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

marsh

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Columbia professors want Biden to appoint a ‘Secretary of Racial Justice’

JESSICA CUSTODIO-SUNY DUCHESSFEBRUARY 18, 2021

JoeBiden.Ron_Adar.Shutterstock-370x242.jpg

Black professor skeptical of the idea

A group of faculty members and criminal justice reform advocates affiliated with Columbia University want President Joe Biden to appoint a “Secretary of Racial Justice” within his first 100 days in office.

The appointee would ensure that all federal policies promote racial equality, according to the proposed priorities list.

“This position would be responsible for coordinating actions across the administration to correct the impact of racial disparities,” members of the Square One Project wrote in a news release.

The Square One initiative consists of Columbia professors and other experts who are working on a three-year-long project to address problems of poverty and racism. It’s currently led by Professor Bruce Western, who teaches sociology at Columbia.

The project is part of the Ivy League university’s Justice Lab, which researches criminal justice and proposes new policies, such as the racial justice secretary position.

This appointee “would review federal policy…to better understand ways it has increased racial disparities and propose innovative solutions to reverse them.”

The proposal points to similar offices in Charlottesville, Virginia, Pittsburgh and San Francisco.
However, one black Columbia professor expressed skepticism of the idea.

“I’m not sure I quite understand the secretary of racial justice, though — I wonder about the overlap with the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department,” English Professor John McWhorter told The College Fix via email. McWhorter said “it would be great to look into the intersection of poverty and criminal justice, as this is at the nexus of much of what beleaguers the black community today.”

McWhorter also worried that the particular definition of “racial justice” that his Columbia colleagues are advocating for could be misguided.

“I may be wrong here [but] the particular idea of racial justice might be influenced by the perspectives on antiracism of [Boston University Professor] Ibram Kendi, which I find oversimplified and of little use to addressing how racism plays out in actual society.”

McWhorter recently wrote an essay criticizing the tactics used by anti-racism advocates.

Square One also wants Biden to “Reimagine the Carceral System and Condemn Its Violent History” and “Address Poverty.”

“Time and time again, we have seen firsthand the flaws within law enforcement agencies across the country,” the criminal justice reform proponents said. “The Biden administration shouldn’t just define safety as the absence of crime, but also as the presence of opportunity.”

The initiative does not outright explain if this demand would include defunding and abolishing the police. The Fix reached out to Sukyi McMahon, the listed contact on the news release, twice via email for comment. McMahon did not respond to requests for comment on if the group wanted to see Biden support police abolition.

The Biden administration should also address unemployment for felons and housing insecurity in his first 100 days, the Square One members said.

“A federal jobs guarantee program that includes formerly incarcerated individuals would certainly mark a step forward in dramatically improving opportunities for millions of Americans,” the proposal said.

“But we know that jobs alone cannot fix America’s poverty crisis,” so Biden should introduce “a plan that addresses housing insecurity and poverty simultaneously.”

The criminal justice reform advocates said there “isn’t a silver bullet” but the “status quo is what got us here in the first place.”

“It’s time to reimagine, rebuild, and bring in new perspectives and voices within the administration that can finally build a new type of justice in America,” Square One officials said.
 

marsh

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Obama WH Staffer Fantasizes About ‘Raiding’, ‘Bombing’, ‘Seizing Assets Of’ Republicans
obama
Kyle Bibby, a former Obama administration fellow, revealed he believed that “raiding, dropping a bomb” or “seizing their assets” of Republicans would have been an appropriate response to the events on January 6th.

Bibby, a Presidential Management Fellow with the Obama Administration’s Office of Management and Budget, made the comments during an interview with The Root.

“Kyle Bibby, national campaign manager at Common Defense and a former Marine Corps Infantry officer, told that had a foreign entity engaged in an attack similar to the Jan. 6 coup attempt or rallied the support of the main culprit thereafter, the U.S. military would have responded with an offensive strike or at the minimum stiff economic penalties,” the outlet summarized.

“But he added that the militias and Trump supporters who were there are ultimately not so much the issue as is the Republican Party that empowers them,” The Root continued.

Bibby, who also appeared on Bernie Sanders’s “Hear The Bern” podcast, emphasized that if the “violent insurrectionists” were “in Afghanistan,” he believes it would have been justified to “raid, drop a bomb,” or “seize their assets”:

When asked about the violent insurrectionists, Bibby said, “If they were in Afghanistan, we would’ve hit them. Either a raid, drop a bomb on them, whatever it is.” He continued, “But the organizations that are funding this and who are backing this that are creating the political movement behind this are organizations like Fox News, Breitbart, One America News Network, and the Republican Party. If these organizations existed in another country, we would be sanctioning them. We would be seizing their assets for inciting terroristic threats against an American ally or against U.S. interests.”
 

marsh

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Techno-Censorship: The Slippery Slope From Censoring "Disinformation" To Silencing Truth

THURSDAY, FEB 18, 2021 - 21:20
Authored by John Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
- George Orwell
This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.


In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.
This is how it starts.

Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all still applies.
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
In our case, however, it started with the censors who went after extremists spouting so-called “hate speech,” and few spoke out—because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shamed for being perceived as politically incorrect.

Then the internet censors got involved and went after extremists spouting “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden, and few spoke out—because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shunned for appearing to disagree with the majority.

By the time the techno-censors went after extremists spouting “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.


Still, few spoke out.

Eventually, “we the people” will be the ones in the crosshairs.

At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

When that time comes, there may be no one left to speak out or speak up in our defense.
Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

Watch and learn.

We should all be alarmed when prominent social media voices such as Donald Trump, Alex Jones, David Icke and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

The question is not whether the content of their speech was legitimate.

The concern is what happens after such prominent targets are muzzled. What happens once the corporate techno-censors turn their sights on the rest of us?

It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

We are on a fast-moving trajectory.

Already, there are calls for the Biden administration to appoint a “reality czar” in order to tackle disinformation, domestic extremism and the nation’s so-called “reality crisis.”

Knowing what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

Here’s the point: you don’t have to like Trump or any of the others who are being muzzled, nor do you have to agree or even sympathize with their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship would be dangerously naïve.

As Matt Welch, writing for Reason, rightly points out, “Proposed changes to government policy should always be visualized with the opposing team in charge of implementation.

In other words, whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, for the sake of the greater good or because you like or trust those in charge, will eventually be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.

As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:
The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.
Welcome to the age of technofascism.


Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.


Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best. Certainly, Facebook and Twitter have become the modern-day equivalents of public squares, traditional free speech forums, with the internet itself serving as a public utility.

But what does that mean for free speech online: should it be protected or regulated?

When given a choice, the government always goes for the option that expands its powers at the expense of the citizenry’s. Moreover, when it comes to free speech activities, regulation is just another word for censorship.

Right now, it’s trendy and politically expedient to denounce, silence, shout down and shame anyone whose views challenge the prevailing norms, so the tech giants are lining up to appease their shareholders.

This is the tyranny of the majority against the minority—exactly the menace to free speech that James Madison sought to prevent when he drafted the First Amendment to the Constitution—marching in lockstep with technofascism.

With intolerance as the new scarlet letter of our day, we now find ourselves ruled by the mob.
Those who dare to voice an opinion or use a taboo word or image that runs counter to the accepted norms are first in line to be shamed, shouted down, silenced, censored, fired, cast out and generally relegated to the dust heap of ignorant, mean-spirited bullies who are guilty of various “word crimes” and banished from society.

For example, a professor at Duquesne University was fired for using the N-word in an academic context. To get his job back, Gary Shank will have to go through diversity training and restructure his lesson plans.

This is what passes for academic freedom in America today.

If Americans don’t vociferously defend the right of a minority of one to subscribe to, let alone voice, ideas and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different, then we’re going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals).

No matter what our numbers might be, no matter what our views might be, no matter what party we might belong to, it will not be long before “we the people” constitute a powerless minority in the eyes of a power-fueled fascist state driven to maintain its power at all costs.
We are almost at that point now.

The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

Nothing good can come from techno-censorship.

Again, to quote Greenwald:
Censorship power, like the tech giants who now wield it, is an instrument of status quo preservation. The promise of the internet from the start was that it would be a tool of liberation, of egalitarianism, by permitting those without money and power to compete on fair terms in the information war with the most powerful governments and corporations. But just as is true of allowing the internet to be converted into a tool of coercion and mass surveillance, nothing guts that promise, that potential, like empowering corporate overlords and unaccountable monopolists to regulate and suppress what can be heard.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, these internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns. They’re laying the groundwork to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Therefore, it is important to recognize the thought prison that is being built around us for what it is: a prison with only one route of escape—free thinking and free speaking in the face of tyranny.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

WHISTLEBLOWER: Coca-Cola Forces Employees to Complete Online Training Telling Them to “Try to be Less White” (PHOTOS + VIDEO)

By Cristina Laila
Published February 19, 2021 at 1:05pm
whitey-guilt.jpg


A whistleblower leaked shocking images of Coca-Cola’s online training modules instructing employees to “try to be less white.”

Karlyn Borysenko, an anti-critical race theory activist, obtained the images from an internal whistleblower and posted them online:

“Confronting Racism: Understanding what it means to be white, challenging what it means to be racist”

“Try to be less white”

To be less white is to:
  • Be less oppressive
  • Be less arrogant
  • Be less certain
  • Be less defensive
  • Be less arrogant
  • Be more humble
  • Listen
  • Believe
  • Break with apathy
  • Break with white solidarity
“In the US and other Western nations, white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white. Research shows that by age 3 to 4, children understand that it is better to be white.”

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Karlyn Borysenko posted a video to her YouTube channel breaking down the images provided to her by a Coca-Cola whistleblower.

WATCH:

View: https://youtu.be/FRWfS0SmNqw
11:32 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Ignored by Media: Dirtbag Joe Biden Says US Veterans and Former Police Officers Are Fueling White Supremacism in America

By Jim Hoft
Published February 20, 2021 at 10:17pm

This did not make any headlines by the leftist media.

Among his many gaffes, Joe Biden on Tuesday blamed US veterans and former police officers for fueling white supremacy in the United States.

Again, the media hid this from the American public like they always do.

The left hates the military, hates the police but will steal their votes if they get a chance.

Joe Biden is a pig.
biden-kkk-police-military.jpg


The Police Tribune reported:

President Biden took aim at the very same Americans who dedicated their lives to keeping the country safe.
“And you see what’s happening — and the studies that are beginning to be done, maybe at your university as well — about the impact of former military, former police officers, on the growth of white supremacy in some of these groups,” the President said.
“You may remember in one of my debates with the former president, I asked him to condemn the Proud Boys. He wouldn’t do it. He said, ‘Stand by. Stand ready.’ Or whatever the phrasing exactly was,” he recalled.
“It is a bane on our existence. It has always been. As Lincoln said, ‘We have to appeal to our better angels,’” President Biden said.
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1361875575032446979
1:43 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

"Morally Grotesque" - Whistleblower At Smith College Resigns Over 'Reverse-Racism'

SUNDAY, FEB 21, 2021 - 12:55
Via Common Sense with Bari Weiss,

We all know that something morally grotesque is swallowing liberal America. Almost no one wants to risk talking about it out loud.

Every day I get phone calls from anxious Americans complaining about an ideology that wants to pull all of us into the past.

I get calls from parents telling me about the damaging things being taught in schools: so-called antiracist programs that urge children to obsess on the color of their skin.

I get calls from people working in corporate America forced to go to trainings in which they learn that they carry collective, race-based guilt — or benefit from collective, race-based virtue.

I get calls from young people just launching their careers telling me that they feel they have no choice but to profess fealty to this ideology in order to keep their jobs.


Almost no one who calls me is willing to go public.

And I understand why.

To go public with what’s happening is to risk their jobs and their reputations.

But the hour is very late. It calls for courage. And courage has come in the form of a woman named Jodi Shaw.


Jodi Shaw was, until this afternoon, a staffer at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She made $45,000 a year - less than the yearly tuition at the school.

She is a divorced mother of two children. She is a lifelong liberal and an alumna of the college. And she has had a front-row seat to the illiberal, neo-racist ideology masquerading as progress.
In October 2020, after Shaw felt that she had exhausted all her internal options, she posted a video on YouTube, blowing the whistle on, what she says, is an atmosphere of racial discrimination at the school.
“I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself,” she said.
“Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my skin color. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on their skin color.”
Watch the whole thing here:

View: https://youtu.be/blqpCMChBpI
10:31 min

Now today, she is resigning from the college.

In doing that — and in speaking out — she is turning down a settlement that would have given her a much easier way out. We need more people like her.

Here’s how Shaw put it in her resignation letter to Smith College President Kathleen McCartney, which she sent to me to publish in full:
Dear President McCartney:
I am writing to notify you that effective today, I am resigning from my position as Student Support Coordinator in the Department of Residence Life at Smith College.
This has not been an easy decision, as I now face a deeply uncertain future. As a divorced mother of two, the economic uncertainty brought about by this resignation will impact my children as well. But I have no choice. The racially hostile environment that the college has subjected me to for the past two and a half years has left me physically and mentally debilitated. I can no longer work in this environment, nor can I remain silent about a matter so central to basic human dignity and freedom.
I graduated from Smith College in 1993. Those four years were among the best in my life. Naturally, I was over the moon when, years later, I had the opportunity to join Smith as a staff member. I loved my job and I loved being back at Smith.
But the climate - and my place at the college - changed dramatically when, in July 2018, the culture war arrived at our campus when a student accused a white staff member of calling campus security on her because of racial bias. The student, who is black, shared her account of this incident widely on social media, drawing a lot of attention to the college.
Before even investigating the facts of the incident, the college immediately issued a public apology to the student, placed the employee on leave, and announced its intention to create new initiatives, committees, workshops, trainings, and policies aimed at combating “systemic racism” on campus.
In spite of an independent investigation into the incident that found no evidence of racial bias, the college ramped up its initiatives aimed at dismantling the supposed racism that pervades the campus. This only served to support the now prevailing narrative that the incident had been racially motivated and that Smith staff are racist.
Allowing this narrative to dominate has had a profound impact on the Smith community and on me personally. For example, in August 2018, just days before I was to present a library orientation program into which I had poured a tremendous amount of time and effort, and which had previously been approved by my supervisors, I was told that I could not proceed with the planned program. Because it was going to be done in rap form and “because you are white,” as my supervisor told me, that could be viewed as “cultural appropriation.” My supervisor made clear he did not object to a rap in general, nor to the idea of using music to convey orientation information to students. The problem was my skin color.
I was up for a full-time position in the library at that time, and I was essentially informed that my candidacy for that position was dependent upon my ability, in a matter of days, to reinvent a program to which I had devoted months of time.
Humiliated, and knowing my candidacy for the full-time position was now dead in the water, I moved into my current, lower-paying position as Student Support Coordinator in the Department of Residence Life.
As it turned out, my experience in the library was just the beginning. In my new position, I was told on multiple occasions that discussing my personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a requirement of my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women! Rich, white women!” in reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my supervisor openly name preferred racial quotas for job openings in our department. I was given supplemental literature in which the world’s population was reduced to two categories — “dominant group members” and “subordinated group members” — based solely on characteristics like race.
Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world.
Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College.
The last straw came in January 2020, when I attended a mandatory Residence Life staff retreat focused on racial issues. The hired facilitators asked each member of the department to respond to various personal questions about race and racial identity. When it was my turn to respond, I said “I don’t feel comfortable talking about that.” I was the only person in the room to abstain.
Later, the facilitators told everyone present that a white person’s discomfort at discussing their race is a symptom of “white fragility.” They said that the white person may seem like they are in distress, but that it is actually a “power play.” In other words, because I am white, my genuine discomfort was framed as an act of aggression. I was shamed and humiliated in front of all of my colleagues.
I filed an internal complaint about the hostile environment, but throughout that process, over the course of almost six months, I felt like my complaint was taken less seriously because of my race. I was told that the civil rights law protections were not created to help people like me. And after I filed my complaint, I started to experience retaliatory behavior, like having important aspects of my job taken away without explanation.
Under the guise of racial progress, Smith College has created a racially hostile environment in which individual acts of discrimination and hostility flourish. In this environment, people’s worth as human beings, and the degree to which they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, is determined by the color of their skin. It is an environment in which dissenting from the new critical race orthodoxy — or even failing to swear fealty to it like some kind of McCarthy-era loyalty oath — is grounds for public humiliation and professional retaliation.
I can no longer continue to work in an environment where I am constantly subjected to additional scrutiny because of my skin color. I can no longer work in an environment where I am told, publicly, that my personal feelings of discomfort under such scrutiny are not legitimate but instead are a manifestation of white supremacy. Perhaps most importantly, I can no longer work in an environment where I am expected to apply similar race-based stereotypes and assumptions to others, and where I am told — when I complain about having to engage in what I believe to be discriminatory practices — that there are “legitimate reasons for asking employees to consider race” in order to achieve the college’s “social justice objectives.”
What passes for “progressive” today at Smith and at so many other institutions is regressive. It taps into humanity’s worst instincts to break down into warring factions, and I fear this is rapidly leading us to a very twisted place. It terrifies me that others don’t seem to see that racial segregation and demonization are wrong and dangerous no matter what its victims look like. Being told that any disagreement or feelings of discomfort somehow upholds “white supremacy” is not just morally wrong. It is psychologically abusive.
Equally troubling are the many others who understand and know full well how damaging this is, but do not speak out due to fear of professional retaliation, social censure, and loss of their livelihood and reputation. I fear that by the time people see it, or those who see it manage to screw up the moral courage to speak out, it will be too late.

I wanted to change things at Smith. I hoped that by bringing an internal complaint, I could somehow get the administration to see that their capitulation to critical race orthodoxy was causing real, measurable harm. When that failed, I hoped that drawing public attention to these problems at Smith would finally awaken the administration to this reality. I have come to conclude, however, that the college is so deeply committed to this toxic ideology that the only way for me to escape the racially hostile climate is to resign. It is completely unacceptable that we are now living in a culture in which one must choose between remaining in a racially hostile, psychologically abusive environment or giving up their income.

As a proud Smith alum, I know what a critical role this institution has played in shaping my life and the lives of so many women for one hundred and fifty years. I want to see this institution be the force for good I know it can be. I will not give up fighting against the dangerous pall of orthodoxy that has descended over Smith and so many of our educational institutions.

This was an extremely difficult decision for me and comes at a deep personal cost. I make $45,000 a year; less than a year’s tuition for a Smith student. I was offered a settlement in exchange for my silence, but I turned it down. My need to tell the truth — and to be the kind of woman Smith taught me to be — makes it impossible for me to accept financial security at the expense of remaining silent about something I know is wrong. My children’s future, and indeed, our collective future as a free nation, depends on people having the courage to stand up to this dangerous and divisive ideology, no matter the cost.
Sincerely,
Jodi Shaw
What is happening is wrong. Any ideology that asks people to judge others based on their skin color is wrong. Any ideology that asks us to reduce ourselves and others to racial stereotypes is wrong. Any ideology that treats dissent as evidence of bigotry is wrong. Any ideology that denies our common humanity is wrong. You should say so. Just like Jodi Shaw has.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Greenwald: Congress Escalates Pressure On Tech Giants To Censor More, Threatening The First Amendment

SATURDAY, FEB 20, 2021 - 22:30
Authored by Glenn Greenwald via. greenwald.substack.com,

For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”

CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey (R) and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (L) are sworn in to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on September 5, 2018. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety,” adding: “This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation.”

House Democrats have made no secret of their ultimate goal with this hearing: to exert control over the content on these online platforms. “Industry self-regulation has failed,” they said, and therefore “we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.” In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.

I’ve written and spoken at length over the past several years about the dangers of vesting the power in the state, or in tech monopolies, to determine what is true and false, or what constitutes permissible opinion and what does not. I will not repeat those points here.

Instead, the key point raised by these last threats from House Democrats is an often-overlooked one: while the First Amendment does not apply to voluntary choices made by a private company about what speech to allow or prohibit, it does bar the U.S. Government from coercing or threatening such companies to censor. In other words, Congress violates the First Amendment when it attempts to require private companies to impose viewpoint-based speech restrictions which the government itself would be constitutionally barred from imposing.

It may not be easy to draw where the precise line is — to know exactly when Congress has crossed from merely expressing concerns into unconstitutional regulation of speech through its influence over private companies — but there is no question that the First Amendment does not permit indirect censorship through regulatory and legal threats.

Ben Wizner, Director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told me that while a constitutional analysis depends on a variety of factors including the types of threats issued and how much coercion is amassed, it is well-established that the First Amendment governs attempts by Congress to pressure private companies to censor:
For the same reasons that the Constitution prohibits the government from dictating what information we can see and read (outside narrow limits), it also prohibits the government from using its immense authority to coerce private actors into censoring on its behalf.
In a January Wall Street Journal op-ed, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Yale Law School’s constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld warned that Congress is rapidly approaching this constitutional boundary if it has not already transgressed it. “Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats,” the duo wrote, “Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.”

That article compiled just a small sample of case law making clear that efforts to coerce private actors to censor speech implicate core First Amendment free speech guarantees. In Norwood v. Harrison (1973), for instance, the Court declared it “axiomatic” — a basic legal principle — that Congress “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” They noted: “For more than half a century courts have held that governmental threats can turn private conduct into state action.”

In 2018, the ACLU successfully defended the National Rifle Association (NRA) in suing Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York State on the ground that attempts of state officials to coerce private companies to cease doing business with the NRA using implicit threats — driven by Cuomo’s contempt for the NRA’s political views — amounted to a violation of the First Amendment. Because, argued the ACLU, the communications of Cuomo’s aides to banks and insurance firms “could reasonably be interpreted as a threat of retaliatory enforcement against firms that do not sever ties with gun promotion groups,” that conduct ran afoul of the well-established principle “that the government may violate the First Amendment through ‘action that falls short of a direct prohibition against speech,’ including by retaliation or threats of retaliation against speakers.” In sum, argued the civil liberties group in reasoning accepted by the court:
Courts have never required plaintiffs to demonstrate that the government directly attempted to suppress their protected expression in order to establish First Amendment retaliation, and they have often upheld First Amendment retaliation claims involving adverse economic action designed to chill speech indirectly.
In explaining its rationale for defending the NRA, the ACLU described how easily these same state powers could be abused by a Republican governor against liberal activist groups — for instance, by threatening banks to cease providing services to Planned Parenthood or LGBT advocacy groups. When the judge rejected Cuomo’s motion to dismiss the NRA’s lawsuit, Reuters explained the key lesson in its headline:



Perhaps the ruling most relevant to current controversies occurred in the 1963 Supreme Court case Bantam Books v. Sullivan. In the name of combatting the “obscene, indecent and impure,” the Rhode Island legislature instituted a commission to notify bookstores when they determined a book or magazine to be “objectionable,” and requested their “cooperation” by removing it and refusing to sell it any longer. Four book publishers and distributors sued, seeking a declaration that this practice was a violation of the First Amendment even though they were never technically forced to censor. Instead, they ceased selling the flagged books “voluntarily” due to fear of the threats implicit in the “advisory” notices received from the state.
In a statement that House Democrats and their defenders would certainly invoke to justify what they are doing with Silicon Valley, Rhode Island officials insisted that they were not unconstitutionally censoring because their scheme “does not regulate or suppress obscenity, but simply exhorts booksellers and advises them of their legal rights.”

In rejecting that disingenuous claim, the Supreme Court conceded that “it is true that [plaintiffs’] books have not been seized or banned by the State, and that no one has been prosecuted for their possession or sale.” Nonetheless, the Court emphasized that Rhode Island’s legislature — just like these House Democrats summoning tech executives — had been explicitly clear that their goal was the suppression of speech they disliked: “the Commission deliberately set about to achieve the suppression of publications deemed ‘objectionable,’ and succeeded in its aim.” And the Court emphasized that the barely disguised goal of the state was to intimidate these private book publishers and distributors into censoring by issuing implicit threats of punishment for non-compliance:
It is true, as noted by the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, that [the book distributor] was "free" to ignore the Commission's notices, in the sense that his refusal to "cooperate" would have violated no law. But it was found as a fact -- and the finding, being amply supported by the record, binds us -- that [the book distributor's] compliance with the Commission's directives was not voluntary. People do not lightly disregard public officers' thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around, and [the distributor’s] reaction, according to uncontroverted testimony, was no exception to this general rule. The Commission's notices, phrased virtually as orders, reasonably understood to be such by the distributor, invariably followed up by police visitations, in fact stopped the circulation of the listed publications ex proprio vigore [by its own force]. It would be naive to credit the State's assertion that these blacklists are in the nature of mere legal advice when they plainly serve as instruments of regulation.
In sum, concluded the Bantam Books Court: “their operation was in fact a scheme of state censorship effectuated by extra-legal sanctions; they acted as an agency not to advise but to suppress.”
Little effort is required to see that Democrats, now in control of the Congress and the White House, are engaged in a scheme of speech control virtually indistinguishable from those long held unconstitutional by decades of First Amendment jurisprudence. That Democrats are seeking to use their control of state power to coerce and intimidate private tech companies to censor — and indeed have already succeeded in doing so — is hardly subject to reasonable debate. They are saying explicitly that this is what they are doing.

Because “big tech has failed to acknowledge the role they’ve played in fomenting and elevating blatantly false information to its online audiences,” said the Committee Chairs again summoning the social media companies, “we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.”

The Washington Post, in reporting on this latest hearing, said the Committee intends to “take fresh aim at the tech giants for failing to crack down on dangerous political falsehoods and disinformation about the coronavirus.” And lurking behind these calls for more speech policing are pending processes that could result in serious punishment for these companies, including possible antitrust actions and the rescission of Section 230 immunity from liability.

This dynamic has become so common that Democrats now openly pressure Silicon Valley companies to censor content they dislike. In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 Capitol riot, when it was falsely claimed that Parler was the key online venue for the riot’s planning — Facebook, Google’s YouTube and Facebook’s Instagram were all more significant — two of the most prominent Democratic House members, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), used their large social media platforms to insist that Silicon Valley monopolies remove Parler from their app stores and hosting services:



Within twenty-four hours, all three Silicon Valley companies complied with these “requests,” and took the extraordinary step of effectively removing Parler — at the time the most-downloaded app on the Apple Store — from the internet. We will likely never know what precise role those tweets and other pressure from liberal politicians and journalists played in their decisions, but what is clear is that Democrats are more than willing to use their power and platforms to issue instructions to Silicon Valley about what they should and should not permit to be heard.

Part 1 of 2
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2

Leading liberal activists and some powerful Democratic politicians, such as then-presidential-candidate Kamala Harris, had long demanded former President Donald Trump’s removal from social media. After the Democrats won the White House — indeed, the day after Democrats secured control of both houses of Congress with two wins in the Georgia Senate run-offs — Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms banned Trump, citing the Capitol riot as the pretext.

While Democrats cheered, numerous leaders around the world, including many with no affection for Trump, warned of how dangerous this move was. Long-time close aide of the Clintons, Jennifer Palmieri, posted a viral tweet candidly acknowledging — and clearly celebrating — why this censorship occurred. With Democrats now in control of the Congressional committees and Executive Branch agencies that regulate Silicon Valley, these companies concluded it was in their best interest to censor the internet in accordance with the commands and wishes of the party that now wields power in Washington:

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The last time CEOs of social media platforms were summoned to testify before Congress, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) explicitly told them that what Democrats want is more censorship — more removal of content which they believe constitutes “disinformation” and “hate speech.” He did not even bother to hide his demands: “The issue is not that the companies before us today are taking too many posts down; the issue is that they are leaving too many dangerous posts up”:

View: https://youtu.be/GtFogUwF4Uc
1:19 min

When it comes to censorship of politically adverse content, sometimes explicit censorship demands are unnecessary. Where a climate of censorship prevails, companies anticipate what those in power want them to do by anticipatorily self-censoring to avoid official retaliation. Speech is chilled without direct censorship orders being required.

That is clearly what happened after Democrats spent four years petulantly insisting that they lost the 2016 election not because they chose a deeply disliked nominee or because their neoliberal ideology wrought so much misery and destruction, but instead, they said, because Facebook and Twitter allowed the unfettered circulation of incriminating documents hacked by Russia. Anticipating that Democrats were highly likely to win in 2020, the two tech companies decided in the weeks before the election — in what I regard as the single most menacing act of censorship of the last decade — to suppress or outright ban reporting by The New York Post on documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop that raised serious questions about the ethics of the Democratic front-runner for president. That is a classic case of self-censorship to please state officials who wield power over you.

All of this raises the vital question of where power really resides when it comes to controlling online speech. In January, the far-right commentator Curtis Yarvin, whose analysis is highly influential among a certain sector of Silicon Valley, wrote a provocative essay under the headline “Big tech has no power at all.” In essence, he wrote, Facebook as a platform is extremely powerful, but other institutions — particularly the corporate/oligarchical press and the government — have seized that power from Zuckerberg, and re-purposed it for their own interests, such that Facebook becomes their servant rather than the master:

However, if Zuck is subject to some kind of oligarchic power, he is in exactly the same position as his own moderators. He exercises power, but it is not his power, because it is not his will. The power does not flow from him; it flows through him. This is why we can say honestly and seriously that he has no power. It is not his, but someone else’s.
Why doth Zuck ban shitlords? Is the creator of “Facemash” passionately committed to social justice? Well, maybe. He may have no power, but he is still a bigshot. Bigshots often do get religion in later life—especially when everyone around them is getting it. But—does he have a choice? If he has no choice—he has no power.
For reasons not fully relevant here, I don’t agree entirely with that paradigm. Tech monopolies have enormous amounts of power, sometimes greater than nation-states themselves. We just saw that in Google and Facebook’s battles with the entire country of Australia. And they frequently go to war with state efforts to regulate them. But it is unquestionably true that these social media platforms — which set out largely for reasons of self-interest and secondarily due to a free-internet ideology — have had the censorship obligation foisted upon them by a combination of corporate media outlets and powerful politicians.

One might think of tech companies, the corporate media, the U.S. security state, and Democrats more as a union — a merger of power — rather than separate and warring factions. But whatever framework you prefer, it is clear that the power of social media companies to control the internet is in the hands of government and its corporate media allies at least as much as it is in the hands of the tech executives who nominally manage these platforms.

And it is precisely that reality that presents serious First Amendment threats. As the above-discussed Supreme Court jurisprudence demonstrates, this form of indirect and implicit state censorship is not new. Back in 2010, the war hawk Joe Lieberman abused his position as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee to “suggest” that financial services and internet hosting companies such as Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, Amazon and Bank of America, should terminate their relationship with WikiLeaks on the ground that the group, which was staunchly opposed to Lieberman’s imperialism and militarism, posed a national security threat. Lieberman hinted that they may face legal liability if they continued to process payments for WikiLeaks.

Unsurprisingly, these companies quickly obeyed Lieberman’s decree, preventing the group from collecting donations. When I reported on these events for Salon, I noted:
That Joe Lieberman is abusing his position as Homeland Security Chairman to thuggishly dictate to private companies which websites they should and should not host -- and, more important, what you can and cannot read on the Internet -- is one of the most pernicious acts by a U.S. Senator in quite some time. Josh Marshall wrote yesterday: "When I'd heard that Amazon had agreed to host Wikileaks I was frankly surprised given all the fish a big corporation like Amazon has to fry with the federal government." That's true of all large corporations that own media outlets -- every one -- and that is one big reason why they're so servile to U.S. Government interests and easily manipulated by those in political power. That's precisely the dynamic Lieberman was exploiting with his menacing little phone call to Amazon (in essence: Hi, this is the Senate's Homeland Security Committee calling; you're going to be taking down that WikiLeaks site right away, right?). Amazon, of course, did what they were told.
(Along with Daniel Ellsberg, Laura Poitras and others, I co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation in part to collect donations on behalf of WikiLeaks to ensure that the government could never again shut down press groups that it disliked through such pressure campaigns and implicit threats, precisely because it was so clear that this indirect means of attacking press freedom was dangerous and unconstitutional).

What made Lieberman’s implicit threats in the name of “national security” so despotic was that they were clearly intended to punish and silence a group working against his political agenda.
And that is precisely true of the motives of these House Democrats in demanding greater censorship in the name of combating “misinformation” and “hate speech”: their demands almost always, if not always, mean silencing those who are opposed to their ideology and political agenda. As but one example: one is perfectly free to opine online, as many Democrats do, that the 2000, 2004 and 2016 presidential elections (won by Republicans) were the by-products of electoral fraud, but making that same claim about the 2020 election (won by a Democrat) will result in immediate banning.

The power to control the flow of information and the boundaries of permissible speech is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. It is a power as intoxicating as it is menacing. When it comes to the internet, our primary means of communicating with one another, that power nominally rests in the hands of private corporations in Silicon Valley.

But increasingly, the Democratic-controlled government and their allies in the corporate media are realizing that they can indirectly and through coercion seize and wield that power for themselves. The First Amendment is implicated by these coercive actions as much as if Congress enacted laws explicitly mandating censorship of their political opponents.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Decline Of The West: American Education Surrenders To "Equity"

FRIDAY, FEB 19, 2021 - 23:20
Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

It will be difficult or even impossible to go back to a system where learning is actually a discipline that requires hard work and dedication...


Public education in the United States, if measured by results, has been producing graduates that are less competent in language skills and dramatically less well taught in the sciences and mathematics since 1964, when Scholastic Aptitude Test scores peaked. The decline in science and math skills has accelerated in the past decade according to rankings of American students compared to their peers overseas. A recent assessment, from 2015, placed the U.S. at 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD), the United States came in at 30th in math and 19th in science. Those poor results must be placed in a context of American taxpayers spending more money per student than any other country in the world, so the availability of resources is not necessarily a factor in most school districts.

Much of the decline is due to technical advances that level the playing field for teachers worldwide, but one must also consider changing perceptions of the role of education in a social context. In the United States in particular, political and cultural unrest certainly have been relevant factors. But all of that said and considered, the U.S. is now confronting a reassessment of values that will likely alter forever traditional education and will also make American students even more non-competitive with their foreign peers.

Many schools in the United States have ceased issuing grades that have any meaning, or they have dropped grading altogether, which means there is no way to judge progress or achievement. National test scores for evaluating possible college entry are on the way out almost everywhere as they are increasingly being condemned as “racist” in terms of how they assess learning based solely on the fact that blacks do less well on them than Asians and whites. This has all been part of an agenda that is being pushed that will search for and eliminate any taint of racism in the public space. It has also meant the destruction or removal of numerous historic monuments and an avoidance of any honest discussion of American history. San Francisco schools are, for example, notoriously spending more than $1 million to change the names of 44 schools that honor individuals who have been examined under the “racism and oppression” microscope and found wanting. They include George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Paul Revere.

The new world order for education is built around the concept of “equity,” sometimes described as using the public education system to “ensure equitable outcomes.” But the concept itself is deeply flawed as the pursuit of equity means treating all American unequally to guarantee that everyone that comes out of the schools is the same and has learned the same things. That is, of course, ridiculous and it penalizes the good student to make sure that the bad student is somehow pushed through the system and winds up with the same piece of paper.

And the quality overall of public education will sharply decline. One might reasonably observe that imposition of a totalitarian style “equity” regime based on race will inevitably drive many of the academically better prepared students out of the system. Many of the better teachers will also move to the private academies that will spring up due to parental and student demand. Others will stop teaching altogether when confronted by political correctness at a level that prior to 2020 would have seemed unimaginable. The actual quality of education will suffer for everyone involved

All of that has been bad enough, but the clincher is that this transformation is taking place all over the United States with the encouragement of federal, state and local governments and once the new regime is established it will be difficult or even impossible to go back to a system where learning is actually a discipline that sometimes requires hard work and dedication. In many school districts, the actual process of change is also being put on the back of the taxpayer. In one Virginia county the local school board spent $422,500 on a consultant to apply so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT) to a new program of instruction that will be mandatory for all employees and will serve as the framework for teaching the students. When schools eventually reopen, all kindergarteners, for example, will be taught “social justice” in a course designed by the controversial Southern Poverty Law Center and “diversity training” will be integrated in all other grade levels. Teaching reading, writing and arithmetic will take a back seat of “social justice.”

Critical Race Theory, which is being promoted as the framework for reorganizing the schools along lines of racial preferences, has been fairly criticized as it pretends to be an antidote to systemic racism but is itself racist in nature as it opposes a race neutral system that equally benefits everyone. It proposes that all of America’s governmental bodies and infrastructures are racist and supportive of “white supremacy” and must be deconstructed. It requires everything to be examined through a value system determined by identity politics and race and it views both whites and their institutions as hopelessly corrupted, if not evil.

Fortunately, some pushback to the Jacobins of political correctness is developing. Parents in many school districts are starting to attend school board meetings to register their opposition and even some school board members and teachers are refusing to cooperate. The teachers do so at risk of losing their jobs. At the elite Dalton private school in New York City parents have sent a letter to the Head of School Jim Best complaining how the newly introduced “anti-racist” curriculum has been gravely distorted by Critical Race Theory and the pursuit of “equity” to such an extent that it has included “a pessimistic and age-inappropriate litany of grievances in EVERY class. We have confused a progressive pedagogical model with progressive politics. Even for people who are sympathetic to that political viewpoint, the role of a school is not to indoctrinate politically. It’s to open the minds of children to the wonders of the world and learning. The Dalton we love, that has changed our lives, is nowhere to be found.

And that is a huge loss.”

The letter also stated that “Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, ‘racist cop’ reenactments in science, ‘decentering whiteness’ in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class. Wildly age-inappropriate, many of these classes feel more akin to a Zoom corporate sensitivity training than to Dalton’s intellectually engaging curriculum.”

Ironically, much of the new curriculum is being driven by a core of radicalized Dalton faculty members, who in December signed on to an “anti-racism manifesto” which demanded that the school “hire 12 full-time diversity officers, abolish high-level academic courses if Black students’ performance isn’t on par with White students’, and require anti-racism ‘statements’ from all members of the staff.”

Inevitably what is going on at Dalton and elsewhere is also playing out at many of America’s top universities, so the rot will persist into the next generation when today’s college students themselves become teachers. A black Princeton professor of classics is calling for all classics departments to be done away with because they promote “racism, slavery and white supremacy.” America’s education system, once upon a time, benefited the nation and its people, but we are now watching it in its death throes. And please don’t expect the Joe Biden administration to do anything to save it. They are on the side of the wreckers.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Nearly 180 Democrats support forming $12 million, 13-member slavery reparations commission
The White House said the president supports the legislation to set up a commission to "study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery."

Danny Glover interview on website 2:46 min

By Nicholas Ballasy
Updated: February 19, 2021 - 8:04am

Nearly 180 Democratic lawmakers have signed on to legislation that would form a 13-member commission to study slavery reparations at a cost of $12 million.

The Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act was reintroduced in the new session of Congress and now has 162 Democratic co-sponsors in the House and 17 Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate. The Senate version was introduced by New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker. The bill was first introduced by former Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers in 1989.

The legislation seeks to "address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery." The 13 colonies were under the control of Great Britain until the U.S. gained its independence in 1776.

Under the bill, the 13-member commission would be comprised of "persons who are especially qualified to serve on the commission by virtue of their education, training, activism or experience, particularly in the field of African American studies and reparatory justice."

According to the legislation, "seven members of the Commission shall constitute a quorum, but a lesser number may hold hearings."

The bill would require the commission to "recommend appropriate remedies in consideration" of its findings after studying reparations and the history of slavery.

"We want to isolate white supremacy," Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, the sponsor of the House bill, wrote Wednesday on Twitter. "White racism, domestic terrorism, we want to look at each other as our fellow bros/sisters, and as have been said to the ages, our fellow Americans, I want H.R. 40 to be in the minds and hearts about fellow Americans, pass it and signed @POTUS."

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties held a hearing on Thursday titled "H.R. 40: Exploring the Path to Reparative Justice in America."

During the hearing, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, connected the reparations committee bill to the Jan. 6 riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol.

"This moment of national reckoning comes at a time when our nation must find constructive ways to confront a rising tide of racial and ethnic division," Nadler said. "On January 6, we saw the ugly confluence of such divisions, as white nationalist groups appeared to be among those playing a central role in the violent assault on the United States Capitol. And, last summer, we saw an outpouring of protests stemming from the killings of unarmed Black people by police."

Nadler said he hopes the commission "can help us better comprehend our own history and bring us closer to racial understanding and advancement."

Utah Republican Rep. Burgess Owens, a member of the subcommittee, said he opposes establishing a reparations committee.

"Reparations are not the way to right our country's wrong," Owens said. "It is impractical and a nonstarter for the United States government to pay reparations. It is also unfair and heartless to give Black Americans the hope that this is a reality.

"The reality is that Black American history is not one of a hapless, hopeless race oppressed by a more powerful white race. It is instead a history of millions of middle and wealthy-class Black Americans throughout the early 20th century achieving the American dream."

The White House has said President Joe Biden supports the legislation that would set up the commission. Vice President Kamala Harris was a co-sponsor of the bill as a senator.

"He certainly would support a study of reparations," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at the White House press briefing on Wednesday. "He understands we don't need a study to take action right now on systemic racism, so he wants to take actions within his own government in the meantime."
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Coca-Cola Confirms Training Employees to ‘Be Less White’

February 20, 2021
by Kyle Becker

After a public relations fiasco, Coca-Cola has effectively conceded that some of its employees participated in a public LinkedIn Learning seminar that advocated that some of its employees be “less white.”

The training curriculum was first exposed on Friday by Dr. Karlyn Borysenko, an organizational psychologist who is working to end the racially divisive ideology of ‘critical race theory.’

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Since then, mainstream media and left-wing outlets had largely avoided the hot topic. However, Blaze Public Relations’ Chris Pandolfo obtained a statement from Coca-Cola that concedes its employees were told to take the seminar in question.

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“The video circulating on social media is from a publicly available LinkedIn Learning series and is not a focus of our company’s curriculum,” Coca-Cola responded.

“Our Better Together global learning curriculum is part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace.”

“It is comprised of a number of short vignettes, each a few minutes long. The training includes access to LinkedIn Learning on a variety of topics, including on diversity, equity, and inclusion. We will continue to refine this curriculum.”

It is important to note this wording concedes it happened. Furthermore, it is not “inclusive” to attack particular individuals’ racial background; that is, by definition, “exclusive.”

The LinkedIn Learning class, called “Confronting Racism, with Robin DiAngelo,” is administered online. DiAngelo, who has become famous for her infamous book “White Fragility,” has become somewhat of a celebrity by holding corporate struggle sessions on critical race theory. This has entailed charging up to $40,000 for half-day indoctrination courses to lecture audiences on the imagined perils of “whiteness” and “white fragility.

The prior description of the course included language that instructed people to be “less white.” We are not talking about a bug, but a feature of the lecture.

The course description said it will cover understanding what it means to be white,” and “challenging what it means to be racist.” Students were instructed “to be less white is to: be less oppressive; be less arrogant; be less certain; be less defensive; be less ignorant; be more humble; listen; believe; break with apathy;” and “break with white solidarity.”
Author and pundit Candace Owens reacted to the revelation:

“If a corporate company sent around a training kit instructing black people to ‘be less black’, the world would implode and lawsuits would follow,” Owens tweeted. “I genuinely hope these employees sue Coca-Cola for blatant racism and discrimination.”
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“Your job at Coca-Cola should not depend on whether or not you buy into the idea of being less white,” Borysenko remarked. “It should depend on whether or not you can go in and do your job.” The organizational psychologist also walked viewers through what it all means on a Youtube video.

Coca-Cola is undoubtedly not the only company that has tapped DiAngelo and similar speakers, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, to lead such trainings. Corporate social re-engineering efforts like diversity trainings are themselves big business. As the Free Beacon noted, “the Diversity and Inclusion business was thought to be worth $8 billion as of 2003; by 2005, 65 percent of big companies offered diversity training.”

Even more strikingly, the Free Beacon points out, there is little-to-no evidence that anti-bias trainings work:
A review of nearly 1,000 studies of anti-bias tools found little evidence that they have any impact. In fact, recent studies suggest anti-bias training’s primary effect may be to encourage discrimination: Firms with diversity training end up with fewer minorities in management, and field research finds that training both reinforces stereotypes and increases animosity against minority groups.
It may be that these “inclusion” seminars actually work the opposite of how they are intended: Instead of bringing people together, they raise awareness of our superficial differences and drive us further apart.
 

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marsh

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DHS: ‘Right-Wing Extremists’ Committed Most Deadly Terrorist Attacks Last Year

BY ROBERT SPENCER FEB 20, 2021 2:04 PM ET

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AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
In yet another story purporting to confirm the left’s view of the world, Jana Winter reported in Yahoo News Friday that “the U.S. government is acknowledging for the first time that right-wing extremists were responsible for the majority of fatal domestic terrorist attacks last year, according to an internal report circulated by the Department of Homeland Security last week.”

But as you might expect, it’s long on vague assertions and decidedly short on facts.

The report was produced by the Joint Regional Intelligence Center, which Winter describes as “a DHS-funded fusion center,” and was sent out to police nationwide. It claims that civil unrest and violence last year were primarily associated with “non-affiliated, right-wing and left-wing actors,” and that “right-wing [domestic violent extremists] were responsible for the majority of fatal attacks in the Homeland in 2020.”

That wretchedly written statement apparently says that most fatal attacks in the U.S. were perpetrated by both “right-wing and left-wing actors,” and yet “journalist” Winter and the “experts” she quotes all concentrate exclusively on the “right-wing extremism.” And to be sure, the report itself appears to be designed to give the impression that “right-wing extremism” is a genuine and major threat, while quietly admitting that there is a bit of violence on the left.

The Yahoo News report asserts that “this appears to be the first known instance of an official government or law enforcement agency clearly acknowledging the trend, though senior officials have noted the rise in white supremacist attacks.” It isn’t really all that new, however: FBI director Christopher Wray claimed back in September 2017 that “white nationalist” violence was at least as much of a danger to the United States as the Islamic State. But now this claim is being codified as policy. Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies states of the new report: “What is a little unusual is that they’ve used terms like ‘right- and left-wing’ in a government document, because the government has generally used other terms. The government in 2020 did try to stay away from ‘right-wing’ terms because they were easily politicized.”

No kidding. And you’ll never guess who is responsible for the fact that this alarming surge in “right-wing” terrorism hasn’t been noted until now: “The report also comes not long after the end of the Trump administration, which was criticized for downplaying right-wing violence.

Former President Donald Trump, in particular, frequently referred to the threat from antifa, a loose movement of left-wing activists.” Yes, and we all know how peaceful and cuddly Antifa is.

Making it very clear what the point of this report is, Mike German, whom Yahoo News identifies as a “former FBI agent and now a fellow at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice,” explains: “There is a lot of overlap between white supremacists and far-right militias, and they often work together during the commission of violent acts, like at the attack on the Capitol.”

However, before you sign on to the idea that support for Donald Trump equals support for “insurrection” and the enabling of terrorism, note that, as Yahoo News points out, “the government has released no data on historical activity or the current threat landscape.”

Apparently we’re just supposed to take their word for it.

Also conspicuously lacking in this report were definitions of the key terms. What does the government define as “right-wing”? What do they classify as “left-wing”? What do they define as a “terrorist attack”? The Joint Regional Intelligence Center report defines “terrorist incidents” as “violence motivated by political or religious conviction,” but offers no definitions of the other terms.

It does, however, attempt to excuse “left-wing” violence, claiming that that there was a “rarity of left-wing extremist attacks,” and that “increased response to right-wing activity motivated more left-wing violence in 2020 than in previous years.” Do the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots all over the country last summer get counted as terrorist attacks?

Given the irresponsible but no doubt calculated lack of definitions, this Joint Regional Intelligence Center report, and the Yahoo News story about it, appears to be one more attempt to portray peaceful, law-abiding Americans who supported President Trump and dissent from the leftist agenda as terrorists and as enablers of terrorism. One certainty of the regime of Biden’s handlers is that there will be a great deal more of this.

Meanwhile, while our agencies purvey this propaganda, the global jihad proceeds apace.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Neo-Marxism: Cultural Marxism, Postmodernism, and Identity Politics
February 20, 2021, 4:14 pm by Jason Brown Leave a Comment


POSTMODERNISM

I am only going to scratch the surface here because this is a deep subject. However, I think it is important to understand Marxist ideology and its evolution, when analyzing the current political climate, and where we stand today. Marxism refers to the world view and ideology of Karl Marx. I guess you could say he wrote the book on communism. The Communist Manifesto was published on February 21, 1848 in London, by a collection of German Socialists that were referred to as the Communist League. This work was written by Karl Marx, with the assistance of Friedrich Engels.

The Communist ideology was responsible for the death of more than 100 million people in the 20th Century alone. Communism destroys the very fabric of society and has always ended with a totalitarian state and murder of all dissenters. This ideology only works in theory. When everything is assembled and it is applied to the real world, the result is catastrophic. This idea is great on paper, but extremely dangerous in practice. Communism has never created the utopia that its advocates preach to the masses. Marxism acts as a social, political, and economic philosophy, that analyzes the effect that capitalism has on labor and productivity. Marx advocated for a workers’ revolution to end capitalism and adopt a communist government to assure fairness and equality for the working man. This social conflict pits the bourgeoisie, or capitalists, and the proletariat, or workers against each other in a struggle for power, or as communists like to call it, equality. In the end, it amounts to a struggle between the haves and the have nots. The circumstances in which the haves become the haves and the have nots become have nots, is irrelevant in this equation. The consensus among these Marxists is that every one person that is wealthy, acquired that wealth by depriving another of the same opportunity. This assumption is a generalization, and is baseless, with no empirical evidence to even suggest that this argument is true.

This social power struggle, was waged by what Vladimir Lenin used to refer to as, useful idiots, or those that fight for a cause that they do not fully understand. It was an oversimplification of the free market, that was sold to the useful idiots as, capitalism vs. the workers. All of the economic nuances that make the wheels of the market turn are ignored and the result is an irrational ideology that feeds on emotion, jealousy, and greed. The so called, workers, showed the same greed that they accused the capitalists of displaying. The difference here is that the have nots, want more without putting in the time or work to earn more.

By the end of the 1960’s, Marx’s communism became a harder sell, as time after time, country after country, this ideology had failed miserably and led to mass genocide. You could not push Marxism out there and continue to promote it because it had been an abject failure every time there was an attempt to implement it. The utopia that communism promises does not exist, and has never existed. This struggle for power had to be repackaged and rebranded. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), was a Algerian-born French philosopher that is best known for a method of analysis referred to as deconstruction. Deconstruction is a type of analysis that examines the relationship between text and meaning. This suggests that metaphysical constructs, meanings, and societal hierarchies are unstable due to a reliance on arbitrary means of identification. In other words, there is a near infinite number of ways to interpret the world as we see it. One’s perception of what they see or experience, coupled with their personal world view, affects how they interpret the world.

This concept of deconstruction was then used as the basis for the development of postmodernism. Postmodernism puts forth a strategic blueprint for destabilization of what we consider societal norms. Examples of these affected norms are identity, historical progress, and epistemic certainty. In 1979, postmodernism was deemed a legitimate branch of philosophy.

Derrida’s postmodernism refers to man’s tendency to reward those with particular traits/status, at the detriment of others that do not meet the established criteria. This is key to his argument here, and this is the component of postmodernism that creates the victim class that we see today. This victim class is used to push identity politics to the masses, in the form of gender, sexual orientation, race, political affiliation, etc. This is how they have divided us. This is the most potent weapon that is being used against the American people. These ideological groups, that force the masses into a tribal mentality has become commonplace in modern society?

Postmodernism has completely consumed the Social Sciences as they exist in academia today.

Postmodernism is much more versatile than its core ideological roots that existed in Marxism due to the fact that the points of conflict increase exponentially. Instead of the bourgeoisie vs the proletariat, we now have race vs sexual orientation vs ethnicity vs socioeconomic status vs gender identity, the list goes on. All of these groups, vying for power and influence over the others. This proves to be counterproductive at best, a complete disaster at worst. Why, because these groups or tribes that people choose to follow are social constructs, created by those that seek to divide us, and conquer us. A population at war with each other does not have the time, energy, or will to resist tyranny. But in reality, this tribal mentality creates victims, and victimhood that is based solely on a straw man is detrimental to the development of the individual. Postmodernism is similar to Marx’s communism because it encourages collectivism where everyone gets a trophy.

All of this based on the perceived concept of equity. Equity refers to equal outcome, or in other words everyone gets an equal size piece of the pie. Individuality means equal opportunity, meaning the harder you work and the more effort you put in, the larger your piece of pie. Creating a victim class of people might be good for carving out a permanent voter bloc, but it demeans those that are led to believe that they are being victimized as it destroys incentive and makes them want to either settle or take from others.

We are seeing this right now with Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa. BLM is calling for reparations and some in the group have called recent looting of private businesses, reparations, in order to justify this lawlessness. But in reality, BLM is an organization founded by self-professed Marxists, and is acting more like a group of revolutionaries looking to overthrow the US government, than a group that fights for racial justice. It is also ironic that the crowds made up of these communist revolutionaries seem to be made up of mostly white millennials. The so called, anti-fascists or Antifa go around torching private businesses, firebombing federal buildings, and burning books. I think maybe these people should look up the definition of fascism, and then for a practical understanding of what a fascist is, stand in front of a mirror.

These groups say that they are being oppressed, they want change, but they have never seen the other side of the coin. The Marxism that had to be abandoned in the 70’s has been resurrected, as for decades now academia has taught our youth that Marx and communism is favorable to our system that we live in now. All while ignoring the millions that were murdered by communist regimes operating under Marx’s ideology. Academia is indoctrinating our children, and these indoctrination camps that we like to call universities have paved the way for a resurgence of Marxism and the collectivist mentality. It is still multifaceted making it postmodernism in its application, but the terms Marxism and communism have become cool again, and young people are not shy about using it to describe themselves. We have a generation of useful idiots, and this group of sheep are ignorant because we have allowed academia to make them ignorant.

As mentioned previously, our young people are being engineered to act as political activists, in support of an anti-American, anti-capitalist, authoritarian narrative. This is why you see the attempt to eliminate God from the minds of people as these influential institutions need to make faith a thing of the past so that their influence reaches god status. Without God, bad actors with an intent to rob us of our liberty, have full authority. Communism within a society cannot coexist with the peoples’ belief and trust in God. The idea that every interpretation and every viewpoint is 100% viable is being taught to young people, and we have already lost at least one generation to this twisted view. I am not suggesting that one should be prevented from offering their viewpoint or interpretation, as it is our right as Americans to speak our mind, without fear of persecution. But if someone looks at an apple, and tries to claim that it is a banana, we should not entertain the notion that the apple is a banana, just to avoid hurting the feelings of the person making the statement. Facts are not societal constructs, they are facts. Allowing people to fabricate their own facts and reality is dangerous. It is much more dangerous than hurting someone’s feelings.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

McDonald's Executives Will Have Bonuses Cut if They Hire Too Many White Men for Top Positions

By Jack Davis
Published February 20, 2021 at 11:40am

Race and gender in hiring are two keys to financial success for top McDonald’s executives, according to the company as it sets its course for the future.

A press release on the McDonald’s website says that part of the bonuses awarded to top company executives will be based upon their efforts to hire women and what the company terms “historically underrepresented groups” for top corporate positions.

“Beginning in 2021, the Company is incorporating quantitative human capital management-related metrics to annual incentive compensation for its Executive Vice Presidents,” the company said.

“In addition to the Company’s financial performance, executives will be measured on their ability to champion our core values, improve representation within leadership roles for both women and historically underrepresented groups, and create a strong culture of inclusion within the Company,” the company said.

The company has clear goals. By the end of 2025, 35 percent of the people in jobs that are at the level of senior director and above will be from underrepresented groups. That metric was at 29 percent in 2020, according to the company.

As for women, the company has set a target of having 45 percent of jobs at the level of senior director and above be women. That number was 37 percent as of 2020, according to the company.

They said that by 2030, it will be seeking to achieve full gender parity.

In its reporting, the Washington Examiner said up to 15 percent of a bonus will be tied to these targets.

In addition to measuring how many of the target groups get into top jobs, the company has also created what it calls an “Inclusion Index” to measure how well it does in its mission of diversity.

The index “has been designed to measure the critical components of building an inclusive culture – including whether our employees feel that they can bring their ‘whole’ selves to work and have equal opportunities. This survey measure is provided to all of our Global Staff employees from our Corporate Office, U.S. and International markets. McDonald’s aims to measure inclusion every six months to monitor our progress and identify areas of opportunity,” the company said.

The company’s diversity website notes that in America, 70 percent of those hired in 2019 were women (54 percent) or minorities (33 percent).

The company was even more focused on non-white, non-male applicants through its University program in 2019–2020, with 81 percent of those admitted being women or minorities.
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Some questioned the program, with Celine Ryan, writing in HumanEvents.com, calling the new plan “McQuotas.”

“But even those who place value in the concepts of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ have repeatedly pointed out that these types of hiring quotas are misguided at best, and empty performances at worst, with unintended negative consequences,” Ryan wrote.

She is not alone in questioning quotas.

“Quotas may be a quick fix to boosting female representation on boards, but they do nothing in and of themselves to remove barriers preventing many women from rising up the corporate ladder in the first place. We are in need of a broader, more comprehensive approach,” Moelis & Company Vice-Chairman and Managing Director Eric Cantor wrote in 2020.

“Ultimately, to achieve greater gender diversity in leadership, company leadership must focus on the entirety of their talent pipeline, recognizing the problems are likely different at each rung of the ladder,” he wrote. “Although this approach is harder than the quick fix of a quota, there is little doubt that it is more likely to result in success both for the cause of diversity and for the cause of improving business performance.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Dr. Carol Swain: The Left Sees Western Civilization as Dangerous
February 19, 2021 by Staff

Rumble video on website 1:45 min

Dr. Carol Swain: The Left Sees Western Civilization as Dangerous
February 19, 2021 by Staff

Dr. Carol Swain, vice chairman of President Trump’s now-disbanded 1776 commission and former professor at Vanderbilt University, reacts to woke culture run amok in academia, which now has William Shakespeare in its gunsights.

“The political Left believes that anything associated with Western civilization is dangerous,” Swain told Stephen K. Bannon.

Swain traces the modern day cultural Marxism to the 1960s, noting that the Left has already destroyed higher education with its radical agenda. Now, K-12 education is being targeted, as globalists and cultural Marxists attempt to rewrite history and undermine the Judeo-Christian mores on which the United States was founded.

She argues that corporations are fueling the destruction of education as we know it, and widening the disparity between children of privilege and working-class children, who will no longer gain exposure to the great books.

“Education is the civil-rights issue of our generation.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wobaAa0mG8
32:38 min
Democrats And Media Advocate For Executing Republicans And Treating The GOP As Enemy Combatants

•Feb 19, 2021


Tim Pool


Democrats And Media Advocate For Executing Republicans And Treating The GOP As Enemy Combatants. The Website The Root is one of the top leftist publications on Facebook and the people interviewed are Democratic politicians and MSNBC personalities. The statements made against Republicans and Trump are so insane and absurd it makes me question whether these people are mentally fit. But its just another escalation we have seen before. Previously MSNBC personality Nicole Wallace advocated drone strikes against republicans and American citizens
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
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Coca Cola Confirms Training Employees To "Try To Be Less White"

MONDAY, FEB 22, 2021 - 12:06
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,


Is Coca Cola sponsoring racism? That's the claim. You be the judge.

‘Try To Be Less White’

When I first saw this story I was highly skeptical.

However, the training course is available online and Coca Cola is doing its best to try to back down from the course.
I walk through the images in this video: Shocking images show Coca-Cola is training employees to "try to be less white"
— Karlyn supports banning critical race theory in NH (@DrKarlynB) February 19, 2021
Here's the course Confronting Racism, with Robin DiAngelo
In this course, Robin DiAngelo, the best-selling author of White Fragility, gives you the vocabulary and practices you need to start confronting racism and unconscious bias at the individual level and throughout your organization. There’s no magic recipe for building an inclusive workplace. It’s a process that needs to involve people of color, and that needs to go on for as long as your company’s in business.
The free into above does not show the ending slide "Try to be less white" but what you can see is galling enough.

The video Tweet by @DrKarlynB shows more of the damning slides.

Coca-Cola Whitewash
Backlash

Late Sunday evening NewsWeek reported Coca-Cola, Facing Backlash, Says 'Be Less White' Learning Plan Was About Workplace Inclusion

Coca-Cola, facing mounting backlash from conservatives online, has responded to allegations of anti-white rhetoric after an internal whistleblower leaked screenshots of diversity training materials that encourages staff to "try to be less white."
A Coca-Cola spokesperson confirmed that the course is "part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace," but also noted that "the video circulating on social media is from a publicly available LinkedIn Learning series and is not a focus of our company's curriculum."
Coca-Cola Logo
The Coca-Cola logo is on training snapshots in the video Tweet.

If Coca-Cola did not authorize and pay for the the training, the slides would not have their logo, Karlyn would be in deep legal trouble, and Twitter would have removed the Tweet.
Who in the hell is reviewing their training materials?

Candance Owens

Best selling author Candance Owens had this to say.
If a corporate company sent around a training kit instructing black people how to “be less black”, the world would implode and lawsuits would follow.

I genuinely hope these employees sue @CocaCola for blatant racism and discrimination. https://t.co/07OPZouEcV
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) February 19, 2021
Owens is Founder of the @BLEXIT organization. "Black people don’t have to be Democrats— still."
Kendall Jenner launched a tequila brand this week and faced immediate, vicious backlash for culturally appropriating Mexicans.

I honestly can’t comprehend how stupid and unbearable American woke-society is becoming.
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) February 18, 2021
Coke Is Racist
Try to be less black.
Try to be less Asian.
Try to be less Indigenous.

Can we say that? No?

Then why can Coca Cola tell their staff to be less white?#cokeisracist
— J.P. Luisi (@JPLuisi1) February 21, 2021
My thanks to Coca-Cola for finally giving me the reason to quit drinking Diet Coke - which for health reasons you should not be drinking anyway.#CokeIsRacist pic.twitter.com/hBeYX5jwnj
— Tom Quiggin (@TomTSEC) February 21, 2021
The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Salon, and Washington Post have no coverage of this.

All the top sites plus Coca-Cola all want to sweep this under the rug.

Why Trump Nearly Won

Please recall Politically Correct Educators Vote to Rename 44 SF Schools Including Washington and Lincoln

Also note The Dumbing Down of America is Poised to Accelerate.

If you are looking for a reason why millions of people voted for Trump, look no further.
I intended to do a post on why Trump nearly won but this post will suffice.

Every bit of this is a complete outrage. It is why Trump won in 2016. Had he toned things down a bit in 2020 he probably would have been reelected.
 

Housecarl

On TB every waking moment
print-icon

Coca Cola Confirms Training Employees To "Try To Be Less White"

MONDAY, FEB 22, 2021 - 12:06
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,


Is Coca Cola sponsoring racism? That's the claim. You be the judge.

‘Try To Be Less White’

When I first saw this story I was highly skeptical.

However, the training course is available online and Coca Cola is doing its best to try to back down from the course.

Here's the course Confronting Racism, with Robin DiAngelo

The free into above does not show the ending slide "Try to be less white" but what you can see is galling enough.

The video Tweet by @DrKarlynB shows more of the damning slides.

Coca-Cola Whitewash

Backlash


Late Sunday evening NewsWeek reported Coca-Cola, Facing Backlash, Says 'Be Less White' Learning Plan Was About Workplace Inclusion



Coca-Cola Logo
The Coca-Cola logo is on training snapshots in the video Tweet.

If Coca-Cola did not authorize and pay for the the training, the slides would not have their logo, Karlyn would be in deep legal trouble, and Twitter would have removed the Tweet.
Who in the hell is reviewing their training materials?

Candance Owens

Best selling author Candance Owens had this to say.

Owens is Founder of the @BLEXIT organization. "Black people don’t have to be Democrats— still."

Coke Is Racist


The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Salon, and Washington Post have no coverage of this.

All the top sites plus Coca-Cola all want to sweep this under the rug.

Why Trump Nearly Won

Please recall Politically Correct Educators Vote to Rename 44 SF Schools Including Washington and Lincoln

Also note The Dumbing Down of America is Poised to Accelerate.

If you are looking for a reason why millions of people voted for Trump, look no further.
I intended to do a post on why Trump nearly won but this post will suffice.

Every bit of this is a complete outrage. It is why Trump won in 2016. Had he toned things down a bit in 2020 he probably would have been reelected.

And the pendulum gets raised a further notch.....
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Years ago, the social services and education providers in my prior county (public and private,) went through a series of trainings (Bridges Out of Poverty - Ruby Payne, PhD.) The premise was that generational poverty came with a set of "environmentally" formed rules of behavior, language constructs and worldview that help the individual and families survive. The barrier to middle class transition is understanding the hidden rules under which the class operates.

It occurred to me that the middle class rules, such as orientation for achievement, (envisioning future self, goal setting, planning, working toward goal, delayed gratification, formal language,) are many of the same qualities of "whiteness" that are being attacked under critical race theory.

I can't help but feel that this whole thing is an attack on the middle class to transition to a two class system.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73MUgTRZdZg
2:02 MIN
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f1qEKdUE2M
2:127:10 min
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-C9vrLQ9zM
1:01:56 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

WATCH: Farage Slams Coca-Cola for Alleged ‘Try to Be Less White’ Staff Training

JACK MONTGOMERY21 Feb 20212,062

Brexit champion Nigel Farage has slammed Coca-Cola for allegedly requiring staff to take training urging them to “be less white”.

Slides from the LinkedIn-based training originally circulated on social media after being shared by psychologist Karlyn Borysenko.

One explains that “To be less white is to: be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be less ignorant, be more humble, listen, believe, break with apathy, break with white solidarity.” Another simply urges the view: “Try to be less white.”

Responding to the scandal on his YouTube channel, Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage lamented that he had thought progress was being made against the “Black Lives Matter madness”, but that the Coca-Cola revelations were another example of the corporate world having “lost its marbles” as a result of the movement.

“So, to be less white means you’ll be less arrogant, less ignorant — I mean, the list goes on: ‘try to be less white’,” he said.

“And the inference here is clear, isn’t it? That white is bad; white means supremacist; white means you look down your noses at everybody else; white means you are guilty!” he continued.
“And this is what Coca-Cola is foisting upon their employees in the USA?” he asked, expressing his hope that it would not “cross the Atlantic”.

“Until we have more people, far more people, in British politics and British media unafraid to stand up and tell the truth, unafraid of the extreme left screaming ‘racist!’ at them, event though they know themselves that that would not be true, until we do this, I fear we continue down this route,” Farage warned.

“And what is telling white people they are guilty and bad, what is that doing?” he asked.
“Do you think it means that white people who are exposed to this suddenly think: ‘Ah, yes! I must become a better person; I must make sure I exhibit within myself no prejudice towards anybody.’ Or does it actually make white people really, really angry, and actually make them feel that society is now more divided than ever?”

The former UKIP supremo suggested that the inheritors of Martin Luther King’s campaign for “justice, fairness, and equality” no longer want people to be judged purely on “character, honesty, integrity, intelligence — no, they want us all to be divided up into different groups, different groups based on race, gender, and sexuality”.

“[W]hen we are confronted with this nonsense, when we are told we must atone for the past, we must confess our guilty simply because we’re white, or any other colour, or any other faith, we’ve just gotta say ‘enough is enough’,” he insisted.

Coca-Cola, for its part, has been careful to avoid denying that the “try to be less white” presentation is a compulsory part of training for any of its staff, but it has claimed it is “not a focus of our company’s curriculum”.

“Our Better Together global learning curriculum is part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace. It is comprised of a number of short vignettes, each a few minutes long. The training includes access to LinkedIn Learning on a variety of topics, including on diversity, equity, and inclusion,” they said in a statement, adding that they would “continue to refine this curriculum.”

Last month, the fizzy drinks corporation announced it would be requiring a quota of “diverse attorneys” from law firms doing work for it, with fees for firms that fail to meet its targets having their fees docked by 30 per cent.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

U.N. Chief Guterres Warns ‘White Supremacy’ Is a ‘Transnational Threat,’
447
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres looks on at the opening of the UN Human Rights Council's main annual session on February 24, 2020 in Geneva. - The UN's secretary general launched a call to action on Monday against rising attacks on human rights worldwide, highlighting the persecution of minorities and alarming …
FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty
SIMON KENT22 Feb 20212,555

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Monday the combination of “white supremacy” and neo-Nazi movements makes for a “transnational threat” through their manipulation of the responses to the global coronavirus pandemic.

Reuters reports Guterres, a former Socialist Party prime minister in his native Portugal, used an address to the U.N. Human Rights Council to call for a global coordinated crackdown:
“White supremacy and neo-Nazi movements are more than domestic terror threats,” the veteran left-wing diplomat said. “They are becoming a transnational threat. Today, these extremist movements represent the number one internal security threat in several countries.”

Without offering any examples of countries he believes are facing this exisential threat, Guterres called for international action to defeat the dangers as part of his long-standing commitment to “more robust global governance.”
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“Far too often, these hate groups are cheered on by people in positions of responsibility in ways that were considered unimaginable not long ago,” Guterres said. “We need global coordinated action to defeat this grave and growing danger.”

Guterres pointed to governments and health authorities who used “heavy-handed security responses and emergency measures to crush dissent.”

“At times, access to life-saving COVID-19 information has been concealed – while deadly misinformation has been amplified – including by those in power,” he said.

Guterres warned about the power of digital platforms and the use and abuse of data.

“I urge all Member States to place human rights at the centre of regulatory frameworks and legislation on the development and use of digital technologies,” he said. “We need a safe, equitable and open digital future that does not infringe on privacy or dignity.”

This is not the first time Guterres has used the backdrop of international turmoil to offer commentary on world affairs.

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As Breitbart News reported, last year he said the world needs an overarching level of multilateral governance that can sideline problematic “national interests.”

He claimed in the 21st century, governments are no longer the only political and power reality, adding “we need an effective multilateralism that can function as an instrument of global governance where it is needed.”

Guterres was prime minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002 and secretary-general of the Portuguese Socialist Party from 1992 to 2002.

The 72-year-old career politician served as president of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005 before moving on to the United Nations.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Has Government Grown Beyond The Consent Of The Governed?

February 21, 2021
By
Michael Schmidt

“Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.”
~ Ronald Reagan
Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan spoke passionately and eloquently at his first Inaugural address about the size of government. A large part of his speech that day was a genuine concern about an out-of-control federal government and how his new administration would work to reduce that growth and decrease regulations. As much as Reagan did during the 1980’s to try and rein in government and allow for more personal independence to live life as each individual saw fit we have seen government balloon to an even more expansive behemoth.

America is at a critical point in history. This republic, as it currently stands, sits at a precipice. With a $30 trillion national debt that continues to grow at an alarming rate, with no end in sight, and a new Biden administration eager to grow government bureaucracy and spend like drunken sailors, we must ask some serious questions.

Has government grown beyond the consent of the governed? How much government does a nation need? What percentage of the population believes that more government is the answer to all that ails us? These questions require us to engage in critical discussions as a country to decide our fate. Failing to have a rational conversation about the size and scope of government only increases our odds of destroying America.

Our Founding Fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to escape from the tyranny of an overgrown government bureaucracy and create a constitutional representative republic. They intended for limited government that allowed people to live their own lives freely without government bureaucracy restricting their ability to earn a living. The federal government was limited in the powers it had. States were given the primary power to run their governments as they saw fit.

Over time the federal government has grown. Under FDR and the New Deal, government bureaucracy ballooned in an effort to put people to work and address the economic hardships brought on by the Great Depression. This was a real shift towards big central government planning and a diminishing of the self-governing independence our republic had been built on.

Then as the 1960’s unfolded, LBJ and “The Great Society” programs added another layer of increasing government bureaucracy. It created such programs as Medicare and Medicaid and greatly increased entitlement spending and social programs to combat poverty and racial injustice. It made the food stamp program permanent and created more federal agencies and bureaucracy. As history shows us, when new government programs and agencies are established, they never sunset and go away. They continue to grow and need to be fed more taxpayer money.

The 1970’s brought more government bureaucracy and created new agencies such as OSHA, the EPA, and a new Department of Education. The Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002, combining 22 different federal departments and agencies into a unified and integrated cabinet agency. The list goes on and on. More government bureaucracy with more taxpayer money needed to run Washington D.C.

Have the American people grown increasingly weary of this bloated federal government? A recent Rasmussen Reports polling survey conducted back in November of 2020 seems to indicate they have indeed. It found that 59% of Likely U.S. Voters agree with Reagan’s Inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Just 27% disagreed and 14% were undecided. Noteworthy, that is the highest level of agreement on that question since Rasmussen Reports started asking it back in 2008. What’s even more interesting is that even 50% of Democrats agree with Reagan’s statement. The percentages are higher for those unaffiliated with a party (58%) and Republicans (70%).

In another polling survey conducted by Gallup, they asked Americans if the federal government had too much power, the right amount, or too little. The most recent data was back in September of 2019 and found 56% of the respondents felt the federal government had too much power compared to 38% who felt it was about the right amount. A year earlier that percentage was 53%. Since 2005, the percentage of Americans who say the federal government has too much power has been at 50% or higher. So clearly, a majority of the American people have at least a sense that government has grown too expansive.

Has government grown beyond the consent of the governed? The argument can be made it most definitely has. While there is a percentage of Americans who believe that government is the solution to all of our problems there seems to be enough people still of the belief that too much government is a problem that needs to be addressed.

This shouldn’t be a right or left issue. This should be a genuine concern no matter what your political views may be. As government expands, freedom and liberty continues to contract. We have seen this truth play out over the last several decades of our republic.

The time to rein in government is now front and center. The American people need to have an open and honest conversation about the continued growth of government. It’s time for the governed to reassert their role as the boss. If Americans truly value their independence and self-reliance then it is imperative to alter this course we are on. Failure to do our due diligence will ultimately result in the loss of our constitutional republic and place us back in the chains of tyranny.
“A free people cannot shift their responsibility for them to the government. Self-government means self-reliance.”
~ Calvin Coolidge
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Corporations Increasingly Pushing Racial Equity Policies, Quotas
February 21, 2021
McDonalds-Coca-Cola.jpg

b3e488da3c873c6e448bc174beccb2cf

Written by Jonathan Davis
OPINION
This article contains commentary which reflects the author's opinion

American corporations are increasingly pushing left-wing critical race theory at the expense of white workers, though the trend shows no signs of slowing

This week, for instance, the Coca-Cola Company was ripped online over a required training program that encourages its Caucasian workforce “to be less white.”

The program appears to mimic so-called “Critical Race Theory” instruction which promotes the belief that American jurisprudence and institutions are inherently racist against people of color.

1614030660376.png

Screenshots of the training program were posted online by psychologist and activist Karlyn Borysenko.

According to the screenshots, one panel says, “To be less white is to:

— be less oppressive
— be less arrogant
— be less certain
— be less defensive

— be more humble
— listen
— break with apathy
— break with white solidarity

Another simply says: “Try to be less white.”

Yet another claims, “In the U.S. and other Western nations, white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white. Research shows that by age 3 to 4, children understand that it is better to be white.”

The materials have been traced back to a Linkedin Learning course called “Confronting Racism,” which is taught by Robin DeAngelo, a left-wing radical believer in the critical race theory who created the highly criticized manifesto “White Fragility.”

For its part, Coca-Cola didn’t come out and deny anything outright but did issue a somewhat vague explainer.

“The video circulating on social media is from a publicly available LinkedIn Learning series and is not a focus of our company’s curriculum. Our Better Together global learning curriculum is part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace,” the statement says.
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“It is comprised of a number of short vignettes, each a few minutes long. The training includes access to LinkedIn Learning on a variety of topics, including on diversity, equity, and inclusion. We will continue to refine this curriculum,” the statement continued.

The course and the beverage company both were ripped online including by author, conservative activist, and co-founder of the “Blexit” movement, Candace Owens.

“If a corporate company sent around a training kit instructing black people how to ‘be less black’, the world would implode and lawsuits would follow. I genuinely hope these employees sue @CocaCola for blatant racism and discrimination,” she wrote.

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Meanwhile, McDonald’s executives were warned by corporate bosses this week they would lose part of their bonuses if they failed to put more minorities in positions of senior leadership.

“We’re implementing policies that hold our leaders directly accountable for making tangible progress on our [diversity, equity, and inclusion] goals,” McDonald’s Corp. noted in a press release titled “Allyship through Accountability.”

The corporation says it wants to achieve “gender parity” by 2030 and that it “expects to increase representation of historically underrepresented groups in leadership roles (Senior Director and above) located in the U.S. to 35%” and “to increase representation of women in leadership roles globally (Senior Director and above) to 45%” by 2025.

Those figures currently are at 29 percent and 37 percent, respectively.

The corporation further noted that 15 percent of bonuses for senior executive vice presidents will be tied to “quantitative human capital management-related metrics.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvFcrzrOYHE
10:30 min
Coca-Cola WHISTLEBLOWER reveals training on how to be 'LESS WHITE'

•Feb 22, 2021


Glenn Beck


Organizational Psychologist Dr. Karlyn Borysenko joins Glenn to discuss the damning materials sent to her last week from a whistleblower within The Coca-Cola Company. The employee, who Dr. Borysenko points out is NOT white, felt so uncomfortable with the diversity training (read: critical race theory training) circulated by the company that he/she decided to share it with the rest of the world. Listen for yourself, but Glenn argues that this material IS racist.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

How to Fight Back Against Racist Attacks on White Americans

By Larry Johnson
Published February 22, 2021 at 8:43pm
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Looks like Jim Hoft’s piece from Sunday (Sounds Racist: McDonald’s Will Punish Executives if They Hire Too Many White Men) is not an isolated example of a new form of corporate racism. Gone to hell is Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of seeing people judged by the content of their heart and their conduct rather than by the color of their skin. That dream is now as dead as Dr. King. Instead, we have a real nightmare of actual racism. People of European and Russian descent are now, by definition, racists. Why? Because of the color of their skin.

The latest corporation being exposed for trafficking in this racist crap is Coca Cola. TGP’s Cristina Laila reported this a few days back:
Coca-Cola, facing mounting backlash from conservatives online, has responded to allegations of anti-white rhetoric after an internal whistleblower leaked screenshots of diversity training materials that encourages staff to “try to be less white.”
A Coca-Cola spokesperson confirmed that the course is “part of a learning plan to help build an inclusive workplace,” but also noted that “the video circulating on social media is from a publicly available LinkedIn Learning series and is not a focus of our company’s curriculum.”
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For starters, so-called “White” people ain’t white. My skin is pinkish to light brown. I will no longer check any box that requires me to identify as “White”. I will choose other. I encourage you to do the same. Start fighting back.

Are Asians considered white? Just because their skin color is the same as mine in many cases, Asians get the luxury of being classified as a separate race. Coca Cola is making a damned stupid decision. As of today, me and my family will no longer purchase any products from Coca Cola (and we’ve been steady customers imbibing Coke Zero).

We need to punish financially McDonalds and Coca Cola and any other corporation that wants to drag us into this filthy ideology of judging people by their skin color. This is now a metaphorical war that must be waged with dollars and credit cards.

But this is not the worst of it. If you are military, especially former military, or law enforcement, you too are a racist and must be eliminated (See Jim Hoft’s piece, Ignored by Media: Dirtbag Joe Biden Says US Veterans and Former Police Officers Are Fueling White Supremacism in America. Joe Biden minced no words on this subject when he blurted out the following at the CNN Townhall:
“And you see what’s happening — and the studies that are beginning to be done, maybe at your university as well — about the impact of former military, former police officers, on the growth of white supremacy in some of these groups,” the President said.
It was the military, under President Truman’s leadership, that made the first moves to erase the legacy of genuine racism. Now, especially if your son or daughter hails from a Southern state, the military leadership is succumbing to pressure to focus on the color of skin rather than the competence to carry out military tasks.

I endorse the words of Kurt Schlichter, who writes at Townhall:
It gives me no pleasure to say that I no longer recommend that young people join the military, and I’m not alone. The non-Blue Falcon veteran community is in full revolt against the conscious decision to decline embraced by our current military leadership. After failing to win a war in the last 20 years – and don’t say Syria, because the second President * woke up in the Oval Office wondering how he got there, more of our troops were heading back into the hellscape for reasons no one has bothered to articulate – the military has decided to target an easier enemy, i.e., other Americans.
See, the problem with me and the other vets who are disgusted by the brass’s choice to focus on SJW priorities instead of, you know, successfully deterring or defeating America’s enemies, is that we actually listened to what we were taught when we were coming up. Most of us were trained by the heroes who put the shattered American military together after the Democrat war in Vietnam broke it. We learned about leadership, about putting mission first but taking care of people always, and about objectives and how to attain them.
None of that’s a thing anymore.
White liberals are pushing this garbage to eviscerate our military forces and are quite open about going after the very people who have fought, served and, in far too many cases, were maimed physically and mentally. Most of the liberal elites and their spawn have no time for such service. That burden has fallen on the backs of men and women who come from the lower and middle economic class in our society. Now these wealthy scum want to punish you for wanting to put America first and for wanting to fight to preserve a society based on equal justice for all.

They want America on her knees and Joe Biden, along with his Democrat and leftist hordes, backed by prominent RINOs, will stop at nothing to intimidate you and try to compel you to accept without complaint that you, because of the color of your skin, are a racist.

No. I will not give in and I encourage you to keep score, remember who embraces this kind of toxic prejudice and fight back. Do not send your children off to fight wars for this sick class of effete Social Justice Warriors. Do not spend your money on products pushed by corporations that embrace this racist nonsense. You have the power to make a difference. Please understand this is now a fight to preserve the soul of the American Republic.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

“We’re Really Moving Into a Coup Situation, a Police State Situation” – Ex-Bill Clinton Advisor and Author Naomi Wolf Warns of Totalitarian State Under Biden (Video)

By Joe Hoft
Published February 23, 2021 at 7:30am
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Former advisor to Bill Clinton and author, Naomi Wolf, was on Tucker Carlson’s Show on FOX News on Monday night. Naomi warned that under Biden America was becoming a ‘totalitarian state before our eyes’.

Of course, this is true, and even a Bill Clinton advisor can see it. Wolf shared:
I’ve been writing for months and months about what I see as the terrible crisis that we’re in, that we have to recognize under the guise of a real medical pandemic. We’re really moving into a coup situation, a police state situation and that’s not a partison thing, that’s, as you say, that transcends everything you and I might agree or disagree on that should bring together left and right to protect or Constitution. We’re absolutely moving into what I call step 10.
I wrote a book in which I pointed out there were 10 steps that would-be tyrants always take when they want to close down a democracy. Whether they’re on the left or the right they always do the same 10 things and now we’re at something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. You described it really, really well. It is step 10 and that’s the suspension of the rule of law, that’s when you start to be a police state and we’re here, there’s no way around it.

Video on website 6.14 min
The window of time here is short. The Democrats and their elites just stole an election. Before that, they stole many jobs and businesses and our rights. Now they want our liberty, our country, and our lives.

Sheriff Lopez and the Commissioners of Mercer County, Jerry Allen, Shane Grooms and Zachary Martin, signed into effect the “Mercer County Missouri Second Amendment Preservation Act”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

DOD Chief Lloyd Austin Asks Troops to Share Experiences of Extremists, Extremist Ideology
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Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin speaks during a visit by US President Joe Biden to the Pentagon in Washington, DC, February 10, 2021. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
KRISTINA WONG23 Feb 20211,671

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a video message Friday asking members of the military to tell commanders of any personal experiences with extremists or extremist ideology.
Austin began by praising members of the military.

“There’s not a single doubt in my mind that you take seriously your oath to the Constitution.

And that you serve this country with honor and dignity, and character. And that you believe in and uphold our core values each and everyday,” he said.

He then acknowledged the sacrifices military members and their families make, and said his 60-day stand down to address extremism in the military may seem like another “burden.”

“But the truth of the matter is, we need your help. I’m talking of course about extremism and extremist ideology. Views and conduct that run counter to everything that we believe in. And which can actually tear at the fabric of who we are as an institution,” he said.

He said extremist ideology can spread faster and wider thanks to social media and “aggressive and organized and emboldened attitude that many of these hate groups and their sympathizers are now applying to their recruitment and their operations.”

Austin asked members of the military to revisit the oath they took when they joined the military, consider “what they really mean,” and “think about the promise” they made.
He then asked military members to share stories with their commanders of extremists and extremist ideology.
I also want you to share with your leadership your own personal experiences with encountering extremists and extremist ideology in the military, should you have any. And I want your leadership to listen to those stories and I want them to listen to any ideas that you might have to help us stamp out of the ranks the dangerous conduct that this ideology inspires.
“Thank you for helping us get smarter about dealing with this very important readiness issue,” he said.

Austin, in one of his first acts as defense secretary, ordered a 60-day stand down to address extremism in the military — a period during which commanders take at least one day to discuss the issue with their troops.

The Pentagon has struggled to provide any statistics on how big an extremist problem there is in the military, saying it does not comprehensively track cases.

Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said Monday the video would be used along with other training materials to “facilitate a good change of ideas as commands work through their stand downs.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Ayanna Pressley: Federal Job Guarantee ‘Lays the Foundation for Economic Justice’
50
Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., speaks at a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 4, 2021, about plans to reintroduce a resolution to call on President Joe Biden to take executive action to cancel up to $50,000 in debt for federal student loan borrowers. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
HANNAH BLEAU23 Feb 2021378

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) is calling for a federal job guarantee, contending it “lays the foundation for economic justice & freedom.”

“A reliable job. A living wage. A federal job guarantee lays the foundation for economic justice & freedom,” Pressley said on Monday, adding it is “about developing programs that meet long neglected needs in our community”:

Pressley introduced the resolution last week, which would “provide every person with an enforceable legal right to a quality job,” per her office. The program, funded by the federal government, would see the federal government work with communities to provide “public jobs for all adults seeking employment.”

Pressley’s office described the proposal as a means to achieve “true full employment” while simultaneously reducing “racial and gender inequities”:
By ensuring everyone has access to a good job with dignified wages, safe working conditions, health care and other benefits—including full worker rights and union protections—a federal job guarantee would address the current jobs crisis while laying the foundation for an equitable economic recovery. It would also set a new standard for quality jobs, pressuring low-wage employers to increase wages and benefits. It would create a pathway to stable employment and begin to close the gaping income and wealth gap for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous workers who continue to face discrimination and are often the “first ones fired, last ones hired” during economic crises. It would also ensure economic inclusion for those experiencing discrimination in the labor market, including people with disabilities, transgender people, caregivers, and people with criminal records or involvement with the criminal legal system. By hiring workers in the midst of a downturn, a permanent job guarantee would operate as an automatic stabilizer, maintaining consumer spending and protecting us from prolonged recessions and jobless recoveries — making the economy more resilient as well as more inclusive.
A summary of the resolution provides an example of “guarantee projects,” which include “expanding emergency preparedness,” “producing works of public art and documentation,” and “augmenting the staffing of public education and early childhood learning.”

Pay would begin at $15 per hour and would include benefits such as health insurance, paid sick days, paid family medical leave, vacation, and retirement benefits.

“It’s time to establish a legal right to a job for all people in America,” Pressley said in a statement. “For years, we have legislated hate, harm and injustice in this country.”

“It’s long past time to pursue bold, intentional policies that affirm equity and recognize the dignity and humanity of all people,” she continued, calling a federal job guarantee an “important investment” to achieve an equitable economy.

According to a 2018 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a federal job degree program could cost $543 billion annually, “or just under 3 percent of GDP.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

E&C COMMITTEE ANNOUNCES HEARING ON TRADITIONAL MEDIA’S ROLE IN PROMOTING DISINFORMATION AND EXTREMISM

Feb 17, 2021
Press Release

Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle (D-PA) announced today that the Communications and Technology Subcommittee will hold a fully remote hearing on Wednesday, February 24, at 12:30 p.m. (EST) entitled “Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media.”

“The prolonged severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and the attack on our Capitol on January 6 have driven home a frightening reality: the spread of disinformation and extremism by traditional news media presents a tangible and destabilizing threat,” said Pallone and Doyle. “Some broadcasters’ and cable networks’ increasing reliance on conspiracy theories and misleading or patently false information raises questions about their devotion to journalistic integrity. We look forward to hearing from media experts about what is being done and what more can be done to address this growing problem moving forward.”

This hearing will take place remotely via Cisco Webex video conferencing. Members of the public may view the hearing via live webcast accessible on the Energy and Commerce Committee’s website. Please note the webcast will not be available until the hearing begins.
Additional information for this hearing, including the Committee Memorandum, testimony, and the live webcast will be posted HERE as they become available.
###​
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Microsoft forms coalition to censor “disinformation” online

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Together with a few other tech and media corporations, Microsoft has formed a coalition focused on fighting “disinformation” and fake news. The other founding members of the coalition are Truepic, Intel, BBC, Adobe, and Arm.

Disinformation and fake news have become prevalent buzzwords to create a justification to censor in this digital age. It’s now very easy for people to formulate and spread falsehoods, according to the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity.

“There’s a critical need to address widespread deception in online content — now supercharged by advances in AI and graphics and diffused rapidly via the internet. Our imperative as researchers and technologists is to create and refine technical and sociotechnical approaches to this grand challenge of our time. We’re excited about methods for certifying the origin and provenance of online content. It’s an honor to work alongside Adobe, BBC and other C2PA members to take this critical work to the next step,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post announcing the coalition.

According to Microsoft, the C2PA will “develop content provenance specifications for common asset types and formats to enable publishers, creators and consumers to trace the origin and evolution of a piece of media, including images, videos, audio and documents.”

Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has been a big supporter of modern moves to censor more on social media.

During an interview at the Wall Street Journal Summit in London, Gates complained that the suggestions for suppressing conspiracy theories and “misinformation” on Big Tech platforms are “less creative than we need at this point” and called for “smart solutions.”

When asked about the role of tech platforms when it comes to dealing with misinformation, Gates lamented what he described as a human “weakness” for “titillating things” such as claims that the coronavirus is man-made or “that there’s some conspiracy.”

Gates added that social media platforms allow this type of content to spread very quickly:
“That stuff spreads so much faster than the truth which is, you know, it comes from a bat, you know, we’re still trying to figure out the exact path of transmission.” Gates said. “You don’t forward that the same that way you would the conspiracy.”
Truepic, a web service that allows users to verify videos and images, has made big strides in content verification. C2PA will be built off Truepic’s technologies, including the hardware-secured photo capture technology.

“Truepic was founded on the principle that provenance-based media authenticity is the only viable, scalable long-term solution to restoring trust in what we see online. We firmly believe that ecosystem-wide adoption through an open standard is crucial to the long-term health of the internet. The C2PA will streamline the distribution of high-integrity digital content at scale, a vital step in restoring society’s shared sense of reality,” Truepic said in a statement.

The C2PA will develop technologies that can be adopted by all online platforms.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Dinesh D'Souza: America is no longer the freest country in the world
The author and filmmaker said that America is now in the middle of the pack of free countries.
Updated: February 20, 2021 - 8:39pm

American freedom is no longer what is once was, producer and author Dinesh D'Souza said as he compared the U.S. to other countries.

When asked about cancel culture, D'Souza told the John Solomon Reports podcast, "it suddenly occurred to me that we're really no longer living, at least in terms of some of our basic civil liberties, in a free country."

Audio on website 31:36 min
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"This is a startling thing for someone like me as an immigrant to say," D'Souza added. “But it suddenly dawned on me that, you know, we always think of America as like, the freest country in the world. And it occurs to me that when we objectively look at it now, we'd have to say that we're kind of in the middle. There are many, many countries much freer than we are. Now, there are countries that are less free than we are, as well. But the very fact that we are in the middle hits me with a kind of a shock, and trying to make sense of it."

D'Souza explained why he thought America has reached this low point in defending civil liberties.

"Is it the case, one possibility, is that the people who are supposed to be liberal have all turned out to be illiberal? In other words, we thought that they were liberals in the sense that they vote - wanted higher taxes, and they wanted a big welfare state," D'Souza said.

"But we assumed that there was an element of classical liberalism in them and that they still believed in things like your right to disagree, this is America, so you can say whatever you want.

And you're - you know, you have a right to your opinion, I may not agree with you, but I defend it - all you know, all of this stuff, this civics book America, that we realize is not the America we live in now. I wonder if the reason for it is this, that these people were never liberals in the first place, but they were held in check by the fact that while they had the majority of the culture, Republicans still had a very strong hold on political power."

D'Souza elaborated on the idea of the left controlling both culture and politics.

"These people have never had political power and the culture both. Now they had it in brief snapshots under Obama, for example. But of course, Obama faced a massive backlash in the midterms that took away those majorities. So now suddenly, they are empowered by the fact that they feel like we got the three branches of government, even if kind of narrowly, and we have a strong monopoly on the culture, let's bring those two things together and crush our opposition once and for all. So this is a very - this is a frightening kind of prospect, because ultimately, it is the job of majorities in a democratic society to make the minority feel safe. And they're certainly not doing that," D'Souza said.

According to D'Souza, this illiberal society began in the universities.

"I think it happened in stages. You know, I saw this, actually, 30 years ago on the campus. And my first book, which was 'Illiberal Education,' a kind of exposé of political correctness on the campus, I began to realize the vulnerability of the students because they were at the mercy of their professors and the administrators. But the campus to me, at that time, I saw it as kind of an asylum, a lunatic asylum. And not only me, everybody else thought that way," D'Souza said.

"When C. Vann Woodward, the Yale historian, wrote a favorable review of my book in 'The New York Review of Books,' the predominant response from liberals was, 'No, no, no, no, no, this can't be going on. It's too insane. Dinesh is just exaggerating the situation,' and so on. But I thought that this was an anomaly of campus subculture. I think the significant development of our time has been the kind of metastasization of campus culture into American culture."

D'Souza continued, "So now the media plays the role of the professors. And you know, and the political establishment plays the role of the deans. And digital media, of course, is the equivalent of the old campus speech code. And so suddenly, we're living in an America that has become an asylum in which intolerance is now the order of the day. So I think that's been brewing for some time, now, but what was once in confined enclaves has now become the state of our society."

The illiberalism in universities originated in a debate on Marxism a hundred years ago, D'Souza said.

"It was a plan in this sense, that there were intellectuals going back to, not only the 1960s, but I would even say the 1920s and '30s, who recognized that they would have to take the culture.

This came out of the so-called 'crisis of Marxism' debate of about a century ago, when the left was basically wondering, like, 'why did Marxist predictions not come true?' And their answer was because the working class is subjected to what they called 'bourgeois culture,' the working-class guy's a patriot, the working-class guy goes to church, he loves his family. So he's not just thinking about his, you know, his union membership or any kind of proletarian revolution, because he's got all these other concerns that are shaping his personality and his allegiances," D'Souza explained.

"'So,' says the left, 'we need to take over those things. We need to take over the schools, we need to take over the universities, we need to undermine the churches, we need to, you know, weaken the power of the patriarchal family. And by doing this, essentially, we create a leftist culture that runs alongside leftist economics.' And so the left has put a lot of effort, a lot of investment in this, and I think they started off in the campus. And then what happened is that they were able to cultivate a generation of intolerant just little savages, and unleash them on the society at large. And that's what happened. They didn't have to plan it because, by creating these apostles and sending them out into the world, they were able to achieve their purpose that way."
 
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