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

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

How The Fight Over American Freedom Will Probably Escalate

FRIDAY, MAR 05, 2021 - 23:40
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

Three months ago in December I published an article titled ‘Is The Globalist Reset Failing? The Elites May Have Overplayed Their Hand’. I was specifically interested in the development of the pandemic “crisis”, the lockdown mandates of governments worldwide, the bizarre vaccination campaign for the new and under-tested mRNA cocktail which was rushed out to the public in the span of six months, the World Economic Forum’s open statements that they hoped to exploit the pandemic as a springboard for their globalist agenda, and the public’s reaction to it all.


I have to say, I continue to see a divergence in what the elites clearly wanted to happen vs. what has actually happened. If the Event 201 pandemic war game on a coronavirus outbreak, held two months before the actual outbreak occurred in China, is any indication, then the globalists greatly overestimated the fear effect of Covid.

They predicted at least 65 million deaths from a coronavirus outbreak, but over a year has passed since the pandemic went international and the official death count stands at 2.5 million, with over 40% of deaths in the US attributed to nursing home patients that were ALREADY dying from preexisting conditions. Removing suspect nursing home deaths from the equation, the death count is probably closer to 1.5 million, again, if we adhere to official estimates.

To put this number in perspective, the CDC states that global deaths from the flu virus peak at around 649,000 depending on the year. Deaths from the flu and pneumonia reach as high as 1.4 million globally per year. Studies funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation find annual pneumonia death stats that are comparable to the CDC’s. Yet, we never saw Bill Gates calling for economic lockdowns, mask mandates and medical passports because of the flu or pneumonia. Why is that?

Today, the death rate of covid is 0.26%, FAR below initial predictions by globalist institutions and governments. It is now widely proven that the lockdowns did NOTHING to slow the infection spread of the virus, and now many areas of the US are starting to experience what the lab coat “professionals” affectionately call “herd immunity”. Infections and deaths are plunging, and the lockdowns and mask mandates were useless.

Like the vast majority of all viral illnesses, humans simply get sick, endure, build immunity and get healthy. Some of us die, as we always have, and government intervention is not needed nor is it welcome. This is why large portions of US and European populations are refusing to accept the lockdowns and the vaccines. Why destroy the economy and submit to a potentially dangerous genetic cocktail over a disease that 99.7% of the population is sure to survive?

The establishment elites really blew it this time.

My suspicion, my “conspiracy theory” if you will, is that the globalists announced their reset agenda under the assumption that the death rate for covid would be MUCH higher than it is. They were expecting something biblical, and instead they got something not much more dangerous than the flu and pneumonia.

There is now mass public resistance to the vaccinations and medical passports. This is probably why they rushed out the vaccines in the span of 6 months instead of a year to 18 months as they hinted at in early 2020. They are trying to get as many people as possible to take the experimental vaccines before the citizenry realizes that covid is a nothing-burger.

I can say that in my area the majority of people never wore the masks and the majority of local businesses never tried to enforce them. And though they initially went along with the first economic shutdown, they will not be complying with another. In my state of Montana, there are 1,300 deaths attributed to covid. In my county, the estimated infection rate is over 25% (which means almost everyone has probably already been infected), and there are only 13 deaths total.

No one is scared of this thing. Almost no conservative is going to wear a mask, and many people in Red states (and some in Blue states) are going to refuse to take the vaccines or accept medical passports.

This means that the globalists have a big problem. They obviously invested a lot into this pandemic. It is the key to their entire Reset agenda. Without a frightening pandemic killing tens of millions, the globalists will not be able to lock down the public and prevent them from traveling or organizing. They will not be able to institute the medical passports and contact tracing apps that would allow them to watch the public 24/7. They certainly won’t get most Americans to go along with the cashless society and the centralized global governance the elites are so obsessed with.

The fear of coronavirus is waning. The globalists have indeed failed in epic fashion. But, this doesn’t mean that they are going to give up. If my experience studying psychopathic people tells me anything, it is that when these lunatics are cornered they tend to double and triple down on their failures.

The question is, what will happen next? The establishment will need maximum instability and chaos in the near term if they hope to salvage their Reset project. If they wait too long awareness will spread and they might not get another chance for many decades to come, if ever. Here are the events I expect to see over the course of the next year…

Covid Mutation Hype

The globalists are doomed unless they can keep the pandemic panic rolling forward. For now, puppets like Biden and Fauci are going to pretend as if a full reopening of the economy is going to happen. This us a lie. Already we are seeing Biden waffling on when a reopening will take place. He has indicated that it will be at least a YEAR before the shutdowns will completely end, and this is predicated on the majority of Americans submitting to vaccinations and medical passports.

In other words, the establishment is telling us that they intend to hold the economy hostage until we take the jab and give up our freedoms.

Now, are these inbred totalitarians just out of their minds? Well, probably, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a Plan B. Just look at all the hype surrounding “covid mutations” in places like South Africa and Brazil; the narrative will be that a “new covid variant” that is more dangerous and deadly than the first virus is spreading, and that the lockdowns must return for the greater good of the public.

As a recent article from ‘The New Scientist’ states:

“Existing vaccines should stop people getting severely ill and dying if they do get infected by the P.1 variant. However, because many people remain unvaccinated, plans to ease lockdown restrictions would have to be rethought if this variant causes a resurgence in case numbers. Plus, any variant that circulates widely will have more opportunities to evolve into a more dangerous form.”

The New Scientist does not seem to understand basic science. The overwhelming majority of viruses circulating in the world usually evolve into less deadly forms of their original iteration. Viruses need to survive too, and they don’t do this by mutating into more and more deadly monstrosities that kill their favorite hosts. There is still no evidence that the new covid mutations are any threat whatsoever, but the establishment is already staging the narrative that new lockdowns are coming.

Federal Lockdowns

If the mutation narrative continues on the path it seems to be following, then I expect the Biden Administration to attempt a national federalized lockdown similar to the Level 4 lockdowns used in Europe and Australia, and it will be announced sometime this year.

This program will trigger several reactions; most importantly, most conservative states and counties will refuse to follow federal mandates. I know that my county and probably most of Montana will defy any new shutdown.

There will be several economic consequences that will erupt from this conflict; some positive and some negative.

Domestic Economic Warfare

This phase of the crisis will happen within a month to two months of any national shutdown. Red states will refuse to comply. State politicians, even if they are part of the agenda, will be too scared to try to enforce federal mandates. They will be compelled by the conservative citizenry to keep their states open. Most people in these areas will ignore mandates.

This will lead to a red state fiscal boom, at least in the beginning, as business continues to thrive in conservative areas while blue states suffer under medical tyranny. Companies will flee leftist states by the thousands and move to any states that remain open and accommodating. This will be short lived, though.

Biden and the federal government will try to retaliate, first by cutting off federal funds to any state that does not bow to their power and refusing to give stimulus to any businesses that relocate. Blue states will be flush with stimulus cash while red states will be forced to reduce or eliminate welfare programs and some pension funds.

Of course, the government has no real money to give, they only have our tax dollars and the fiat that the central bank creates from thin air. The likely response will be that conservative states and citizens will simply stop paying federal taxes. Another reaction will be red states taking over federal lands and utilizing the resources on those lands to rejuvenate their industry and make up for the federal dollars lost.

What this amounts to is a soft secession of conservative regions, which will eventually lead to federal attempts at physical intervention (the economic war will turn into a shooting war). The argument from the establishment will be that conservatives are putting the rest of the country “at risk”, that we are “selfish” and “literally killing grandma”.

Complete Erasure Of Conservatives From The Internet

I expect Biden and Big Tech to further pursue their current witch hunt against conservative voices, far beyond what we have already seen. In order to win a fight with conservatives they will first have to silence us so that our side of the argument is never seen or considered by the rest of the population. If they allow us to be heard, we will undoubtedly win because facts and moral reason are on our side.

It is hard to demonize people that simply want to be free.

But, if you can silence conservatives and moderates, then the narrative can be rigged. The establishment spin doctors can tell people that we don’t actually want freedom; we want something else, something evil and nefarious. They can tell people we are “fascists”, and that we are “racists” and that we actually want tyranny. Who is going to tell the public otherwise when we are removed from all available platforms and our websites are booted off service providers due to “dangerous ideas”?

Gun Control Madness

I know that some people think that leftists under Biden will not try to carry out a widespread gun crackdown and that much of the current talk is merely hollow rhetoric. I disagree. I think the globalists are going for broke, and they need to get as many combat capable firearms as they can from Americans soon. Democrats will push hard for legislation like HR 127.

They will then offer a “compromise” with Republicans and the NRA, cutting out portions of the bill. This will be a trick to make the public think that the new restrictions are a “reasonable compromise”. They think we will breath a sigh of relief and say “Well, at least they didn’t take everything…”

The gun grabbers are delusional.

What will really happen is millions of gun owners will pass local and state laws negating federal restrictions. No conservatives are going to give up their gun rights, allow red flag laws to be implemented or allow high capacity firearms to be limited; not at this stage in the game.

International Intervention

Eventually, leftists and the establishment will realize that conservatives will be harder to subjugate than they expected. They will discover that a large part of the US military and law enforcement is on our side. They will start to see mutiny among the people that they rely on as cannon fodder to carry out their dictates.

Even now, there are sheriff’s departments across the country refusing to enforce lockdown orders. And, 30% to 50% of medical professional say they will not be taking the covid vaccine depending on the state. When the rebellion goes live, this is when the globalists will have to pursue extreme options. They will not be able to win using domestic forces. Instead, they will seek out an international response, probably through the United Nations.

The rationale will be that the US has an enormous nuclear arsenal and that the international community cannot allow these weapons to fall into the hands of “white supremacists”. This is when the real fight will begin. If international intervention fails in the US, the globalists will find their heads on the chopping block. If the globalists win the fight in the US then there will be very few people left to resist them in the years going forward.

I have had numerous readers from all over the world write to me, saying that they believe in the face of the pandemic lockdowns it is now all up to Americans to turn the tide. I agree. A successful rebellion against globalism in America will lead to rebellions elsewhere, but the fact remains that if we lose, no one else will dare lift a finger. The future is in our hands.

 

[marsh]

Federal court rejects attempt to revive Equal Rights Amendment

A federal court on Friday shot down Virginia’s attempt to force the National Archives to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, ruling that the ratification deadline passed decades ago.

www.washingtontimes.com

Federal court rejects attempt to revive Equal Rights Amendment


The E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington is seen here on Sept. 22, 2014. (Associated Press) **FILE** more >

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Friday, March 5, 2021

A federal court on Friday shot down Virginia’s attempt to force the National Archives to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ruling that the ratification deadline passed decades ago.

Judge Rudolph Contreras, an Obama appointee to the district court in Washington, D.C., said the last deadline Congress set was 1982. Virginia, which says it was the key 38th state to ratify, had argued that the deadline wasn’t binding, but the judge shot down that argument.
Plaintiffs’ ratifications came too late to count.
For good measure, he said, Virginia and fellow states didn’t have standing to sue, either.
The ruling is a serious blow to backers of the ERA, who had hoped to thread a legal needle in forcing the amendment into the Constitution.

The amendment, proposed by Congress in 1972, read: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

When Congress sent it to the states it said the requisite three-fourths — in this case 38 states — had to ratify it by 1979. When that deadline approached, Congress tacked another three years onto the deadline, but the amendment was still three states shy of the target. And by then, a half-dozen states had revoked their ratifications.

In the last several years a new push to ratify the amendment began, with backers arguing Congress’s deadline was always illegal. Those backers also argued that states weren’t allowed to revoke a ratification.

With that belief, Nevada, Illinois and Virginia — none of which had ratified the ERA before — did so.

Virginia was the final state, acting last year, immediately after Democrats took complete control of the legislature for the first time in more than two decades.

After Virginia’s action, the states sued the National Archivist, who keeps the records of the Constitution, demanding that he publish the ERA as the 28th Amendment.

But Judge Contreras said in his opinion Friday that the 1982 deadline is legal.

“There is no doubt that Congress intended them to be binding. And few have questioned that they are,” he ruled.

Because of that, he said he never had to confront the question of states that revoked their ratifications.

 

[marsh]

Alan Dershowitz: All Americans Need to Fight Cancel Culture

www.theepochtimes.com

Alan Dershowitz: All Americans Need to Fight Cancel Culture

March 5, 2021 11:04, Last Updated: March 5, 2021 11:04
By Jack Phillips

Harvard Law professor emeritus said that cancel culture needs to be fought by all Americans, after a House subcommittee last week held a hearing to discuss disinformation and extremism in the media.

Dershowitz, who notably defended former President Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial last year, said that Americans who subscribe to all political viewpoints—including liberals—should be pushing back. The House subcommittee specifically aimed at cable and satellite carriers that give a voice to conservative-leaning networks.

“I hope all Americans wake up to this,” Dershowitz told Newsmax on Thursday. “I hope it’s not just the ‘shoe is on the other foot’ test. Now, the conservatives are the victims of cancel culture so they’re big supporters of the Constitution and constitutional rights. During McCarthyism, it was the left that were the victims, and the right were the oppressors.”

Going further, he stated that “we need both the right, the left, and also the center to stand united against censorship, against cancel culture, and in favor of the marketplace of ideas.”

“We have the right to flip the channel if we don’t like what’s on Newsmax. Change the channel, but don’t tell the carriers, the satellite carriers, and the cable carriers, to deny us the right to watch Newsmax. That is wrong,” he remarked.

Last month, Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Jerry McEnerney (D-Calif.) sent letters in which they asked whether cable providers should carry Newsmax, Fox News, or One America News Network. The letter was panned by Republicans, who argued that the question suggested that some Democratic lawmakers are seeking to impose authoritarian means on what can and cannot be published. This comes on the heels of a rash of censorship and deplatforming of prominent conservatives by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Amazon.

A recent poll from Harvard CAPS-Harris found that about 64 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of cancel culture, which is a form of ostracism in which someone is removed from social circles or their job. The concept has also increasingly been applied to books and movies.

This week, the organization that oversees children’s book author Dr. Seuss’s legacy moved to stop publishing six of his books due to allegedly racist or offensive imagery and depictions. The move drew widespread backlash online.

“Americans are showing increased and substantial concern about the growth of cancel culture,” said Mark Penn, the director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey, reported The Hill. “Tech companies beware that the public sees them of acting out of bias tilted towards the Democrats and voters are calling for new regulations to ensure fairness and openness. Amazon, in particular, still has a strong image compared to Facebook and Twitter, but that image may start to erode if they expand the banning of books on their platform.”

 

[marsh]

Arizona State Dean: Grading Writing Based On Quality Is ‘Racist,’ Promotes ‘White Language Supremacy’ | The Daily Wire

www.dailywire.com

Arizona State Dean: Grading Writing Based On Quality Is ‘Racist,’ Promotes ‘White Language Supremacy’
By Chrissy Clark
•
Mar 5, 2021 DailyWire.com

David Kozlowski/Contributor/Getty Images

An Arizona State University Associate Dean penned a 358-page book detailing how grading student’s writing is a form of racism and white supremacy.

In a book titled “Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom,” professor Asao Inoue encourages teachers to ditch grading for a “labor-based” grading system wherein students earn grades based on their effort. The quality of a student’s writing would not help or hinder their course grade.

“This book focuses on one kind of grading contract, one that calculates final course grades purely by the labor students complete, not by any judgments of the quality of their writing,” Inoue writes. “While the qualities of student writing is still at the center of the classroom and feedback, it has no bearing on the course grade.”

Near the beginning of the document, the author admits that the theory of “labor-based” grading is rooted in critical race theory. Critical race theory is the idea that America is rooted in racism as are the systems of modern American society.

Critical race theory contributed to Inoue’s idea that ranking things is a system rooted in racism. Because grading is a form of ranking, grading must also be a racist idea. In his book, Inoue dubbed grading and the education system writ large “racist” for their connections to ranking.

“Ranking is a part of a much longer racist, and White supremacist, tradition in Western intellectual history,” Inoue writes. “Ranking has been deeply embedded in racist thinking, discourses, and logics, mainly because it has been deployed as a way to justify a number of racist, empirical, and colonial projects over the last four hundred years.”

The author claims that “education at all levels has been and still is a part of these racist projects” as well.

The crux of the author’s argument is that grading calls for student uniformity and high-quality completed assignments, both of which are allegedly racist ideas.

“Grading literacy performances by a single standard for so-called quality is racist and promotes white language supremacy,” the author writes. “Because all grading and assessment exist within systems that uphold singular, dominant standards that are racist, and White supremacist when used uniformly. This problem is present in any grading system that incorporates a standard, no matter who is judging, no matter the particulars of the standard.”

According to the book, grading allegedly perpetuates “white language supremacy” in schools. Nearly every U.S. school requires children to speak and write in proper English during English and literacy classes. According to the author, holding students to that standard is racist.

“The traditional purposes and methods used for grading writing turn out to be de facto racist and White supremacist,” Inoue writes. “Grading by a standard, thus, is how White language supremacy is perpetuated in schools.”

Teachers who use regular grading systems and ask all of their students to use proper English in English class are also deemed racist to the author. The author does not dub them “bad people,” just people who directly contribute to society’s alleged “racist status quo.”

“In our current society and educational systems, regardless of who you are, where you came from, or what your intentions or motives are as a teacher, if you use a single standard to grade students’ language performances, you are directly contributing to the racist status quo in schools and society,” Inoue writes.

The book also touches on the “white racial habitus” which are societal norms that the author considers implicit in white people. Speaking proper English is considered a “white racial habitus.” According to the book, all things that are derived from the “white racial habitus” are inherently “white supremacist.”

“All standards for good writing are deeply informed by a White racial habitus, which makes grading by such standards White supremacist,” Inoue writes.

The “white racial habitus” is also how teachers allegedly perpetuate “White language supremacy.” The author says that English is derived from white people, which means it’s inherently white and racist.

“Because we live in a White-dominant society, and our dominant Englishes have historical White racial roots in White racial formations in the US, coming from White Racial habitus,” the book reads.

At one point, Inoue goes as far as to call upholding grading systems a “slave-making mechanism.” “All the ways we judge language, even by well-intentioned teachers, are almost always racist and slave-making, almost always White supremacist,” Inoue said.

The author justifies this claim with the example that white students get ahead in English class because they allegedly have an “unearned privilege” of speaking proper English.

According to his blog, Inoue identifies as a Japanese man because his father is of Japanese descent, though he was born in Hawaii. His mother is white with links to Eastern Europe. He received both his bachelor’s and his master’s degrees from Oregon State University and his Ph.D. from Washington State University.

In an anecdote, Inoue claims that he lived in an “explicitly racist world” because he got a B in an English class while getting A’s in other, more advanced, classes. He claims that his racial composition attributed to his average grade in a high school English class.

“I lived in an explicitly racist world. The racism was very present to me,” Inoue wrote. “During my Freshman year of high school, I got an A in honors French and every other class I took, yet received a B (not a B+) in English, not honors English, regular English. How was this possible?

What was I doing wrong? Apparently, nothing. It was me, my habitus. I knew this but didn’t want to admit, admit that my language and body were being judged together.”

The word “solution” is used just three times in the 358-paged book. The only solution appears to be getting rid of grading systems that judge students for their work and accepting the work of “raciolinguistically diverse students.”

In the book, Inoue specifically addresses that “labor-based grading” is how professors and teachers can enact their “social justice agenda” into the classroom.

Inoue directed The Daily Wire to his book for all questions and comments.

 

[Lone_Hawk]

Bumping this to insure the insanity is shared by all.......

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

There Is No Such Thing As "White" Math

SATURDAY, MAR 06, 2021 - 20:30
Via Common Sense with Bari Weiss substack,

I am not at all qualified to introduce today’s guest writer, Sergiu Klainerman.

I barely eked out a C+ in high school calculus, while Sergiu is a professor of mathematics at Princeton who specializes in the mathematical theory of black holes. He’s been a MacArthur fellow, a Guggenheim fellow and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences
Mathematics allowed a young Sergiu, who came of age in Ceausescu’s Romania, to escape to a world where right and wrong couldn’t be fudged, and, ultimately, to a life of freedom in the United States. Without math, his life quite literally would not have been possible.

In the piece below he explains how activists are destroying his discipline in the name of progress. Worse, they are robbing poor children of the opportunity to raise themselves up by mastering it — with untold effects on all of us.

Math, with its seemingly unbiased tools — 2 + 2 always equals 4 — has presented a problem for an ideological movement that sees any inequality of outcome as evidence of systemic bias. The problem cannot be that some kids are better at math, or that some teachers are better at teaching it. Like so much else, the basic woke argument against math is that it is inherently racist and needs to be made antiracist. That is accomplished by undermining the notion of right and wrong answers, by getting rid of the expectation that students show their work, by referring to mathematical testing tools as racist, and by doing away with accelerated math classes.

If that sounds like a caricature, I urge you to read this whole document, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which Sergiu writes about below. As the linguist John McWhorter put it in a powerful piece published yesterday: “to distrust this document is not to be against social justice, but against racism.”

Sergiu wrote me in an email that the situation in his field reminds him of this line from Thomas Sowell:

“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”

This week, as promised, is education week. Like Shark Week! But dorkier. And, I hope, far more important. This is our first installment.

I’m pleased to publish Sergiu Klainerman:

In my position as a professor of mathematics at Princeton, I have witnessed the decline of universities and cultural institutions as they have embraced political ideology at the expense of rigorous scholarship. Until recently — this past summer, really — I had naively thought that the STEM disciplines would be spared from this ideological takeover.

I was wrong. Attempts to “deconstruct” mathematics, deny its objectivity, accuse it of racial bias, and infuse it with political ideology have become more and more common — perhaps, even, at your child’s elementary school.

This phenomenon is part of what has been dubbed “The Great Awokening.” As others have explained powerfully, the ideology incubated in academia, where it indoctrinated plenty of bright minds. It then migrated, through those true believers, into our important cultural, religious and political institutions. Now it is affecting some of the country’s most prominent businesses.

Unlike the traditional totalitarianism practiced by former communist countries, like the Romania I grew up in, this version is soft. It enforces its ideology not by jailing dissenters or physically eliminating them, but by social shaming, mob punishment, guilt by association, and coerced speech.

When it comes to education, I believe the woke ideology is even more harmful than old-fashioned communism.

Communism had a strong sense of objective reality anchored in the belief that humans are capable of discovering universal truths. It forcefully asserted, in fact, the absolute truth of dialectic materialism, as revealed by its founders Marx, Engels and Lenin. Communist ideology held science and mathematics in the highest regard, even though it often distorted the former for doctrinal reasons.

Mathematics was largely immune to ideological pressure, and thus thrived in most communist countries. Being skilled in math was a source of great societal prestige for school children. And it was a great equalizer: those from socioeconomically disadvantaged families had a chance to compete on equal footing with those from privileged ones.

Like children all over the world, I was attracted to mathematics because of its formal beauty, the elegance and precision of its arguments, and the unique sense of achievement I was able to get by finding the right answer to a difficult problem. Mathematics also granted me an escape from the intoxicating daily drum of party propaganda — a refuge from the crushing atmosphere of political and ideological conformity.

The woke ideology, on the other hand, treats both science and mathematics as social constructs and condemns the way they are practiced, in research and teaching, as manifestations of white supremacy, euro-centrism, and post-colonialism.

Take for example the recent educational program called “a pathway to equitable math instruction.” The program is backed financially by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; it counts among its partners the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, the California Math project, the Association of California School Administrators, and the Los Angeles County Office of Education, among others; and it was recently sent to Oregon teachers by the state’s Department of Education.

The program argues that “white supremacy culture shows up in the classroom when the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer” or when students are required to show their work, while stipulating that the very “concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false”. The main goal of the program is “to dismantle racism in mathematics instruction” with the expressly political aim of engaging “the sociopolitical turn in all aspects of education, including mathematics.”

In the past, I would have said that such statements should be ignored as too radical and absurd to merit refutation. But recent trends across the country suggest that we no longer have that luxury.

So let me state the following for the record: Nothing in the history and current practice of mathematics justifies the notion that it is in any way different or dependent on the particular race or ethnic group engaged in it.

For historical reasons, we often discuss contributions to the field of mathematics from the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese, Indians and Arabs and refer to them as distinct entities. They have all contributed through a unique cultural dialogue to the creation of a truly magnificent edifice accessible today to every man and woman on the planet. Though we pay tribute to great historical figures who inform the practice of mathematics, the subject can be taught — and often is — with no reference to the individuals who have contributed to it. In that sense it is uniquely universal.

Schools throughout the world teach the same basic body of mathematics. They differ only by the methodology and intensity with which they instruct students.

It is precisely this universality of math — together with the extraordinary ability of American universities to reward hard work and talent — that allowed me, and so many other young scientists and mathematicians, to come to this country and achieve success beyond our wildest dreams.

The idea that focusing on getting the “right answer” is now considered among some self-described progressives a form of bias or racism is offensive and extraordinarily dangerous. The entire study of mathematics is based on clearly formulated definitions and statements of fact. If this were not so, bridges would collapse, planes would fall from the sky, and bank transactions would be impossible.

The ability of mathematics to provide right answers to well-formulated problems is not something specific to one culture or another; it is really the essence of mathematics. To claim otherwise is to argue that somehow the math taught in places like Iran, China, India or Nigeria is not genuinely theirs but borrowed or forged from “white supremacy culture.” It is hard to imagine a more ignorant and offensive statement.

Finally, and most importantly, the woke approach to mathematics is particularly poisonous to those it pretends to want to help. Let’s start with the reasonable assumption that mathematical talent is equally distributed at birth to children from all socio-economic backgrounds, independent of ethnicity, sex and race. Those born in poor, uneducated families have clear educational disadvantages relative to others. But mathematics can act as a powerful equalizer.

Through its set of well-defined, culturally unbiased, unambiguous set of rules, mathematics gives smart kids the potential to be, at least in this respect, on equal footing with all others.

They can stand out by simply finding the right answers to questions with objective results.

There is no such thing as “white” mathematics. There is no reason to assume, as the activists do, that minority kids are not capable of mathematics or of finding the “right answers.” And there can be no justification for, in the name of “equity” or anything else, depriving students of the rigorous education that they need to succeed. The real antiracists will stand up and oppose this nonsense.

 

[marsh]

A Quick Guide to Free Speech and Avoiding Big Tech Online. - The National Pulse

Many people have been asking for a basic, anti-big tech guide. So we’re putting this together as a starting point for information on what services you should use, and what you really shouldn’t. We will be constantly updating this page, so make sure to favorite/bookmark it and check back...

thenationalpulse.com

A Quick Guide To Free Speech And Avoiding Big Tech Online.

• MARCH 7, 2021
• WAHAGEN KHABAYAN

Many people have been asking for a basic, anti-big tech guide. So we’re putting this together as a starting point for information on what services you should use, and what you really shouldn’t. We will be constantly updating this page, so make sure to favorite/bookmark it and check back often.

Social Media.
Gab launched in 2017 as a free speech alternative to both Facebook and Twitter. Since recent Big Tech purges, the platform has seen an enormous surge. The website has similar layout to Twitter, a dedicated posting section, a timeline, and a news section. The platform introduces new additions such as GabTV—allowing the user to view all the latest content from their favorite channel/user. You can even sign up for “PRO” services, which allow you to support the network as well as take advantage of rich text, scheduling, and other features (we do).

GAB’S VALUES.

Another platform which advocates for free speech and is open source is Minds.
This social network not only stands firm to its core principles but also introduced the concept of cryptocurrency for its content creators and users, making it a unique and attractive place for people to monetize their social media usage.

THE MINDS’ PRINCIPLES PAGE
There are also growing video platforms which are willing to compete with YouTube and challenge their censorship practices. BitChute and Rumble are both great alternatives to YouTube which do not demonetize publishers and support organic search in their results.

On a side note—Parler, which has gained the most popularity as the counter platform to Twitter, has been terminated by Amazon from hosting their platform and by Apple and Google from publishing the app on their App Store. Finally, there are also new social media platforms like Clouthub, WeME, and Thinkspot which advocate free speech and are worth trying out to explore new communities based on personal interest.

Platforms to avoid: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch.

Messaging Apps.
Ever since the news broke that WhatsApp will share data extensive data with Facebook starting February 2021, there has been a massive campaign to move users over to Signal.
It is a powerful alternative to WhatsApp and iMessage, with a heavy focus on privacy and encryption. It is available on Android, iOS, PC, and Mac. Second to Signal, Telegram also offers also an alternative pathway from WhatsApp by focusing on user privacy (Signal is still the best in this category) but also offering unique options to join open groups and communities, such as The National Pulse, to participate in open discussions and stay up-to-date. Threema, another messaging app that guarantees anonymity and privacy, has also been gaining huge traction.

Besides switching messaging apps, the default SMS app on Android can be modified to further distance yourself from Google or the OEM. Silence is a SMS app which can substitute your default Google or iPhone manufacturer’s SMS/text message solution (only on Android).

Elements is another secure messaging app which compared to the competition is rather advanced, decentralized, and supports self hosting for maximum security and privacy.

Avoid: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage, Google Hangouts/Duo/Meet.
Browsers.
Brave and/or Dissenter should be go-to browsers for everyone who is willing to stop supporting Big Tech companies. They are both privacy-oriented, do not feed upon user tracking, and have built-in, exclusive features.

Brave supports their own cryptocurrency (token)—allowing users to mine them while browsing the web and use those coins to support favorite content creators. Don’t let this feature discourage you if all you want to do is browse the web. It’s totally optional, and you aren’t required to go anywhere near it unless you really want to.

Dissenter introduces a universal comment section for every website—meaning every user who has Dissenter can basically comment on each page, and other users with Dissenter can follow up comments and reply them. This occurs whether or not the website offers a comments section.

The idea is to decentralize commentary and create an alternative social platform. Both are based upon the Chromium engine, are lightning fast, and have fully up-to-date capabilities.
While Firefox might once have made this list, they also recently joined Big Tech efforts against free speech. Drop Google, Yahoo, or Bing as your primary search engine. DuckDuckGo is still sort-of okay, but we prefer StartPage.

Avoid: Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox.
All the recommended changes above can be implemented by any user who is already familiar with mainstream social networks. The given list is by no means complete, but is the first line of defense against Big Tech.

VPN.
While VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) are great services to protect yourself from your internet service providers (ISP), there are a lot of misconceptions about their capabilities. In general, the main advantages of using VPNs are masking your IP address by the address of your VPN provider, bypassing censorship, prohibiting your ISPs from seeing which websites you visit, protecting your location, and providing encryption throughout your browsing session—especially if you are connected to open WiFi networks. It is a good practice to use VPNs while browsing the internet; however, they do not provide full anonymity or full privacy. They also don’t prohibit Big Tech from tracking you (unless you improve your chosen browser with add-ons such as PrivacyBadger and many more), nor do they protect from viruses.
Keep in mind that your media access control (MAC) address and accounts that you are logged into can still uncover your anonymity. For that reason, VPN work best when combined with secure browsers and ad blockers. Some of the great VPN services are Mullvad or NordVPN, both highly rated by privacy advocates.

Advanced.
For advanced users, the following list of recommendations can provide further decoupling from Big Tech:

• Instead of Windows10 and MacOS, explore Linux (Ubuntu) or any other flavor as main operating system;
• Instead of stock Android and iOS, try custom Android roms like LineageOS or GrapheneOS;
• Instead of Gmail or Outlook or YahooMail, try MailFence, Tutanota, CripText, or ProtonMail;
• Instead of Google Photos or iCloud, try Internxt;
• Instead of Google Authenticator, try Tofu (IOS) or andOPT (Android);
• Instead of iCloud KeyChain (Safari) or other mainstream password manager, try Bitwarden.

We’ll be updating this article regularly, so please bookmark it and check back often

 

[marsh]

Our Collapsing Culture: How 'The Church of Woke' Upends Language and Ends Debate

pjmedia.com

Our Collapsing Culture: How 'The Church of Woke' Upends Language and Ends Debate

BY STACEY LENNOX MAR 06, 2021 4:49 PM ET

(AP Photo/Fernando Antonio)
The Church of Woke™ and its catechism are slowly and surely deconstructing American culture and institutions. To stifle dissent and excommunicate non-believers, they have several tools in their arsenal. To engineer the deconstruction, Wokeists have created phrases that upend the meanings of words to prevent thoughtful discussion and end ideological debate. This twisted language serves to increase division and polarization based on group identity.

For example, when LeBron James tweets that blacks are “literally hunted” when they step out of their homes, Wokeists will defend that as something called “his truth.” On the intersectional pyramid, you are never allowed to question a person speaking their truth if they are a member of an ostensibly oppressed group as long as they discuss issues related to that group’s identity. Even a multi-millionaire basketball player whose hyperbolic overstatement is remarkable should not be questioned.

Of course, this only works if you are speaking in support of the Wokeist worldview. The Church of Woke™ does not consider individual differences because they believe only group identity matters. An Asian male telling their truth about being passed over for admission to Harvard because of his race would likely be canceled, despite objective proof showing that could well be the case. Because Asian-Americans are quite successful in the traditional American meritocracy, their ethnic minority status does not reconcile with the Wokeist view of an oppressed minority. They will only be considered if it serves the Wokeist agenda.

Another example is former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. To justify her electoral loss, she has had a national platform to accuse Republicans in the state of actively engaging in suppressing minority votes for several years. This assertion is her “lived experience” and is never questioned by the corporate media or Democrats. It has also brought tens of millions into her not-for-profit organizations. She has never provided any proof or data to support her position, and there is plenty of data to disprove her claims.

Now, suppose I say that after voting in Georgia for the last eight years, my “lived experience” is that something was distinctly different and unsettling about the 2020 election. In that case, I am dismissed and even censored if it appears on any number of social media platforms.

Because I am white and not a member of the Church of Woke™, I would be dismissed as a racist who doesn’t want black and brown people to vote.

Wokeists would hurl these slurs to shut me up despite the fact we know that there was a coordinated national effort to reduce election security, according to Time magazine. It has also been documented that there was private funding of election offices in specific counties to create a get-out-the-vote machine. If I said I want everyone who votes to feel their vote matters and that I don’t engage in the soft bigotry of low expectations that asserts people’s ability to access the ballot varies by their skin color, I would still be called a racist. In reality, minorities nationwide and in Georgia have registered and voted at rates higher than white voters for several years prior to 2020.

“My truth” and “lived experience” denote opinions, perspectives, or an individual’s version of events. In the absence of data and evidence, they are meaningless in a public policy debate, a courtroom, or in straight news stories. They corrupt the institutions in our culture that we use to solve problems, judge guilt or innocence, and receive information.

The Church of Woke’s™ rules specify who may question these assertions and destroy cultural norms. How many riots have we seen following jury verdicts, no matter what the facts in evidence were? Why did the Biden administration feel the need to write an executive order on trans rights? Because of the new rules. If due process, the law, or a news story contradict an oppressed group’s “truth” or “lived experience,” it must be torn down or transformed.

If you are not a member of the Church of Woke™ and object, they dismiss you as the appropriate -ist or -phobe. If taking you down increases its power, you get excommunicated. Some call this cancel culture. It is actually a process used by a secular religion with institutional power that has no mechanism for redemption.

Another Church of Woke™ tool is dog whistles. These are opinions or symbols used by non-adherents that the Wokeists assert convey a secret message to bigots and fascists, such as the okay hand sign. It seems only Wokeists can interpret these because they are the only ones who can hear them. A recent example is the stage used at CPAC. According to actress Alyssa Milano, its shape resembled a rune that Nazis favored. If you don’t know what a rune is, they are symbols representing ancient Germanic letters used before adopting the Latin alphabet.

Anyone who really thinks Matt Schlapp and the planners of CPAC sat around looking for runes to send a secret message to their predominantly Christian and conservative crowd that strongly supports Israel may need a psychiatrist. As I understand it, runes are used as divination tools, much like tarot cards and crystal balls, not typically used by faithful Christians. If you were one of the people who heard that particular high-pitched noise upon laying your eyes on the stage, you might want to ask yourself why. Maybe you’re a bigot or fascist.

Finally, the Church of Woke™ uses false binaries. One of these is mask-wearing. If you disagree that you need to wear one at all times except perhaps in your own home, you are a heartless individual who doesn’t care if people die. False binaries are often used to virtue-signal, establishing one position as the moral one. As High Priestess Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once asserted, she didn’t need to be factually correct. It is more important to be morally right. There is no nuance in a false binary.

The priorities of the Church of Woke™ become useful tools for political and institutional leaders who want to avoid ideological debates. The obfuscation of the fundamental issues facing our country, like a crisis at the border, saves them from difficult questions. However, the use of twisted language and group identity also threaten a culture based on logic, reason, and the open exchange of ideas. Ultimately, they seek to destroy the meritocracy and individual freedom that allowed the United States to become one of the most innovative, powerful, and wealthy nations the world has ever known.

Ronald Reagan famously said:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

If the majority who do not subscribe to the teachings of the Church of Woke™ do not speak up and act now, it will be us delivering that message to our grandchildren. There is no choice but to find the courage.

 

[marsh]

The Antifascist Scam › American Greatness

Demonstrating that irony is far from dead, eBay has just pulled six of Dr. Seuss’s books for sale, but buyers are still free to bid on Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It seems that the woke Left has gone after…

amgreatness.com

The Antifascist Scam
Contemporary antifascists don’t care much about Hitler’s tyranny, except as an image that can be applied to those whom they want to bully.

By Paul Gottfried

March 6, 2021

Demonstrating that irony is far from dead, eBay has just pulled six of Dr. Seuss’s books for sale, but buyers are still free to bid on Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It seems that the woke Left has gone after the children’s classics for “racist imagery” but are cool with people reading Hitler. The latest victim of this leftist cancel culture, the late Theodore Geisel, and the author of such charming, illustrated reading for children as Scrambled Eggs Super and The Cat’s Quizzer, was on the Left politically and a passionate antiracist. Dr. Seuss denounced putative fascist-sympathizers even after World War II, readily joined far-Left organizations, and was an early, outspoken champion of the civil rights movement. His posthumous fate illustrates the law of History formulated by the Genevan counterrevolutionary Jacques Mallet du Pan in 1793: “Like Saturn, revolutions devour their own children.”

The treatment of Dr. Seuss’s classics confirms an argument that runs through my book on antifascism that is now in press. I quickly discovered in doing research that contemporary antifascists don’t care much about Hitler’s tyranny, except as an image that can be applied to those whom they want to bully.

Even a once serious scholar like Deborah Lipstadt, who has spent decades going after Holocaust deniers or minimizers, most famously the English historian David Irving, has engaged in a truly bizarre form of Holocaust trivialization. Lipstadt has not only repeatedly compared Donald Trump’s administration to Hitler’s dictatorship, but she has also claimed that those who raise questions about the 2020 presidential election are exactly like Holocaust-deniers. If David Irving landed in an Austrian jail as a “Holocaust trivializer” (he grossly lowballed the death figures for Nazi murders), I have no idea where we should place his accuser. Her comparisons seem even more shocking than Irving’s highly questionable scholarship.

In Germany, someone who asserts the Holocaust was not unique (einzigartig) in its cruelty or that Hitler was not uniquely evil could face legal and certainly professional difficulties in a country that is obsessively antifascist (but not noticeably antitotalitarian). Germany is also a country in which the argumentum ad Hitlerum was regularly employed by academics, journalists, and politicians to describe Trump’s America. The rule there may be that one is not allowed to compare any leader to Hitler or any government to Nazi Germany unless it advances the purposes of the antifascist Left.

One of the most transparent deceptions engaged in by American antifascist polemicists, including media celebrity Mark Bray and Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, is to depict the United States as being on the verge of a Nazi takeover. The only way we can avoid repeating the disaster that befell Germany in 1933 is by practicing ruthless intolerance.

Granting one’s opponents the right to express their views seems to Bray especially unwise, since we are sitting on the top of a fascist volcano. In Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, he explains that “militant antifascism” rejects the “liberal alternative,” which “is to have faith in rational discourse.” This supposedly was the mistake of those liberals who tried to appease Hitler, and who naturally failed. (Bray does not reveal who these “liberals” were who helped bring the Nazis to power by engaging in “rational discourse.”)

Stanley reaches the same conclusion, namely, that there is too much fascist talk these days, by drawing breathtaking comparisons between Hitler’s Germany and Trump’s America. In How Fascism Works, a booklet that brought Stanley national attention, we learn that Trump’s America came closer and closer every day to the Third Reich because of the prevalence of “sexual anxiety,” “anti-intellectualism,” “failure to introduce gender equity,” and our stubborn resistance to the LGBT movement.

For Stanley, another sure sign of our slouching toward some form of fascism, although not necessarily German Nazism, is our embrace of “the libertarian ideal of self-sufficiency and freedom from the state.” Since Mussolini spoke about putting everything into the total state and leaving nothing outside of it, I find no way to reconcile the American ideal of individual self-reliance with Stanley’s identification of fascism with self-sufficiency.

What Stanley is really doing is defending a powerful centralized state which advances an intersectional agenda while controlling the economy. His complaints have nothing to do with the antifascism of the 1930s or 1940s. In 2016, Stanley poured out obscenities in intersectional fashion against Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, who dared to criticize gay relationships. One doubts that past anti-Nazis, say, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, FDR, or even Josef Stalin, would have raged at a critic of gay rights. They might well have agreed.

The full measure of antifascist bullying can be found, however, in the counsels of Bernie Sanders organizer Kyle Jurek, who in a rant caught by Project Veritas in January 2020 called for putting “Nazified” Trump voters into Soviet-style gulags. The rest of Jurek’s comments about the fascist enemy almost equals in vulgarity Stanley’s tear against Swinburne. Such is the antifascist scam in America today.

 

[marsh]

Satanists sue for religious right to ritual abortions

This past week while the nation was distracted by Joe Biden’s dementia-ridden incompetence, The Satanic Temple of Texas filed suit to defend its religious right to engage in child sacrifice as a spiritual ritual.

www.washingtontimes.com

Satanists sue for religious right to ritual abortions
The Satanic Temple of Texas files suit to defend its religious right to child sacrifice


Illustration on freedom of religion and abortion by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times
By Everett Piper - - Saturday, March 6, 2021

ANALYSIS/OPINION:
This past week while the nation was distracted by Joe Biden’s dementia-ridden incompetence and Andrew Cuomo’s predatory misogyny, The Satanic Temple of Texas filed suit to defend its religious right to engage in child sacrifice as a spiritual ritual.

The Dallas Observer reports as follows.

“[On Feb. 23, 2021] The Satanic Temple [of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston] filed a lawsuit against the State of Texas alleging certain state-mandated abortion regulations violate the religious liberty of its members … [and] violate the temple’s religious teachings. The Satanic Temple … wants its followers to be exempt from such regulations. The temple has members across the country, including in Texas.”

“It’s legal to get an abortion in Texas,” clarifies the Observer, “but the procedure is banned after 20 weeks unless a life-threatening medical condition is involved or the fetus has a severe abnormality. If a person is eligible, the state requires them to get a sonogram and receive paperwork about medical risks, adoption alternatives, and developmental stages of the fetus … The state then requires a woman to wait 24 hours after receiving the sonogram and paperwork before she can go through with the abortion …”

The Observer continues, “But the temple’s members consider abortion a ritualistic practice according to co-founder and spokesperson Lucien Greaves … [who maintains the] state regulations disrupt this ritual.”

“We have a distinct kind of procedure for this,” said Mr. Greaves, “and in no part of this do we include getting sonograms or any other medically unnecessary acts as are required in Texas. Therefore, the imposition of those things, we feel, is a violation of our religious liberty.”

Mr. Greaves goes further: “The ritual goes like this: Before the abortion takes place … a member of The Satanic Temple will look at her reflection, be reminded of her personhood and responsibility to herself, take deep breaths, focus on her intent and make herself comfortable.

When ready, she will say the third and fifth tenet of the temple aloud.”

The Satanic third tenet reads, “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone,” and the fifth reads, “Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.”

“[After the abortion],” says Mr. Greaves, “the woman would return to her reflection and cite her personal affirmation: ‘By my body, my blood. By my will, it is done.’”

The Observer offers this context for the Satanic suit: “In the Texas suit, an anonymous pregnant temple member has claimed that state regulations interfere with her religious ceremony and raise constitutional suspicions. The member lives 100 miles away from the nearest abortion clinic, the suit claims. It asks the state to reconsider four abortion regulations through the lens of religious liberty … The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas Houston Division against the Texas Department of State Health Services and John Hellerstedt, the commissioner of the agency.”

Referring to the suit in question, Mr. Greaves concluded, “At this point, it’s still unclear how the lawsuit will play out. We feel that we have such a clearly strong case when we’re looking at legal precedent, and we’re looking at how robust religious liberty laws are now. I’m particularly interested to see how your [expletive] Attorney General Ken Paxton replies … He’s often releasing press releases about the state of religious liberty in other states and what he feels should be done. He likes to use the language of religious liberty, where it seems to me quite obvious he means religious privilege for a specific viewpoint.”

So, there you have it. Abortion as a religious ritual. Calling those who disagree with you vulgar names. An infantile focus on one’s own body at the expense of everyone else’s. Denying the science of biology, genetics, DNA, and even sonograms, under the banner of science. Killing your own child while chanting “by my body, my blood, by my will, it is done.” Infanticide as merely another religious viewpoint. All of these positions as well as the third and fifth tenets of The Satanic Temple. Sounds stunningly similar to the Democratic Party platform, doesn’t it?

Ted Cruz once said, “If you find yourself litigating against nuns, you’re probably doing something wrong.” One might add, “If you find yourself aligning with Satanists, you might be wrong too.”

 

[marsh]

Military eyes using social media to keep troops in line: ‘Extreme’ patriotism a no no?

Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, March 5, 2021 Fighting the “enemy within” is apparently a top priority for the team running the Joe Biden White House and the military brass under their …

www.worldtribune.com

Military eyes using social media to keep troops in line: ‘Extreme’ patriotism a no no?
By World Tribune on March 5, 2021

Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, March 5, 2021

Fighting the “enemy within” is apparently a top priority for the team running the Joe Biden White House and the military brass under their command.

During his Senate confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged to “rid our ranks of racists and extremists.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin
“The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies. But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks,” Austin said.

The problem, as conservative analysts frequently note, is that according to the narrative parroted by the Democrat media monolith and establishment, the terms “racists and extremists” are synonymous with patriotic and often Christian conservatives. Are such the new “enemies within our own ranks”?

Austin followed up those proclamations by ordering a “stand down” of the entire U.S. military for 60 days in order for commanders to address “extremism” in the ranks.

Now, the Pentagon “is looking for a new way to screen social media as part of its background check process, in an effort to prevent extremist behavior in the ranks,” Stephen Losey reported for Military.com on March 3.

The Pentagon under the Biden administration “is examining a scalable means of implementing social media screening in conjunction with background investigations,” Pentagon officials said in suggested training materials distributed for Austin’s stand-down order.

According to Department of Defense training materials, the report said, military personnel and department civilians, who submit an SF-86 form to begin a background investigation process, consent to having their publicly available social media information reviewed. The FBI currently is screening social media for extremism and criminal activity, the document states.

Anthony Kuhn, an attorney with the law firm Tully Rinckey who specializes in security clearance issues, told Military.com that the Pentagon is indicating it plans to take a much more aggressive approach to monitoring troops’ social media in the wake of the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol.

“Kuhn said he represents several people who have had their security clearances jeopardized due in part to social media posts, so the military does look at it in at least some cases. But he added that the momentum for doing so will probably keep growing,” Losey noted in his report.

Troops are allowed to have and express their own political opinions, Kuhn said, as long as they follow certain guidelines, such as not doing so on duty or in uniform.

But the Pentagon’s new training materials make clear how service members’ activities online can run afoul of the military’s standards, such as by advocating for violence or sedition against the government.

Service members are not allowed to “actively advocat[e] supremacist, extremist or criminal gang doctrine, ideology and causes,” the training materials state. They also cannot actively participate in organizations that “advance, encourage or advocate illegal discrimination based on race, creed, color, sex, religion, ethnicity or national origin,” or “the use of force, violence or criminal activity” to deprive people of their civil rights.

The training material states that, while troops have First Amendment rights to speak freely and assemble peaceably, the military must still assess their character, honesty, discretion, judgment and trustworthiness when deciding whether they are reliable enough to have access to classified or sensitive information.

Kuhn said the Pentagon’s language suggests it might add social media checks to its continuous evaluation process, which already uses computers and investigators to track clearance holders and flag any financial trouble, criminal arrests, or emerging drug or alcohol problems.

Tracking violations of DoD regulations’ Guideline A, which requires “allegiance to the United States,” has been difficult to monitor, he said.

“That could be anything from liking a comment on a social media post that’s buried somewhere on the internet, all the way through openly advocating violence against the government or a government official,” Kuhn said. “They’re trying to figure out a system to track that kind of behavior, those types of red flags. Right now, there isn’t one.”

While the military could start by only periodically reviewing social media posts when troops need background checks, Kuhn said he expects that, before long, it would be expanded into a practice of real-time monitoring to catch whether troops are involved in emerging threats.

“They will be using whatever technology they have available to them at this point to be able to monitor, in real time, social media posts and groups they have concerns about,” Kuhn said. “I’m sure they’ve already started” working on a continuous monitoring system after the shock of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, and the alleged number of rioters with military backgrounds.'''

Tucker Carlson noted in a broadcast last month that Bank of America secretly turned over to the FBI data on 211 customers who might be of interest because they were in D.C. on or after Jan. 6. Federal investigators actually interviewed one of the individuals, who was eventually cleared.

“Imagine if you were that person? The FBI hauls you in for questioning in a terror investigation,” Carlson said. “Not because you have done anything suspicious. You haven’t. You bought plane tickets and visited your country’s capital.”

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Welcome To The Inversion

MONDAY, MAR 08, 2021 - 0:00
Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

Getting along by going along with the patently absurd...

A seamless web, they all believe because they all believe.
- The Gordian Knot, Robert Gore, 2000

If it seems like the world has turned upside down it’s because it has. Right is wrong and wrong is right. Truth is lies and lies are truth. Knowledge is ignorance and ignorance is knowledge. Success is failure and failure is success. Reality is illusion and illusion is reality.

It would be comforting to say that this inversion is a plot by nefarious others. Comforting, but not true, in the pre-inversion meaning of the word true. Rather it stems from answers to questions that confront everyone. To think for yourself or believe with the group? To stand alone or cower with the crowd? It’s the conflict between the individual and the collective, and between what’s true and what’s believed.

We live in an age of fear. It’s not fear of germs, war, poverty or any other tangible threat that most besets humanity. It’s the fear of being disliked and ostracized by the group.

If every age has its emblematic technology, ours is social media, with its cloying likes and thumbs up and its vicious cancellations, doxing, and deplatforming. No longer must you wander through life plagued by that nagging insecurity—am I liked? Now you can keep virtual score: you not only know if you’re liked or disliked, you know how much and by whom.

Unfortunately, that knowledge doesn’t seem to help; the scoreboards only amplify the insecurity. What was once an occasionally troubling question, privately asked of one’s self, has become a widely held, public obsession.

The official Covid-19 response is the apotheosis of inversion and probably the one that runs it off the rails. There’s a model that has repeatedly erred predicting infection and death rates by orders of magnitude. Use it! Politicians and bureaucrats, the two most power-hungry groups on the planet, are clamoring for unlimited powers to destroy jobs, businesses, economies, lives, and liberty. Give it to ’em, no questions asked! Sunshine, Vitamin D, fresh air, and exercise prevent diseases and lessen their symptoms’ severity. Lock ’em up! Lockdowns aren’t working.

Lock ’em up harder! Masks don’t prevent or hinder viral transmission, their packaging says so.

Double, triple, or better yet, quadruple mask! At high cycle thresholds, the PCR test throws off many false positives, inflating case counts. Crank up the cycle thresholds until Biden gets in office! Cheap medicines hydroxychloroquine, and ivermectin both prevent and cure the disease, provided it’s not too far advanced. Discourage their use! They work better than expensive vaccines. Make vaccinations mandatory! Scores of reputable and eminent doctors and scientists are questioning and criticizing the protocols. Censor them and follow our shapeshifting science! Death counts are inflated because hospitals have a financial incentive to attribute deaths to Covid-19 and anybody who has tested positive and subsequently dies of whatever cause is labeled a Covid-19 death. If they scare people into saving just one life…. The cure is far worse than the disease. Shut up or we’ll shut you up! There’s always germs out there and they constantly mutate, this horseshit could last forever. New Normal, Great Reset. It will last forever, and it will get worse, won’t it? We’ll circle back on that.

Peer pressure is the fundamental force of the social universe. Anyone who’s part of a collective will be pressured to accept its consensus on matters trivial and important.

Congruence between what a collective believes and truth is happenstance. The larger the group, the higher the chance of incongruence.

Groups don’t think, they perpetuate and enforce belief. Collectives collectivize what passes for thought, none more so than governments. There’s always the danger that someone might ask why those who rule get to club everyone else into submission. Rulers either suppress that question or try to provide a nominal justification. If they have the clubs, what are they worried about?

The ruling caste is always small compared to the ruled. No matter how many clubs it has and how overmatched the subjects may be, the ruling caste knows its position is more secure if their subjects believe their propaganda and consent to their rule. The underpinnings of frightened compliance with, “Do as you’re told or else!” are rickety compared to a chorus chanting in unison “We’re all in this together!” or some such rot.

None are so enslaved as those chained to group belief. Truth is irrelevant, group acceptance paramount. Belief is unquestioned and unchallenged, truth the shunned and hated enemy.

Governments have promoted this inversion for centuries, always telling the same lies. Faith in government may be the strongest and longest-lived secular religion, and it’s certainly the one most resistant to questions, investigation, or contrary evidence.

The script never varies. We’re good, they’re bad, exterminate them. Conquest, domination, and empire are our nation’s greatness. Need not greed: those who earn it are selfish for trying to keep it; we’re virtuous for taking it away. Our pieces of paper are good as gold. Your squalor has nothing to do with our opulent lifestyles; be grateful for your bread and circuses. Dissidence must be suppressed; opposition is traitorous. Ruination and death are everyone’s fault but ours. You just weren’t good enough to live up to our ideals.

Inversions can only last so long. People consciously or unconsciously reject them, and reality doesn’t invert. A small coterie in Washington may believe they run a global empire, but Russia and China refuse to kowtow, even nominal allies are backing away, and the costs of maintaining its crumbling empire are helping drive the US into bankruptcy. What US cheerleaders call the best military in the world hasn’t won a significant war since World War II and its fighting forces are being ideologically culled or indoctrinated in wokesterism, systematically rendering it even less fit to fight.

The censors no longer hide their censorship. There are stories that cannot be reported, questions that cannot not be asked, investigations that cannot be launched, platforms that cannot be allowed, and issues that cannot be discussed within the captured media. It cried foul when Donald Trump made “fake news” a catch phrase, but it caught on because it confirmed what millions know: much of today’s “news” is fraudulent propaganda.

After a month-and-a-half of one-party rule it’s clear that suppression is only going to get worse. Among those who intellectually stand outside the collective, suppression neither decreases belief in what is suppressed nor increases belief in the party line. They know the truth lies in what’s being kept from them.

Subconsciously, even adherents to the party line never completely believe it. Fully “woke,” you may “know” that Western civilization is a discredited product of the white male patriarchy.

However, do you throw yourself from the top of a tall building because the properties of gravity were first described by white English patriarch Isaac Newton?

Psychological dissonance plagues true believers. What are they going to believe: dogma or their own senses and thought processes, such as they are? It’s the root cause of their psychic brittleness: the inability to answer questions or engage in debate, the insistence on ostensible agreement, and the need to suppress anyone who doesn’t go along.

The fragility that tries to adjust reality to belief runs head-on into the desire among those whose behaviors are to be adjusted to live their own lives as they see fit, not to mention reality itself. America’s divide is between those who want to be left alone and those who want to tell them what to do. It’s so much easier for the latter if they can impose at least the appearance of consent on the former through suppression, fraud, or force.

Reality doesn’t invert, no matter how many people believe otherwise. Governments and central banks will debase their fiat debt instruments until the illusion that they’re worth something is discarded. They have every incentive to do so and it’s happening now as governments go broke. Empires crumble because they require more energy and resources to maintain than they generate. The American empire will be no exception. The more production is taxed.
regulated, and otherwise penalized, the less production you get. The more indolence is rewarded, the more indolence you get. As government’s power expands, people’s freedom shrinks. You can make people engineers or brain surgeons based on their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference or any other irrelevant factor, but it increases the likelihood that the bridge collapses and the patient dies on the operating table.

A society that corrupts science, the basis for discovering, describing, and employing reality, is doomed. Honest science requires free inquiry and debate. It is a never-ending process of proposing, testing, evaluating, revising and discarding hypotheses for new ones with more explanatory and predictive power. There is no such thing as settled science. The claims that there is with regards to climate, coronaviruses, or any other scientific issue are nothing more than admissions that the purported science is propaganda. Unchallenged science is a contradiction in terms; challenge is the lifeblood of science.

So add science that isn’t science to the long list of inversions that collectively could spell humanity’s doom. Consequences don’t recognize wishful thinking or political diktat. Climate and coronavirus dogma masquerading as science is the Trojan horse ushering in the great reset of a new world order. Global governance, state-approved science, political and cultural canons enforced with jihadist zeal, top down economic command and control, the eradication of any vestiges of liberty, and billions of unthinking adherents will destroy rather than build, compounding today’s inversions and creating new ones.

The danger to all this is individuals who think and act for themselves, those who are woke to the woke, so to speak. The key to standing on the outside, critically examining what’s within, is to abandon any desire to be on the inside. The docile dreck and their puppet-masters within are usually sufficient inducement to stay outside. Once that decision is made, independence of thought is almost assured. (Those who see the inside for what it is and still want in are corrupt beyond redemption.)

Challenge dogma and propaganda and you’re a dissident. Not always a comfortable position, but the dissidents will have the best shot at surviving the coming collapse. The insiders will suffer shattering disillusionment as reality obliterates cherished belief…and the insiders.

The historically unprecedented scale of present inversions guarantees upheaval and change beyond reckoning when reality’s full force can no longer be denied or subverted. Even those who see things as they are and regard themselves as fully prepared will be shocked by what’s to come. At least they will retain the existential essentials of observational power and logic as they sort through the smoldering intellectual landscape, discard the inversions, and get on with the rebuilding.

 

[marsh]

Supreme Court Stops College from Denying Christian Students' Free Speech - LifeNews.com

The Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 decision Monday that a Georgia college’s speech code policy violated the First Amendment and that a student who was harmed by the policy can seek damages. Justice Clarence Thomas issued the opinion of the court Monday, siding with Chike Uzuegbunam, a former...

www.lifenews.com

Supreme Court Stops College from Denying Christian Students’ Free Speech

The Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 decision Monday that a Georgia college’s speech code policy violated the First Amendment and that a student who was harmed by the policy can seek damages.

Justice Clarence Thomas issued the opinion of the court Monday, siding with Chike Uzuegbunam, a former student at Georgia Gwinnett College, and affirming his right to share his Christian faith on campus. The opinion reversed an Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which said Uzuegbunam didn’t have standing to sue the college over its policy that severely restricted his speech.

“The Supreme Court has rightly affirmed that government officials should be held accountable for the injuries they cause,” Kristen Waggoner, general counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), said in a statement Monday. “When public officials violate constitutional rights, it causes serious harm to the victims.”

In 2016, Uzuegbunam was told that he needed to use one of two “speech zones,” which made up less than 1% of the entire campus, if he wanted to continue sharing his Christian faith on campus, according to ADF. Uzuegbunam complied, but minutes after speaking in a reserved zone, campus police threatened him with discipline if he continued.

“School officials violated [Uzuegbunam’s] constitutional rights when they stopped him twice from speaking in an open area of campus,” Tyson Langhofer, the director of ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in January. “The only permit students need to speak on campus is the First Amendment.”

School officials ultimately accused Uzuegbunam of violating a campus speech code, which prohibited offensive speech, Langhofer said. Georgia Gwinnett College initially defended its speech code in court after ADF sued on behalf of Uzuegbunam in 2016, but then reversed its speech policy and argued the case was moot as a result.

Thomas was joined in his opinion Monday by seven justices from across the ideological spectrum. The justices agreed that because Uzuegbunam’s rights were violated, he can sue the school and receive nominal damages.

“It is undisputed that Uzuegbunam experienced a completed violation of his constitutional rights when respondents enforced their speech policies against him,” Thomas wrote.
Justice John Roberts issued the lone dissent. Roberts agreed with the appeals court, which argued that because Georgia Gwinnett College changed its policy after Uzuegbunam sued, the case was moot.

“Today’s decision risks a major expansion of the judicial role,” Roberts wrote. “Until now, we have said that federal courts can review the legality of policies and actions only as a necessary incident to resolving real disputes.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, American Humanist Association, Frederick Douglass Foundation and U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops all filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of Uzuegbunam.

 

[marsh]

Hold Your Tongue ⋆ Politicrossing

Marxists groups aside, sometimes it seems as if the U.S. is an authoritarian society.

politicrossing.com

Hold Your Tongue

Marxists groups aside, sometimes it seems as if the U.S. is an authoritarian society.

March 8, 2021 By Jeff Davidson

We’ve all witnessed the verbal fascism of groups such as Antifa, BLM, and the Left in general: Unless you employ terms and phrases which they approve, watch out. Yet, apart from these Marxists groups, sometimes it seems as if the U.S. is an authoritarian society. I learned early about three statements that you’d better not make, although each of these statements otherwise seems perfectly acceptable.

Don’t Discuss Job Offers
Only once in my life have I ever received unemployment compensation, in between my first and second job. When I was asked by an unemployment office agent if I had been looking for jobs in the last two weeks, I replied yes. In fact, I said, I even got an offer, but it was from a firm significantly far from my residence and for far less salary than I had been earning years ago.

So, I had to turn it down.

Bzzzz! Wrong answer. With that, on cue, the agent became indignant. Was this the moment for which she lived? She told me definitively that I would receive no further unemployment compensation. I had violated the rules. The rules encompassed having to accept a job offer, apparently, even if the job paid far less than you are accustomed to be earning, represented a hardship in terms of distance, and was not quite in your field.

I needed another eight weeks to finally land the right job for my needs, and I surely could have used the unemployment compensation during that time. I was 25 years old, with no savings, barely making my way in the career world. Lesson learned, I’ll never volunteer that kind of information again.

Don’t Ask About IRS Procedures
I brought coins to a coin show and was contemplating selling them to a particular dealer. In the back of my mind, I remembered that if you deposit too much cash in the bank on any given day, you might flag the IRS. Never mind that I was seeking to sell coins that I purchased with money which I had earned, and upon which I already paid taxes. Never mind that I was selling the coins at a slight loss.

I harmlessly (or so I thought) asked the coin dealer, “What is the amount that triggers IRS scrutiny?” With this question, the dealer clammed up and told me, “I can’t discuss that with you,” otherwise, I am potentially “colluding to violate IRS rules.” I said, “What? I’m simply asking if you know what the sum happens to be.” He clammed up even further. I could see this conversation was going nowhere, so I stopped on a dime.

Why, in contemporary America, can you not ask a simple question related to the laws of our nation? The Internal Revenue Service used to be called the Department of Taxation. Funny, I’m not sure where the ‘service’ aspect of their activities kick-in.

Don’t Mention Your Reasons
I’m at a local Red Cross chapter, donating blood, as I do every eight weeks. I’ve been donating blood for years. It is helpful to me and it is helpful for those in need. The need presumably is urgent: I continually receive messages from the Red Cross every few days, even after I’ve already donated, asking me to donate again. For health and safety, one is asked to wait at least eight weeks between donations.

During one encounter with the nurse on hand, I said that one of the reasons I donate blood is that I have a high iron count. Donating blood helps to keep it in check. At that point she bristled. Then she regained her composure, and told me I should not mention my reasons.

Donating blood for purposes of lowering your iron count, which has some technical name, gets you thrown out of the system.

Well, excuse me.

During the same visit, because I have a blood type that is in demand, I was asked by someone else if I could come in more frequently to make other kinds of transfusion donations? So, you want me to visit more often to donate what you need. Yet, if I seek to make a donation that benefits both the Red Cross and myself, I am violating Red Cross regulations? Guess who’s going to seek another place to donate blood, other than at the local Red Cross?

Today’s Deadly Words
The above scenarios are tame and lame compared to the ridicule, employment termination, career destruction, physical attack, or death that might fall you if you have the temerity to state in public, or in a public forum, “All Lives Matter,” “All Black Lives Matter,” “White Lives Matter” “All Baby Lives Matter,” “All Victims Matter,” or, God forbid, “Blue Lives Matter.”

 

[marsh]

Bill Gates Collaborated with China Firm BGI Genomics that Was Caught Mining Americans’ Data | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

Natalie Winters from The National Pulse broke the news this past weekend that BGI Genomics, flagged by U.S.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

Bill Gates Collaborated with China Firm BGI Genomics that Was Caught Mining Americans’ Data

By Jim Hoft
Published March 8, 2021 at 3:53pm

Natalie Winters from The National Pulse broke the news this past weekend that BGI Genomics, flagged by U.S. officials as “mining” the DNA of Americans, collaborated extensively with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Winters went on The War Room on Monday.

Bill and Melinda Gates took several trips to China to visit the BGI Genomics.

Rumble video on website 2:16 min

The National Pulse reported:

BGI Genomics—the Chinese Communist Party-linked genomics firm flagged by U.S. officials as “mining” the DNA of Americans—has collaborated extensively with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The National Pulse can reveal.

The company has recently come under fire following a 60 Minutes exposé on the company’s use of COVID-19 tests to “collect, store and exploit biometric information” on American citizens, according to former U.S. intelligence officials. What’s more, a recent Reuters article linked the firm to the Chinese Communist Party’s military.

In addition to the Obama administration enabling the firm to gain a foothold in the U.S., the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation played a critical role in BGI’s American expansion.

In September of 2012, the Microsoft founder’s foundation signed a “Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to form a collaboration on global health and agricultural development with the goal of achieving common objectives in health and agricultural development.”

The co-founder of BGI praised the agreement, celebrating the forthcoming “scientific breakthroughs in the areas of human, plant and animal genomics.” He also revealed that the collaborative efforts focused on sequencing genomes—the precise activity flagged for national security threats in the 60 Minutes segment.

 

[marsh]

[Comment: Interesting read. I see a good explanation of Country Club Republican thinking and how it meshes with the DC Swamp and Biden.]

Twilight of the American empire

After years of liberal imperialism, the US has finally overstretched itself

unherd.com

Twilight of the American empire
After years of liberal imperialism, the US has finally overstretched itself
BY ARIS ROUSSINOS

When Joe Biden announced to the Munich Security Conference last week that “America was back” at the centre of the Atlantic alliance, his European virtual audience responded with a collective shrug. For all their protestations of fealty, Europe’s leaders, defiantly pushing ahead with trade and energy deals with America’s rivals, are not interested in any great ideological crusade on the hegemon’s behalf.

As Nathalie Tocci, chief advisor to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles, notes in a recent paper, “the European project developed under… an order made up of international organisations, laws, norms, regimes and practices premised on US power”. Yet today, “that world is fast fading”. While the US remains the only state able to project power globally, it “no longer represents the undisputed hegemon of the international system”. Indeed, as Tocci observes, China’s rise “suggests that we can no longer claim with confidence that economic prosperity and political freedoms can only go hand in hand”. Moreover, our dramatically different experiences of Covid “suggests that the jury is out on which governance system is perceived as best addressing the pandemic crisis, prompting questions about the management of other global challenges too”.

To his credit, Biden squarely addressed these pressing questions. Summoning up the ghosts of past confrontations, he declared that “we’re at an inflection point” between those who believe that “autocracy is the best way forward… and those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting those challenges”. For the President, “Democracy will and must prevail… We have to prove that our model isn’t a relic of our history.”

Yet this justificatory emphasis on democracy as the foundation of empire is a relic of a very specific moment in world history. As the historian Stephen Wertheim observes in his book Tomorrow the World, following the fall of France in 1940, American foreign policy elites feared that a Nazi victory would see the United States hemmed into the Western Hemisphere. But the British victory in the Battle of Britain opened up a new prospect, hitherto undreamed of by American politicians: first of an Anglo-American imperial condominium, dividing up the post-war world between them; and then, as Britain’s relative decline became apparent, a vision of total global hegemony.

“Americans ever since, from experts to ordinary citizens, have considered world dominance to be their nation’s natural role,” Wertheim notes. It is an ideology which “holds that the superior coercive power of the United States is required to underwrite a decent world order” — one which “assumes that in order to prevent the international realm from descending into chaos or despotism, a benign hegemon must act as the world’s ordering agent,” with that onerous burden falling upon themselves.

To turn its wary populace into eager participants in this imperial project, American intellectual and foreign policy elites framed global expansion as the establishment of a universal liberal-democratic order, guided and protected rather than ruled by Washington. As Wertheim notes in a passage that is as true of American liberal commentators today as those of the 1940s, “anything less [than global supremacy] would be an abdication, tantamount to inactivity, absence, and head-in-the-sand disregard for the fate of the world.” America’s pursuit of global hegemony was not a sordid, self-aggrandising imperial project like that of the fading European powers; instead, it was a moral duty, a noble sacrifice undertaken for the benefit of the rest of the world. In such a way, Wertheim writes, “the country jumped from ‘isolationism’ to ‘imperialism’, acquiring a taste for unilateral intervention everywhere in order to remake the world in the image of the United States”. In doing so, they constructed the global order whose waning days we now inhabit.

Yet by making the Second World War the founding myth of the American-led order, certain pathologies were built into the system which now threaten its survival. As a useful myth became liberal dogma, the neurotic belief that the end of American hegemony would mean the return of dark forces has become so entrenched that it constrains America’s ability to negotiate reality. In the same way US political radicals appear doomed to endlessly replay the ideological battles of 1930s Germany in the streets of America’s cities, it is always 1933 in the world of the D.C. liberal hawk: American hegemony is all that stands between the free world and the rise of new Hitlers, destined to crop up from the blood-soaked soil of the Old World without regular American pruning.

The increasing salience since the 1990s of a Hollywood-esque understanding of the Second World War exemplifies this distortion of reality in the pursuit of a grand, moralising origin myth. It is a worldview shorn of moral compromises, such as the necessary alliance with Stalin’s murderous regime, in which every challenger to US hegemony magically becomes a new Hitler. Complex and intractable ethnic, tribal and sectarian conflicts — literally inexplicable in such a moral framework — are either reduced to the evil deeds of individual dictators, whose removal will lead automatically to the flourishing of liberal democracy, or ignored as too difficult to comprehend.

The results are plain to see. As Tocci notes, more in sorrow than censure, “the last war which the US led and unequivocally won both militarily and politically was over Kosovo 22 years ago.” In the ever-expanding wars since then, the US has “won militarily, but (abysmally) lost politically.” The result, as she observes, is that “the outcomes of the many wars that have been fought in China’s absence during the decades of its economic rise have been, in one way or another, to China’s strategic advantage.”

The danger for America, then, is that its leaders have become high on their own ideological supply, overlaying their fantasy map on the real world. It seems, at times, that by fusing the Realist desire for hegemony with an idealistic mission to remake the world, America’s elites believe they have secured the mandate of heaven for their project. Challengers, from Putin to Gaddafi to Assad, are not merely opponents; they are rebels against the arc of history, individual reincarnations of the 1930s whose very existence, let alone survival, is morally unbearable.

Indeed, there are worrying intimations that America’s leaders believe the victory of liberal democracy is predestined, purely through its own perceived moral virtue: as if the victories of the Second World War and the Cold War were won by holding the correct ideology, and not through the possession of stronger industrial bases and amoral political alliances. The rise of China, concomitant with America’s decline, is largely the unintended product of such a dangerously idealistic worldview.

Yet like the American millennials role-playing Weimar, their elders continue to re-enact the sacred myth on the global sphere, invoking the litanies of another time, on another continent, for their magical power. By intoning the sacred word democracy over and over again at the Munich conference — including three times in his concluding sentence — Biden echoed the themes of his first domestic foreign policy speech: that he will “host the summit of democracies early in my administration to rally the nations of the world to defend democracy globally” and that “there’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy”. The riot at the Capitol and the future confrontation in east Asia are now part of the same Manichean struggle, a worldview we could term the true D.C. cinematic universe.

Of course, Biden’s framing is not true in a literal sense: the same speech contained a pledge to defend Saudi Arabia — which is not noted for its liberal governance — even as he announced the welcome end of American military support for the Saudi kingdom’s bloody and disastrous war in Yemen. Likewise to confront China, the US will need to enhance alliances with authoritarian or dubiously democratic South East Asian states, with even India’s commitment to “liberal democracy” in the American sense increasingly debatable. Even in Europe, Poland, the most eager cheerleader for America’s continued military dominance on our continent, displays a far more equivocal approach to both liberalism and democracy than Biden’s framing suggests. As in the first Cold War, America can either promote global democracy or preserve its imperial reach, but not both.

Nevertheless, the democratic ideal retains immense rhetorical power for defenders of the American-led global order. Thus the openly imperialist writer Robert Kagan argued recently that Americans must “accept the role that fate and their own power have thrust upon them”, because “the only hope for preserving liberalism at home and abroad is the maintenance of a world order conducive to liberalism, and the only power capable of upholding such an order is the United States”.

In starker terms than Biden, Kagan argues that the empire is necessary to preserve democracy at home: an America that retreats from global hegemony would no longer be America. But as the Realist professors of International Relations David Blagden and Patrick Porter observe in a recent paper arguing for a strategic withdrawal from the Middle East, the precise opposite case can be made. The pursuit of global hegemony since the end of the Cold War has seen the United States overstretch itself, taken on unsustainable levels of debt to fund its military expansion, eroded the country’s image abroad, militarised policing at home, enabled the rise of China and fostered disillusionment and political radicalism in America. The Trump era, they note, was not so much a threat to America’s global mission as its product, a marker of growing popular dissent to imperial overreach now observable on both the Left and Right of the American political system.

As they observe, America’s “position as ‘global leader’ is premised on a set of impermanent and atypical conditions from an earlier post-war era”, but “the days of incontestable unipolarity are over, and cannot be wished back”. The result is that “overextension abroad, exhaustion and fiscal strain at home, and political disorder feed off one another in a downward spiral, cumulatively threatening the survival of the republic”.

The US empire is, then, at an impasse. Its moral and political justification of overseeing a global order of universal liberal democracy — the closest real-world equivalent to the Kantian perpetual peace that has both motivated and eluded liberal idealists for the past two centuries — is now beyond its capabilities to maintain. Yet to return to its core imperial concerns of the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Northeast Asia, as Blagden & Porter counsel, would tarnish the imperial crown. Without the idealistic universalism that has justified America’s global mission since the Second World War, the US empire would be an empire like any other: self-interested, amoral, and hostage to the cycle of rise and fall that has seen every other empire pass into history. Kagan is in this sense correct: without the justifying myth to organise the empire around, the moral logic of the entire enterprise falls apart.

Even within the heart of the Nato alliance, European strategic autonomy therefore represents a dilemma for America, which, as Blagden & Porter note, has always “displayed a longstanding preference for preventing even its major allies in Europe and Asia from exercising true strategic autonomy”. A more autonomous Europe lessens the strategic burden on the United States, allowing America to refocus its forces on confronting China; yet a more autonomous Europe will also be less constrained by American pressure, and more inclined to pursue its own interests.

How does this end for America? Biden and the presidents after him will be forced to make a hard choice: whether to retrench to a smaller and more manageable empire, or to risk a far greater and more dramatic collapse in defence of global hegemony. In the meantime, perhaps our European allies are correct in discerning a greater opportunity to rebalance the Atlantic alliance in our favour for the first time in decades. A more modest American commitment to a limited democratic order, rather than an unsustainable global one, can only enhance European influence, including ours, especially as the bloody distractions of the Middle East, America’s self-defeating imperial burden, fade from prominence. American leaders will soon be forced to choose between realism and idealism; the same is also true of us.

 

[marsh]

When Academic Achievement Means ‘Acting White’ | National Review

The Oregon Department of Education’s idea to tinker with instruction threatens to do more harm than good.

www.nationalreview.com

When Academic Achievement Means ‘Acting White’
By DEVON WESTHILL
March 8, 2021 4:15 PM

(diane39/Getty Images)

National studies consistently find disparities between black students, especially black boys, and their peers in reading, mathematics, and other core academic subjects. Still other studies show these disparities follow black males into college. That is, notwithstanding the many root issues of these gaps, black males on average are failing to get to the right answer more often than their peers. A new method of teaching threatens to supercharge this reality.

The Oregon Department of Education released a bulletin last month informing math teachers of a course available to those who are “looking for a deeper dive into equity work.” In an essay titled “Why Math is Racist,” John Hinderaker at Powerline calls out the bizarre concepts that the course promotes such as how “white supremacy culture shows up in the mathematics classroom” when “students are required to ‘show their work’” and “the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer.” I encourage folks to read Hinderaker’s take on the training and the other perspectives that have been shared in print and television.

Since time immemorial, one solution proposed to fix differences in educational outcomes for black boys has been to change the curriculum such that they will be inspired to learn. There are many ready-made programs from which educators can choose that alter the subject matter to make it more relatable and ostensibly of greater interest to certain students.

A recent and popular example is the curriculum developed for the 1619 Project, which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.” That is, the consequences of slavery still permeate all facets of current American life and it ought to be central in our discussion of current issues.

A curriculum that teaches black kids that they are on average poorer, less educated, and more oppressed than their non-black peers because of slavery has an obvious relevance to them. So, whether intended by its creators or not, the 1619 Project curriculum has an emotionally motivating effect on, particularly, poor black students.

As the debate over curricula rages on, the approach in Oregon and other math departments to engage students of color focuses not on what is taught but instead on how it is taught. It should face the same scrutiny and similar condemnation as the 1619 Project.

In the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a youth in the American South, there existed an unfortunate element in the subculture of poor blacks — within which I was a member. To show a desire to learn or to do well academically was criticized as “acting white” or considered effeminate for boys and men. I remember it well.

I didn’t live in what now are called “predominately communities of color”; my family always lived in solely black communities. In the neighborhood that I spent my adolescence and teenage years, I remember my mother being the only white person in the community.

This destructive part of southern poor black subculture meant that nearly all of the black boys in my neighborhoods — including me — shunned schooling or, at least, did well to pretend they disliked learning. At that time and place, appearing to be a race traitor or homosexual were two of the worst sins one could commit. I’m confident this element contributed to many of the black youths I knew turning to more culturally glamorized delinquency and ultimately, to trouble with the law, drugs, and the many other problems reflected in statistics on young black men.

The Oregon Department of Education’s approach to tinker with pedagogy threatens to further the problematic elements in the subculture of poor blacks, which may well extend to communities of color beyond the South of the ’80s and ’90s to places such as the Pacific Northwest today.

 

[marsh]

BLM Protesters Harass Young Cheerleaders Over Their ‘White Privilege,’ Organizer Stands By Actions | The Daily Wire

www.dailywire.com

BLM Protesters Harass Young Cheerleaders Over Their ‘White Privilege,’ Organizer Stands By Actions

"The reason why you get to be here in these pretty little gorgeous outfits and your gorgeous hair and your gorgeous bows is because of your white privilege."

By Amanda Prestigiacomo
•Mar 8, 2021 DailyWire.com

Vancouver via Getty Images

Black Lives Matter protesters badgered young cheerleaders while they entered the Kentucky International Convention Center in downtown Louisville for a cheer competition on Saturday.
One of the protester leaders Carmen M. Jones, who said Sunday that she stands by her comments, yelled at the girls for their “white privilege” and told one of the women with the cheerleaders that she better “make sure your kids aren’t somebody my kids are gonna have to beat up.”

“The reason why you get to be here in these pretty little gorgeous outfits and your gorgeous hair and your gorgeous bows is because of your white privilege,” Jones said over a megaphone to the girls.

“Breonna [Taylor] is dead,” she told the girls and their parents. “Black mothers are burying their babies while white mothers send their daughters to cheer competitions.”

A Facebook livestream from Tara Bassett with 502 livestreamers captured the incident, WDRB reported Sunday.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/can-men-and-women-compete-athletically-heres-what-the-science-says
Pushing back against the harassment, one of the women said in the direction of the protesters, “They’re yelling at our girls for no reason.”

Jones responded to the complaint, “I am on your a**, I am on your a**, you cannot come through that door without me being on your a**.”

“Black Lives Matter, I agree,” the woman told Jones.

“Tell your kids that — make sure your kids aren’t somebody my kids are gonna have to beat up,” Jones replied.

A father of cheerleaders who went only by Rob told WDRB that the protesters “were badgering” the girls “all the way in the door.” His oldest daughter, he said, “cried for about an hour” over the incident.

“You could see it affected all these kids,” Rob said.

The father said demonstrators have a right to protest, of course, but should leave innocent children out of it.

“If there’s a problem within life, you keep it between adults,” he said. “You don’t take kids and add them into the problems. It had nothing to do with them. Even if you have something that you’re passionate about. That wasn’t the way to go about it.”

Jones, however, said she and “other protesters” stands by their harassment of the young girls.
“Yes, I did tell them don’t be somebody that my child is going to have to fight,” she told WDRB. “Because right now I’m fighting the grandchildren, the great grandchildren of people’s ancestors who didn’t do right.

“… Breonna Taylor will never be able to have a child to be able to take to a cheer competition,” she added. “If black kids are children enough and child enough and mature enough to go through the things that we go through as children, then their children are children enough, child enough and mature enough to learn about their privilege.”

Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker fired at plainclothes officers executing a raid on the young woman’s home on March 13; officers returned fire and the altercation left Taylor dead and one officer shot.

WATCH:
https://www.facebook.com/edb5b38e-9d6e-43bc-91a5-165b9c94b879 23:41 min

 

[marsh]

Black Lives Matter militants harass young girls for their 'white privilege' as they walk into cheerleading competition | Blaze Media

A megaphone-wielding woman ridiculed their 'pretty little gorgeous outfits,' 'gorgeous hair,' and 'gorgeous bows'

www.theblaze.com

Black Lives Matter militants harass young girls for their 'white privilege' as they walk into cheerleading competition

A megaphone-wielding woman ridiculed their 'pretty little gorgeous outfits,' 'gorgeous hair,' and 'gorgeous bows'
DAVE URBANSKI
March 08, 2021

Image source: Twitter video screenshot via @CIA-Simulation Warlord

Black Lives Matter militants harassed groups of young girls for their "white privilege" as they walked into a cheerleading competition in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, on Saturday.

What happened?
As one group of cheerleaders crossed the street into the Kentucky International Convention Center, Carmen M. Jones spelled out a message for them as she spoke into a megaphone,

WDRB-TV reported.

"The reason why you get to be here in these pretty little gorgeous outfits and your gorgeous hair and your gorgeous bows is because of your white privilege," Jones said, according to the station. "Breonna [Taylor] is dead. Black mothers are burying their babies while white mothers send their daughters to cheer competitions."

Here's the clip:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1368556451463983112

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1368556451463983112
.58 min

Black Lives Matter activists harass a group of young children in Louisville by mocking them for their “White privil… https://t.co/mUWegDCwiO
— Ian Miles Cheong (@Ian Miles Cheong) 1615124259.0

Jones also appeared to command the cheerleaders to "do something black today with your white privilege." WDRB also said protesters held signs and used chants with profanities as the children walked in and out of the building.

Another video shows what appears to be a protester holding a rifle as the group faces down a group of police officers in front of the convention center:

Image source: Twitter video screenshot via @CIA-Simulation Warlord

In the second video Jones can be heard on the megaphone hollering — apparently to cops — "We are not afraid of you! We are not intimidated by you!"

Then as another group of young girls headed into the cheerleading competition, Jones could be heard saying "they don't give a f*** about y'all!" One of the protester's signs read, "F*** the police."

Here's the clip. (Content warning: Profanity):

Antifa guys armed semiautomatic rifles showed up with the Black Lives Matter activists to harass children who were… https://t.co/G6x5L8NSN2
— Ian Miles Cheong (@Ian Miles Cheong) 1615124839.0

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1368558884848164878

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1368558884848164878
2:20 min

One dad isn't happy
A father of cheerleaders told WDRB that protesters "were badgering them all the way in the door" and that his oldest daughter "cried for about an hour" after the interaction.

"You could see it affected all these kids," the father told the station, only giving his first name — Rob — and not showing his face on camera during an interview.

Rob told WDRB that the protesters have a right to be there but should have left children out of it: "If there's a problem within life, you keep it between adults. You don't take kids and add them into the problems. It had nothing to do with them. Even if you have something that you're passionate about. That wasn't the way to go about it."

The station said Louisville police made three arrests at the protest, and among the charges were disorderly conduct and obstructing a highway.

Black Lives Matter leader is unmoved
Jones told WDRB that she and fellow protesters stand by their words and methods: "Yes, I did tell them 'Don't be somebody that my child is going to have to fight.' Because right now I'm fighting the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren of people's ancestors who didn't do right."

She added to the station that "Breonna Taylor will never be able to have a child to be able to take to a cheer competition. If black kids are children enough, and child enough, and mature enough to go through the things that we go through as children, then their children are children enough, child enough. and mature enough to learn about their privilege."

This Saturday will be the one-year anniversary of the death of Taylor, a 26-year-old black woman shot six times by Louisville police officers during a "no-knock" search warrant at her apartment. Officers returned fire after Taylor's boyfriend fired his gun thinking he and Taylor were robbery targets. Police suspected Taylor's apartment was being used to traffic drugs, but no drugs or money were found during the search. The incident ignited public outrage and protests around the country.

 

[marsh]

WATCH: Ted Cruz Grills Vanita Gupta on Her Hostility to Free Speech

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) took Vanita Gupta to task Tuesday for her past hostility to freedom of speech, during her confirmation hearing.

www.breitbart.com

WATCH: Ted Cruz Grills Vanita Gupta on Her Hostility to Free Speech

Senate Judiciary Committee

JOEL B. POLLAK9 Mar 2021

Video on website 3:46 min

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) took Vanita Gupta to task Tuesday for her past hostility to freedom of speech, during her confirmation hearing for the position of Associate Attorney General.

Gupta, a left-wing activist who ran the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division during President Barack Obama’s tenure, faced scrutiny from Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee over her radical views and history of partisan rhetoric.

During follow-up questions to his initial round, during which he excoriated Gupta over her record, Cruz honed in on her past claim that freedom of speech was not a “floating” right, but carried “responsibilities.”


Cruz specifically asked Gupta whether she had ever defended the freedom of speech of someone with whom she had disagreed, and whether she thought tech companies — who are heavily backing her confirmation — should exercise more censorship, or less censorship.
The two had the following exchange:

Sen. Cruz: One area that gives me real concern, Ms. Gupta, is in the area of free speech, and the censorship we see from Big Tech. You are one of a handful of individuals invited to have dinner with [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg to discuss the growing problem we’ve seen of Big Tech censorship silencing voices that Silicon Valley billionaires disagree with. And the dismaying thing is that what’s been publicly reported about that meeting is not that you urged Mr. Zuckerberg and others in tech to protect free speech, to have a free and fair marketplace of ideas, but precisely the opposite. From what’s been publicly reported, and the quote that’s been reported from this, in fact you tweeted this, was: “Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know what the first amendment is for. He thinks it’s a floating right that carries no responsibilities.” That seems to suggest that you want Big Tech to censor more speech rather than less speech. Would that be a good direction in this country ?

Gupta: Senator, I have fiercely defended freedom of speech. I’ve worked for an organization that has often been criticized for being so fierce in its defense of all free speech. I also believe that any type of viewpoint discrimination is an anathema to this country, it is unconstitutional plainly. My engagement with facebook was —

Sen. Cruz: Ms. Gupta, if I could ask you: Have you defended speech of someone you disagreed with? Have you ever defended the speech of pro-life advocates? Have you ever defended the speech of pro-Second Amendment advocates? Or is it just the people that politically agree with you whose free speech rights should be protected?

Gupta: Senator, as you know the American Civil Liberties Union defends —

Sen. Cruz: I’m asking about you personally know not more broadly, others.

Gupta: I haven’t been a free-speech lawyer myself, I have advocated alongside —

Sen. Cruz: You headed the Civil Rights Division .

Gupta: — free speech at the ACLU and the Civil Rights Division, yes.

Sen. Cruz: So can you point to any instance of your defending the free-speech rights of someone you disagreed with?

Gupta: I’m sure that I did. The Civil Rights Division doesn’t enforce, doesn’t have a federal statute on this. Let me — I would welcome, actually, Senator, so that I don’t misspeak, an opportunity to respond in writing.

Sen. Cruz: I would welcome a response in writing. Let me just ask a simple question: should Big Tech be censoring more or censoring less?

Gupta: I think we want to ensure we have free speech and a free Internet while understanding the responsibility that social media has in propagating and radicalizing terrorists online, in —

Sen. Cruz: Let me try again. Is Big Tech engaged into much censorship or too little censorship ?

Gupta: I’m not sure I know which side of the ledger you’re talking about. they have community standards that they are not enforcing at many of these companies that are creating a lot of problems around issues in our democracy. For a long time they were allowing, Facebook was allowing unlawful ad targeting in housing ads, in using Section 230 as a shield —

Sen. Cruz: I guess I’m concerned if you’re saying that you want them enforcing community standards when you began this exchange with Senator [Cory] Booker [of New Jersey] by saying everyone in America has implicit racial bias, and you now want Big Tech Silicon Valley billionaires with monopolies to enforce standards that just happen to coincide with the political views you have.

The New Yorker article Gupta shared criticized Zuckerberg for allegedly believing in “unchallenged freedom of all speech.”

 

[marsh]

NYT: Big Tech's Section 230 Protections Will 'Survive' Congress

In a recent article, the New York Times writes that the law protecting the Masters of the Universe, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), appears likely to survive, with Congress focusing on making changes to details within the law.

www.breitbart.com

NYT: Big Tech’s Section 230 Protections Will ‘Survive’ Congress
2

KENZO TRIBOUILLARD /Getty
LUCAS NOLAN9 Mar 20219

In a recent article, the New York Times writes that the law protecting the Masters of the Universe, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), appears likely to survive, with Congress focusing on making changes to details within the law.

In a recent article titled “Tech’s Legal Shield Appears Likely to Survive as Congress Focuses on Details,” the New York Times writes that while former President Donald Trump called for the repealing of laws that shield tech companies from legal responsibility and President Joe Biden during his candidacy stated that Section 230 should be “revoked,” it is seeming increasingly unlikely that this will happen.

Instead, Congress appears to be focusing on making changes to Section 230 of the CDA that would eliminate protections for specific kinds of content rather than eliminating the law entirely.

The New York Times writes:

One bill introduced last month would strip the protections from content the companies are paid to distribute, like ads, among other categories. A different proposal, expected to be reintroduced from the last congressional session, would allow people to sue when a platform amplified content linked to terrorism. And another that is likely to return would exempt content from the law only when a platform failed to follow a court’s order to take it down.

Even these more modest proposals to the legal shield, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, could ripple across the internet. The adjustments could give companies like Facebook and YouTube an incentive to take down certain types of content while leaving up others. Critics of the ideas also say there is a huge potential for unintended consequences, citing a 2018 law that stripped the immunity from platforms that knowingly facilitated sex trafficking, making some sex work more unsafe.

“I think we are trying to say, ‘How can you narrowly draw some exceptions to 230 in a way that doesn’t interfere with your free speech rights?’” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who has introduced legislation to trim the law with a fellow Democrat, Senator Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii.

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who researches online misinformation, stated: “I think we want to take as modest of a step as possible. Give it a year or two, see how it unfolds and make adjustments.”

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who co-wrote Section 230 while in the House, used 9/11 as an argument for not repealing the law entirely, stating: “If you remember 9/11, and you had all these knee-jerk reactions to those horrible tragedies. I think it would be a huge mistake to use the disgusting, nauseating attacks on the Capitol as a vehicle to suppress free speech.”

Read more at the New York Times here.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Taibbi: The Prophet Of The Trump Era

MONDAY, MAR 08, 2021 - 20:45
Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

I entered Martin Gurri’s world on August 1, 2015. Though I hadn’t read The Revolt of the Public, at the time a little-known book by the former CIA analyst of open news sources, I hit a disorienting moment of a type he’d described in his opening chapter. There are times, he wrote, “when tomorrow no longer resembles yesterday… the compass cracks, by which we navigate existence. We are lost at sea.”


Gurri’s book is about how popular uprisings are triggered by collapses of faith in traditional hierarchies of power. I felt such a collapse that day in Waterloo, Iowa, covering the Republican presidential primary. The first debate was five days away and the man expected to occupy center stage, Donald Trump, held a seemingly inexplicable six-point lead.

Two weeks before, on July 18th, Trump lashed out against former Republican nominee John McCain. Even McCain’s critics considered his physical and mental scars from years as a Vietnam war prisoner to be unassailable proofs of his patriotic gravitas, but the service-evading Trump was having none of it. “I don’t like losers,” he said, adding, “He’s only a war hero because he was captured.” It was the universal belief among colleagues in campaign journalism that this was an unsurvivable gaffe, a “Dean scream” moment. We expected him to apologize and wash out. Instead, he called McCain a “dummy” and kept a firm grasp on the lead.

A different candidate, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, was in Waterloo. Two years before, Time all but dubbed Christie the favorite for 2016 with a silhouette cover portrait, over the nastily shallow (but publicity-generating) double-entendre headline, THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. Christie was every Washington consultant’s idea of a “crossover” superstar. I’d describe the concept in Rolling Stone as someone “mean enough for the right-wing, but also knows a gay person or once read a French novel.”

Christie parked himself in the middle of Waterloo’s annual “Irish fest” street fair, waiting for an Iowan to ask for a souvenir campaign handshake. He had his hand out and thumb stuck upwards, like an Iguanodon. Nobody came. Kids ran around him like he was a shrubbery. Two young women, giggling about something that clearly had nothing to do with him, walked his way, separated just long enough to avoid hitting him, then linked up again a few yards down. He eventually posed with a few passersby, but the rubbernecking that usually attends the arrival of any “famous politician” was conspicuously absent.

Christie in Waterloo
Later, I sat in the park discussing Trump’s stubborn grasp on the lead with another reporter, an Iowan. “It’s amazing,” he said, shaking his head. “We’re beating the shit out of the guy, and he just won’t die.” He compared it to a nightmare, where you stab an attacking monster over and over, and nothing happens.

Elections in the pre-Trump era had been stale rituals. As recently as 2013, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post called them “remarkably scripted and controlled.” Donors, party chiefs, and pundits could concoct contenders through sheer alchemy, mesmerizing the public with incantations like “electability.” But in Iowa that summer, one “electable” Republican candidate after another — from Jeb Bush to Scott Walker to Marco Rubio — flopped in public appearances, savaged as phonies on social media. Walker, the betting favorite among reporters, saw his campaign deflated when his online strategist, Liz Muir, started tweeting her real feelings about Iowa (including the classic, “#agsubsidies #ethanol #brainless”).

I’d spent weeks crisscrossing the state in search of even one piece of evidence that conventional wisdom still had predictive power in Republican politics, finding none. Now, here was Christie, reduced from being lionized in a Time cover story as a favorite and a “guy who loves his mother and gets it done,” to being nobody at all, a clown standing alone in a park.

The realization that no one was in control of the campaign show anymore was jarring even to me, a critic of the old gatekeeping ritual.

In the introduction to The Revolt of the Public, Arnold Kling speaks of a different “Gurri moment”: when Dan Rather’s 2004 expose about George W. Bush’s military service was blown up by an amateur blogging under the name “Bucklehead.” In the past, a media titan like CBS could only be second-guessed by another major institutional power. In “Rathergate,” both the network and one of its most iconic celebrities were humiliated by a single individual, a preview of the coming disorientation.

The thesis of The Revolt of the Public is that traditional centralized powers are losing — have lost — authority, in large part because of the demystifying effect of the Internet. The information explosion undermined the elite monopoly on truth, exposing long-concealed flaws.

Many analysts had noted the disruptive power of the Internet, but what made Gurri unique is that he also predicted with depressingly humorous accuracy how traditional hierarchies would respond to this challenge: in a delusional, ham-fisted, authoritarian manner that would only confirm the worst suspicions of the public, accelerating the inevitable throw-the-bums-out campaigns. This assessment of the motive for rising public intransigence was not exactly welcomed, but either way, as Kling wrote, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.”


Gurri also noted that public revolts would likely arrive unattached to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable cycles of zero-sum clashes between myopic authorities and their increasingly furious subjects. He called this a “paralysis of distrust,” where outsiders can “neutralize but not replace the center” and “networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” With a nod to Yeats, Gurri summed up: “The center cannot hold, and the border has no clue what to do about it.”

Read the rest of the report here.

 

[marsh]

My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell claims he is launching his own social media site

My Pillow founder Mike Lindell has made the grand claim that he is launching his own social media site — after he was booted from Twitter for spreading baseless claims about election fraud. The pil…

nypost.com

My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell claims he is launching his own social media site

By Yaron Steinbuch
March 9, 2021 | 1:20pm | Updated

Mike Lindell has claimed that he lost $65 million in revenue this year because of mass boycotts over his claims that the presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.Bloomberg via Getty Images

My Pillow founder Mike Lindell has made the grand claim that he is launching his own social media site — after he was booted from Twitter for spreading baseless claims about election fraud.

The pillow pusher said on conservative radio host Charlie Kirk’s podcast Friday that his Big Tech rival could even be live within a month, Business Insider reported.

“Every single influencer person on the planet can come there. You’re going to have a platform to speak out,” Lindell announced, adding that he has been working on the site for four years.

“It’s not just like a little Twitter platform,” said the businessman, who has claimed that he lost $65 million in revenue this year because of mass boycotts over his ongoing claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

“They’re suppressing our voices,” Lindell railed on the show Friday.

Mike Lindell (center) laughs with President Donald Trump during a “Made in America” roundtable event in the East Room at the White House.The Washington Post via Getty Images
“We’re launching this big platform so all the voices of our country can come back and start telling it like it is again,” he declared.

“You will not need YouTube. You won’t need these places … it will be where everything can be told, because we’ve got to get our voices back. People will be able to talk and not walk on eggshells.”

Lindell then discussed “cancel culture” and claimed his Wikipedia page had been “changed into something I’m not,” without elaborating.

“Google canceled me on some things, I can tell you,” he said in the podcast, explaining that he bought ads on the search engine giant so more people would see “evidence” of the alleged election fraud.

But he said Google took “tens of thousands of dollars” in ad revenue from him before shutting him down.

Lindell also complained that “even the bad stations” wouldn’t have him on their shows to talk about election fraud, the COVID-19 vaccine and Dominion Voting Systems, which recently filed a lawsuit accusing him of defamation.

The voting machine company is seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages on allegations that Lindell falsely accused it of “stealing millions of votes” in the federal election.

Mike Lindell cheers as President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at Scheels Arena in Fargo, North Dakota.Getty Images

The My Pillow CEO said the site would launch in “four or five weeks,” but also that it could launch in “10 days,” adding that he couldn’t announce the platform’s name yet. No further details about the platform, including what it would look like or how it would function, were offered.

 

[marsh]

Disney+ removes 'Peter Pan,' 'Dumbo' from children's profiles due to negative stereotypes

newschannel9.com

Disney+ removes 'Peter Pan,' 'Dumbo' from children's profiles due to negative stereotypes
by Alexx Altman-Devilbiss

Tuesday, March 9th 2021

FILE - In this Aug. 8, 2017, file photo, The Walt Disney Co. logo appears on a screen above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Disney’s new streaming service, Disney Plus, is adding a disclaimer to "Dumbo," “Peter Pan” and other classics because they depict racist stereotypes, underscoring a challenge media companies face when they resurrect older movies in modern times. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

(WPDE) — Disney+ has removed several movies from children's profiles on its service due to negative stereotypes.

The Walt Disney Company previously showed content warnings on the films for “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people and cultures” in October but has now removed access to the films for children under 7.

Adults can still view the movies on their Disney+ accounts with the content warnings.
Some of what Disney has said about each of the movies at the "Stories Matter" section include:

• “Dumbo” (1941): “The crows and musical number pay homage to racist minstrel shows, where white performers with blackened faces and tattered clothing imitated and ridiculed enslaved Africans on Southern plantations. The leader of the group in Dumbo is Jim Crow, which shares the name of laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States.”
• “Peter Pan” (1953): “The film portrays Native people in a stereotypical manner that reflects neither the diversity of Native peoples nor their authentic cultural traditions. It shows them speaking in an unintelligible language and repeatedly refers to them as ‘redskins,’ an offensive term. Peter and the Lost Boys engage in dancing, wearing headdresses and other exaggerated tropes.”
• “Swiss Family Robinson” (1960): “The pirates who antagonize the Robinson family are portrayed as a stereotypical foreign menace. Many appear in ‘yellow face’ or ‘brown face’ and are costumed in an exaggerated and inaccurate manner with top knot hairstyles, queues, robes and overdone facial make-up and jewelry, reinforcing their barbarism and ‘otherness.’”
• “The Aristocats” (1970): “The (Siamese) cat (Shun Gon) is depicted as a racist caricature of East Asian peoples with exaggerated stereotypical traits such as slanted eyes and buck teeth. He sings in poorly accented English voiced by a white actor and plays the piano with chopsticks.”

The content warning displays on the films says:

“This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together. Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe.”

 

[marsh]

Transgender Activist Says 'Little Girls are Kinky' to Defend Bathroom Invasion - Big League Politics

The LGBT movement has a pedo problem.

bigleaguepolitics.com

Transgender Activist Says ‘Little Girls are Kinky’ to Defend Bathroom Invasion

Shane Trejo
Mar 7, 2021

A far-left Twitter page called “Women’s Voices” is promoting transgenderism and offering the perspectives of these severely mentally ill predators who are targeting children for induction into their depraved lifestyle.

A transgender activist, Alok Vaid-Menon, said that “little girls are kinky” to defend the sexualization of young children.

“These days the narrative is that transgender people will come into bathrooms and abuse little girls. The supposed “purity” of the victims has remained stagnant,” Vaid-Menon said, apparently defending the abuse of the innocent.

“There are no princesses. Little girls are also kinky. Your kids aren’t as straight and narrow as you think,” he added.

Other transgender activist shared their opinions on the page to show exactly how disgusting and reprehensible they are.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1368516106520911874

View: https://twitter.com/WomenReadWomen/status/1368516106520911874?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1368613005399891970%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es3_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.revolver.news%2F


“While I never really believed the cliché about women being good for only one thing, that sentiment kept creeping into my fantasies. It’s called forced feminization… transforming the loss of male privilege into the best f*ck ever,” wrote trans-identifying author Julia Serano.

“Pornography is what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you. It is therefore a quintessential expression of femaleness. Getting f*cked makes you female because f*cked is what a female is,” wrote trans-identifying academic Andrea Long Chu.

“Autogynephilia describes… the basic structure of all human sexuality. The assimilation of any erotic image is, by nature, female. To be female is, in every case, to become what someone else wants. At bottom, everyone is a sissy,” Chu added.

“I think there are a lot of gay men out there who are gay men as a consolation prize because they couldn’t be women. That was certainly true of me,” wrote trans-identifying author Juno Dawson.

Juno Dawson used to be known as “James Dawson” and announced their transition after pushing a book depicting graphic sex acts on children. This allowed him to avoid some of the criticism he was receiving for his “pedophile behavior,” as one mother described it.

“There is something about being treated like shit by men that feels like affirmation itself, like a cry of delight from the deepest cavern of my breast… To be the victim of honest, undisguised sexism possesses an exhilarating vitality,” wrote trans-identifying academic Grace Lavery.

“Women around the world have been treated as sexual objects. Yet if sexual objectification is so categorically awful, then why do I want it so badly? The idea that being seen as a ‘sex object’ is universally a bad thing is too simple, like many tenets of feminism,” transgender author Jacob Tobia wrote.

Now that these individuals are no longer shunned by society, they are coming out of the closet and explaining their inner thoughts and feelings. Their own words prove the Christian right to be correct about the LGBT societal menace.

 

[marsh]

Social conservatives can’t let GOP become the party of 'gay family values' - LifeSite

President Trump and his advisers have made the calculation that courting moderate, pro-LGBT voters won’t hurt them in the slightest with his Evangelical and pro-life base. They’re right.

www.lifesitenews.com

Social conservatives can’t let GOP become the party of ‘gay family values’

President Trump and his advisers have made the calculation that courting moderate, pro-LGBT voters won’t hurt them in the slightest with his Evangelical and pro-life base. They’re right.
Wed Oct 21, 2020 - 6:32 pm EST

GEORGE FREY / GETTY IMAGES

October 21, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — In case you missed it, Ric Grenell, the former acting director of National Intelligence, gave an outstanding speech at the Republican National Convention last month.

It was a historic broadside against the Deep State and internationalists who’ve been in power for pretty much the last 40 years. I’m sure their blood was boiling as they watched it.

Just days before Grenell, a homosexual, delivered his remarks, he made a video declaring Donald Trump the “most pro-gay president in American history.”

President Trump retweeted the video, stating that it was his “great honor” to receive the title.

My great honor!!! https://t.co/kh2a5yumef
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2020

The Trump administration has walked a fine line the past several years with its social conservative base and the LGBT community. No one can deny that President Trump is quite possibly the most pro-life president we’ve ever had. He’s also admirably defended the religious liberty of the Little Sisters of the Poor and others. He’s to be praised for those efforts. But, and this is a big but, he has said nothing against the abomination that is same-sex “marriage.” In fact, he’s okay with it.

In 2016, before assuming office, Trump told 60 Minutes he’s “fine” with gay unions. “It’s irrelevant because it was already settled. It’s law. It was settled in the Supreme Court. I mean, it’s done,” he said.

It’s hard to say that if any other Republican had been elected in 2016, they’d be expressing opposition to gay “marriage.” The party has simply given up on it after Obergefell v. Hodges was handed down by the Supreme Court in 2015. I can see a President Ben Carson calling out homosexual unions, but a President Jeb Bush? Or even a President Cruz? I doubt it.

Sadly, it seems that the country, and even religious conservatives, have moved on from same-sex “marriage,” even though we all know that God surely hasn’t and will no doubt exert His vengeance on us at some point for allowing the scourge of sodomy to continue.

Politically speaking, President Trump and his advisers have made the calculation that courting moderate, pro-LGBT voters won’t hurt them in the slightest with his Evangelical and pro-life base. They’re right. Trump has delivered all and then some to those two voting blocs. There’s no way they wouldn’t turn out for him because of Grenell’s short little video.

In my own district here in Michigan, moderate Republican Peter Meijer was endorsed by Grenell just this week. He even sent out a tweet claiming that the GOP “has become a party that celebrates diversity and inclusion.”

The Trump-led GOP seems to want to give social conservatives laws that restrict abortion and to uphold their religious liberty. Meanwhile, for the LGBT crowd, a Trump GOP will work to see that homosexuality will no longer be viewed or treated as an abnormality. Whether this arrangement can be sustained over the long run remains to be seen.

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, has taken a leading role in encouraging young people to take a more laissez-faire view toward homosexuality. He’s frequently tweeted and often “liked” other tweets that normalize the gay agenda.

Others, like pro-abortion Fox News feminist Tomi Lahren, have also expressed support for LGBT “rights” on libertarian grounds. Donald Trump Jr. — the president’s heir apparent — has previously said he’s “totally for” gay “marriage.”

But some Christians aren’t having it.

Dave Reilly, a devout traditional Catholic who lives and works in Indiana, confronted Kirk at one of his rallies in 2019.“How does anal sex help us win the culture war? … Why are you promoting it?” he bravely asked in front of hundreds of other attendees.

Kirk was caught flat-footed. “Like, I don’t care what two consenting adults do ... and your hyper-focus on it is kinda ... weird.”

Apparently, Kirk has never read the part of the Bible that says men lying with other men is an abomination and that sin makes nations miserable.

Rob Smith, the gay black man who was co-hosting the event with Kirk, was also on stage. He didn’t have a good answer to Riley’s question either, opting to throw a temper tantrum and hurl empty LGBT talking points back in his face.

The altercation didn’t end there. Popular Twitter personality Benny Johnson, who works for Kirk, slammed Reilly for his remarks, scurrilously claiming that his question was “homophobic.”

Social conservatives are going to see more of these sorts of baseless attacks on Biblical marriage if they let moderates like Meijer and Kirk and gay men like Grenell run the show.

It’s up to grassroots Christians to ensure that Republican politicians will reverse homosexual “marriage” the same way they’ve successfully forced them to take up the cause of overturning abortion.

If religious Americans are simply content with getting pro-life laws, so be it. In truth, they need to strive for much more. If they don’t, the realignment currency underway on the political right will continue to push for the acceptance and normalization of homosexual behavior in the United States and across the world.

 

[marsh]

https://archive.fo/C5Xrg

A Vexing Question for Democrats: What Drives Latino Men to Republicans?

Several voters said values like individual responsibility and providing for one’s family, and a desire for lower taxes and financial stability, led them to reject a party embraced by their parents.

Jose Aguilar said he related to Republican messages about personal responsibility. “There’s really no secret to success,” he said. “It’s really that if you apply yourself, then things will work out.”Credit...Go Nakamura for The New York Times

By Jennifer Medina

• March 5, 2021

Erik Ortiz, a 41-year-old hip-hop music producer in Florida, grew up poor in the South Bronx, and spent much of his time as a young adult trying to establish himself financially. Now he considers himself rich. And he believes shaking off the politics of his youth had something to do with it.

“Everybody was a liberal Democrat — in my neighborhood, in the Bronx, in the local government,” said Mr. Ortiz, whose family is Black and from Puerto Rico. “The welfare state was bad for our people — the state became the father in the Black and brown household and that was a bad, bad mistake.” Mr. Ortiz became a Republican, drawn to messages of individual responsibility and lower taxes. To him, generations of poor people have stayed loyal to a Democratic Party that has failed to transform their lives.

“Why would I want to be stuck in that mentality?” he said.

While Democrats won the vast majority of Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential race, the results also showed Republicans making inroads with this demographic, the largest nonwhite voting group — and particularly among Latino men. According to exit polls, 36 percent of Latino men voted for Donald J. Trump in 2020, up from 32 percent in 2016. These voters also helped Republicans win several House seats in racially diverse districts that Democrats thought were winnable, particularly in Texas and Florida. Both parties see winning more Hispanic votes as critical in future elections.

Yet a question still lingers from the most recent one, especially for Democrats who have long believed they had a major edge: What is driving the political views of Latino men?

For decades, Democratic candidates worked with the assumption that if Latinos voted in higher numbers, the party was more likely to win. But interviews with dozens of Hispanic men from across the country who voted Republican last year showed deep frustration with such presumptions, and rejected the idea that Latino men would instinctively support liberal candidates. These men challenged the notion that they were part of a minority ethnic group or demographic reliant on Democrats; many of them grew up in areas where Hispanics are the majority and are represented in government. And they said many Democrats did not understand how much Latino men identified with being a provider — earning enough money to support their families is central to the way they view both themselves and the political world.

Like any voter, these men are also driven by their opinions on a variety of issues: Many mention their anti-abortion views, support for gun rights and strict immigration policies. They have watched their friends and relatives go to western Texas to work the oil fields, and worry that new environmental regulations will wipe out the industry there. Still, most say their favorable view of Republicans stems from economic concerns, a desire for low taxes and few regulations.

They say they want to support the party they believe will allow them to work and become wealthy.

Public polling has long showed political divides within the Latino electorate — Cuban-Americans have favored Republicans far more than have Mexican-Americans, for example.

During the 2020 election, precincts with large numbers of Colombian and Venezuelan immigrants swung considerably toward Mr. Trump. Surveys conducted last year by Equis Research, which studies Latino voters, showed a striking gender gap, with Latino men far more inclined than Latina women to support Republicans.

And researchers believe that Mexican-American men under the age of 50 are perhaps the demographic that should most concern Democrats, because they are more likely to drift toward conservative candidates. According to a precinct-level analysis by OpenLabs, a liberal research group, Hispanic support for Democrats dropped by as much as 9 percent in last year’s election, and far more in parts of Florida and South Texas.

Winning over Latino men is in some ways a decades-old challenge for Democrats — a nagging reminder that the party has never had a forceful grip on this demographic. Still, some strategists on the left are increasingly alarmed that the party is not doing enough to reach men whose top priorities are based on economics, rather than racial justice or equality. And they warn that Hispanic men are likely to provide crucial swing votes in future races for control of Congress in the midterm elections, as well as who governs from the White House.

“Democrats have lots of real reasons they should be worried,” said Joshua Ulibarri, a Democratic strategist who has researched Hispanic men for years. “We haven’t figured out a way to speak to them, to say that we have something for them, that we understand them. They look at us and say: We believe we work harder, we want the opportunity to build something of our own, and why should we punish people who do well?”

Image

According to exit polls, 36 percent of Latino men voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, up from 32 percent in 2016.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Jose Aguilar grew up in McAllen, Texas, in the 1960s, raised by parents who had limited means for buying food and clothing. They were hard workers, and instilled in him that “if you apply yourself, you will get what you deserve.” His family welcomed relatives from Mexico who stayed for a short time and then returned across the border; some managed to immigrate legally and become citizens, and he believes that’s how anyone else should do so.

Still, Mr. Aguilar did benefit from an affirmative action-style program that recruited Hispanic students from South Texas to enter an engineering program.

“They were trying to fill quotas to hire Hispanic people in their company,” he said. “The first I ever got on was on a paid ticket to interview for a job, so I did. I saw that as a good opportunity for me to take advantage of, this was my chance, to take that opportunity and run.”

Mr. Aguilar, who now lives near Houston, said he saw Mr. Trump as a model of prosperity in the United States.

“I’m an American, I can take advantage of whatever opportunities just as Anglo people did,” he added. “There’s really no secret to success — it’s really that if you apply yourself, then things will work out.”

Sergio Arellano of Phoenix, Ariz., said he had a story he liked to tell about the moment he registered as a Republican. When he was an 18-year-old Army infantryman on home leave, he went to a July 4 event and spotted the voter registration table. He asked the woman sitting there: What’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats?

Democrats, he recalled her saying, are for the poor. Republicans are for the rich.

“Well that made it easy — I didn’t want to be poor, I wanted to be rich, so I chose Republican,” Mr. Arellano said. “Obviously she figured I would identify with the poor. There’s an assumption that you’re starting out in this country, you don’t have any money, you will identify with the poor. But what I wanted was to make my own money.”

Last fall, Mr. Arellano campaigned for Mr. Trump in Arizona, and this year, he narrowly lost his bid for chairman of the state Republican Party. Still, he does not fit the Trumpian conservative mold, often urging politicians to soften their political rhetoric against immigrants.

“Trump is not the party, the party is what we make it — a pro-business, pro-family values,” he said. “People who understand we want to make it as something here.”

All of this sounds familiar to Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who is deeply critical of the party under Mr. Trump, and who has worked for decades to push the party to do more to attract Hispanic voters.

“Paying rent is more important than fighting social injustice in their minds,” Mr. Madrid said.

“The Democratic Party has always been proud to be a working-class party, but they do not have a working-class message. The central question is going to be, Who can convince these voters their concerns are being heard?”


Image

Supporters of Mr. Trump in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami in November. They were celebrating his winning Florida’s electoral votes. Credit...Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
Ricardo Portillo has contempt for most politicians, but has been inclined to vote for Republicans for most of his life. The owner of a jewelry store in McAllen, Texas, for the past 20 years, Mr. Portillo prides himself on his business acumen. And from his point of view, both he and his customers did well under a Trump administration. Though he describes most politicians as “terrible” — Republicans, he said, “at least let me keep more of my money, and are for the government doing less and allowing me for doing more for myself.”

In the last year, Mr. Portillo, 45, has seen business dip as fewer Mexican citizens are crossing the border to shop at his store. Before the coronavirus pandemic, business was brisk with customers from both sides of the border.

A sense of economic security is a shift for Mr. Portillo, who grew up often struggling.

“We were brought up the old-school way, that men are men, they have to provide, that there’s no excuses and there’s no crying. If you don’t make it, it’s because you’re a pendejo,” he said, using a Spanish term for idiot. “Maybe that’s not nice, but it breeds strong men, mentally strong men.”

The question now, he said, is “what am I going to be able to do for myself and for my family? We don’t feel entitled to much, but we’re entitled to the fruit of our labor.”

As a child in New Mexico, Valentin Cortez, 46, was raised by two parents who voted as Democrats, but were personally conservative. Mr. Cortez was around “a lot of cowboys and a lot of farmers” who were also Hispanic, but he never felt as though he was part of a minority and said he never personally experienced any racism.

Like so many other men interviewed, he views politics as hopelessly divisive now: “You can’t have an opinion without being attacked.”

Though a handful of friends have blocked him on social media when he expressed conservative views, he said, he does not feel silenced in his own life.

Mr. Cortez occasionally resents being seen as a minority — he grew up around other Hispanics in New Mexico and believes he has the same kinds of opportunities as his white counterparts. The bigger problem, as he sees it, is the lack of willingness to disagree: “I’ve got friends, they think that I hate my own culture. I have been shut down personally, but I am comfortable with who I am.”

Image

Valentin Cortez grew up around other Hispanics in New Mexico and believes he has the same kinds of opportunities as his white counterparts.Credit...Audra Melton for The New York Times
Like other men interviewed, Mr. Cortez, a registered independent, said he voted for Mr. Trump in large part because he believed he had done better financially under his administration and worried that a government run by President Biden would raise taxes and support policies that would favor the elite.

Some of the frustrations voiced by Hispanic Republican men are stoked by misinformation, including conspiracy theories claiming that the “deep state” took over during the Trump administration and a belief that Black Lives Matter protests caused widespread violence.

In interviews, many cite their support for law enforcement and the military as reasons they favor the Republican Party.

For Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who helped run Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign last year, the warning signs about losing Latino men were there for months. In focus groups conducted in North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona, Hispanic men spoke of deep disillusionment with politics broadly, saying that most political officials offer nothing more than empty promises, spurring apathy among many would-be voters.

“We’re not speaking to the rage and the inequality that they feel,” he said. “They just wanted their lives to get better, they just wanted somebody to explain to them how their lives would get better under a President Biden.”

To Mr. Rocha, the skepticism of Democrats is a sign of political maturity in some ways.

“We’re coming-of-age, we’re getting older, and now it’s no longer just survival, now you need prosperity,” he said. “But when you start to feel like you just can’t get ahead, you’re going to have the same kind of rage we’ve long seen with white working-class voters.”

For some Latino men who favor Republicans, they simply want the government to stay out of their way and not impede their chances of success.

“You can’t legislate equality, you can’t legislate work ethic and you can’t legislate being a good person,” Mr. Ortiz said. “I am not perfect and nobody is perfect, but for me it starts with individual responsibility.”

 

[marsh]

Firefox introduces extension that automatically censors "hate speech"

Yet another example of how Mozilla has lost its way.

reclaimthenet.org

Firefox introduces extension that automatically censors “hate speech”

• By Didi Rankovic
• Posted 3:41 pm

Mozilla seems to be replacing innovation and investment in software development with virtue signaling. That doesn’t look like a road leading to anywhere in particular: Firefox browser’s existing user base might be turned off by the lack of focus on technical improvements of the browser itself, while luring in Chrome users with wokeness alone seems like a massive uphill battle.

In this context, the last thing we need is segregation of women into “safe language spaces” – through none other than Mozilla’s several years ago controversially rewritten add-ons system.
But that’s what we’re getting.

Most of your average early adopters and supporters of Firefox and Mozilla over the many years only really have this one hope for these entities these days: live up to the promise of promoting an open, web standards-compliant internet, that makes participation accessible to everyone.

We want a browser that is technically advancing, actively trying to replace the clunky rendering engine at its core, i.e., improving, instead of declining into oblivion against the competition of Google’s Chrome.

But in the market reality, what we see is Firefox – that once victoriously put Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in its place through the sheer strength of technical merit – flat-lining at the bottom of the chart, ironically along with Microsoft’s latest offering, “Edge” – more ironically still, based on Google’s Blink/Chrome engine.

So what does Mozilla do – that foundation for years bankrolled by Google’s hundreds of millions of ad dollars, possibly simply as a way for the giant to prove that Chrome browser is not a monopoly, because there’s another, barely alive though it may be, called Firefox?

Mozilla hits its users with the “Firefox B!tch to Boss” extension. There’s nothing “boss” about it though – women here are treated like old-timey “damsels in distress” that need somebody else to help them cope in the world (this time, on the internet) – like comments and “harassing language” (including the word “b!tch” in the name of the very extension, maybe?)

Meanwhile, Mozilla promises to alter reality for its women users (NO THANKS). But for anyone who might want it, Mozilla will replace words like “bitch” (but apparently not only) with “boss.”

 

[marsh]

Progressive Neo-McCarthyism: A Serious Threat to the First Amendment?

America seems to be witnessing the early stages of mirror-image McCarthyism, with leftists harassing their opponents.

nationalinterest.org

March 8, 2021

Progressive Neo-McCarthyism: A Serious Threat to the First Amendment?

America seems to be witnessing the early stages of mirror-image McCarthyism, with leftists harassing their opponents.

by Ted Galen Carpenter

The stifling intolerance that Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-WI) and his ideological allies fostered during the 1950s went far beyond the effort to purge government employees suspected of being part of the international Communist movement. The campaign also exerted pressure on the news media, universities, and the entertainment industry to exclude individuals subjectively considered to be disloyal.

There are more than a few unsettling similarities between the abuses committed during that period and the current calls to investigate and cancel (purge) individuals in those same occupations and professions who reject left-of-center ideological positions on an array of issues. In essence, America seems to be witnessing the early stages of mirror-image McCarthyism, with leftists harassing their opponents. And if that trend is not halted, we are likely to suffer similar deleterious effects. The original McCarthy era smothered the expression of iconoclastic, or even unorthodox, views on various issues, especially foreign policy, and the corrosion persisted well into the 1960s.

Given that history, we should be alert to any new attempts to demonize a political faction and seek to silence debate. However, manifestations of neo-McCarthyism are now taking place on multiple fronts. Echoes of McCarthyism are loud and growing louder.

So, too, is a campaign to compel ideological conformity and blacklist dissenters on a wide array of policy issues. One of the hallmarks of the McCarthy era was the plague of investigatory hearings that congressional committees conducted to root-out “subversives” in the opinion-shaping professions, including both the movie industry and the news media. That same pattern is recurring today, as illustrated by House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearings in late February 2021 on “disinformation and extremism in the media.”

And just as the McCarthy-era hearings were designed to intimidate more than illuminate, the new investigations exhibit similar motives. The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel noted one especially ugly aspect of the House subcommittee’s effort. “The precursor to the hearing was a revealing letter sent Monday by California Democrats, Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney. The duo demanded the CEOs of a dozen cable, satellite and broadband providers explain what ‘response’ they intended to take to the ‘right-wing media ecosystem’ that is spreading ‘lies’ and ‘disinformation’ that enable ‘insurrection’ and provokes ‘non-compliance with public health guidelines.’ Specifically, they asked each CEO: ‘Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax and OANN . . . ? If so, why?’”

Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, was deeply troubled by the behavior of the other Democratic members of the subcommittee as well. “What was most disappointing was that no Democratic members used the hearing to offer a simple and unifying statement: we oppose efforts to remove Fox News and these other networks from cable programming. Not a single Democratic member made that statement, which (in my view) should be easy for anyone who believes in free speech and the free press.”

That silence, he concluded, was “chilling to the point of glacial.”

Three committees played especially active roles during the original McCarthy era. The best known was the House Committee on Un-American Activities—or as its critics altered the name to reflect the body’s ugly, arbitrary behavior, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Once the Cold War erupted, the committee became an implacable nemesis of the political, especially antiwar, left. HUAC devoted a disproportionate amount of time to investigating the communist penetration of Hollywood. The scrutiny led to the blacklisting of prominent writers and actors—especially the so-called Hollywood Ten—but a number of journalists and academics also came to the committee’s hostile attention.

Another influential investigative body was the Senate Government Operations Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy held a seat on that subcommittee when the Republicans were in the minority (1947–53) and chaired the body from January 1953 to January 1955, when the GOP narrowly controlled the Senate. McCarthy focused more on the State Department and other government agencies than he did on the news media, the movie industry, or academic institutions, but those were far from immune. The miasma of suspicion that McCarthy generated festered and persisted long after his personal political star plummeted.

The third head of the congressional investigative Hydra was the Senate Committee on Internal Security, which ultra-conservative Senator James Eastland (D-MS) chaired during the mid- and late- 1950s. Between 1952 and 1957, the Eastland committee compiled a list of more than five hundred suspect journalists. In a series of hearings mainly held during 1955, more than one hundred journalists were subpoenaed and interrogated about suspected ties between the Communist Party USA, and the newspaper industry. The committee even delved into alleged communist affiliations of some of the most prominent newspapers in the United States.

In his detailed account of the Eastland Committee hearings. Edward Alwood, associate professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University, notes that while the official rationale was to ask reporters and editors about any involvement they had had with the Communist Party USA, “the actual questioning went much further. The committee asked about their political interests and personal thoughts and beliefs. Members questioned newspaper editorial policies and hiring practices, areas that were thought to be sacrosanct under the First Amendment.”

Victor Navasky, longtime editor of the Nation, observes that the consequences of the hearings and other probes were far-reaching. “[A]t papers owned by a conservative like William Randolph Hearst or the Scripps-Howard chain, they conducted their own purges of suspected subversives.” Procedures also included signed “loyalty oaths” as a condition of continued employment. In some cases, reporters were fired merely because a witness at one of the hearings had named them as being communists. Even when no overt purges or blacklists resulted, the chilling impact on dissent in the press was palpable. Navasky highlights the comment of John B. Oakes, the editor of the New York Times editorial page: “McCarthyism has a profound effect on us all—on our writing, our speaking and even thinking.” Given the extensive use of intimidation through investigations, Kafkaesque public hearings, or “off the record” phone calls from government officials to private organizations, such a pervasive chilling effect was unsurprising.

It is more than a little unsettling that there is now a similar concerted effort to conduct congressional investigations of “extremist” groups and individuals. Pressure for taking such action was noticeable even before the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, but since that episode, the demands for hearings have exploded. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was the first to announce that his committee would hold hearings to investigate “anti-government extremists.”

Warner’s committee had already amassed a troubling record in previous hearings as far back as 2018 when it focused on possible “foreign influence” on social media platforms. Warner and several of his colleagues cautioned the CEOs of those firms that if they didn’t take more vigorous action to remove “disinformation” “fake news,” and “hate speech,” the government might well preempt them and impose content regulations. Lawmakers highlighted recent influence campaigns operated out of countries such as Russia and Iran, as well as the broader potential for information spreading on social media to incite violence and “foment chaos.”

When members of a powerful Senate committee issue warnings, it’s not the same as an ordinary citizen venting about media “misconduct.” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s attempts to placate legislators reflected that realization. She opened her testimony by saying the company had been too slow to spot abuse of the platform and “too slow to act” in the past. That defensive attitude was nearly identical to that of establishment newspaper, magazine, television, and movie executives during congressional hearings into “subversion” and “disloyalty” during the 1950s. The chilling effect posed by congressional intimidation is very real, and the increasingly intolerant, ideologically biased behavior on the part of Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms may well be at least partly a response to fears about government preemption.

It’s especially worrisome that the standards that proponents of hearings (and criminal prosecutions) use are exceeding imprecise. What they consider “extremism,” “incitement,” and “sedition” is at least as vague as the concepts of “subversion” and “disloyalty” were during the McCarthy era. And today’s strident faction seems intent on defining those offenses as broadly as possible. Indeed, the demand for ideological conformity seems even broader and more comprehensive than it did with the original McCarthyism. A Wall Street Journal editorial lamented that “progressives seem to believe that they are in a position to dictate the terms of what is acceptable speech in a more controlled media environment.”

“Right now, the greatest threat to free speech in this country is not any law passed by the government—the First Amendment stands as a bulwark,” notes Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr. “The threat comes in the form of legislating by letterhead. Politicians have realized that they can silence the speech of those with different political viewpoints by public bullying.”

But the current crop of crusading, ideologically intolerant politicians is not the first contingent of would-be censors to discover such power. Joe McCarthy and his political allies were avid practitioners of the technique seven decades ago. It is just a bitter irony that the political descendants of liberals, who were the main victims of McCarthyism, are now using the same tactics in a campaign to silence their opponents.

 

[marsh]

Liberals Love to Stereotype Conservatives

townhall.com

Liberals Love to Stereotype Conservatives

Jeff Davidson
|
Posted: Mar 08, 2021 12:01 AM

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Source: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

I switched to a mostly vegan diet years ago. My principal foods during the week are greens, beans, and berries. Occasionally, I allow myself to stray, a few times per week, with chicken or fish, and usually when I'm out and about with others. I’ve found that 19 vegan meals out of 21 per week still yield great benefits.

One of my local groups, Raleigh vegans, periodically holds a potluck dinner. Everyone brings some yummy dish that contains no meat, fish, eggs, or dairy. Periodically, at the start of meetings, someone will make an announcement of "community interest." Invariably these messages are political.

‘Progressive’ is Not Synonymous with ‘Progress’

Virtually all such announcements represent the liberal, "progressive" viewpoint, which I might or might not share (Hint: I do not.) "Progressives" believe they are on the "right side" of history, although I can discuss at length how "progressive" policies have doomed whole subcultures within our society, have decimated the black family, have placed us on the brink of national calamity, et cetera, but I'll spare you.

I've chosen to eat a mainly vegan diet, but I do not subscribe to the mindset that only "progressives" have the intelligence to do so. Being vegan or vegetarian doesn’t require being a liberal. Do not middle-of-the-road voters and Republican voters read health magazines? Do they not clip out articles on the benefits of plant-based diets? According to progressive dogma, they do not. Such an erroneous belief is, of course, silly, but then so many progressive viewpoints are silly.

I am registered as a non-affiliated voter. At a dinner recently, in conversation with one of the ladies at my table, I learned that she does not believe any Republican "would choose a vegan diet." I told her, "I know several who are vegans." She was surprised, as if no Republican could muster the requisite brain power to come to such a decision.

Eschewing Republicans

"Progressives" believe that anyone who does not capitulate to their point of view, by definition, must be an idiot. So, in their cloistered world, it's nearly impossible that a registered Republican could be a vegan. What’s more, it's not likely that a Republican could be interested in donating his time and effort to charity.

For any social cause or community good you can cite, the "progressive" view is that Republicans don't participate in such activities. Why not? Apparently, Republicans (and this means all of them) are too busy looking out for themselves, seeking to make obscene amounts of money, ravaging the environment, suppressing women and minority groups, and exploiting others, among countless other misdeeds. I personally participate in a variety of charitable activities. I know other independents as well as registered Republicans who do the same.

As someone who has voted on all sides of the spectrum, in the last couple of decades, I have leaned Right, despite the RINOs and some instances of their short-sidedness, because I’ve witnessed that the Left causes considerable damage in all realms.

The Altruism of the Right

I know Republicans who, whether in business for themselves or holding an executive position in a larger organization, are totally committed to the well-being of others. These people wouldn't think of making a dishonest dollar. They participate in community activities. They help others. They look out for the environment.

Indeed, in 2018, The New York Times article, “How Political Ideology Influences Charitable Giving,” states that, “Red counties, which are overwhelmingly Republican, tend to report higher charitable contributions than Democratic-dominated blue counties,” although giving in blue counties is often bolstered by a combination of charitable donations and higher taxes.

No More Mr. Silent Type

I have remained silent over the years when I attend functions primarily consisting of "progressives" when they endlessly perpetuate the same stereotypes and false narrative: "Everyone here must be a progressive because, after all, we know what's best, such as being vegan.” So how could a Republican, or someone leaning right, have any interests in this lifestyle?

Going forward, I have chosen to speak up. I state that I am here for the meal, not the politics, and the two, despite the intense wish of "progressives" that they are inextricably linked, are not linked.

 

[marsh]

Researchers: Smart Speakers Are Listening so Carefully They Can Detect an Irregular Heartbeat

Researchers at the University of Washington have reportedly found a new way to screen for irregular heartbeats — using smart speakers such as the Amazon Alexa or Google Home to detect variations in heart rhythms.

www.breitbart.com

Researchers: Smart Speakers Are Listening so Carefully They Can Detect an Irregular Heartbeat
26

Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
LUCAS NOLAN10 Mar 202164

Researchers at the University of Washington have reportedly found a new way to screen for irregular heartbeats — using smart speakers such as the Amazon Alexa or Google Home to detect variations in heart rhythms.

The Washington Post reports that researchers at the University of Washington claim to have developed a contactless way to screen for irregular heartbeats using smart speakers. The analysts have reportedly developed an AI-powered system that harnesses consumer smart speakers like Amazon and Google’s products to pick up vibrations caused by nearby chest wall movements.

The heart-tracking technology could be used to enhance how doctors and medical professionals conduct telemedicine appointments by giving them data that would otherwise require wearable health trackers or an in-person checkup.

Researchers aimed to use devices that people already had access to in order to push cardiology and health monitoring into the future, said Arun Sridhar, a UW assistant professor of cardiology.

Shyam Gollakota, a computer science professor at UW and co-author of the new report, stated: “We have Google and Alexa in our homes all around us. We predominantly use them to wake us up in the morning or play music. The question we’ve been asking is, can we use the smart speaker for something more useful.”

Researchers believe that smart speaker manufacturers could integrate the new heartbeat tracking features into their products via software updates. The system works by emitting audio signals into the room at a volume that humans cannot hear, as the pulse bounces back to the speaker an algorithm then identifies beating patterns generated from a human’s chest wall. A second algorithm then determines the amount of time between two heartbeats.

This information, called inter-beat intervals, could help doctors gauge how well an individual’s heart is functioning. Researchers trained the smart speakers to pick up regular and irregular heart rhythms.

Read more at the Washington Post here.

 

[marsh]

Today’s Big Tech tyranny is a dry run for future dystopian censorship

Things are really bad, right? Big Tech tyranny is absolutely horrendous right now with censorship, suspensions, and outright bans on

freedomfirstnetwork.com

Today’s Big Tech tyranny is a dry run for future dystopian censorship

We look around as conservatives and Christians and think that Big Tech is really coming down hard on us over certain topics like voter fraud and Covid vaccines. But this isn't the height of censorship. Not yet. It's a dry run. Things are going to get worse and they're only going to get better on platforms that are not "woke."

by NOQ Report

March 10, 2021

Things are really bad, right? Big Tech tyranny is absolutely horrendous right now with censorship, suspensions, and outright bans on accounts that talk about voter fraud, transgenderism, Covid vaccines, and a few other taboo topics. But as bad as it all seems right now, it’s only going to get worse. In fact, what we’re seeing today is just a dry run of the total control and dystopian policies we’re going to see in the near future from Big Tech.

There are several reasons to believe it’s going to get worse, most notably the fact that suppressing discussions of voter fraud is pointless. We’re on day 50 of the Biden administration.

The appetite to fight over Dominion Voting Systems, mail-in balloting, and any other attempts to correct the results of the 2020 election are down to nil. Even QAnon is regrouping under different talking points. Censoring accounts at this stage serves no purpose. The machinations of Big Tech, mainstream media, the Democratic Party, and the various interested globalist parties have been fully realized.

The truth is they’re normalizing this type of censorship. They’re backing conservatives and Christians into a corner where we must decide between telling the truth and getting booted off of the big platforms or self-censoring and playing their game like good little sheep.

Unfortunately, most in conservative media are still beholden to the Silicon Valley overlords for traffic and exposure, so most are playing along. Many have even convinced themselves, perhaps out of contempt for their own cowardice, that none of the forbidden topics are worthwhile.

Therein lies the key to the accelerating degrees of censorship. If we had already seen Big Tech’s endgame, they would be lightening their iron grip. Instead, they’re squeezing even tighter.

The scary part is we do not know for sure what the real censorship show is going to target. We can speculate that it will be used to usher in globalist plans like “The Great Reset.” We can assume that there will be a further Cultural Marxist crunch on speech that turns any criticism against anyone who isn’t a straight, cisgender, Caucasian male is “hate speech.” But my best guess at this point is that they’re going to go after religious discussions. Just like in Communist China, backwards North Korea, and oppressive Iran, it may soon be dangerous to discuss faith in a Biblical worldview in the very near future in America.

On the latest episode of NOQ Report, I went over this topic thoroughly, playing off of my interview last night with John B. Wells on Caravan to Midnight. The topics we discussed for an hour and a half seemed to meld together behind the notion that the evil forces arrayed against us are driving the Big Tech censorship we’re seeing today. Our conclusion: We haven’t seen the last of this censorship. It’s just going to get worse.

Taking feedback from our members at Locals, I’ve switched format a bit to include shorter segments on a wider array of topics. Instead of 1-3 stories, NOQ Report will deliver daily doses of several stories important to patriots. Among the topics we discussed today are:

Desperate Gavin Newsom tells lie after lie in ‘State of the State’ appeal to save his job
Fact-Checking Gavin Newsom’s State of the State Address – Red State’s Jennifer Van Laar

Curiously, one of the first “accomplishments” related to Wuhan flu response Newsom listed was his highly-criticized mask deal.

While others competed to buy personal protective equipment at exorbitant prices—we quickly built our own pipeline, supplying critical gear to millions of essential workers.

That pipeline included a no-bid $1 billion contract with Chinese company BYD for KN95 masks (not N95) Newsom announced on MSNBC on April 7, much to the surprise of the state’s legislators (who had not approved or even heard of the deal), even though there were manufacturers in California Newsom could have contracted with. It wasn’t until June 8 that the masks received NIOSH certification, and the $3.30/unit price Newsom had negotiated was much higher than the $0.79/unit price Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti paid domestic producer Honeywell in March.

Covid relief money to New York, San Francisco shows it’s pure Marxism by rewarding failure

Biden’s Stimulus Wipes Out New York and San Francisco’s Budget Deficits – Investment Watch

New York, which has seen an exodus of citizens and businesses due to their high taxes and spending (among many other issues) will secure $23.5 billion in funding from the stimulus. The funding is enough to cover all of New York’s budget deficit – with Gov. Cuomo saying in January that $15 billion would be enough to resolve their budget deficit for this year and next.
And they’re not the only ones.

The liberal mecca of San Francisco in particular stands to have two years worth of their budgetary troubles erased at your expense. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported:
The federal stimulus package likely to be signed by President Biden this week will erase the majority of San Francisco’s projected $650 million budget deficit over the next two years, saving City Hall from having to make painful service cuts and layoffs — for now.

Why is $3.5 billion in Covid relief money earmarked for Bill Gates organization that fights AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria?

Bill Gates’ Global AIDS Fund Provided With $3.5 Billion in Coronavirus Stimulus Package – Richard Morehead at Big League Politics

The coronavirus stimulus package that passed the Senate last week includes a provision to provide a $3.5 billion giveaway to Bill Gates’ Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The $3.5 billion is tucked away onto page 613 of the American Rescue Plan.

Convicted murderer toasts Soros-backed LA District Attorney with prison moonshine after release directive

California killer, expecting early release, toasts DA George Gascón – David Aaro at Fox News

A convicted killer was captured on video celebrating in his California prison cell after learning that Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón had issued a new directive calling for the possible resentencing of inmates following 15 years of imprisonment.

Phillip Dorsett and his cellmate at New Folsom State Prison are seen toasting Gascón with prison moonshine known as “white lightning.”

“Right here with my cellie,” Dorsett said while making a toast, according to a video released Tuesday by the California District Attorneys Association (CDAA). “Some white lightning, a little cup, boom! Celebrating us going home on this Gascón directive. Whoop!”

Dorsett was sentenced to 40 years to life for shooting a rival gang member in the head at close range in 2005. A jury convicted him of second-degree murder and found that he used a gun in the commission of the crime.

The association, in a release, called on Gascón to “abandon his reckless policies that put violent criminals like Dorsett back on the streets.”

“Recent footage of convicted murderer Phillip Dorsett celebrating George Gascón is compelling proof that violent criminals, not victims, will be the biggest beneficiaries of his radical policies,” said Greg Totten, chief executive officer of the CDAA.

“No one is celebrating George Gascón more than violent criminals,” Totten continued.

Biden-backing evangelicals were not betrayed by him. They were betrayed by their own idiocy.

How Utterly Absurd that So-Called Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden Now Feel Betrayed and Used – Michael Brown at Townhall

To be totally candid, it was hard for me to believe the headline was real. “Pro-life Evangelicals for Biden: ‘We feel used and betrayed.’”

Seriously? They “feel used and betrayed” because the pro-abortion president they helped put in office did exactly what he said he would do? They “feel used and betrayed” because he carried out his campaign promises? They “feel used and betrayed” because he stayed true to the Democratic platform?

I could understand feeling embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated at their extreme naivety. But “used and betrayed”?

Joe Biden made it absolutely clear that he was running as a pro-abortion president. His running mate, Kamala Harris, was even more extreme in her positions. Yet, somehow, these evangelicals, some of them high-quality Christian leaders, actually believed that Biden would moderate his position if he was elected.

Conservative lawmakers need to embrace fundraising WITH Donald Trump, not against him

This particular topic came in at the end because I wasn’t sure I could get to it. I did, and the results were very acceptable. Conservative lawmakers who want to win in 2022 and beyond need to strike a proper balance of accepting infrastructure and ground game help from the RNC while focusing on spreading the MAGA message. President Trump has made it clear that he does not want his name used by the RNC to drive fundraising for RINOs. They objected, of course, which is why we need to focus our energy and fundraising on Trump’s Save America PAC.

Most Republicans do not have the resources to abandon RNC help altogether, but it behooves them to embrace Donald Trump’s messaging and seek his endorsement. The Republican Establishment may be trying to downplay him, but the conservative base must continue to support him

The tyrants in Big Tech aren’t just worried about voter fraud and vaccines. They have a broader and more dangerous agenda they’re going to be pushing in the near future. It’s long past time for conservatives and Christians to break free from their clutches.

Link to Apple Podcasts on website

 

[marsh]

Dem/Media Complex Inventing “Far-Right Extremism” Bogeyman To Criminalize Dissent

Previously: CAPITOL 'INSURRECTION' HOAX: How Our Lying Press Would Have Spun Jan 6 Protest If Trump Were A Democrat The Democrats canceled business in the House on March 4 because of a falsely-predicted attack on Capitol Hill. But the highly-touted Q-Anon-inspired “insurrection” was, as The...

www.unz.com

Dem/Media Complex Inventing “Far-Right Extremism” Bogeyman to Criminalize Dissent
WASHINGTON WATCHER II• MARCH 9, 2021



The Democrats canceled business in the House on March 4 because of a falsely-predicted attack on Capitol Hill. But the highly-touted Q-Anon-inspired “insurrection” was, as The Washington Post reported, “a mirage” [At the Capitol, a March 4 threat from militant Trump supporters proves a mirage, by Katie Mettler et al., March 4, 2021]. Nevertheless, this crazy conspiracy theory pushed by the Regime Media had a purpose: to further smear all Trump supporters as a “white nationalist” militia who might attack “our democracy” at any time. That, in turn, informs the meme that Democrat/ media complex been pushing for months, not least through federal law enforcement agencies; i.e., right-wing (white) extremists are the No. 1 threat to the country, and so the state must have the power to crush them. Curbs on basic liberties such as gun rights and free speech—the latter already enforced on social media—in the works, as are police-state tactics to code and trace the activities of rank-and-file Trump supporters. Some GOP/GAP lawmakers are getting alarmed, but not enough.

Thus, also last week, Time Magazine breathlessly dished out the Regime’s black propaganda: Domestic white terrorists are “one of the greatest domestic threats since the Civil War,” writers Vera Bergengruen and W.J. Hennigan fretted. And Biden, they sighed in relief, is the first president to “refocus the network of U.S. security agencies to help combat domestic extremism.”

Here’s what the Regime is doing according to Time:

Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, is working with the FBI and DHS to assess the threat. A new four-person office at the National Security Council (NSC) has launched a 100-day push to better understand and tackle the problem. The office is seeking crime data and information on recruitment strategies, and convening weekly video meetings with former federal officials, scholars and advocacy groups.

There’s talk of expanding FBI field offices and boosting funding for programs that rehabilitate former violent white supremacists and neo-Nazis. …

At DHS, officials are expanding programs that focus on keeping those who flirt with extremist views from joining militant groups or committing violent acts. Biden’s newly confirmed Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the task will be to “identify where the line between hateful rhetoric and hateful action takes place, to be well ahead of the action before it occurs and to stop it.” The agency announced it will provide at least $77 million in federal grants to state and local governments to combat domestic violent extremism, including training beat officers to spot the signs of far-right violence early on.

[Inside the Biden Administration’s Uphill Battle Against Far-Right Extremism, March 4, 2021]

Ignore for now the long-known fact that Time itself was a CIA asset, and focus on the import of its current claim: Mouth-breathing right-wingers are an American Taliban, crazed outcasts hiding in caves, ready to strike when the mysterious Q delivers the order. The threat, though, isn’t just from cave-dwelling, right-wing jihadists. Also implicated are normal Americans upset with the direction of the country, Time reports: The “vast majority [of January 6 demonstrators] were ordinary Americans—members of church groups, families who traveled together, and what the report calls ‘inspired believers’—which shows how far-right beliefs have seeped into the mainstream.”



Hence the proposed crackdown. So-called experts recommended that the surveillance state embrace “community-based initiatives” that spy on ordinary middle Americans to ensure they don’t consume any “disinformation.”

Already, lawmakers are pushing a new “domestic terrorism” law, backed and at least partly conceived by the Anti-Defamation League. ADL, of course, along with Southern Poverty Law Center, routinely targets those it doesn’t like for professional and financial ruin with accusations of “hatred” and “racism.”

ADL’s plan would create state and federal offices dedicated to the following matters [PROTECT Plan to Fight Domestic Terrorism, ADL.org]:

• domestic terrorism;
• barring alleged “extremists” from any public sector job;
• fund re-education efforts targeted at “extremists;”
• revising existing law to prohibit “domestic terrorist” speech on social media;
• funding non-profits that monitor right-wing content; and,
• targeting foreign “white supremacist” groups

In short, it would shred the First Amendment and bar Trump supporters from public life.

Shockingly, some prominent Republicans are backing this blitzkrieg. “What happened Jan. 6 just cries out” for new terror laws, Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, a former Homeland Security Committee chairman, said last month at a hearing about the plan. “I think it sends a strong message about where Congress is, that we’re going to treat domestic terrorism on an equal plane as international terrorism.” Of course, Democrats want to strengthen Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to help Big Tech to censor even more [Bipartisan support emerges for domestic-terror bills as experts warn threat may last ‘10 to 20 years’, by Karoun Demirjian, The Washington Post, February 4, 2021].

Thus outside of formal legislation, lawmakers can pressure Big Tech and other institutions to deplatform, stigmatize and then ostracize the Right.

FBI director Christopher Wray recently testified to the Senate on the alleged “domestic terror” threat and warned of the dangers of uncensored online speech [Wray Stresses Role Of Right-Wing Extremism In Hearing About Jan. 6 Riot, by Brian Naylor and Ryan Lucas, NPR, March 2, 2021]. Several lawmakers concurred with his opinion and demanded the feds do more to monitor “hate speech” on social media.

Sen. Patrick Leahy was particularly obsessed with “white supremacists,” and Wray snapped up the bait.

View: https://youtu.be/wjxZ3hzwtjM
3:42:30 min

Nebraska’s Ben Sasse asked Wray if the feds can criminalize social media posts and dedicate resources to investigating what middle school “bullies” say online.
Middle school bullies? Really?


The threat that sixth-graders post to the public weal notwithstanding, any time Big Tech execs are hauled before Congress, Democrats—and some Republicans—demand to know why they don’t censor “hate speech.” We know what’s happening there. But patriots have more to worry about their Twitter accounts. They have to worry that banks and other financial institutions deny them service. Gab, for instance, reports that four banks have refused to host its account.

Watching all this, Republicans are mostly silent. A few such as McCaul and Sasse are even cheering this reign of political terror against their own voters. Only one Republican worried about the new domestic terror laws and ADL plan, for instance. “Can people not have differing opinions and those opinions not affect the actual work that they do?” Georgia Rep. Andrew S. Clyde asked ADL chieftain Jonathan Greenblatt at the hearing where the censorship plan was discussed.

Greenblatt fired back:

Fierce debate shouldn’t allow you to dehumanize me or any other person from any minority group.

ADL, of course, will decide what’s “dehumanizing,” which means it will settle the parameters of acceptable speech.

This was the sole “testy exchange” of the hearing, the Washington Post reported. No kidding. No good Republican would ever question the ADL.

At least patriots have Sen. Josh Hawley over in the Senate. The Missourian has questioned DHS for issuing with little justification its “heightened threat environment” warning in January. “If this is just some attempt to amass power, and to go after the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans, we’re going to have a big, big problem,” he told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham [Josh Hawley Criticizes ‘Troubling’ DHS Report on ‘Heightened’ Domestic Terror Threat, by James Walker, Newsweek, January 28, 2021].

And he grilled Wray on the FBI’s violating the Bill of Rights with its invasive investigation into the Mostly Peaceful protest on January 6. Hawley was particularly concerned about the exploitation of cell phone data without proper oversight [Hawley presses Wray on use of geolocation data to track Capitol rioters, by Dominick Mastrangelo, The Hill, March 2, 2021].

View: https://youtu.be/9ACp-QhIv-k
6:50 min

The most heroic Republican lawmaker to defend Trump supporters: Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. He routinely challenges the Deep State’s narrative about the events of January 6. He has correctly noted it wasn’t an “armed insurrection” because the “insurrectionists” did not use firearms, which he forced an FBI official to admit under oath. And Trump, he says, is not to blame. Johnson also speculates that fake Trump supporters were responsible for much of the violence, which the Leftist MSM denounced as a baseless “conspiracy theory,” despite the arrest of pro-Antifa agitator John Sullivan [Ron Johnson at the center of the storm, by Manu Raju and Alex Rogers, CNN, March 4, 2021].

View: https://youtu.be/Mpn7Kl5E4Wg
7:14 min

Sullivan’s arrest raises an important point. While government super spies go on a snipe hunt for “white supremacist” terrorists, very real Antifa terrorists run wild. The Department of Justice has just dropped 31 of 90 cases against Portland rioters involved in the attacks on federal buildings and officers. This is the same federal government that keeps Trump supporters locked up indefinitely for walking around the Capitol without permission [A Family on Trial for January 6, by Julie Kelly, American Greatness, March 4, 2021]. The feds won’t put resources toward the real domestic threat—the helmeted, leftist goons who burned property, attacked police stations, beat up journalists, and hurt hundreds of innocent Americans.

In other words, the Anarcho-Tyranny grows more powerful.

Here’s the takeaway from all this:

The Biden-Deep State Regime is planning a totalitarian crackdown to end dissent and smooth the way for one-party rule. Stopping that requires refuting the Regime’s January 6 narrative, and showing that the real terror threat in this country is the nationwide network of heavily-armed and battle-ready Antifa goons and their allies in Black Lives Matter.

Discouraging as the result of November 3 is, the GOP must fight. If it doesn’t act soon, January 6 will become the Regime’s Reichstag Fire to erect a totalitarian state that not only suppresses but also criminalizes all opposition.

That, of course, will hasten the insidious dispossession of the Historic American Nation, and, ultimately, finalize The Great Replacement.

Hawley, Johnson, and like-minded legislators know the stakes and what they must do.
Who else on The Hill has the guts to join them?

 

[marsh]

Revenge of the Gods

Next week, the California Department of Education will vote on a new statewide ethnic studies curriculum that advocates for the “decolonization” of American society and elevates Aztec religious symbolism—all in the service of a left-wing political ideology. The new program, called the Ethnic...

www.city-journal.org

Revenge of the Gods
California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum urges students to chant to the Aztec deity of human sacrifice.

Christopher F. Rufo
March 10, 2021

Next week, the California Department of Education will vote on a new statewide ethnic studies curriculum that advocates for the “decolonization” of American society and elevates Aztec religious symbolism—all in the service of a left-wing political ideology.

The new program, called the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, seeks to extend the Left’s cultural dominance of California’s public university system, 50 years in the making, to the state’s entire primary and secondary education system, which consists of 10,000 public schools serving a total of 6 million students.

In theoretical terms, the new ethnic studies curriculum is based on the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” developed by Marxist theoretician Paolo Freire, who argued that students must be educated about their oppression in order to attain “critical consciousness” and, consequently, develop the capacity to overthrow their oppressors. Following this dialectic, the model curriculum instructs teachers to help students “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs” and critique “white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.” This approach, in turn, enables teachers to inspire their pupils to participate in “social movements that struggle for social justice” and “build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society.”

R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original co-chair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, developed much of the material regarding early American history. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, which is cited throughout the curriculum, Cuauhtin argues that the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” The document claims that whites began “grabbing the land,” “hatching hierarchies,” and “developing for Europe/whiteness,” which created “excess wealth” that “became the basis for the capitalist economy.” Whites established a “hegemony” that continues to the present day, in which minorities are subjected to “socialization, domestication, and ‘zombification.’”

The religious narrative is even more disturbing. Cuauhtin developed a related “mandala” claiming that white Christians committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes, killing their gods and replacing them with Christianity. White settlers thus established a regime of “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide,” characterized by the “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.” The solution, according to Cuauhtin and the ethnic studies curriculum, is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” in a posture of “transformational resistance.” The ultimate goal is to “decolonize” American society and establish a new regime of “countergenocide” and “counterhegemony,” which will displace white Christian culture and lead to the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”

This religious concept is fleshed out in the model curriculum’s official “ethnic studies community chant.” The curriculum recommends that teachers lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appeals directly to the Aztec gods. Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.”

Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule. Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which students shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!” in pursuit of ultimate “critical consciousness.”

The chants have a clear implication: the displacement of the Christian god, which is said to be an extension of white supremacist oppression, and the restoration of the indigenous gods to their rightful place in the social justice cosmology. It is, in a philosophical sense, a revenge of the gods.

California parents should be concerned. Under the guise of “equity” and “empowerment,” activists within the public education system have developed this radical new curriculum in order to transform California schools into factories for left-wing political activism. They have recast the United States as an oppressor nation that must be deconstructed and subverted through politics. The curriculum’s vision statement makes this aim explicit: it presents education not as a means of achieving competency, but as a “tool for transformation, social, economic, and political change, and liberation.”

The religious element of the ethnic studies curriculum, with direct appeals to Aztec gods, is almost certainly a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Public schools are prohibited from leading state-sanctioned Christian prayers; they would presumably be similarly prohibited from leading state-sanctioned chants to the Aztec god of human sacrifice.

The state board of education will vote on this curriculum next week. Any sane governing body would reject it wholesale. Given the nature of California politics, though, the board is likely to pass it. The best hope for opponents is to strike out some of the most galling material, such as the chants to the Aztec gods, and then devise a long-term strategy to push back against the public education establishment. For now, the activists appear to be driving the narrative—and they will not stop until they have solidified their “counterhegemony.”

 

[marsh]

Biden Administration Is Doing To Trump Supporters What China Does To Uighurs - CDM - Human Reporters • Not Machines

Biden Administration Is Doing To Trump Supporters What China Does To Uighurs. Will They Force Your Wife To Sleep With A Communist Next?

creativedestructionmedia.com

Will They Force Your Wife To Sleep With A Communist Next?

Uighur Muslim minority in concentration camp in China
Please Follow us on Gab, Parler, Minds, Telegram, Rumble

Most of the world is now aware of the genocide happening in China against the Muslim Uighur minority. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has interned millions of these people in concentration camps where their human rights are violated, they are raped, tortured, re-educated, and murdered.

China famously takes medical information from political prisoners and harvests their organs while still alive to sell on the black market to support their robust organ transplant tourism.

Another diabolical policy instituted by the CCP against these people is to force their wives to sleep with CCP members while their husbands are in prison, to dilute the Uighur bloodline and complete the purge to the dustbin of genetic history. Forced abortions are also common.

This behavior is right up there with the best of Nazi repression, but the American Left, the Deep State, and their globalist corporations are all fine with that. “It’s part of their culture”, says Joe Biden, who is completely compromised by Beijing.

Now let’s look at what the illegitimate Biden regime is currently doing to supporters of President Trump.

People that went to the Capitol on January 6th are being rounded up and held without bail.

Chansley had traveled to Washington with others and had a large online following, and there would be no guarantee that he wouldn’t continue pushing his false claims about election fraud once released, declared Assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly Paschall, reported The Gateway Pundit.

Trump supporters around the country are receiving visits from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in a campaign of intimidation.

Trump supporters are having their Global Entry, TSA PreCheck revoked and enduring lengthy searches upon re-entering the United States.

A massive information operation is underway by the corporate media and Leftist mouthpieces in Congress and elsewhere in government to label Trump supporters ‘domestic terrorists’.

Book burnings are being held for Western iconic literature.

‘Progressive’ talking heads have advocated taking children from Trump supporters and putting them in re-education camps.

Statutes of our history are being toppled. Western literature is being cancelled from universities, and on, and on, and on. We’ve all seen it. The slander is complete.

Who knows what is next, but we can guess – a Kristallnacht for supporter of the American way of life and 45 may be imminent. This has all been long planned by those behind the scenes, Barack Obama and his minions.

Will they also make your wife sleep with a communist?

 

[marsh]

California's Proposed "Ethnic Studies" Curriculum Urges Students to Chant to Aztec Deity of Human Sacrifice and Cannibalism - Calls For "Counter-Genocide" Against White Christians | The Gateway Pundit | by Cristina Laila

Christian prayer in public school is prohibited, but now the Marxists in California are trying to force millions of students to chant to the Aztec gods of human sacrifice and cannibalism.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

California’s Proposed “Ethnic Studies” Curriculum Urges Students to Chant to Aztec Deity of Human Sacrifice and Cannibalism – Calls For “Counter-Genocide” Against White Christians

By Cristina Laila
Published March 10, 2021 at 5:27pm

Christian prayer in public school is prohibited, but now the Marxists in California are trying to force millions of students to chant to the Aztec gods of human sacrifice and cannibalism.

California’s proposed “ethnic studies” curriculum calls for the “decolonization” of American society and a “counter-genocide” against white Christians.

The curriculum would also require students to chant to the Aztec ‘gods’ of human sacrifice and cannibalism.

Investigative reporter Christopher Rufo obtained the proposed curriculum and broke it down:

• The solution, according to the curriculum materials, is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” in a posture of “transformational resistance.” The ultimate goal, Cuauhtin says, is to engineer a “counter-genocide” against whites.
• The curriculum includes an official “ethnic studies community chant,” in which students appeal to the Aztec gods—including the god of human sacrifice—for the power to become “warriors” for “social justice.” Students seek a “a revolutionary spirit” through these incantations.

The California Department of Education will vote on the statewide ethnic studies curriculum next week.

Via City.Journal (emphasis our own):

The new program, called the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, seeks to extend the Left’s cultural dominance of California’s public university system, 50 years in the making, to the state’s entire primary and secondary education system, which consists of 10,000 public schools serving a total of 6 million students.

In theoretical terms, the new ethnic studies curriculum is based on the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” developed by Marxist theoretician Paolo Freire, who argued that students must be educated about their oppression in order to attain “critical consciousness” and, consequently, develop the capacity to overthrow their oppressors. Following this dialectic, the model curriculum instructs teachers to help students “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs” and critique “white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.” This approach, in turn, enables teachers to inspire their pupils to participate in “social movements that struggle for social justice” and “build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society.”

This religious concept is fleshed out in the model curriculum’s official “ethnic studies community chant.” The curriculum recommends that teachers lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appeals directly to the Aztec gods. Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule.Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which students shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!” in pursuit of ultimate “critical consciousness.”

Read the full report here.

 

[marsh]

https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2021-03-10/facebook-asks-court-to-dismiss-us-government-states-antitrust-cases

Facebook Asks Court to Dismiss U.S. Government, States Antitrust Cases
By Reuters, Wire Service Content March 10, 2021



More

FILE PHOTO: A 3D-printed Facebook logo is seen placed on a keyboard in this illustration taken March 25, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File PhotoREUTERS

WASHINGTON (REUTERS) - Facebook asked a federal court on Wednesday to dismiss major antitrust cases filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and nearly every U.S. state, saying they failed to show the company had a monopoly or harmed consumers.

"By a one-vote margin, in the fraught environment of relentless criticism of Facebook for matters entirely unrelated to antitrust concerns, the agency decided to bring a case against Facebook," Facebook said in responding to the FTC complaint.

"None of the harms typically alleged in antitrust actions is alleged here," it said.
In lawsuits filed in December, the FTC and states asked the court to force the social media giant to sell two prized assets, its messaging app WhatsApp and photo-sharing app Instagram. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in the District of Columbia will hear the cases.

The FTC and states accused Facebook of breaking antitrust law to keep smaller competitors at bay and snapping up social media rivals, like Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion.

All told, the federal government and states filed five lawsuits against Facebook and Alphabet's Google last year following bipartisan outrage over use and misuse of social media clout both in the economy and in the political sphere.

In its response to the FTC lawsuit, Facebook argued that the government failed to show that Facebook had a monopoly in a clearly defined market or that it had hurt consumers.

The company also dismissed emails cited in the FTC lawsuit written by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives expressing worry about the competitive threat posed by Instagram and WhatsApp.

"Lacking facts to establish either unlawful conduct or harm to consumers, the FTC attempts to bolster its claims with a grab-bag of selectively quoted internal emails and messages from Facebook executives, which are offered to show that Facebook was concerned about competitive threats from Instagram and WhatsApp – but also many, many other firms," Facebook said in its response.

Separately, in the lawsuit brought by dozens of states and territories, Facebook argued that the state case should be dismissed because the states failed to show that they were harmed by Facebook and because they waited more than four years.

New York Attorney General Letitia James said that Facebook was "wrong on the law and wrong on our complaint."

"We are confident in our case, which is why almost every state in this nation has joined our bipartisan lawsuit to end Facebook's illegal conduct," she said in a statement.

The FTC had no comment regarding Facebook's response.
The states and FTC have until April 7 to formally respond to the court.
(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

The Government's War On Free Speech: Protest Laws Undermine The First Amendment

WEDNESDAY, MAR 10, 2021 - 23:40
Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”— George Washington

It’s a given that the government is corrupt, unaccountable, and has exceeded its authority.

So what can we do about it?

The first remedy involves speech (protest, assembly, speech, prayer, and publicity), and lots of it, in order to speak truth to power.

The First Amendment, which is the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights, affirms the right of “we the people” to pray freely about our grievances regarding the government. We can gather together peacefully to protest those grievances. We can publicize those grievances. And we can express our displeasure (peacefully) in word and deed.

Unfortunately, tyrants don’t like people who speak truth to power.


The American Police State has shown itself to be particularly intolerant of free speech activities that challenge its authority, stand up to its power grabs, and force it to operate according to the rules of the Constitution.

Cue the rise of protest laws, the police state’s go-to methods for muzzling discontent.

These protest laws, some of which appear to encourage violence against peaceful protesters by providing immunity to individuals who drive their car into protesters impeding traffic and use preemptive deadly force against protesters who might be involved in a riot, take intolerance for speech with which one might disagree to a whole new level.

Ever since the Capitol protests on Jan. 6, 2021, state legislatures have introduced a broad array of these laws aimed at criminalizing protest activities. Yet while the growing numbers of protest laws cropping up across the country are being marketed as necessary to protect private property, public roads or national security, they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a thinly disguised plot to discourage anyone from challenging government authority at the expense of our First Amendment rights.

It doesn’t matter what the source of that discontent might be (police brutality, election outcomes, COVID-19 mandates, the environment, etc.): protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, etc., aim to muzzle every last one of us.

However, as Human Rights Watch points out, these assaults on free speech are nothing new. “Various states have long-tried to curtail the right to protest. They do so by legislating wide definitions of what constitutes an ‘unlawful assembly’ or a ‘riot’ as well as increasing punishments. They also allow police to use catch-all public offenses, such as trespassing, obstructing traffic, or disrupting the peace, as a pretext for ordering dispersals, using force, and making arrests. Finally, they make it easier for corporations and others to bring lawsuits against protest organizers.”

Make no mistake: while many of these laws claim to be in the interest of “public safety and limiting economic damage,” these legislative attempts to redefine and criminalize speech are a backdoor attempt to rewrite the Constitution and render the First Amendment’s robust safeguards null and void.

For instance, there are at least 205 proposed laws being considered in 45 states that would curtail the right to peacefully assemble and protest by expanding the definition of rioting, heightening penalties for existing offenses, or creating new crimes associated with assembly.

No matter how you package these laws, no matter how well-meaning they may sound, no matter how much you may disagree with the protesters or sympathize with the objects of the protest, these proposed laws are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent.

In Alabama, lawmakers are pushing to allow individuals to use deadly force near a riot. Kentucky, Missouri and New Hampshire are also considering similar stand your ground laws to justify the use of lethal force in relation to riots.

In Arizona, legislators want to classify protests involving seven or more people as felonies punishable by up to two years in jail. Under such a law, traditional, nonviolent forms of civil disobedience—sit-ins, boycotts and marches—would be illegal.

In Arkansas, peaceful protesters who engage in civil disobedience by occupying any government property after being told to leave could face six months in jail and a $1000 fine.

In Minnesota, where activists continue to protest the death of George Floyd, who was killed after police knelt on his neck for eight minutes, individuals who are found guilty of any kind of offense in connection with a peaceful protest could be denied a range of benefits, including food assistance, education loans and grants, and unemployment assistance.

Oregon lawmakers wanted to “require public community colleges and universities to expel any student convicted of participating in a violent riot.” In Illinois, students who twice infringe the rights of others to engage in expressive activities could be suspended for at least a year.

Proposed laws in at least 25 states, including Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Florida, would give drivers the green light to “accidentally” run over protesters who are preventing them from fleeing a riot. Washington wants to levy steeper penalties against protesters who “swarm” a vehicle, punishing them for a repeat offense with up to 40 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.

Responding to protests over the Keystone Pipeline, South Dakota enabled its governor and sheriffs to prohibit gatherings of 20 or more people on public land if the gathering might damage the land. At least 15 other states have also adopted or are considering legislation that would levy harsher penalties for environmental protests near oil and gas pipelines.

In Iowa, all it takes is for one person in a group of three of more people to use force or cause property damage, and the whole group can be punished with up to 5 years in prison and a $7,500 fine.

Obstruct access to critical infrastructure in Mississippi and you could be facing a $10,000 fine and a seven-year prison sentence.

A North Carolina law would have made it a crime to heckle state officials. Under this law, shouting at a former governor would constitute a crime.

In Connecticut, you could be sentenced to five years behind bars and a $5,000 fine for disrupting the state legislature by making noise or using disturbing language.

Indiana lawmakers wanted to authorize police to use “any means necessary” to breakup mass gatherings that block traffic. Lawmakers have since focused their efforts on expanding the definition of a “riot” and punishing anyone who wears a mask to a peaceful protest, even a medical mask, with 2.5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Georgia wants to ban all spontaneous, First Amendment-protected assemblies and deny anyone convicted of violating the ban from receiving state or local employment benefits.

Virginia wants to subject protesters who engage in an “unlawful assembly” after “having been lawfully warned to disperse” with up to a year of jail time and a fine of up to $2,500.

Missouri made it illegal for public employees to take part in strikes and picketing, only to have the law ruled unconstitutional in its entirety.

Oklahoma created a sliding scale for protesters whose actions impact or impede critical infrastructure (including a telephone pole). The penalties range from $1,000 and six months in a county jail to $100,000 and up to 10 years in prison. And if you’re part of an organization, that fine goes as high as $1,000,000.

Talk about intimidation tactics.

Ask yourself: if there are already laws on the books in all of the states that address criminal or illegal behavior such as blocking public roadways, trespassing on private property or vandalizing property—because such laws are already on the books—then why does the government need to pass laws criminalizing activities that are already outlawed?

What’s really going on here?

No matter what the politicians might say, the government doesn’t care about our rights, our welfare or our safety.

Every despotic measure used to control us and make us cower and comply with the government’s dictates has been packaged as being for our benefit, while in truth benefiting only those who stand to profit, financially or otherwise, from the government’s transformation of the citizenry into a criminal class.

In this way, the government conspires to corrode our core freedoms purportedly for our own good but really for its own benefit.

Remember, the USA Patriot Act didn’t make us safer. It simply turned American citizens into suspects and, in the process, gave rise to an entire industry—private and governmental—whose profit depends on its ability to undermine our Fourth Amendment rights.

In much the same way that the Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect, the government’s anti-extremism program criminalizes otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities such as peaceful protesting.

Clearly, freedom no longer means what it once did.

This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from soldiers invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

Yet the unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the right to think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.

In other words, if we no longer have the right to voice concerns about COVID-19 mandates, if we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to protest unjust laws or government policies by voicing our opinions in public or on social media or before a legislative body—no matter how politically incorrect or socially unacceptable those views might be—then we do not have free speech.

What we have instead is regulated, controlled speech, and that’s what those who founded America called tyranny.

On paper, we may be technically free.

In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

As the great George Carlin rightly observed: “Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”

In other words, we only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

Remember: if the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

 

[marsh]

Asian Americans Emerging as a Strong Voice Against Critical Race Theory

Few are willing to speak out against it for fear of being labeled racists or white supremacists. Asian Americans, however, have emerged as a powerful voice against this pernicious ideology.

www.newsweek.com

Asian Americans Emerging as a Strong Voice Against Critical Race Theory | Opinion

HELEN RALEIGH , ENTREPRENEUR, WRITER AND SPEAKER
ON 3/9/21 AT 6:00 AM EST

House Passes Police Reform Bill Named After George Floyd

Critical race theory (CRT) is a divisive, discriminatory ideology that judges people on the basis of their skin color. It has penetrated our society—it's in federal agencies' and federal contractors' "bias training," in school curricula and many corporations' "diversity training." Few are willing to speak out against it for fear of being labeled racists or white supremacists. Asian Americans, however, have emerged as a powerful voice against this pernicious ideology.

The Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York (CACAGNY) delivered the most vigorous rejection of CRT yet, calling it "a hateful, divisive, manipulative fraud." CACAGNY is one of the oldest chapters of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, which was founded in San Francisco in 1895 to respond to nationwide discrimination and violence against Chinese Americans. For more than a century, this organization has helped Asian Americans, especially Chinese Americans, to "quicken the spirit of American patriotism" and to "insure the legal rights of its members." CACAGNY speaks out against CRT now because Asian Americans have experienced its harm firsthand.

According to CRT's victimization ledger, all whites are oppressors, and all "people of color" are oppressed. CRT argues that unequal economic outcomes among different races in our society result from white power and white privilege. Asian Americans punch a big hole in that worldview. As a group, their economic achievement has surpassed that of all other racial groups, including whites. Last year's Department of Labor statistics even showed that the median weekly earnings of Asian women surpassed white men's earnings.

Values drive Asian Americans' economic success. Many believe in education attainment, stable marriages, delayed gratification, hard work and meritocracy. CRT attacks all these as "white" values, and the people who practice them as acting "white."

Because Asian Americans' economic achievement and educational attainment resist CRT narratives, irritated activists have tried to eject Asian Americans from the "people of color" category. Last November, the North Thurston public school district in Washington state released an "equity report" in which it grouped white and Asian American students together, while placing everyone else in the "students of color" category. The school district only apologized after an outcry from the community's Asian American families.

Even as victims of hate crimes, Asian Americans discredit CRT's assertion that racial prejudice only goes one way—from white people to people of color.

This year has seen a rising number of hate crimes against Asian Americans, especially in some of the most progressive cities in the United States. In San Francisco, an 84-year-old Thai immigrant died last month after being violently knocked to the ground during his morning stroll. In Oakland's Chinatown, 28-year-old Yahya Muslim aggressively shoved a 91-year-old Asian man to the pavement from behind and attacked two other Asian seniors. Also, in Oakland, in broad daylight, two young men attacked a 71-year-old Asian woman by "knocking her to the ground before yanking her purse so hard the strap breaks off."

A demonstrator wearing a face mask and holding a sign takes part in a rally to raise awareness of anti-Asian violence, near Chinatown in Los Angeles, California, on February 20, 2021. - The rally was organized in part in response to last month's fatal assault of Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old immigrant from Thailand, in San Francisco.RINGO CHIU / AFP/GETTY

In New York City, a young man used a box-cutter knife to slash Noel Quintana's face on a New York subway during the morning commute. Quintana, a 61-year-old Filipino immigrant, was rushed to the hospital, where he received more than 100 stitches.

CRT activists blame white nationalism for these hate crimes against Asian Americans. However, all perpetrators in these cases were non-Asian minorities. Asian Americans are concerned that CRT activists intentionally ignoring this inconvenient truth may result in the government misallocating resources and failing to protect Asian American communities from hate crimes.

Asian Americans have felt the most harm from CRT in education. Activists claim that teaching math and science perpetuates "white privilege." They're more interested in indoctrinating kids with identity politics, intersectionality and race struggles. In an elementary school in Cupertino, California, where 94 percent of the students are non-white, a math teacher told third-graders in a math class that they live in a white-dominated culture, and had them rank themselves according to their "power and privilege" on an identity map. Chinese parents organized a protest, demanding the school stop teaching racism to their children and start teaching actual math instead. One Chinese parent explained that CRT's emphasis on dividing society into oppressors and oppressed based on skin color reminded him of the bloody class struggle in Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Asian parents are also alarmed about attempts to change admissions standards for colleges and top high schools at the expense of Asian American children. CRT activists have been pushing for lowering admission standards—or the complete removal of difficult entrance exams—to top high schools because "too many Asians" are in good schools, and Asians are so "over-represented" that these schools are not "diverse." These were the arguments New York City mayor Bill de Blasio used to eliminate the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test. He wanted to replace it with a new admissions process based on race, so the student bodies of New York City's elite public high schools would mirror the city's overall population composition and not be dominated by Asian kids. CACAGNY, along with Asian American families and other allies, fiercely protested the mayor's proposal. The mayor recanted after his failed presidential bid.

However, CRT activists found success in other places. Last year, the Fairfax County public school board in Virginia canceled the entrance exam for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Last month, the San Francisco Unified School District voted to eliminate the merit-based admission process to Lowell High School, one of the city's top high schools. The school board claimed such an admission process "perpetuates the culture of white supremacy and racial abuse towards Black and Latinx students," even though students of color make up 75 percent of Lowell's student body and more than half of them are Asian. Asian parents worry that eliminating merit-based admission will result in fewer admissions for qualified Asian students.

In Washington and California, CRT activists tried to restore affirmative action in employment and college admissions. One of their arguments was that Asian Americans were "overrepresented" in universities. Efforts in both states were defeated at the ballot box, mainly due to opposition by Asian Americans, who were concerned Asian students would be unfairly penalized in college admissions.

Many Asian Americans believe education is the way to achieve upward mobility and the American dream. They see any attempt to limit their children's access to quality education as unjust exclusion. That's why CACAGNY calls CRT "today's Chinese Exclusion Act" and "the real hate crime against Asians."

In an increasingly intolerant environment, calling out CRT takes tremendous courage. Those willing to speak up may face economic and reputational consequences. Asian Americans have spoken fearlessly and taken the lead to expose CRT's divisive and destructive nature. The rest of us should follow their example and join their effort to stop this harmful ideology from tearing apart our society.

 

[marsh]

NYC school encourages kids to stop using words like ‘mom,’ ‘dad’ in ‘inclusive language’ guide

A Manhattan private school aiming to use more “inclusive language” is encouraging its students to stop using the terms “mom,” “dad” and “parents” bec…

nypost.com

NYC school encourages kids to stop using words like ‘mom,’ ‘dad’ in ‘inclusive language’ guide
By Elizabeth Elizalde
March 10, 2021 | 11:46pm | Updated

A Manhattan private school aiming to use more “inclusive language” is encouraging its students to stop using the terms “mom,” “dad” and “parents” because the words make “assumptions” about kids’ home lives.

The Grace Church School in Noho — which offers academic courses for junior kindergarten through 12th grade — issued a 12-page guide to students and staff explaining the school’s mission of inclusivity.

The detailed guide recommends using the terms “grown-ups,” “folks,” “family” or “guardians” as alternatives to “mom,” “dad” and “parents.” It also suggests using “caregiver” instead of “nanny/babysitter.”

“Families are formed and structured in many ways. At Grace Church School, we use inclusive language that reflects this diversity. It’s important to refrain from making assumptions about who kids live with, who cares for them, whether they sleep in the same place every night, whether they see their parents, etc.,” the guide reads.

The document also states how to use appropriate terms relating to gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity.

Instead of asking a person, “What are you? Where are you from?,” the query should be, “What is your cultural/ethnic background? Where are your ancestors/is your family from?,” according to Grace’s guide.

Scribd doc on website


The school defended the guide, telling City Journal that its goal is to “promote a sense of belonging for all of our students.”

“Grace is an Episcopal school. As part of our Episcopal identity, we recognize the dignity and worth common to humanity,” the Rev. Robert Pennoyer, assistant head of school, said in a statement to the outlet.