, Communist Cuba, Communist Venezuela, and many African and Middle East Countries. America is the least racist country in the world, yet members of the Biden Administration imply that many members of the US armed forces are inherent racists, homophobes, white supremacists, and/or other extremists – an indictment which lacks proof. Note: after extensive investigation, a total of four of the 26,000 National Guard Troops were sent home on suspicion of being “extremists”— but what does “extremist” mean anyway, as we still have no definition from the government?

For the last 50 years, the US military has been the role model for racial integration and for addressing and overcoming discrimination. The understanding between races within the US armed forces has made the US military one of the few places in society where advancement to the most senior ranks have been much less biased than in most integrated work forces around the nation. There are no races or colors in a foxhole; the occupants of those foxholes are all bonded brothers, leaning forward with bayonets fixed, protecting each other’s backs. The new Secretary of Defense and the current Chief of the US Air Force rose to the rank of four-star general, and both are black. “Systemic racism” – if it truly existed in the military – would have precluded those promotions from happening.

Five months after the election of Biden, the continuing serious external national security threats from Communist China, Communist North Korea, Communist Cuba, the radical Islamic terrorist state of Iran, Communist Venezuela, Marxist Russia, The Muslim Brotherhood international terrorist organization, radical Islamic terrorist organizations in the Middle East, and domestic terrorist groups like BLM and Antifa in the US just haven’t seemed to be the urgent policy focus of the Oval Office. Rather, the daily focus is on the alleged systemic racism, white nationalists, and white supremacists within the ranks of the US armed forces and is repeatedly publicly by socialist Democrats, including Pelosi, Schumer, Biden, Harris, and their political allies in the leftist mainstream media, and Big Tech.

The fact that the Biden, Harris, and Obama appear fixated on systemic racism, white nationalists, and white supremacists within the ranks of the US armed forces could very well embolden the real threats to the country with potentially catastrophic consequences for US national security in the future. Who is really in charge in charge of the Biden Administration and hell-bent on undermining the US military (a question Americans never asked about the Trump administration)?

The worst kept secret in the West Wing of the White House is that Biden’s apparent dementia is making it exceedingly difficult for him to execute the duties of his office. The socialist Democrats are essentially allowing Harris to usurp Biden’s power by having her call foreign heads of state – something vice presidents never do. In addition, the President’s February State of the Union Address has been put off (if not cancelled outright) by Biden’s handlers – likely because he doesn’t have the mental acuity or physical stamina to deliver the requisite speech to Congress and the nation. Under Obama’s instructions, Biden has signed over 80 executive orders whose content of which he has no knowledge, bypassing Congress. For all practical purposes, Obama is running the government behind the scenes with one Biden executive order after another, canceling Trump orders and reinstating Obama’s orders.

This week Pelosi had 31 of congressional socialist Democrats write a letter demanding that the nuclear codes, “The Football”, that always accompanies the President should no longer be under Biden’s sole control. Pelosi has now joined in the above plan to neuter the Commander-in-Chief, apparently using Biden’s dementia as her reason. Pelosi would never have executed that initiative on her own; she must have received her instructions to do so from Obama via his long-time aide Susan Rice, who is Biden’s domestic policy advisor. Despite Harris’s lack of qualifications, her extreme unpopularity, and her family’s long time Marxist and Communist background, the plan is for Harris to become the first female president of color, and it is well underway. The current DoD stand down will look like a walk in the park if the Marxist Harris has her way!

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62

CAPT, USN (Ret)/Former FBI

Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC

2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184

San Diego, CA 92108

https://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org

Log In or Sign Up to View

The end.

 

[marsh]

How critical race theory is being weaponized to take down Western society

Critical race theory is dangerous. Even if you haven't done the research on the topic, you likely know exactly

noqreport.com

How critical race theory is being weaponized to take down Western society

From Coke going woke to 3-month-olds being labeled as racists, the false concept of critical race theory is dangerous, and it's spreading. We discussed it in detail and then interviewed Karlyn Borysenko about what's happening to Western society today.

by JD Rucker

March 3, 2021



Critical race theory is dangerous. Even if you haven’t done the research on the topic, you likely know exactly what it is based on the various insane examples that pop up in the news on a daily basis. It went from a controversial discussion point in progressive academia to a way of life for far too many Americans. What we’re witnessing today is the weaponization of the theory as a tool to be used against the foundation of Western society.

Before anyone gets annoyed and starts thinking that I’m addressing the topic in a shocking or melodramatic fashion for effect, please note that I was among those who thought it was a passing fad just a few years ago. I thought, wrongly, that Americans were too smart to fall for such ludicrous notions. But what I underestimated was the pervasiveness of desires to be “woke” even if doing so requires cognitive dissonance. In other words, my assumption that people were too smart was only wrong because I didn’t take into account the willingness of so many to turn off their brains and absorb their indoctrination like sheep.
It doesn’t take deep exploration of obscure news outlets to find examples. On any given day, there are dozens of clear-cut occurrences of critical race theory playing a major role in policies, actions, and changes to the foundation of our culture and lifestyle. According to Campus Reform, it is now being taught as a minor at St. John’s University.
St. John’s University in New York City has announced it will offer a 15-credit “Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Interdisciplinary” minor. The interdisciplinary minor is described as a method for students to study and research major critical race theory subjects like “social inequalities, international migration, economic globalization, healthcare systems, legal and carceral structures, colonialism, and empire.”

“Critical Race & Ethnic Studies devotes itself to the study of social justice issues shaped by race, ethnicity, class, dis/ability, gender, sexuality, and other contemporary and historical forms of group-differentiation. It also looks to the political struggles of systematically and structurally marginalized people as resources for exploring innovative strategies for social transformative action,” a webpage for the minor states.

The required courses are Introduction to Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Methodologies in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Anti-Blackness around the Globe, Comparative Racializations: Blackness, Indigeneity, Asianness, and Latinidad; and Capstone Seminar in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.
One might think this is to be expected since American universities have been engulfed by radical leftist beliefs for at least five decades. The shock and awe of seeing our colleges teaching social justice dribble has long since passed, replaced by a quick roll of the eyes as thoughtful Americans have accepted it as a given. But they’re not just going after college students. That’s too easy. They’re going after high schools. They’re going after junior highs. They’re going after elementary schools. They’re going all the way back. In Arizona, they’re trying to make us believe racism by Caucasians in particular begins as early as 3-months-old.

If we’re to believe Caucasians are racist before they can understand a racial slur, then it’s no wonder so many have embraced Robin DiAngelo’s book, White Fragility. As we reported last week, Coca-Cola has a training program that encourages their Caucasian employees to “be less white.” That story was first broken by Karlyn Borysenko who joined us for the latest episode of NOQ Report. She is not a fan of DiAngelo’s, noting how the sudden guru is trying to convince Caucasians that they’re inherently racist.

“Robin DiAngelo actually says that in her book,” Borysenko said. “She says, ‘I have been racist since the womb.’ She talks about how she’s been a racist her entire life. She talks about how even now she does racist things to her colleagues and thank God she has colleagues who forgive her for her racism.”

Having an educated Caucasian woman admitting that she’s racist and trying to convince every other Caucasian that they can’t help but to be racist is the gift that keeps on giving to Neo-Marxist groups like Black Lives Matter and Democratic Socialists in Washington, DC. This is just one of the ways that critical race theory has been weaponized and is being spread by corporations like Coca-Cola, but Borysenko laid out what the book and subsequent teachings by DiAngelo really mean.

“White Fragility is essentially the 150-page confession of an extremely racist person that is trying to convince everyone else that they’re racist to be able to validate her experience in the world,” Borysenko said.

What does this have to do with taking down Western society? It’s all about division. They’re using critical race theory to convince people of all colors that we must operate based solely on our race. It’s the epitome of racism itself which is why I naively believed Americans would see through it more easily. Instead of promoting a world in which race, gender, and other “categories” of humanity have minimal effect on our place in the world, critical race theory seeks to make people of color hate Caucasians and Asian-Americans while simultaneously making Caucasians and Asian-Americans hate themselves.

Concepts like “white privilege” and it’s variations are used to justify racism. If a leftist who embraces critical race theory wants to attack a person, they generally do not attack them based on their ideas. Instead, they find the boxes of intersectionality that are not checked off by their opponent and claim that their lack of diversity is what makes them wrong. And it’s working. Progressives are rushing to demonstrate their wokeness by embracing critical race theory tactics while many conservatives are failing to defend themselves properly out of fear of being labelled a bigot.

There are three reasons critical race theory is so effective at destroying Western society. First, it’s used to change the way we operate in government and business. Instead of hiring the best person for a job without regard to race, gender, religion, or sexual preference, many are being forced into picking people who are less qualified in an effort to either be seen as more “woke” or to meet some arbitrary quota.
Second, critical race theory promotes racism and therefore promotes division amongst the races. This affects Caucasians the most as they’re not only fighting against racism from other races but are fighting amongst themselves about whether or not they’re inherently racist. This is why White Fragility is such a powerful tool for the radical progressives. It tries to unite people of color against Caucasians and Asian-Americans while driving division within these groups.

Lastly, the constant playing of the race card invokes feelings of victimhood. When a person of color fails, they’re told their failure is not due to their own shortcomings but the systemic racism of Western culture. They are trained to be victims first, which is why victimhood has become a status that is coveted by leftists, particularly younger generations. It promotes weakness within the nation by offering intangible excuses for failure.

More people MUST start recognizing the existential threat of critical race theory. If it continues to dominate our culture and drive division across the nation, we will never be able to unite. If wokeness wins, everyone loses.

Watch the video of this podcast and interview on Rumble.

 

[Lone_Hawk]

I really appreciate you posting these. I want to scream and click the thumbs down on a lot of them because of the content. I don't because I don't want them to show up as negatives against you personally.

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut_KEsRlMmM
32:10 min

Social Media Purge Backfiring? & the Real History of Fascism | Patrick Byrne | TECH | Rubin Report

•Jan 13, 2021

The Rubin Report

Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report talks to Patrick Byrne (Entrepreneur & former Overstock CEO) about the social media purge, social media censorship, the false history of fascism, and what we can learn from China. Patrick details how he founded Overstock.com and the importance of freedom of speech. He shares how the social media ban affecting conservatives and the big tech banning Trump from virtually all social media platforms will only create a demand for more alternatives like Locals. He also shares why he thinks section 230 should be repealed. He also shares how Milton Friedman convinced him to become an advocate for school choice and why so many people have a poor knowledge of history. Patrick also explains the leftist roots of fascism and socialism, as well as what China does right that America could learn from. What is the future of tech? What effect is all the innovation coming out of silicon valley having on us? Is it inevitable that machine intelligence will eliminate a vast majority of our jobs? Is it even possible to know what future tech will look like? Watch these experts describe the cutting edge in new tech, but also what we can expect in the future and the effect it will have on you in this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

 

[marsh]

The Virtual Book Burning Continues: eBay Bans Listings of 'Offensive' Dr. Seuss Books | The Gateway Pundit | by Cassandra MacDonald

Online action site eBay has banned users from selling copies of the Dr.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

The Virtual Book Burning Continues: eBay Bans Listings of ‘Offensive’ Dr. Seuss Books

By Cassandra Fairbanks
Published March 4, 2021 at 9:20am

Online action site eBay has banned users from selling copies of the Dr. Seuss books that the left found “problematic.”

The company is now messaging users saying that their listings have been removed because it didn’t follow the “Offensive Material Policy.”

Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced this week that they are discontinuing six of the author’s books that crazy liberal activists have been complaining about, including If I Ran the Zoo and And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.

“Listings that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination aren’t allowed,” the message



Under a heading about “what activity didn’t follow the policy,” eBay explained that “Dr. Seuss Enterprises has stopped publication of this book due to negative portrayal of some ethnicities.”

“As a courtesy, we have ended your item and refunded your selling fees, and as long as you do not relist the item, there will be no negative impact to your account,” the message continued.
If outdated political ideas are now banned, the list of books eBay refuses to list will be miles long.

The attack on Seuss heated up last week when a Virginia school district banned reading Dr. Seuss during Read Across America Day — a day celebrating the children’s author’s work.
The uproar was caused by a far-left group called Learning for Justice — an Southern Poverty Law Center affiliate.

The group cited a study from St. Catherine University that claims Dr. Seuss’s children’s books are rife with “orientalism, anti-blackness, and white supremacy.”

“Of the 2,240 (identified) human characters, there are 45 of color representing two percent of the total number of human characters,” the study reads. Of the 45 characters of color, 43 “exhibited behaviors and appearances that align with harmful and stereotypical Orientalist tropes.”

 

[marsh]

YouTube Deletes All Copies of President Trump's CPAC Speech, Suspends RSBN for Two Weeks | The Gateway Pundit | by Kristinn Taylor

YouTube has deleted all copies of President Trump’s speech to CPAC given last Sunday in Orlando and has suspended the account of Right Side Broadcasting Network for two weeks as apparent punishment for live streaming the speech in which Trump reiterated his belief the 2020 presidential election...

www.thegatewaypundit.com

YouTube Deletes All Copies of President Trump’s CPAC Speech, Suspends RSBN for Two Weeks

By Kristinn Taylor
Published March 4, 2021 at 12:21pm

YouTube has deleted all copies of President Trump’s speech to CPAC given last Sunday in Orlando and has suspended the account of Right Side Broadcasting Network for two weeks as apparent punishment for live streaming the speech in which Trump reiterated his belief the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

YouTube took down videos from mainstream outlets including the U.K. Independent which had over one million views as well as Fox, Fox Business, ABC News and the U.K. Sun. A search of YouTube that earlier this week showed several channels with archived live streams of the speech now shows all archived live streams have been taken down.

Trump’s speech was wildly popular, with upward of over 30 million streaming views across several platforms being reported. CNN reported about 5.8 million viewers watched the speech on cable TV’s Fox News Channel and another 1.5 million watched on Newsmax, making Trump’s speech the most watched on all of cable for February and besting the Golden Globes awards show on broadcast over the air on NBC later Sunday that was watched by 6.9 million viewers.

TGP reported Monday on some of the view counts of Trump’s speech on YouTube: Right Side Broadcasting 3.7 million; The Independent 1,000,000; The Hill 906,000; Reuters: 902,000; News Now 818,000; ABC Australia 352,000; SKY News 222,000; ABC News 208,000;FOX 35 Orlando 50,000.

RSBN announced the suspension Thursday, noting they had foretold the action by YouTube after they ran Trump’s speech on Sunday, “President Trump talked about election fraud. That’s a big no-no on some platforms we stream to. We try to play by the rules, but we will not censor President Trump. We’re not going to remove or edit this video. Just so we’re all clear- if it gets removed, we didn’t do it.”

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1367517385549316097

View: https://twitter.com/RSBNetwork/status/1367517385549316097


“NEW: RSBN has been suspended from YouTube for two weeks because of the Trump #CPAC2021 speech, which violated their guidelines on election misinformation. The video was approaching 4 million views. They have also removed it from their platform.”


Before:

After:

This tweet has an embedded live feed from the U.K. Sun newspaper’s YouTube account. Click on the video link to see what YouTube has done.

- YouTube (removed)

And a link to the Fox News Channel on YouTube:

- YouTube (removed)

ABC News feed at YouTube:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knIWglEeZJI
(removed)

While hard to find on Twitter, a Periscope feed survives as of now:

CPAC @CPAC

CPAC 2021

t.co

As does the U.K. Independent’s inhouse video which did not get the million views its YouTube feed did.



C-SPAN has not been taking over by the Maoists of Big Tech yet and still has Trump’s speech in full online.

Video on website1:35:41 min

Regardless of the Big Tech censors, the people love Trump.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1366159562986852353

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1366159562986852353
.38 min

 

[marsh]

Freedom Watch: China Behind Global Decline in Freedom

Freedom House reports on the “deterioration of democracy” around the world in 2020, driven by the “malign influence of the regime in China."

www.breitbart.com

Freedom Watch: China Behind Global Decline in Freedom
788

GREG BAKER/AFP/Getty Images
JOHN HAYWARD4 Mar 20211,990

Freedom House on Wednesday released the 2021 edition of its annual Freedom in the World report, charting an alarming “deterioration of democracy” around the world in 2020.
The report cited the “malign influence of the regime in China” as one of the most “profound” factors in the rising tide of authoritarianism.

Of course, the pandemic that swept out of China to destabilize the world was a major factor as well, and it was a powerful force multiplier for the identified malevolence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As the Freedom House report, subtitled Democracy Under Siege, put it:

Beijing ramped up its global disinformation and censorship campaign to counter the fallout from its cover-up of the initial coronavirus outbreak, which severely hampered a rapid global response in the pandemic’s early days. Its efforts also featured increased meddling in the domestic political discourse of foreign democracies, transnational extensions of rights abuses common in mainland China, and the demolition of Hong Kong’s liberties and legal autonomy. Meanwhile, the Chinese regime has gained clout in multilateral institutions such as the UN Human Rights Council, which the United States abandoned in 2018, as Beijing pushed a vision of so-called noninterference that allows abuses of democratic principles and human rights standards to go unpunished while the formation of autocratic alliances is promoted.

The spread of the Wuhan coronavirus was accompanied by a matching spread of “excessive surveillance, discriminatory restrictions on freedoms like movement and assembly, and arbitrary or violent enforcement of such restrictions by police and nonstate actors,” which is tantamount to saying the CCP’s worldview and ideology spread along with its virus. A growing number of ruling regimes took advantage of the coronavirus to “quash opposition and fortify their power,” and China is the world leader in exports for opposition-quashing tactics and technologies.
Freedom House contended that the global erosion of democracy had “tangible effects on human life and security, including the frequent resort to military force to resolve political disputes,” citing conflicts in Libya, Yemen, Ethiopia, and the Nagorno-Karabakh region. In each case, Freedom House pointed out that a powerful authoritarian government with little fear of pushback from the free nations of the world was involved in starting or escalating the conflicts.

Just a few days ago, Chinese state media argued the West should stop criticizing Beijing’s ruthless oppression of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong because those demonstrators are criminals just like the January 6 Capitol Hill rioters. Freedom House lamented the situation in Hong Kong at length, without engaging the CCP’s claims that all of its abuses are positive features of its strong and stable authoritarianism:

In this climate of impunity, the CCP has run roughshod over Hong Kong’s democratic institutions and international legal agreements. The territory has suffered a massive decline in freedom since 2013, with an especially steep drop since mass pro-democracy demonstrations were suppressed in 2019 and Beijing tightened its grip in 2020. The central government’s imposition of the National Security Law in June erased almost overnight many of Hong Kong’s remaining liberties, bringing it into closer alignment with the system on the mainland. The Hong Kong government itself escalated its use of the law early in 2021 when more than 50 pro-democracy activists and politicians were arrested, essentially for holding a primary and attempting to win legislative elections that were ultimately postponed by a year; they face penalties of up to life in prison. In November the Beijing and Hong Kong governments had colluded to expel four pro-democracy members from the existing Legislative Council, prompting the remaining 15 to resign in protest. These developments reflect a dramatic increase in the cost of opposing the CCP in Hong Kong, and the narrowing of possibilities for turning back the authoritarian tide.

The CCP’s core argument is that all democracies are illegitimate because they have no foundation of authoritarian power to rest on; their people cry out for the kind of “justice” and “security” that only an undemocratic centralized state can deliver. The real threat to democracy around the world is that the political elites of free nations are beginning to agree with this argument, embracing a new vision of peripheral democracy with an authoritarian core — a foundation of power that is not subject to the will of voters in any meaningful way, to tackle “vital issues” that have been decided by a “consensus of experts” whose judgment should not be questioned by the common people.

That is the nature of the ideological virus spreading around the world in the wake of the Wuhan coronavirus, and it is a worldview embraced far more fervently by former President Donald Trump’s opponents than his allies. Democracy is nearing a crisis point where its very definition and nature will be questioned more vigorously than ever before, by forces both sincere and unprincipled, well-meaning and malevolent, internal and external. The ruthlessly exploited emergency powers accumulated during the pandemic, which Freedom House criticized through its 2021 report, will not dissipate until the definition of democracy is resolved.

 

[marsh]

China Using 'Emotion Recognition Technology' to Arrest People

China is reportedly increasing its use of "emotion recognition technology" to prevent crime, state media reported.

www.breitbart.com

China Using ‘Emotion Recognition Technology’ to Arrest People
1,439

William Thomas Cain/Getty
FRANCES MARTEL4 Mar 2021456

China’s state-run Global Times boasted in an article on Thursday that Chinese people are increasingly becoming accustomed to the use of “emotion recognition technology,” artificial intelligence that allows the government to track human feelings, as part of everyday life.

The Global Times illustrated the usefulness of this technology with an example in which police arrest passengers of a car after using artificial intelligence to discover drugs in their car.

“Emotion recognition technology” tells the officers that the passengers are more nervous than the average person at a checkpoint, which they use as an excuse to search the car.

The notoriously repressive Communist Party is allegedly applying “emotional recognition technology” in “various fields including health, anti-terrorism, and urban security,” according to the Global Times.

The development of this technology to criminalize feelings follows increasingly alarming developments in Chinese law enforcement, most recently the revelation that Chinese technology giant Huawei is developing facial recognition technology that can identify a person’s ethnicity, making it easier for Chinese police to persecute members of the Uyghur ethnic minority. Multiple governments around the world, including the current and past administration of the United States, have accused China of committing genocide against the Uyghur people.

The Communist Party has built over 1,000 concentration camps in the Uyghurs’ native region, Xinjiang, where survivors say they were forced into indoctrination, slavery, and subject to rape and torture. Of particular concern are reports that China is systematically sterilizing Uyghur women against their will to eliminate the ethnic group, a practice specifically listed in the definition of genocide.

The Communist Party claims that the concentration camps are “vocational training centers” for uneducated people and that all eyewitnesses are liars and paid actors.

The Global Times did not specifically mention using “emotion recognition technology” in Xinjiang, but did not that much of the experimentation with the medium appears to be conducted in China on inmates at prisons. At least six prisons are openly using this technology on its inmates to predict which are the most likely to be violent, the newspaper claimed.

As China considers any slight or criticism of the Communist Party a crime – often formally identified as “subversion of state power” or “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – many of those experimented on are likely political prisoners. It is also illegal in China to hold religious views outside of the regulation of the state, and only five religions are legal: Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestant Christianity.

“n China, emotion recognition has contributed to the risk assessment of prisoners in a few regional prisons,” the Global Times noted, citing experimentation in a prison in Guangzhou in 2019. “The technology helps prison officers to evaluate whether a prisoner presents potential risks, including possible mental problems and violent or suicidal tendencies, and estimate whether he or she is likely to repeat an offense after release.”

The state propaganda outlet quoted the head of the Guangzhou center conducting the experiments to justify its use, who detailed, “After a prisoner looks at the camera for three to four seconds, this recognition system can know his or her seven main physiological indexes including body temperature, eye movement, and heart rate, and convert them into psychological signs showing whether the prisoner is calm, depressed, angry or whatever else at that time.”

Outside of prisons, the state newspaper lauded “emotion recognition technology” for its uses on the road, where police can track the emotions of every driver and stop anyone with “abnormal” feelings. This, it claimed, would help prevent road rage incidents or other potentially criminal behavior.

The Global Times cited Chinese “experts” who claimed that Chinese AI could identify a person’s emotions with up to 95-percent accuracy.

“Emotion recognition is definitely the direction of humanity’s future tech development,” a “neuromanagement expert” told the newspaper.

The technology can work by either monitoring a person’s face for an extended period of time or by forcing individuals to wear devices that track their blood pressure, temperature, and other factors.

The Global Times mentioned that, outside of China, the public may express concerns for their privacy and safety in the event that their governments implement this form of AI to monitor their emotions. The Times claimed that the technology is already in use in several states, however, including America, and insisted, citing Chinese government-approved experts, that it is “not an evil ‘mind-reading’ technique.”

According to the MIT Technology Review, “emotion recognition technology” was already a $20 billion market in 2019.

“The technology is currently being used to assess job applicants and people suspected of crimes, and it’s being tested for further applications, such as in VR headsets to deduce gamers’ emotional states,” the outlet observed at the time, citing a study by AI Now. The study warned that the technology may be particularly problematic when being used across race and gender lines, as its conclusions could “amplify” discrimination.

 

[marsh]

Big Tech Censorship Is Now Hitting Non-Political Businesses, Nonprofits

Three stories about apolitical businesses and charities, like the many others before them, portend a scary future for using social media platforms.

thefederalist.com

Big Tech Censorship Is Now Hitting Completely Non-Political Businesses And Nonprofits
Three stories about apolitical businesses and charities, like the many others before them, portend a scary future for using social media platforms to market one's cause or business.

By Phillip Stutts
MARCH 4, 2021

Is big-tech censorship out of control? Clearly yes. Three recent stories, like the many others before them, portend a scary future for using social media platforms to market one’s business or cause.

Let me tell you what happened. Justin Donald wanted to spread his unique financial message to the average investor. He hit it big. His recently released book, “The Lifestyle Investor: The 10 Commandments of Cash Flow Investing for Passive Income and Financial Freedom,” landed No. 1 on the Wall Street Journal’s best-seller list. Pretty cool, right?

It almost didn’t happen. As Justin was planning to launch his book, he needed to get it loaded onto Amazon’s platform for sale. Amazon refused.

That’s right, Amazon refused to put Justin’s book on their platform because he had dared to describe (in his book) how he invested and made money during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amazon’s explanation? They said Justin was not a medical professional, so he wasn’t allowed to even use the following words in his book: “pandemic,” “COVID,” “COVID-19,” and “coronavirus.” I’m not making this up.

Even though Justin was only using those medical terms to address how his investment portfolio performed during the pandemic, Amazon refused to budge. So he removed the terms from his book. Utterly ridiculous.

The second story is even worse. It involves an incredible charity called the Emerald Coast Children’s Advocacy Center (ECCAC), whose mission is to provide support for children who have been sexually or physically abused, neglected, or assaulted. What was ECCAC’S social media crime?

Facebook categorizes ECCAC as a “social issue organization,” and Facebook has banned ads for these types of nonprofits since October 27, 2020. So ECCAC was unable to run a digital fundraising membership campaign to end 2020, the most challenging year in their history due to the lockdowns. With Facebook’s ban now ending on March 4, ECCAC also missed out on their early 2021 online fundraising.

Bottom line: A charity that needs donors to fund their efforts to save sexually and physically abused kids from harm is being banned from promoting their work to grow supporters and their community on Facebook. This is actually happening.

I’ve had my own issues with Facebook. They banned my soon-to-be-released business marketing book called “The Undefeated Marketing System — How To Grow Your Business And Build Your Brand Using The Secret Formula That Elects Presidents.”

Let me ask you a question: does that title sound like a book that’s trying to influence an election? Or does it sound like a business marketing book?

Facebook said my title was a violation of their political ad ban and that my ads were trying to influence an election. What election was I trying to influence?

Flabbergasted, I told my team to appeal the decision and explain to the moronic Facebook “hall monitors” that the book has nothing to do with right versus left or any election; it’s about how business leaders should employ a five-step marketing system that is used to elect presidents, including Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or any political candidate at all.

I’ll give you one guess as to how the referees at Facebook responded to my appeal. You got it right, they refused to back down and then banned my business book ad campaign, again, claiming it was a violation of their policy for trying to influence an election.

Still confused? So were Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino of Fox News when they interviewed me on this Facebook ban story:

View: https://youtu.be/i_rJmbrLdZc
3:06 min

Since 2018, political advertisements have been subjected to the scrutiny of the social media police. You might think that’s a great idea (everyone hates those crazy political ads!) until you realize that it now extends to certain charities, like ECCAC.

It only took two years for these policies to seep into the nonprofit and corporate marketing world. The tech oligarchs don’t care what your intent is, they will decide what ad, what message or what company triggers their algorithm and thus can determine your fate. Right or wrong — doesn’t matter.


Over the past two years, I’ve laid out my belief that social media is coming upon a big disruption. Whether it happens in the next year or five years, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s coming.

Ultimately, Congress must do something stop this blatant censorship. The law in place right now, called “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,” basically gives the social media companies legal immunity over their users’ words and actions.

This has given those social media companies the leverage to police speech. A few Democrat U.S. senators want to address some of these issues with their recent proposal called the Safe Tech Act.

Still, unfortunately, their effort will fall short of holding big tech accountable and might actually give these platforms more power over you and your messages, data, and ad dollars. It’s a scary time.

 

[marsh]

China’s ‘Sharp Eyes’ Program Aims to Surveil 100% of Public Space

The program turns neighbors into agents of the surveillance state

onezero.medium.com

China’s ‘Sharp Eyes’ Program Aims to Surveil 100% of Public Space

The program turns neighbors into agents of the surveillance state


Dave Gershgorn

One of China’s largest and most pervasive surveillance networks got its start in a small county about seven hours north of Shanghai.

In 2013, the local government in Pingyi County began installing tens of thousands of security cameras across urban and rural areas — more than 28,500 in total by 2016. Even the smallest villages had at least six security cameras installed, according to state media.

Those cameras weren’t just monitored by police and automated facial recognition algorithms. Through special TV boxes installed in their homes, local residents could watch live security footage and press a button to summon police if they saw anything amiss. The security footage could also be viewed on smartphones.

In 2015 the Chinese government announced that a similar program would be rolled out across China, with a particular focus on remote and rural towns. It was called the “Xueliang Project,” or Sharp Eyes, a reference to a quote from communist China’s former revolutionary leader Mao Zedong who once wrote that “the people have sharp eyes” when looking out for neighbors not living up to communist values.

Sharp Eyes is one of a number of overlapping and intersecting technological surveillance projects built by the Chinese government over the last two decades. Projects like the Golden Shield Project, Safe Cities, SkyNet, Smart Cities, and now Sharp Eyes mean that there are more than 200 million public and private security cameras installed across China.

Through special TV boxes installed in their homes, local residents could watch live security footage and press a button to summon police if they saw anything amiss.

Every five years, the Chinese government releases a plan outlining what it looks to achieve in the next half-decade. China’s 2016 five-year plan set a goal for Sharp Eyes to achieve 100% coverage of China’s public spaces in 2020. Though publicly available reports don’t indicate whether the program has hit that goal — they suggest that the country has gotten very close.

China’s modern surveillance scheme started in 2003, according to Dahlia Peterson, research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, with the creation of the Golden Shield Project.

The Golden Shield Project, run by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), is, in part, responsible for the country’s strict internet censorship. But the program also included physical surveillance. The MPS created databases that included 96% of China’s citizens, with one titled the National Basic Population Information Database. That database includes household registration information, called “hukou,” as well as information on past travels and criminal history, according to a report from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.

Local population databases were also created, according to a paper published in the American Journal of Political Science. These local databases allowed for blacklists, which barred the use of public transportation. Police would be dispatched if someone who had been blacklisted tried to book a bus, train, or airline ticket.

Following Golden Shield, China launched two other surveillance projects focused on the installation of cameras. Safe Cities, launched in 2003, focused on disaster warnings, traffic management, and public security. SkyNet focused on installing cameras connected to facial recognition algorithms.

“Chinese state-run media has claimed Skynet can scan the entire Chinese population in one second with 99.8 percent accuracy, yet such claims ignore glaring technical limitations,” Peterson wrote.

Observers should take these figures with a grain of salt: Accurate and up-to-date information about China’s surveillance initiatives isn’t easily available, and what is publicly known is mainly generated by academics and journalists with some access to government officials or surveillance equipment manufacturers. It’s also unclear which cameras are exclusively viewed by village, city, and provincial governments, and which feed data back to the central government.

Just like Golden Shield, the SkyNet program still exists today, and benefits from 16 years of A.I. research, as well as the tech industry’s boom. According to the New York Times, SkyNet data is used at building complexes that use facial recognition to open security gates. The photos from those security gates are then shared with local police to build a database of the local population.

“Chinese state-run media has claimed Skynet can scan the entire Chinese population in one second with 99.8 percent accuracy, yet such claims ignore glaring technical limitations.”

However, these surveillance schemes are mostly targeted at cities, where funding and population density makes centralized surveillance easier. Sharp Eyes, which is focused on rural areas, is meant to offload work from potentially understaffed police departments.

For instance, an article written by Chinese state media about the Sharp Eyes implementation in Pingyi notes that the county has a population of 1 million people, and only about 300 police officers.

What gets reported to police by the Sharp Eyes program isn’t just limited to crime. One Pingyi resident in the state media article spoke of reporting a collapsed manhole cover, while another mentioned that they had suspected a multilevel marketing scheme happening in a nearby building. The MLM organization was reported to the police, who allegedly broke it up with warnings and fines.

According to Peterson, the Sharp Eyes project is implemented differently depending on each city or town’s needs, but the general premise is the same: The city or town is divided into a grid, and each square of the grid acts as its own administrative unit. Citizens watch security footage from within their grid, giving a sense of ownership over their immediate surroundings. Municipal data can then be aggregated based on reports from each square on the grid.

Cities can also add new technology to the mix at their discretion. Though the system primarily relies on facial recognition and locally broadcast CCTV, the city of Harbin, for instance, published a notice that it was looking for predictive policing technology to sweep a person’s bank transaction data, location history, and social connections, as well as make a determination as to whether they were a terrorist or violent.

Much of the funding for these various surveillance schemes comes from the central government, but regional municipalities and cities also foot the bill for local networks of cameras. At times, counties’ surveillance spending far outstrips other municipal services. An analysis of more than 76,000 government procurement notices by ChinaFile showed that surveillance spending has become a significant portion of many cities’ budgets. In 2018, contracts from the city of Zhoukou showed that officials spent as much on surveillance as they did on education, and spent more than twice as much money on surveillance as on environmental protection programs.

In some instances, Chinese citizens even crowdfund these surveillance measures. In the Shandong province, residents of the small city of Linyi raised an additional 13 million yuan, or $2 million, to help support the full coverage of video surveillance cameras.

This countrywide demand for surveillance technology has created a gold rush for companies developing and selling surveillance technology. Many of the companies selling camera hardware and video management software, especially for locally streamed Sharp Eyes footage, aren’t well known outside of China.

In a list translated by CSET’s Peterson, some of the top companies supplying this technology are surveillance camera manufacturers VisionVera and UniView, as well as big data company Neusoft. On its website, Neusoft specifically calls out that it manages a database on a population of 1.3 billion, and integrates data from more than 20 government sectors, as well as analyzes tens of millions of social videos.

In some instances, Chinese citizens even crowdfund these surveillance measures.

Internationally known Chinese companies like Sensetime, Megvii, Hikvision, and Dahua are far more prevalent in conversations about the persecution of ethnic minorities. These companies have all been sanctioned by the U.S. government based on their involvement with the human rights abuses in Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has been accused of committing genocide against the country’s Uighur ethnic minority. Reports from Xinjiang’s internment camps are horrific, with documented cases of rape, sterilization, or forced labor.

The facial recognition system pitched to Xinjiang’s Shawan region to detect religious minorities was developed by Megvii, which denies involvement in the program. However, ChinaFile found contracts and state media reports that suggest large parts

A recent report from the LA Times and surveillance industry watchdog IPVM also showed that Dahua had also developed facial recognition to specifically detect Uighurs, a Chinese ethnic minority widely persecuted in China’s Xinjiang province. A separate report from IPVM showed how Huawei and Megvii cooperated in the development of a Uighur detection system in 2018.

China’s next five-year plan, which covers 2021 to 2025, places specific emphasis on giving social governance to local municipalities via the grid system, as well as building out even more security projects, to “strengthen construction of the prevention and control system for public security.”

This means the future of China’s surveillance apparatus likely looks a lot like Sharp Eyes: More power and social control given to local governments, so neighbors watch neighbors.

The government also emphasized the persecution of those it maintains as hostile and separatists.

“We will also closely guard against, and crack down on, the infiltration, sabotage, subversion and separatist activities of hostile forces,” the plan says.

 

[marsh]

Bokhari: Microsoft and Friends Want to Destroy Online Privacy

Microsoft has teamed up with a number of tech and media companies to create a system of tracing content around the internet that could destroy online privacy and anonymity, radically transforming the nature of the web.

www.breitbart.com

Bokhari: Microsoft and Friends Want to Destroy Online Privacy
3,490

Jason Redmond/AFP
ALLUM BOKHARI25 Feb 2021750

Microsoft has teamed up with a number of tech and media companies to create a system of tracing content around the internet that could destroy online privacy and anonymity, radically transforming the nature of the web.

Against stiff competition, the alliance of tech and media giants has devised a plan that may constitute Big Tech’s most brazen power-grab yet.

According to Microsoft’s press release, it has partnered with several other organizations to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).

Put simply, the purpose of this organization is to devise a system whereby all content on the internet can be traced back to its author.

The press release states that it will develop these specifications for “common asset types and formats,” meaning videos, documents, audio, and images.

Whether it’s a meme, an audio remix, or a written article, the goal is to ensure that when content reaches the internet, it will come attached with a set of signals allowing its provenance — meaning authorship — can be detected.

Consider the companies that have signed on to this initiative. Leading the pack is Microsoft, which operates Word, Paint, Notepad, Edge, and the Office Suite. If you create a .doc or a .jpg, a Microsoft service is probably involved in some capacity.

Then there’s Adobe, the company behind Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and Premiere Pro, as well as several other market-leading applications for publishing photos, videos, and documents.

There’s also Truepic, a company that has developed technology to track the provenance of photos from the very moment they are captured on a smartphone.

Finally, there’s Intel, which dominates the market in laptop and desktop central processing units (CPUs). The CPU is responsible for processing virtually all information on computers. Whether you’re typing a sentence or taking a screenshot, it’s the CPU that is processing that data.
Accessing the CPU is the ultimate form of digital surveillance. Even if you’re disconnected from the internet, the CPU still sees what your computer is doing.

The combination of these forces creates the potential to track and de-anonymize information from the moment it is created on a computer. Signals could be attached to information to ensure it is censored and suppressed wherever it travels online. Even if someone else is sharing the information, it could be suppressed simply because of its point of origin. And, of course, the signals could be used to identify the creators of dissident content.

Nowhere in Microsoft’s press release is there any indication that these are not the ultimate goals.

And, in fact, the press release gives several indications that these are precisely the ultimate goals.

According to Microsoft, the coalition was created for a single purpose: to stop the spread of “disinformation” — which, in modern establishment journo-speak, means information that challenges establishment narratives. Disinformation, based on how the word is used today, might as well be called dissident information.

According to Microsoft’s press release, the coalition has been established “to address the prevalence of disinformation, misinformation and online content fraud through developing technical standards for certifying the source and history or provenance of media content.”

Naturally, the mainstream media, which is most threatened by dissident information, is heavily involved. The precursor to this coalition, Project Origin, included the New York Times, the BBC, CBC, and Radio Canada.

Project Origin’s mission statement declares:

Misinformation is a growing threat to the integrity of the information eco-system. Having a provable source of origin for media, and knowing that it has not been tampered with en-route, will help to maintain confidence in news from trusted providers.

The goal has been stated up front. The establishment media wants to trace the origin of all digital content so that “trusted providers” can be distinguished from non-trusted providers.

We all know what this means by now. The difference is that instead of doing it via the censorship of online social media platforms and search engines, they are now going to do it at the level of offline software and hardware, most likely down to the most fundamental unit of computer hardware – the CPU.

In other words, there will be nowhere to hide.

Even the brazen behavior of Facebook, Twitter, and Google over the past year — the election interference, the censorship of a President, the mass-censorship of grassroots political movements — pales in comparison to this.

This is Big Tech’s most dangerous plan yet.

Breitbart News has reached out to Microsoft for comment.

 

[marsh]

The Cancellation Of Dr. Seuss Should Disturb You, Because You’re Next

America is entering its very own Mao-like Cultural Revolution. The iconoclasm of the left’s culture war isn’t a side effect, it’s the point.

thefederalist.com

The Cancellation Of Dr. Seuss Should Disturb You, Because You’re Next
America is entering its very own Mao-like Cultural Revolution. The iconoclasm of the left’s culture war isn’t a side effect, it’s the point.

By John Daniel Davidson
MARCH 3, 2021

Dr. Seuss has been cancelled. Some of his work has been deemed racist, and we can’t have that. On Tuesday, the entity that oversees the estate of Theodor Seuss Geisel announced it would no longer publish six of Geisel’s books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

Among the works now deemed unfit for children are Geisel’s first book under the pen name Dr. Seuss, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” published in 1937, and the much-beloved, “If I Ran the Zoo,” published in 1950. The former depicts a “Chinaman” character and the latter shows two men from “the African island of Yerka” in native garb.

There’s not much point in quibbling over whether these and other such illustrations in the condemned Dr. Seuss books are in fact racist or bigoted, or whether Geisel held racist or xenophobic views. By all accounts he was a liberal-minded and tolerant man who hated Nazis and, as a political cartoonist, mocked the antisemitism that was all-too-common in America during World War II.

He was also a man of his era. Later in life, he regretted some of his political work during the war that stereotyped Japanese Americans, which, as jarring as it might seem today, nevertheless reflected attitudes that were commonplace at the time.

But context and nuance don’t factor into the inexorable logic of the woke left, which flattens and refashions the past into a weapon for the culture wars of the present. What’s important to understand is that this isn’t simply about banning six Dr. Seuss books. All of Geisel’s work is, in the judgment of left-wing academia, an exercise in “White supremacy, paternalism, conformity, and assimilation.” It might be easy for conservatives to laugh that off as nonsense, but they shouldn’t, because this isn’t really even about Geisel.

The Left Is Carrying Out a Cultural Revolution

To grasp how a man known as much for his messages of tolerance as for his artistic genius could be canceled for racism, you have to understand what’s actually happening here. The left’s war on the past, on long-dead authors like Geisel, isn’t really about the past, it’s about the future. It’s about who gets to rule, and under what terms.

There’s a predictable pattern to what we’re seeing now. It’s predictable because it has happened before in much the same way it’s happening now. During China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Chinese Communist Party, at the direction of Mao Zedong, called for the destruction of the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. All of these stood in the way of Mao’s socialist ideology, so they had to be destroyed.

Children and students were encouraged by the communist government to inform on their parents and elders, to shame and condemn them in public. The guilty were forced to recant in “struggle sessions,” during which they were mocked and humiliated, sometimes tortured, sometimes murdered. Before it was over, millions were dead.

We’re obviously not there yet, but the woke revolutionaries who now run our elite institutions and exert outsized influence in the corridors of power are following this same pattern.

First, they come for the monuments, destroying the icons of the past and re-writing history to turn even our national heroes and Founding Fathers into enemies. The animating ethos of the mobs pulling down Confederate statues is the same as The New York Times editors who gave us the 1619 Project. And because there is no limiting principle to iconoclasm, they have moved on from Confederates.

The City of Charlottesville, for example, having removed or tried to remove every last Confederate monument, is now pleading for someone, anyone, to haul away a giant statue of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The 18-foot-tall bronze statue, which was erected in 1919 and depicts Lewis and Clark with Sacajawea crouched behind them, is free for anyone who can prove he knows how to move it safely—although at this point it’s a wonder the city doesn’t just dynamite the thing to rubble, Taliban-style.

Then they come for the books, destroying any ideas or literature that challenges their ideology—like Ryan Anderson’s 2018 book on the dangers of transgenderism, which Amazon summarily canceled last month. Even seemingly unobjectionable books can be targeted, if not for their content then for the race of their author. Just ask Jeanine Cummins, whose novel “American Dirt” drew the ire of the left last year simply because Cummins, who is white, wrote a book about Mexican drug cartels. The list goes on and on.

So much for statues and books. At some point, the left will come for actual people, because the ideology of revolution demands that dissent—and therefore dissidents—be silenced, by force if necessary.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, recall what happened all across the country last summer when Black Lives Matter “protesters” took to the streets. They didn’t just march and chant, they rioted. They attacked businesses, destroyed entire city blocks, and carried out a campaign of intimidation, harassing, and in some cases attacking random people if they didn’t kneel and repeat the slogans of the revolution. Dozens of people lost their lives in the chaos and violence that ensued.

The people behind the statue-toppling, the digital book burnings, and the street violence won’t stop until all three of these things—history, ideas, and dissidents—have been destroyed. These are all impediments to their cultural revolution, and they mean to eliminate them.

So forget about Dr. Seuss. Forget about the statues and the books. Those things are just the beginning. It could easily get much worse. The woke revolutionaries of the left can’t be bargained with or appeased. They believe this is a zero-sum game, that one side will win and one side will lose. And they’re right.

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAcelOxaz8g
7:37 min

Here's how new technology from Big Tech could be SCARILY misused
•Mar 4, 2021


Glenn Beck

Allum Bokhari, Senior Tech Correspondent for Breitbart News, joins Glenn to detail new technology from Big Tech — including Microsoft, Adobe, and Intel — that has the potential to be SCARILY misused. The companies say the technology will allow users to more accurately distinguish between factual and misinformation, but should Big Tech REALLY be trusted? Bokhari explains all the sinister ways this tech could be used, too…

 

[marsh]

"It's Un-American, Un-Texan and Soon Will Be Illegal" - Texas Governor Abbott Announces Bill Prohibiting Tech Giants from Censoring Viewpoints | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

Texas Governor Breg Abbott announced on Thursday he will join Texas state Senator Bryan Hughes on Friday to discuss the proposed bill prohibiting far left social media companies from censoring viewpoints.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

“It’s Un-American, Un-Texan and Soon Will Be Illegal” – Texas Governor Abbott Announces Bill Prohibiting Tech Giants from Censoring Viewpoints

By Jim Hoft
Published March 5, 2021 at 9:45am

Texas Governor Breg Abbott announced on Thursday he will join Texas state Senator Bryan Hughes on Friday to discuss the proposed bill prohibiting far left social media companies from censoring viewpoints.

Governor Abbott follows Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who announced legislation in February that would prevent Twitter, Facebook-Instagram, Google-YouTube, Amazon, and Apple from censoring content or selling users’ data.



Via CBS Local — According to a press release, Gov. Abbott will be joined by Senator Bryan Hughes to discuss Senate Bill 12 (SB12) which “will help prohibit social media companies from censoring Texans based on the viewpoints they express.”

** Here is the text of the bill TX SB12.

Will Chamberlain cheers the move by Abbott.

 

[marsh]

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Announces Bill Prohibiting Social Media Censorship

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) announced on Friday that he plans to sign a bill into law that would prohibit social media companies from censoring Texans' viewpoints online, adding that censorship is "not going to be tolerated in Texas."

www.breitbart.com

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Announces Bill Prohibiting Social Media Censorship
103

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
ALANA MASTRANGELO5 Mar 2021111

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) announced on Friday that he plans to sign a bill into law that would prohibit social media companies from censoring Texans’ viewpoints online, adding that censorship is “not going to be tolerated in Texas.”

“We see that the First Amendment is under assault by these social media companies, and that is not going to be tolerated in Texas,” said Governor Abbott at a press conference on Friday alongside State Senator Bryan Hughes (R).

“There is a dangerous movement spreading across the country trying to try to silence conservative ideas, religious beliefs,” the governor added. “We saw that first arise on college campuses.”

In 2019, Governor Abbott signed into law the “Campus Free Speech” law, ensuring that students’ First Amendment rights would be protected on college campuses.

“But now,” Abbott continued, “these social media tech companies are using their tools to silence conservative speech on their platforms.”

The governor added that senator Hughes’ Senate Bill 12 will protect Texans “from being wrongfully censored on social media, making sure that their voices are going to be heard and canceled or silenced.”

Abbott went on to note that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter “have evolved into the modern-day public square.”

“These are the areas that used to be the courthouse square where people would come and talk,” said Abbott. “Now, people are going to Facebook and Twitter to talk about their political ideas, and what Facebook and Twitter are doing — they are controlling the flow of information, and sometimes denying the flow of information.”

“Texas is taking a stand against big tech political censorship. We are not going to allow it in the Lone Star state,” Governor Abbott affirmed.

The governor explained that Senator Hughes’ legislation will prohibit social media companies from censoring Texans based upon their viewpoints.

“It would also allow any Texan who has been canceled or censored or de-platformed to be able to file a lawsuit against Twitter, Facebook, or any of these other companies, and make sure they are able to get back on,” said Abbott.

“The United States of America was built on freedom of speech and healthy public debate,” the governor added. “Big tech’s efforts to silence conservative viewpoints is un-American, un-Texan, and it is unacceptable. And pretty soon, it’s going to be against the law in the state of Texas.”

Senator Hughes also expressed his concerns regarding Americans being “locked out social media for not conforming to a narrow worldview” approved by the political left, and explained why it should be illegal for social media companies to behave in this manner.

“We don’t allow your phone company to cut you off because they don’t like your politics, your cable company can’t cut you off because of your religion,” said Hughes. “These social media companies are common carriers. They have chosen to enter into that business, and they cannot discriminate against people in a violation of the First Amendment.”

Governor Abbott says that he looks forward to signing the bill into law.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

How Democracy Dies: Big Tech Becomes Big Brother

THURSDAY, MAR 04, 2021 - 23:40
Authored by Leni Friedman Valenta with Dr. Jiri Valenta via The Gatestone Institute,

"Digital giants have been playing an increasingly significant role in wider society... how well does this monopolism correlate with the public interest?," Russian President Vladimir Putin said on January 27, 2021.

"Where is the distinction between successful global businesses, sought-after services and big data consolidation on the one hand, and the efforts to rule society[...] by substituting legitimate democratic institutions, by restricting the natural right for people to decide how to live and what view to express freely on the other hand?"

Was Mr. Putin defending democracy? Hardly. What apparently worries him is that the Big Tech might gain the power to control society at the expense of his government.

What must be a nightmare for him -- as for many Americans -- is that the Tech giants were able to censor news favorable to Trump and then censor Trump himself. How could the U.S. do this to the president of a great and free country?

Putin made these comments at the Davos World Economic Forum, in which he and Chinese President Xi Jinping, sped on by the "Great Reset" of a fourth industrial revolution, used enlightened phrases to mask dark plans for nation states in a globalist New World Order. Thus did Xi caution attendees "to adapt to and guide globalization, cushion its negative impact, and deliver its benefits to all countries and all nations."

In March 2019, Putin signed a law "imposing penalties for Russian internet users caught spread 'fake news' and information that presents 'clear disrespect for society, government, state symbols the constitution and government institutions.'" Punishments got even heavier with new laws in December.

Meanwhile, opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been sentenced to prison for more than three years (with a year off for time served), in part because he revealed photos of a lavish Russian palace allegedly belonging to Putin on the coast of the Black Sea. Its accouterments supposedly include an $824 toilet brush. Many of the thousands of people protesting Navalny's imprisonment have since been protesting Putin by waving gold-painted toilet brushes.

How nice that American Big Tech companies is pushing democracy in Russia -- even while it is denying it at home. Do you notice how many leaders in Europe have risen to condemn censorship in America even though many in Europe are censoring their citizens as well, and are not exactly fans of the person who was being censored, former President Donald J. Trump? Like Putin, they probably do not want Big Tech competing with their governments, either.



The power-sharing of the U.S. Federal government with Big Tech appears a recipe for unharnessed power and corruption. Navalny caught on right away, saying:

"This precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world. In Russia as well. Every time when they need to silence someone, they will say: 'this is just common practice, even Trump got blocked on Twitter.'"

What watchdog, if any, is now restraining Big Tech in America? It has become quite clear that Big Tech's censorship may well have cost Trump the election, even if one ultimately finds that election fraud did not.

Big Tech took it upon itself to censor an exposé -- published by the New York Post on October 24, 2020, as well as follow-up exposés -- reporting that Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, had sold his influence to China and Ukraine, and had raked in millions for the family.

The Media Research Center (MRC) found that "One of every six Biden voters we surveyed (17%) said they would have abandoned the Democratic candidate had they known the facts about one or more of these news stories". That information might well have changed the outcome in all six of the swing states Biden reportedly won.

Last August, Twitter also undertook censoring the trailer of an explosive documentary entitled "The Plot Against the President." The film, narrated by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) with commentary by leading members of the Republican Party, exposes leading members of the Democratic Party and their deep state allies, many of whom knowingly used phony evidence to frame President Trump and some in his circle to try convince Americans that he and his campaign had colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election.

The film claims, using with recently declassified information, that President Barack Obama, as well Hillary Clinton, were involved in an almost four-year attempted coup incomparably more undemocratic than any riot at the Capital Building on January 6.

Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, claimed in August 2020 that Biden also knew of the ongoing efforts to unseat Trump. Nevertheless, Trump did not target them, perhaps to avoid dividing the country even further.

According to the Washington Times, the Twitter account of the movie, which debuted in October 2020, attracted 30,000 followers. Twitter blacklisted it for a day, but after a public uproar, put the popular documentary back. Our question is: How many blacklistings did Twitter not put back?

The January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol was a pivotal event for Trump and the Republican Party. Prior to January 6, President Trump had offered to deploy 10,000 troops to the capitol,
according to his former Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows. The Pentagon and the Department of Justice had also offered help but were also reportedly turned down by the US Capitol Police The problem, apparently, was "optics" -- about a Capitol now surrounded by barbed wire and thousands of troops, which the current Administration now seems to like.

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for further details about the event were also rejected -- it is not clear by whom. It is ridiculous, therefore, for anyone to frame the riots, ugly as they were, as a seditious "insurrection," particularly in light of what appears to be a massive security failure that could have averted the violence. One thing is certain: the timing of the event could not have been more perfect for opposition groups, which is probably why it had been planned for weeks before January 6.

What these efforts and the media did achieve was an end to all attempts to ascertain election fraud at a time when Vice President Mike Pence was counting Electoral College ballots, and allowing speeches from those supporting that claim. Some politicians even called for the resignation of Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, and referred them to the ethics committee for even suggesting an election audit of battleground states, despite questions having been asked -- with no objections -- concerning the results of the 2000, 2004 and 2016 presidential elections.

Ultimately, the result of the latest "witch hunt" against President Trump, as it has been called, was a contrived impeachment attempt to bar Trump from a future presidential bid -- a kangaroo court devoid of due process, hearings, witnesses, and evidence. The prosecution, however, was undeniably eloquent in evoking "democracy" for a totally undemocratic procedure that justly resulted in Trump's acquittal.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter banned Trump and some of his supporters from their cyber domains. An alternative social media platform, Parler, was banned from the Apple and Google app stores, and then completely closed down by Amazon.

Meanwhile, mainstream social media platforms were reportedly used to rally and organize carry out riots in American cities last year. No one was penalized.

Do not, however, expect such slackness now. According to Fox News:

"People like Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have made various public statements labeling Republicans as extremists -- with Ocasio-Cortez claiming the GOP has 'white supremacist sympathizers' within its ranks, and Brennan claiming 'domestic violent extremists' in the form of far-right supporters of President Trump are more dangerous than Al Qaeda."

Columnist and radio host Jeffrey Kuhner warns that a new bill, H.R. 350, "is the liberals' equivalent of the Patriot Act redux. This time, however, it is not aimed at Islamic jihadists. Rather, it directly targets Trump patriots." Kuhner writes that the bill "has the full backing of the Democratic congressional leadership, the Biden administration... Big Media and Big Tech."

"The bill empowers the Deep State to monitor, surveil and spy on American citizens' social media accounts, phone calls, political meetings and even infiltrate pro-Trump or 'Stop the Steal' rallies.

"Conservatives who are deemed potentially 'seditious' or 'treasonous' can be arrested and jailed, fined and/or lose their employment. The goal is simple: to crush all dissent to the Biden regime."

Moreover, last month the new Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, ordered a "stand down "of the entire military for 60 days, "so each service, each command and each unit can have a deeper conversation about this issue [extremism]." Normally stand downs last only a few hours or days and do not involve the entire military. Austin, in addition, has pledged to "rid our ranks of racists and extremists."

These are words that can be applied to anyone dreamed up, including Trump supporters, and based, of course, on nothing but propaganda.

Austin's plan is therefore needless, divisive and dangerous, considering the foreign dangers now circling their prey. This punishment of the regime's "foes" makes one wonder what is next. Are we already marching in lockstep with Russia and China? The way to unite and strengthen the United States is not through suppression and punishment but through political power with checks and balances, a free press and closer adherence to the Constitution.

But here, again, there seems to be. a problem. The Federalist wrote in July:

"According to a new Quillette survey released last month, 70 percent of self-identifying liberals want to rewrite the U.S. Constitution 'to a new Americans constitution that better reflects our diversity as a people.'"

Oh, so that is what we lack: diversity!

What can Americans Do? We are presently at a tipping point in America. Communist China is working hard and is focused on global domination; we are just messing around. In an increasingly digital world, the war against infringements on our freedoms most probably needs to be fought largely in the digital and cyber-space. That is why ending censorship in both the traditional and social media is such an important priority. First, break up the Big Tech companies. Let them become the utilities they originally claimed to be, or else be liable to lawsuits as other publishers are.

We do take some comfort that whereas dictatorships in authoritarian countries such as China and Russia is vertical -- from the top down -- in America, the central government shares power with the states from the bottom up, and with powers separated: the executive, the judiciary and the legislative. Fortunately, governors such as Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas and Kevin Stitt in Oklahoma are now moving legislatively to counter federal laws that may have adverse effects on freedom of speech, jobs, election integrity, the energy industry, the first or second amendments and general constitutional rights.

This does not speak, however, to the major issue here -- that democracy cannot survive in a country where a few technocrats and oligarchs can choose to deny access to information or platforms to candidates running for office. It is simply unacceptable that they alone -- unelected, unappointed, untransparent and unaccountable -- can deem what is "harmful" to society. The job now for all of us is to prevent the United States from slowly becoming a full-blown tyranny.

 

[marsh]

Poll: Majority of voters believe Big Tech censored political views they 'don't like'

Republicans overwhelmingly believe so; Democrats more divided.

justthenews.com

Poll: Majority of voters believe Big Tech censored political views they 'don't like'

Republicans overwhelmingly believe so; Democrats more divided.

By Daniel Payne
Updated: March 5, 2021 - 3:02pm

Asolid majority of U.S. voters believe big tech companies are censored political views their leaders "don't like," according to a new Just the News Daily Poll with Scott Rasmussen.

Fifty-six percent of respondents agreed with the poll statement: "Big tech companies [have] censored the distribution of political views they don’t like." Just 19% said no, while the remaining 24% was uncertain.
Image

JTN poll
Just the News

The breakdown by political affiliation was notable, particularly among Democrats, on the question of whether tech companies censor political content in line with their leaders.
Thirty-eight percent of Democrat respondents said "yes," while 30% said "no," and 32% said they were uncertain. That compares to 78% of Republicans saying tech companies have engaged in such censorship.

The majority response comes after a chaotic start to the year in which multiple, major social media platforms – including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – banned conservative figures including then-President Donald Trump.

The survey of 1,200 Registered Voters was conducted by Rasmussen using a mixed mode approach from February 25-27, 2021.

Click here to see this poll's cross-demographic tabulations.
Click here to see this poll's methodology and sample demographics.

 

[marsh]

Almost Three-Quarters of U.S. Academics Wouldn't Even EAT With Someone Who Rejects Transgenderism

Academia does not need to outright

pjmedia.com

Almost Three-Quarters of U.S. Academics Wouldn't Even EAT With Someone Who Rejects Transgenderism

BY TYLER O'NEIL MAR 04, 2021 6:02 PM ET

AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File
The insanity on America’s college campuses appears to have abated somewhat. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE) database, university speaker disinvitations peaked in 2016 and have slowly declined since. The Niskanen Center declared that “the campus free speech crisis” ended in 2018, and Commentary magazine reported that things were “looking up on campus” in 2019. The latest education scandals often involve elementary and high schools more than college campuses.

Yet this comparative decrease in campus outrage does not mean conservatives have made any headway in academia. In fact, an exhaustive survey of bias in academia paints a horrifying picture of systemic leftist orthodoxy and demonization of conservative dissent.

Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of London’s Birkbeck College and a board member at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, insisted that despite the relative placidity of campus news, “Academic freedom is in crisis on American campuses.”

Kaufmann noted that the National Association of Scholars recorded 65 instances of professors getting disciplined or fired for protected speech in 2020, a fivefold increase from 2019. He also reported the results of his exhaustive new study from the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. In the study, he analyzed eight comprehensive surveys of academic and graduate-student opinion across the U.S., Canada, and Britain — and the results paint an ugly picture of academic groupthink.

“High-profile activist excesses are mere symptoms of a much wider problem of progressive authoritarianism,” Kaufmann argued. His study found that roughly 1 in 3 conservative academics and graduate students have faced discipline or threats of disciplinary action. “A progressive monoculture empowers radical activist staff and students to violate the freedom of political minorities like conservatives or ‘gender-critical’ feminists, who believe in the biological basis of womanhood—all in the name of emotional safety or social justice.”

Kaufmann’s report found that political discrimination pervades academia. Four in ten American academics said they would not hire a known Trump supporter for a job. In Canada, 45 percent said so. One in three British academics said they wouldn’t hire a Brexit supporter.

Between 20 percent and 50 percent of academics and graduate students have said they would discriminate against right-leaning grant applications, journal submissions, and promotion cases. Kaufmann noted that this “virtually guarantees” conservatives will face discrimination from any four-person panel.

Pro-transgender bias seems particularly virulent. Only 28 percent of American academics said they would be comfortable sitting with a gender-critical scholar over lunch, even fewer than the 41 percent said they would sit with a Trump-voting colleague. This preference isolates academics from millions of Americans who accept the truth of biological sex over the nebulous concept of gender identity.

About 75 percent of conservative academics in the social sciences and humanities in the United States and Britain said their departments have a climate hostile to their beliefs. Nearly 40 percent of faculty members who describe themselves as centrist agree.

According to Kaufmann, only 9 percent of Trump-supporting academics said they would feel comfortable expressing their political beliefs to a colleague. Only 14 percent of U.S. academics said a Trump supporter would feel comfortable expressing his beliefs at their college or university. Seventy percent of conservative U.S. academics said they self-censor in their teaching, research, or academic discussions.

Kaufmann’s studies have found that only 5 percent of American scholars in the social sciences and humanities identify as conservative and that academics on the Left outnumber those on the right by 14 to 1 in the U.S. and Canada.

Only one in ten academics support “canceling” controversial right-wing professors by firing them from their jobs, but younger academics and doctoral candidates are more likely to support this ideological enforcement. Even without high support for outright “canceling” conservatives, the hostile ideological climate exiles right-leaning academics from the outset.

Conservative and centrist students learn that if they want a future on campus, they have to self-censor — or, more likely, they decide academia is not right for them. As Kaufmann noted, “Conservatives who think their politics wouldn’t fit are significantly less likely than others to be interested in pursing an academic career.”

“In effect, there is a feedback loop: Low viewpoint diversity reproduces the hostile climate that sustains the progressive monoculture that has developed in many faculties over the past four decades,” Kaufmann explained.

Colleges and universities don’t have to engage in controversial “cancelations.” Their leftist orthodoxy is self-perpetuating and without reform, the situation will only get worse.

Tragically, this leftist stranglehold on academia often translates to claims that conservative ideas are unscientific or false, because many of the authorities automatically exclude them from discussion.

 

[marsh]

Stanford conservatives stand up to 'leftist fascism' amid calls to cancel

The Stanford College Republicans were denied a chance to respond to a call in the campus newspaper for the organization to be removed from campus.

campusreform.org

Stanford conservatives stand up to 'leftist fascism' amid calls to cancel

The Stanford College Republicans were denied a chance to respond to a call in the campus newspaper for the organization to be removed from campus.
The response was denied because it did not meet the “editorial standards” of the newspaper.

Ashley Carnahan | California Campus Correspondent
Thursday, March 4, 2021 8:48 AM

The Stanford Daily, the student newspaper of Stanford University, published an op-ed criticizing the Stanford College Republicans, saying they don't deserve a place on campus. The news outlet now isn't letting the College Republicans chapter respond to the allegation.

Claire Dinshaw, a senior at Stanford, wrote the op-ed, titled "SCR does not deserve its place on campus," where she argued that the group has gone "unpunished" for promoting "misogynistic" and "hateful" views.

“There are multiple groups on campus that have platformed and promoted racist, misogynistic and hateful rhetoric over the years. But one group stands among the rest as the most consistently unpunished offender: the Stanford College Republicans,” she wrote.

She went on to say that the SCR’s have “frequently provided a platform, or have themselves used, hateful and discriminatory rhetoric that serves to dehumanize groups of students that are members of the Stanford community. Furthermore, they have caused the doxxing of students and professors. SCR’s consistent disregard for student safety and unwillingness to engage in good-faith debates are grounds for removing them from campus.”

Dinshaw said she is not “against the presence of a Republican student group, but it must be a group which engages in respectful dialogue rather than hateful attacks against student groups and individual identities.”

The SCR’s sent a response letter to The Stanford Daily Editorial Board on February 28, but the board denied publication, according to the group's Facebook page.

"Far from being committed to publishing diverse viewpoints, we are sad to see the Stanford Daily’s active role in promulgating leftist fascism and ideological conformity. We are currently considering other avenues to publish our response," the group said.

In a comment to Campus Reform, the Editor in Chief of the Stanford Daily, Erin Woo, said that “the Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of op-eds and letters to the editor.”

She went on to say the letter from the SCR’s did not meet its “editorial standards.”

Campus Reform sent a follow-up email asking Woo to further describe what exactly in the SCR’s letter did not meet its standards, but a response was not received.

Stephen Sills, president of the SCR's told Campus Reform that the incident shows how the Stanford Daily is an "ideological reflection" of the most "radical elements" of those on the campus left.

“The greater implication here is that the Stanford Daily is the ideological reflection of the most radical elements of the campus left. We’ve actually received an outpouring of support from Stanford students on the right and center-left. Stanford students see the value in our contributions to free debate and civil discourse on Stanford’s campus," Sills said. "It is blatantly clear that individuals such as Ms. Dinshaw have no interest in attending our events or understanding our point of view. Rather, Dinshaw joins a concerning trend of students interested [in] stifling any and all healthy debate and civil dialogue at Stanford.”

Sills went on to say, “we are sure the university is aware of what’s going on, and their refusal to issue a public statement on the issue is reflective of how much more Stanford needs to do to protect the First Amendment rights of its students.”

Campus Reform reached out to the Stanford Media Relations team for further comment. Senior Director of Media Relations E.J. Miranda told Campus Reform, “The Stanford Daily is an independent, student-run newspaper.”

 

[marsh]

Biden Labor Board Blocks Construction Workers From Union Exodus

The Biden administration is blocking the exits for construction workers who unanimously voted to cut ties with their union.

freebeacon.com

Biden Labor Board Blocks Construction Workers From Union Exodus
Workers unanimously opted out of carpenters' union

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Graham Piro - MARCH 4, 2021 4:50 PM

The Biden administration is blocking the exits for construction workers who unanimously voted to cut ties with their union.

The National Labor Relations Board refused to allow a group of Indiana workers to hold a vote that would decertify their representation with the local carpenters' union despite the group's unanimous support for cutting ties. The group of workers submitted the request to the regional NLRB, which blocked the attempt to decertify.

The board's lawyers allege that the workers are engaging in "bad faith" bargaining, according to the case filing. Indiana is a right-to-work state, meaning the state allows employees to work without requiring union membership, but the board is blocking the vote under federal law on the grounds of bad faith bargaining.

The carpenters' union did not respond to a request for comment.

The conflict comes as President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats signal their readiness to take executive and legislative action to empower labor unions. Biden has already overhauled the leadership of the NLRB with the unprecedented removal of the board's general counsel, and House Democrats are expected to vote on the PRO Act, a drastic labor reform bill.

Patrick Semmens, vice president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which is assisting the workers, said the labor board is already moving to undo reforms put in place by the NLRB under former president Donald Trump that simplified the process for workers to decline union representation.

In March 2020, the NLRB finalized rules that simplified the process for employees to decertify their union leadership. "The Board believes that these amendments better protect employees’ statutory right of free choice on questions concerning representation," the board stated.
Semmens said the move to block the Indiana workers from decertifying their leadership is the first step in weakening those rules.

"I would fully expect that once there's a Biden majority on the NLRB, they're going to move to undo those rules to allow unions to block even more instances where workers are seeking decertification elections," Semmens said. "It certainly points to something I unfortunately think we're going to see more of in the coming years."

House Democrats are also expected to vote on the PRO Act next week. The act would significantly weaken right-to-work laws nationwide, although it stands little chance of passing the deadlocked Senate.

 

[marsh]

U.S. Adversaries Weaponize Woke Politics

The propaganda efforts of American adversaries show they're seizing on the rhetoric of the far left, particularly its criticism of the United States.

freebeacon.com

U.S. Adversaries Weaponize Woke Politics

China says U.S. leads 'axis of white supremacy' while Russia smears dissidents

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  Getty Images

Yuichiro Kakutani and Jack Beyrer - MARCH 4, 2021 2:47 PM

The propaganda efforts of American adversaries show they're seizing on the rhetoric of the far left, particularly its criticism of the United States.

China responded to international criticism about the Uighur genocide on Monday by pledging to submit a "report on human-rights violations in the United States" that will discuss the Black Lives Matter movement. Russia, meanwhile, convinced Amnesty International in late February to revoke the "prisoner of conscience" label from Russian dissident Alexei Navalny by disseminating his decade-old anti-immigrant comments.

American rivals—from China to Russia to Iran—are using terms out of the woke dictionary, such as "white supremacy" and "systemic racism," to peddle propaganda in the United States.

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the progressive rhetoric allows propagandists to deflect criticism about their authoritarian politics and sow discord in America.
"This is a two-fer for them: It can sow dissent and unrest here, and then it can let them say to their own people, ‘Look how unruly and violent democracy can be,'" Gonzalez told the Washington Free Beacon. "It makes the conduct of our foreign policy much harder, in places like Hong Kong or Xinjiang for example."

The Chinese government has repeatedly used progressive language to distract from its own human-rights abuses. China's foreign ministry spokeswoman responded to U.S. criticism about its crackdown in Hong Kong by tweeting, "I can't breathe" in May 2020, days after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Chinese propagandists also accused the United States of hypocrisy for supporting Chinese dissidents while cracking down on riots at home.

The Chinese propaganda effort has doubled down on its woke approach as pressure mounts on the authoritarian regime's treatment of Muslim Uighurs. In February, a Chinese mouthpiece accused a U.S.-led "axis of white supremacy" of spreading slander about Xinjiang to isolate China on the international stage.

"A U.S.-centered, racist, and mafia-styled community [is] willfully and arrogantly provoking China and trying to consolidate their hegemony as all gangsters do," reads a Feb. 23 editorial by the Global Times, a state-sponsored mouthpiece. "They are becoming a racist axis aimed at stifling the development rights of 1.4 billion Chinese."

Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) said the proliferation of progressive ideology in American society has allowed the Chinese government to exploit U.S. social divisions.

"It’s no surprise to see the Chinese Communist Party trafficking in propaganda that mirrors the shoddy arguments coming out of American newsrooms and universities," Hawley said. "And frankly, woke liberals and our increasingly deranged cancel culture give them every reason to think those arguments will work."

In one case, the progressive rhetoric allowed Chinese propagandists to shape American media coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. Chinese state outlets accused Western outlets of racism for using the term "Wuhan flu" to refer to the virus in February 2020—even though those same outlets used that term for months. The racism charge convinced most U.S. outlets to drop the term, allowing the Chinese government to obfuscate the origins of the virus as the pandemic spread across the globe.

"As they say, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend," Republican congressman Jim Banks (Ind.) said. "It’s terrifying to see … internal and external enemies of American greatness collude out in the open."

American adversaries have a history of exploiting U.S. progressive politics in their propaganda efforts. As far back as the 1960s, KGB agents tried unsuccessfully to recruit Martin Luther King Jr. to exacerbate racial tensions.

Russia has inherited its Soviet predecessors' finesse for exploiting Western progressive discourse for its own gains. As Russia contended with growing domestic unrest over its detention of Navalny, the Kremlin organized a coordinated effort to disseminate comments made by Navalny more than a decade ago in which he called immigrants "cockroaches." In response, Amnesty International dropped the "prisoner of conscience" label for Navalny for his past "advocacy of hatred" on Feb. 24, securing a public relations victory for Russian president Vladimir Putin.

"One of the most visible international human-rights organizations has, in fact, labeled Navalny a bigot, a hater, an advocate of violence—in sum, a reprehensible person not deserving the title of ‘prisoner of conscience,'" University of Houston professor Paul Roderick Gregory wrote.

"Consider the irony of the unwoke Kremlin holding the feet of Western institutions to the woke fire."

China and Russia are not the only U.S. rivals using progressive rhetoric to smear the United States. Iran's foreign minister wrote tweets in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in May, while North Korea labeled the United States a country of "extreme racists" after the death of Floyd.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) said the progressive narrative meshes well with foreign propaganda because they share a common assessment of America as a "hopelessly evil country."

"Our enemies in places like China, Russia, and Cuba love nothing more than to point to these profoundly wrong ideologies to justify their own ongoing human-rights atrocities and to sow division here," Cruz said.

 

[marsh]

Arizona House Passes Law to Nullify Biden's Federal Gun Control - Big League Politics

Arizona won't recognize gun control.

bigleaguepolitics.com

Arizona House Passes Law to Nullify Biden’s Federal Gun Control

Arizona won’t recognize gun control.

Mar 4, 2021
By Richard Moorhead

The Arizona House passed a law to nullify federal gun control measures last last month, establishing the state as a Second Amendment sanctuary. State Rep. Leo Biasiucci’s Second Amendment Firearm Freedom Act would nullify any new federal gun control laws restricting gun rights, citing the unconstitutionality of the Biden administration’s support for “assault weapons” bans, attacks on online firearms transactions, and forced registry of semiautomatic rifles as NFA items.

The law passed the Arizona State House in a 31-29 party line vote in February.

“We’re Second Amendment friendly. We love our law-abiding citizens, gun owners,” Biasiucci told the Epoch Times. “So I have a bill HB 2111 … it’s very simple. It says if the federal government changes anything at the federal level, Arizona is not gonna play. We’re not going to use money. We’re not gonna use resources to comply—if they ban AR-15 and they try to come in and start arresting people. Not gonna happen in our state.”

The law- or a similar proposal currently being prepared by Arizona Senators- has a strong chance of passing Arizona’s State Senate, where Republicans hold a two-seat lead. If signed into law, Arizona would be the biggest state to pass a Second Amendment nullification provision that blocks federal gun control proposals, following Missouri, Wyoming, South Dakota, Tennessee, Kansas, and Alaska.

The Second Amendment Firearm Freedom Act would institute state criminal penalties for law enforcement officials that attempt to enforce illegal gun grabs.

Biasiucci touted the law as an invitation for firearms companies to move to Arizona, citing respect for gun laws and a pro-small and medium business economic atmosphere.

“I ask all these gun manufacturers come to Arizona. We got low taxes. We’re trying to drop our income tax again this year. We’re gonna try to move it to a flat tax. We have a lot of land, business-friendly. We’re open for business. So I tell everybody: hey, come to Arizona, the land of the free over there, the last frontier.”

 

[marsh]

The Left’s Attack on the Nuclear Family Echoes Language of CCP: Morgan Zegers

The left’s attack on the nuclear family and the collectivist mindset that is growing in the United States echoes narratives from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), says Morgan Zegers, founder of Young ...

www.theepochtimes.com

The Left’s Attack on the Nuclear Family Echoes Language of CCP: Morgan Zegers

March 4, 2021 6:31, Last Updated: March 4, 2021 6:31
By Isabel van Brugen and Joshua Philipp

The left’s attack on the nuclear family and the collectivist mindset that is growing in the United States echoes narratives from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), says Morgan Zegers, founder of Young Americans Against Socialism.

“The left’s attack on the nuclear family … all goes into that growing support for socialism, that collectivist mindset that we’re seeing in America,” Zegers told The Epoch Times’ “Crossroads” at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, last week.

Young Americans Against Socialism is a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to exposing socialism’s failures by creating viral educational videos for social media.

Zegers said she has grown increasingly concerned by the language used at socialist conventions that focus on the topics of the family unit and pregnancies.

“If you look at what happens at socialist conventions, they discuss how they have to get rid of the American nuclear family structure to implement socialism—it’s more easy,” she said. “What they specifically talk about is how pregnancy is a tool of oppression, and that they need to free women from being ‘baby making machines.’”

“We recently saw communist China use that exact language, and so it’s very concerning for me,” Zegers added.

Under communism the family unit is an obstacle to human liberation. Classical communism regards economic factors as key in determining the formation of familial relationships, and it requires the private family unit to be revolutionized into a form of public ownership.

The “liberation of mankind” sits at the heart of communist ideology. Communist thought holds that oppression is not merely economic or social, but ingrained in the very culture of a society.

For communists, “liberation” means the destruction of cultural norms “imposed” by traditional social morality. In their view, the patriarchy of the traditional family structure oppresses women, and traditional sexual morality represses human nature.

“They say that they’re empowering us, but in the end, they’re really just trying to create that collectivist mindset, so that’s what we have to fight against,” Zegers said.

Zegers said that in particular, language from the left and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) initiative feeds into this narrative.

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” BLM’s official website once stated, according to the Mises Institute.

That post now appears to have been deleted.

“At that convention that I was discussing earlier, they talked about how they want to replace the nuclear family with a more surrogacy style program put on by the government, so women won’t be oppressed by having to bear their own children. If you’ve read ‘The Giver’—that dystopian novel—it’s literally that,” Zegers said. “Black Lives Matter has said they want to use the community raising to raise children instead of the family, so if you connect the dots, it’s quite concerning.”

Zegers added: “It’s really taken a 180, and gone from women’s empowerment and supporting women and not making us only housewives. It’s done a complete way of saying, actually, reject all aspects that make you a woman.”

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

"It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World..."

FRIDAY, MAR 05, 2021 - 16:19
Authored by Simon Black via Sovereign Man, [Gold]

Are you ready for this week’s absurdity?

Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, risks to your prosperity… and on occasion, inspiring poetic justice.


White People Shouldn’t Translate Black Poetry

Amanda Gorman— a poet who happens to be Black— rose to notoriety after speaking at President Biden’s inauguration.

She is publishing a book of poetry, which will be translated into Dutch.

Gorman chose a female Dutch author to translate her work, but a Dutch activist journalist had other plans.

She rallied the woke mobsters to express their disgust that a White woman would be translating the work of a Black poet.

After the backlash, the white translator pulled out and decided she will not translate the book of poetry.

Apparently to be woke, we have to segregate poetry.
Click here to read the full story.

* * *
California Demands Solitary Confinement for Kids Exposed to Covid

A regional health department in California issued guidelines telling parents what to do if their child has been exposed to a classmate with Covid-19.

Health officials recommend that children be kept in solitary confinement for two weeks without contact with family members. These children should be forced to eat separately from the rest of the family, and wear a mask when they leave their bedroom jail cell.

Keep in mind this is the recommendation “if your child does not have any symptoms,” has NOT tested positive for Covid, and simply may have come into contact with someone who was positive for Covid.

Sadly, some parents will follow this insane advice, and leave psychological scars on their children far worse than anything Covid would do to them.
Click here to see the guidelines.
* * *
School Superintendent Fired for Refusing to Perform Wakanda Salute

A group of school superintendents in New York City routinely posed for the “Wakanda salute” at the end of their meetings.

Wakanda is the fictional, technologically advanced African nation from the Marvel comic universe made popular in Black Panther and the Avengers movies.

But one superintendent— a “Black/Afro Latina Hispanic woman”— thought the salute introduced unnecessary racial division, and refused to perform it.

She was “admonished and told that it was inappropriate for her not to participate in the black power /Wakanda/ Black Panther Salute.”

Then, after having been employed by the district for nearly three decades, she was fired. The reason given was that the school district is “moving in a new direction.”

(She later reached a deal with the district to instead be demoted in order to keep her retirement benefits.)

So the woke mob is now victimizing Black women in the name of racial justice. Makes sense.
Click here to read the lawsuit.
* * *
Gay Dad Not Diverse Enough for San Francisco Parent Advisory Committee

The San Francisco schools’ Parent Advisory Committee recently spent two hours debating about allowing a gay white male father onto the committee.

They ultimately rejected him because he did not add enough diversity to the all female committee.

The race-obsessed committee at one point during the meeting read off their racial demographics as if these were credentials:

“I’ll give you the breakdown now. Currently the P.A.C has two African-American parents, one Asian-American parent, three Latinx parent, one pacific islander parent and three white parents. Currently all of those are women.”

Clearly this is more important than the content of one’s character.

Click here to read the full story.
* * *
Canada Post Suspends Mail Delivery to Mask-less Residents

The Canada Post is a “Crown corporation,” which means it is a government agency which functions as a private corporation. But it will soon require tax subsidies to function, plus taxpayers are on the hook for the agency’s more than $5 billion of underfunded pensions.

After residents were seen without masks in the common area of their apartment building, the Canada Post suspended mail delivery to the complex.

And the apartment complex will no longer receive the government service until all residents wear masks in common areas at all times.

Click here to read the full story.
* * *
Seattle Shelter Offers Tax-Funded Heroin Pipes

A tax-funded Seattle homeless shelter is advertising free pipes to help homeless people more easily and safely use heroin.

One flier at the shelter states, “Smoking is a lower risk alternative to injection. Give it a try!”

Another poster instructs homeless addicts to ask the front desk about “booty bumping kits,” which is apparently a method of injecting drugs anally.

Your tax dollars hard at work.

Click here to read the full story.
* * *
New Hampshire Bill Would Empower Mask Nazis

A bill introduced in the New Hampshire legislature carries the catchy title: “Establishing a criminal penalty for an assault committed against a person who is conveying public health or safety guidance or requirements during a declared state of emergency.”

That’s a mouthful. But it basically says that the bill is intended to outlaw assault against people not wearing a mask. Except that’s not what it does.

Instead, the bill makes a criminal out of anyone who “refuses to comply” if someone asks them to put on a mask.

You can feel all the Karens’ excitement growing over their pending new powers.

Click here to read the full bill .

 

[Ractivist]

No one speaks of academic misconduct......the actual reality here.