Political and Scientific Censorship Short-circuits the Quest for Truth

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Those who seek to streamline online discourse, according to “official standards”, end up impoverishing public debate.

Over the course of the past decade, numerous regulatory authorities, both public and private, have increasingly positioned themselves as guardians of the integrity of our public sphere, standing watch over the content of information, and flagging or suppressing information deemed to be harmful, misleading, or offensive.

The zeal with which these gatekeepers defend their power over the public sphere became evident when billionaire Elon Musk promised to undo Twitter’s policy of censoring anything that contradicted leftist ideology or questioned the safety of Covid vaccines. There was an uproar, a wringing of hands, and lamentations, as “experts worried” that Twitter would collapse into a den of “far right” extremists and misinformers.

Sound and fury

Threats by the EU Commission to fine Twitter or even completely ban the app in Europe, if it did not enforce EU regulations on hate speech and misinformation, show that the hand-wringing over Twitter’s potential embrace of free speech is much more than empty rhetoric: the European Commission has declared its intention to force Twitter to revert to its old censorship policies if it does not play ball. According to Euronews,

The European Commission has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must do much more to protect users from hate speech, misinformation and other harmful content, or risk a fine and even a ban under strict new EU content moderation rules.

Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for digital policy, told the billionaire Tesla CEO that the social media platform will have to significantly increase efforts to comply with the new rules, known as the Digital Services Act, set to take effect next year.

Censorship has recently occurred principally on two fronts: Covid “misinformation” and “hate speech.” Some forms of censorship are applied by agencies of the State, such as courts and police officers; others by private companies, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Google-YouTube. The net effect is the same in both cases: an increasingly controlled and filtered public sphere, and a shrinking of liberty of discussion around a range of topics deemed too sensitive or “dangerous” to be discussed openly and freely.

Censorship, whether public or private, has proliferated in recent years:

  • First, there was Canada’s bizarre claim that people had an enforceable human right to be referred to by their preferred pronouns
  • Next, UK police were investigating citizens for using language the police deemed “offensive”
  • Then, we saw Big Tech giants, in particular Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, censoring perspectives that dissented from their version of scientific and moral orthodoxy on issues such as transgender rights, vaccine safety, effective Covid treatment protocols, and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Now, advocates of censorship have argued that it is all to the good that vile, hateful and discriminatory opinions, as well as every conceivable form of medical and scientific “misinformation,” are shut out of our public sphere. After all, this makes the public sphere a “safe” place for citizens to exchange information and opinions. On this view, we need to purge the public sphere of voices that are toxic, hateful, harmful, and “misleading” on issues like electoral politics, public health policies, and minority rights.

Thin ice

While there is a strong case to be made for censorship of certain forms of manifestly dangerous speech, such as exhortations to suicide or direct incitement to violence, the hand of the censor must be firmly tied behind his back, so that he cannot easily decide for everyone else what is true or false, just or unjust, “accurate” or “misleading”, innocent or offensive.

For once you hand broad, discretionary powers to someone to decide which sorts of speech are offensive, erroneous, misleading, or hate-inducing, they will start to purge the public sphere of views they happen to find ideologically, philosophically, or theologically disagreeable. And there is certainly no reason to assume that their judgement calls on what counts as true or false, innocent or toxic speech will be correct.

The fundamental mistake behind the argument for aggressive censorship policies is the notion that there is a set of Truths out there on contested political and scientific questions that are crystal clear or can be validated by the “right experts”; and that anyone who contradicts these a priori Truths must be either malicious or ignorant. If this were true, the point of public discussion would just be to clarify and unpack what the “experts” agree are the Truths of science and morality.

But there is no such set of pristine Truths that can be validated by human beings independently of a free and open discussion, especially on difficult and complex matters such as infection control, justice, climate change, and economic policy. Rather, the truth must be discovered gradually, through the vibrant back-and-forth of dialogue, debate, refutation, and counter-refutation. In short, public deliberation is fundamentally a discovery process. The truth is not known in advance, but uncovered gradually, as an array of evidence is examined and put to the test, and as rival views clash and hold each other accountable.

If we empower a censor to quash opinions that are deemed by powerful actors to be offensive, false, or misleading, we are effectively short-circuiting that discovery process. When we put our faith in a censor to keep us on the straight and narrow, we are assuming that the censor can stand above the stream of conflicting arguments, and from a position of epistemic and/or moral superiority, pick out the winning positions in advance.

We are assuming that some people are so smart, or wise, or virtuous, that they do not actually need to get their hands dirty and participate in a messy argument with their adversaries, or get their views challenged in public. We are assuming that some people are more expert and well-informed than anyone else, including other recognised experts, and may therefore decide, for everyone else, which opinions are true and which are false, which are intrinsically offensive and which are “civil,” and which are “facts” and which are “fake news.”

Needless to say, this is an extraordinarly naïve and childish illusion, that no realistic grasp of human nature and cognition could possibly support. But it is a naive and childish illusion that has been enthusiastically embraced and propagated by Big Tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in their rules of content moderation, and it is a view that is increasingly finding its way into the political discourse and legislative programmes of Western countries that were once champions of freedom of expression.

It is imperative that the advocates of heavy-handed censorship do not win the day, because if they do, then the public sphere will become a hall of mirrors, in which the lazy, self-serving mantras of a few powerful actors bounce, virtually unchallenged, from one platform to another, while dissenting voices are consigned to the shadows and dismissed as the rantings of crazy people.

In a heavily censored public sphere, scientifically weak and morally vacuous views of the world will gain public legitimacy, not because they have earned people’s trust in an open and honest exchange of arguments, but because they have been imposed by the arbitrary will of a few powerful actors.

This article has been republished from David Thunder’s Substack, The Freedom Blog.

AUTHOR

David Thunder

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society. More by David Thunder

RELATED VIDEO: Lib Gets OWNED When GOP Rep. Uses Her Own Testimony Against Her In Real-Time

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

How Migrants Make The Economies They Move To A Lot Like The Ones They Left

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Ponder the implications of this for mass Muslim migration into Europe. And those implications are by no means solely economic.

Coming to America: REVIEW: ‘The Culture Transplant’ by Garett Jones

by Charles Fain Lehman, Washington Free Beacon, December 11, 2022:

Imagine that you are a U.S. immigration officer, handing out green cards to the would-be Americans of the world. You have before you two applicants who look almost completely the same; for some arcane, unspecified bureaucratic reason, you can only approve one of them. They’re both well-educated by American standards, both bringing identical families, both passed their background checks.

The major difference is their nation of origin. One is from a nation with a strong tradition of rule of law, free markets, and democratic pluralism. The other is from a country where kleptocracy, autocracy, and socialism are standard. The difference, in other words, is the character of the society that your two would-be immigrants come from. The question is: Should this difference matter?

The basic argument of The Culture Transplant, the new book from George Mason University professor Garett Jones, is that at least in the aggregate, the answer to this question is “yes.” The marginal immigrant, to be sure, may not matter. But Jones shows, through an engaging and digestible tour of the academic literature, that people bring their national character with them when they migrate; that those values persist for up to several generations; and that some values really are better for societal flourishing than others, so the values immigrants bring matters a great deal.

To reach this conclusion, Jones relies on a fairly diverse set of evidence. Much of the basis for his argument, though, is drawn from the so-called deep-roots literature. That research, in essence, looks at what today’s countries were like 500 to 2,500 years ago, in terms of level of governance, agricultural development, and technological development. It observes that what a country was like hundreds of years ago is a strong predictor of how developed it is today. More to Jones’s point, it observes that what a country’s people were like hundreds of years ago predicts what they are like today.

The point here is that, for whatever reason, certain fundamental facts about a civilization—i.e., its level of development—are both highly relevant to its performance on the centuries timespan and transplantable from one place to another. One plausible explanation is that whatever determines this outcome inheres in the people from those civilizations, who carry it with them and “transplant” it wherever they migrate.

Indeed, Jones reviews extensive research that shows immigrants often look more like their ancestors than the countries they arrive to, even several generations after arrival. If your ancestors believed in things conducive to development—social trust, cooperation, fairness, etc.—then you probably do too. And those beliefs matter for how the country you now live in does.

What are the concrete implications of this view? Jones offers two. One is that the countries with the highest rates of innovation—China, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States—should be extremely cautious about changing the population composition through migration. These countries produce the overwhelming majority of the world’s progress, and if progress is a function of your country’s composition, then we should care a lot about keeping their current mix, because otherwise all of humanity loses out….

Read more.

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Twitter Execs Were Looking for Any Excuse to Ban Trump

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Elon Musk’s Twitter released another batch of internal discussions on Friday night, which revealed that executives at the social media giant established a “framework” for banning former President Trump’s account before the events of January 6, and used the Capitol chaos as their excuse to finally blacklist him.

The documents posted to Twitter by journalist Matt Taibbi is the first release of documents pertaining to President Trump’s account ban in January 2021. In a lengthy Twitter thread, Taibbi explained that the internal communications at Twitter between January 6 and January 8 2021 suggest that even the employees of the social media company understood the move to censor a sitting U.S. president would have a historical impact.

“Is this the first sitting head of state to ever be suspended?” one Twitter user asked in internal communications.

After banning Trump, Twitter executives appeared to relish their newfound power, and even flirted with banning future the official @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts, but ultimately decided the accounts “will be transitioned over to the new administration in due course and will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.”

With regards to their reasons for banning Trump’s account, one Twitter executive said in an internal chat: “the narrative that Trump and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and frankly the last 4+ years must be taken into account.”

In addition to these revelations, Taibbi also published damning internal documents pertaining to Twitter execs “getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies” like the FBI during the 2020 presidential election.

Twitter

28 Known Connections

Twitter Employees Donate 99% to Democrats

On April 27, 2022, Fox News reported:

“Twitter employees are maintaining their torrid pace of 99 percent of their political donations pouring into Democratic campaigns and committees for the midterm elections, filings show. The partisan skew of Twitter employees’ donations illustrates the uphill battle facing Elon Musk, who has pledged to make the company ‘politically neutral’ in order to maintain trust.

“Individuals employed by the social media giant have disbursed 1225 donations through ActBlue, the Democrats’ central fundraising platform, totaling $72,296, Federal Election Commission records show. Meanwhile, just ten donations from Twitter employees were pushed through WinRed, the Republicans’ fundraising platform, for $505 through the end of March, according to the filings. This means that Twitter employees have maintained their astronomical pace of 99 percent of their contributions going towards Democratic campaigns and committees with just over six months until the 2022 elections.”

To learn more about Twitter, click here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

COVID Rush, Gold Rush

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Title 42 COVID restrictions at the border are expected to end next Wednesday and it’s shaping up to be a disaster.   Up to 14,000 illegal aliens a day are expected to rush the border.  This is on top of a record number of apprehensions and known gotaways at the border in November – over 300,000 combined.

Numbers alone don’t tell the whole story.  The burden on the border states is so great, they’re taking action on their own.  Arizona’s lame-duck Republican Governor is building a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border with shipping containers.  Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared an invasion and sent National Guard troops and armored personnel carriers to the border in anticipation of COVID restrictions being lifted.  The troops have experienced 267 suspicious or violent events, including gunfire from across the border and physical assaults.

Meanwhile, the number of illegal border-crossers on the terrorist watchlist is skyrocketing.  Nine were caught in October alone, a faster pace than the 98 caught in the fiscal year before that, and up exponentially from the 14 apprehended in the previous fiscal year.  A Muslim-only transit shelter opened across the border from San Diego, recently.  The shelter operator screens occupants a bit for ties to terrorism and has rejected two.  The operator is willing to provide more information to U.S. authorities, but they’ve never called.  The operator also says the shelter’s vetting is incomplete and it’s certainly possible for terrorists to slip through.

Biden’s border policies are raising other national security concerns, as well.  The air marshals warn that diverting them to border ground duties increases the likelihood of another 9/11 attack.  There was an attempt to breach a cockpit, recently, but the Biden administration isn’t answering the phone on this one, either.

That’s because the Biden administration has the pedal to the metal to pack the country with as many illegal aliens as possible before somebody puts a stop to it.  I’ve told you in previous commentaries about dozens of Biden administration policies opening the border and today I add some more.

ICE agents are being told to limit their arrests to illegal aliens with Class A felonies like murder to free up detention bed space for the anticipated influx of new arrivals when COVID restrictions end.  But the number of criminal alien arrests was already down, 71 percent from a comparable period under Trump.  Removals are down by two-thirds under Biden policy.   To add insult to injury, our government is lying to us.  The ICE website says there are 266 illegal aliens who have been released into the U.S. interior without any electronic monitoring through ankle bracelets or cell phones.  But an ICE document distributed at an event last month shows the number is not 266; it’s almost 50,000.

The fallout from Biden’s border policies continues to mount.  An HHS whistleblower said the government is promoting sex trafficking, threatening alien children with deportation if they don’t comply.  The whistleblower also said the government’s child sponsor program is so bad many alien children are being forced into indentured servitude.

The only explanation we’ve ever gotten out of Biden administration officials for all this insanity is that they want to open the borders to increase diversity in the country.   That would be pretty stupid, but recent stories make you wonder if it’s not just all about the money.  There are at least 30 nominally private organizations involved in processing illegal aliens, taxpayer-funded government contractors with friends in high places and a revolving door between government agencies and their executive suites.  Contracts can run into the billions of dollars.  Hunter Biden had an 8 percent stake in a digital banking and remittances platform for illegal aliens.  Which begs the question: did 10 percent go to the Big Guy?  Is the Big Guy selling his office?  Is the Big Guy above lining his own pockets, the fate of the country be damned?  The Biden administration has never adequately explained why it’s opening the border, so I will assume the worst.  Somebody should take a closer look at the money that’s being made in all this.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

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Court Permanently Blocks Biden Administration’s Transgender Mandate

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A reprieve from the most depraved regime since Caligula……

As one commenter points out, “This mandate is from 2016 in the Obama ACA. So it took 6+ years and countless harm to children and young adults for the courts fix this abhorrent mandate. This is an Obama-Biden sick perverse action.”

Court Permanently Blocks Biden Administration’s Transgender Mandate

By: The Epoch Times, December 10, 2022:

A federal appeals court has permanently blocked the Biden administration’s bid to force doctors and insurers to perform or pay for gender-transition procedures even if they object on grounds of conscience and medical judgment, with the court basing its decision on constitutional protections of religious freedom.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit issued a unanimous ruling (pdf) on Dec. 9 blocking the controversial U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) transgender mandate.

Issued in 2016, the mandate interpreted the Affordable Care Act in a way that required doctors to perform gender-transition procedures on any patient, including children, even if the doctor was convinced the procedure could harm the patient.

Controversial Mandate

The mandate also required the vast majority of private insurance companies and many employers to cover the costs of gender-transition therapy or face penalties.

The HHS’s own panel of medical experts acknowledged that gender-transition procedures can be harmful and in many cases not medically justified, with HHS determining that Medicare and Medicaid should not be forced to cover such procedures.

Research has shown that gender-transition procedures carry significant risk for children, including loss of bone density, heart disease, and cancer.

‘Do No Harm’

Religious organizations and states sued to block the mandate, with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the North Dakota Attorney General’s office representing some of the groups.

“The federal government has no business forcing doctors to violate their consciences or perform controversial procedures that could permanently harm their patients,” Luke Goodrich, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, said in a statement.

“This is a common-sense ruling that protects patients, aligns with best medical practice, and ensures doctors can follow their Hippocratic Oath to ‘do no harm,’” he added.

Becket filed the lawsuit in 2016 on behalf of a coalition of Catholic hospitals, a Catholic university, and Catholic nuns who run health clinics for the poor.

A federal district court blocked the mandate from taking effect, leading the Biden administration to appeal the case to the 8th Circuit, which in its Dec. 8 ruling concluded that the lower court “correctly held that ‘intrusion upon the Catholic Plaintiff’s exercise of religion’” justified a permanent injunction.

The Biden administration has 90 days to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court or 45 days to ask the 8th Circuit court to rehear the case.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House to the ruling.

Goodrich said in a call with reporters that he doubts the “Biden administration will pursue either of these avenues.”

The case is Religious Sisters of Mercy v. Becerra, case No. 21-1890.

Keep reading…..

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

AZ Whistleblower: Chain Of Custody For OVER 298,942 Maricopa County Ballots Delivered To Runbeck On Election Day Did Not Exist

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Arizona Employees Allowed To Add Family Members’ Ballots Without Any Documentation.

The question remains, is there not one honest judge in Arizona?

Read the whole complaint:

HUGE: Runbeck Whistleblower Reveals That Chain Of Custody For OVER 298,942 Maricopa County Ballots Delivered To Runbeck On Election Day Did Not Exist, Employees Allowed To Add Family Members’ Ballots Without Any Documentation

By Jordan Conradson, The Gateway Pundit, December 10, 2022:

Never in US history has there been so much evidence compiled of a fraudulent election taking place.

The brave attorneys representing Kari Lake are HEROES who deserve a Medal of Freedom.

Read the full complaint below:

Kari Lake Files Election Challenge in Arizona Court

“Maricopa County election officials engaged in numerous breaches of Arizona election law in their handling and custody of ballots, making it impossible to conclude that the vote tallies reported by Maricopa County accurately reflect the votes cast by Arizona voters,” contends the lawsuit.

Kari Lake’s team of expert attorneys have gathered evidence from signed witness testimony, Runbeck whistleblowers, and Maricopa County whistleblowers to craft a 70-page lawsuit against Maricopa County and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.

Included in the complaint is a shocking claim by a Runbeck employee that nearly 300,000 ballots were delivered to Runbeck on Election Day with no chain of custody documentation.

Maricopa County is the only jurisdiction in the country that picks up completed ballots at USPS Processing Distribution Center but doesn’t bring them back to the election department or tabulation center. Instead, Maricopa County picks up mail-in ballots and takes them directly to its print vendor Runbeck Election Services, which is headquartered in Phoenix.

The Gateway Pundit has reported on Runbeck’s services in Maricopa County. The County has still not provided all chain of custody documents from Runbeck and USPS for the 2020 election.

The scanning of ballot envelopes takes place behind closed doors and apparently with no documentation.

According to Kari Lake’s lawsuit contesting the 2022 election, a Runbeck employee stated that “Runbeck received 298,942 ballots on Election Day, which includes the EV ballots. The required chain of custody for these ballots does not exist.”

Maricopa County also asked Runbeck how many ballots were received on election night, demonstrating that they did not even know how many ballots were in Runbeck’s custody.

[…]

The Runbeck employee also revealed that 9,530 duplicate ballots were transported without any chain of custody documentation. “They were simply handed over to the delivery driver,” states the lawsuit.

Additionally, Employees of Runbeck were allowed to add their own ballots and family members’ ballots to the batches without chain of custody documentation.

All of these ballots were illegally cast and counted.

The complaint states, “There is no way to know whether 50 ballots or 50,000 ballots were unlawfully added into the election in this way. The Runbeck facility is not a legal ballot drop off site… Given this blatant violation of Arizona law, there is no way to tell the number of ballots that were illegally injected into the 2022 election.”

From Kari Lake’s historic lawsuit:

Illegal Ballot Handling and Chain of Custody Failures with Respect To Over 300,000 Ballots Make The Outcome of the Election Uncertain

Maricopa County election officials engaged in numerous breaches of Arizona election law in their handling and custody of ballots, making it impossible to conclude that the vote tallies reported by Maricopa County accurately reflect the votes cast by Arizona voters.

Arizona law requires that “[t]he county recorder or other officer in charge of elections shall maintain records that record the chain of custody for all election equipment and ballots during early voting through the completion of provisional voting tabulation.” Stat. § 16-621(E) (emphasis added). See also Arizona Elections Procedures Manual 61-61.

A proper chain of custody is not ministerial. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission instructs that “Chain of custody is essential to a transparent and trustworthy election.”[1] “Chain of custody documents provide evidence that can be used to authenticate election results, corroborate post-election tabulation audits, and demonstrate that election outcomes can be trusted.” at 3.

R.S. § 16-452(C) states, “A person who violates any rule adopted pursuant to this section is guilty of a class 2 misdemeanor.” This criminal penalty underscores the Arizona state legislature’s recognition of the critical nature of expressly following chain of custody requirements with respect to ballots. See also A.R.S. § 16-1016(7), (8).

The Arizona Elections Procedure Manual, pages 61-62, establishes required procedures for secure ballot retrieval and chain of custody for all drop box ballots. The requirements include that each county must confirm receipt of the retrieved ballots by signing the retrieval form and indicating the date and time of receipt on the form. The retrieval form must be attached to the outside of the transport container or maintained in a way that ensures the form is traceable to the respective ballot container. Significantly, when the secure transport container is opened by the county recorder, “the number of ballots inside the container shall be counted and noted on the retrieval form.”

Maricopa County election officials received two categories of early voting ballots on Election Day, EV ballots received at ballot drop-off sites and mail-in ballots returned through the U.S. Postal Service. Maricopa County delivered these ballots to Runbeck to obtain electronic images of the signatures on the ballots. After scanning, the ballots were eventually transferred back to the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center.

Maricopa County failed to maintain and document the required secure chain of custody for hundreds of thousands of ballots, in violation of Arizona law, including as described below, for over 298,942 ballots delivered to Runbeck on Election Day.

A Runbeck employee observed that Maricopa County election workers delivered Early-Vote (“EV”) ballots retrieved from ballot drop boxes and mail-in ballots from the Postal Service, neither of which were accompanied by any of the required chain of custody paperwork which, among other things, would document the number of ballots received from ballot drop boxes. According to the employee, Runbeck received 298,942 ballots on Election Day which includes the EV ballots. The required chain of custody for these ballots does not exist. Indeed, two days later, on November 10, 2022, the employee observed that Maricopa County had to ask Runbeck how many ballots Runbeck had received on election night, demonstrating that Maricopa County itself did not know how many EV ballots had been retrieved from ballot drop boxes on Election Day in violation of Arizona law.[2]

The Runbeck employee’s testimony is confirmed by Maricopa County’s response to a public records request for chain of custody forms. Early Voting Ballot Transport Statements were produced by Maricopa County on December 6, 2022, in response to a public records request by Lake. Maricopa County produced 1149 of these documents dated October 12th through November 7th but not a single document from Election Day drop box ballot retrievals. The official canvass report indicated that Maricopa County received over 292,000 EV ballots (not including provisional and ballots picked up by the U.S. Postal Service) dropped off on Election Day. However, Maricopa County did not produce chain of custody documents for these reported Election Day drop box ballots.

The fact that no required chain of custody documentation exists for these 298,942 ballots (as well as others) is further confirmed by the sworn testimony of a credentialed election observer at MCTEC on Election Day. That observer testified she observed the trucks and vehicles delivering ballots and memory cards from the Vote Centers and ballot drop boxes. She observed the delivery of the transport containers of ballots retrieved from drop boxes on Election Night. The witness observed the receipt and processing of the ballot transport containers. She saw MCTEC workers cut the plastic security seals off of the ballot transport containers and let them fall to the floor without any attempt to record seal numbers. When the transport containers were opened, the ballots inside the containers were not counted and therefore no numbers were recorded on retrieval forms.  She observed the transport containers of early voting ballots delivered without any required documentation or paperwork on the outside of the containers. No Early Voting Ballot Transport Statements were utilized. She observed early ballot envelopes being removed by workers from opened containers without any attempt to count them or document them as required by Arizona law. She observed packages of misfed/misread ballots collected and moved around with no discernable process to track or account for the ballots. She observed temporary employees moving unsecured metal carts full of ballots without any security or monitoring.[3]

Keep reading…..

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: Twitter Files Part 4: Platform Changed Policy Specifically To Ban ‘Trump Alone’ “Election Squad” Tasked With Rigging Election

RELATED TWEET:

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

U.S. Navy Forced to Make Dangerous Compromise as Biden’s Military Obsesses About Diversity

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But it’s not just the Navy—our entire Military, every branch is now WOKE at policy making levels thanks to Obama clone Secretary if Defense Austin, his Under Secretaries and all current Generals and Admirals who should be retiring rather than serving a socialist government and forcing DEI, CRT, Climate Change, and other Marxist policies on the men and women in the trenches.

WATCH: U.S. Navy in SHAMBLES as focus moves away from military readiness toward Woke diversity training.

Emphasis is no longer on combat readiness and being able to fight and win against an enemy!

Navy Forced to Make Dangerous Compromise as Biden’s Military Obsesses About Diversity

 By Peter Partoll, Western Journal • December 9, 2022

The U.S. Navy is addressing a massive drop in recruitment numbers by making a dangerous compromise that could leave the country in a much more vulnerable position.

On Monday, USNI News reported that the Navy is lowering admittance requirements for one of its entrance exams.

Under the plan, recruits who score lower on the Armed Forces Qualification Test can now be accepted into the Navy so long as they score high enough on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.

According to USNI, the Armed Forces Qualification Test essentially determines if recruits have the ability to succeed as members of the armed forces. The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery tests recruits to see which role in the Navy would suit them best.

Navy spokesman Cmdr. Dave Benham told USNI, “As we continue to navigate a challenging recruiting environment, changing the AFQT requirement removes a potential barrier to enlistment, allowing us to widen the pool of potential recruits and creating opportunities for personnel who wish to serve.”

Read the full article.

©Royal A. Brown III. All rights reserved.

Twitter Exec Pushed To Ban Matt Gaetz’ Account After Jan. 6

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Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, pushed internally for the company to ban Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots, despite messaging another employee that such a decision did not align with the company’s policies, according to the company’s internal documents published by author Michael Shellenberger Friday as part of Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files.”

An employee, whose name was redacted, messaged Roth around noon on Jan. 7, 2021, asking “What’s the latest on Antifa claims?” — seemingly in reference to a Jan. 6, 2021, tweet by Gaetz alleging that members of the anarchist movement Antifa had “infiltrated Trump protestors who stormed Capitol” — and noting that another employee, identified only as “C,” was “yelling from the other room that we should just ban Gaetz,” Shellenberger reported. Roth responded that Twitter had employees “working on that.”

“It doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh),” Roth said, prompting agreement from the unnamed employee before he continued, according to the messages posted by Shellenberger. “But I’m trying to talk safety into treating it as incitement … I think we’ll get over the line for removal as a conspiracy that incites violence … [then-head of Legal, Policy and Trust] Vijaya [Gadde] was directionally okay with it.”

Gaetz’ account was ultimately never banned, despite the internal discussions.

The discussion occurred roughly seven hours before Roth would inform a sales executive that Twitter was “changing [its] public interest approach for [Donald Trump’s] account to say any violation would result in a suspension,” Shellenberger reported. Twitter policy protects tweets from elected officials that would otherwise violate its rules under so-called “public-interest exceptions,” which allow tweets to remain live so that the public may be aware of and discuss the users’ “actions and statements.”

Gaetz later had a June 1, 2021 tweet that read “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?” hit with one such public-interest label for violating Twitter’s rules regarding the glorification of violence. At time of writing, Twitter users cannot share, like or comment on that tweet, but can still “quote tweet” it.

“This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence,” the label reads at time of writing. “However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”

Neither Twitter nor Gaetz’ office immediately responded to a Daily Caller News Foundation request for comment.

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

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In Joe Biden’s Woke America, Enemies Exploit Our Achilles Heel

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Twitter’s prior leadership accused of facilitating child porn

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Illegal accounts ‘acted with impunity for years’.

SAN FRANCISCO (ChurchMilitant.com) – Twitter systematically failed to remove child pornography from its platform for years, allowing accounts to operate with impunity.

The revelations came from Andrea Stroppa, who works on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, who published a series of tweets about the council’s recent findings Friday night.

“We found several accounts that shared CSAM [child sexual abuse material], including videos of children and teens involved in sexual activities,” he wrote, explaining that “>95% of these accounts were created before Elon Musk bought Twitter. Some of these accounts have been active for years (even since 2017).”

“These accounts that shared CSAM acted with impunity for years,” he noted. “The contents of these accounts obtained over ten million views on Twitter. Yes, 10.000.000 views.”

“They won’t get any new views because Twitter has now taken down all these accounts,” he added.

Prior to Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter refused to suspend most of the accounts posting criminal content, opting instead to delete the offending posts while allowing the accounts to remain active.

Stroppa co-authored a 17-page report in September titled “Child Porn on Twitter,” which accused prior Twitter executives of “doing next to nothing to fix” the problem of CSAM on its platform.

“Twitter is known to have very permissive policies regarding pornographic content and indeed such content is easy to find on the platform,” the report noted. “However, our research shows something much more troublesome: in the initial 20 days of September 2022, over 500 accounts shared, requested and/or publicly exchanged child pornography material.”

Eliza Bleu, a victim of human trafficking who now works as a child victims’ advocate, took part in a Twitter Spaces discussion Friday night discussing Twitter’s failure to prioritize child porn while spending resources on censoring voices that expressed political viewpoints Twitter did not approve of.

“I watched folks get banned over using words that aren’t even illegal to use,” Bleu said. “The child sexual abuse material had been on Twitter for four years, 10 million views, and yet if you said certain words, especially during the pandemic, especially during an election season, you were removed instantly.”

Her words echoed an earlier tweet that day: “Twitter prioritized the censorship of non-illegal speech over the removal of child sexual abuse material at scale. Let that sink in.”

It led to confirmation from Musk: “Exactly correct.”

Musk later joined the Twitter Spaces discussion, confirming that he is making the elimination of child porn his first priority.

“I was actually really shocked to learn about it,” he said, going on to say that “literally top priority in the whole company is that Twitter cannot be used for child exploitation.”

Bleu, who has been highly critical of Twitter’s failures to protect children on its platform, had high praise for Musk.

“I think this is a new day and time for Twitter,” said Bleu, later adding, “You’ve blown my mind. And I was Twitter’s biggest hater. … You will see children’s lives are saved as a result of these changes on Twitter.”

Trust and Safety Council

Friday’s revelations centered on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, tasked with removing child porn from the platform. The group plays such a key role at Twitter that Musk even tweeted, “The real CEO was the head of ‘Trust & Safety’.”

Musk and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey openly sparred over allegations Dorsey failed to do enough to remove child porn.

“It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!” tweeted Musk.

It led to a denial by Dorsey: “This is false.”

“No, it is not,” Musk retorted. “When Ella Irwin, who now runs Trust & Safety, joined Twitter earlier this year, almost no one was working on child safety. She raised this with Ned & Parag, but they rejected her staffing request. I made it top priority immediately.”

Irwin confirmed this in a tweet: “I fought hard to get funding to replace the people working on this who left in early 2022 and was told no. At one point there were 0 engineers and very few employees working on CSE and still no funding.”

Joining the Twitter Spaces discussion, Irwin added that funding for the council had been slashed years ago, and when she joined “it was a skeleton crew.”

Bleu responded to the thread, “I like you Jack. I always did. It would be incredible if you just grew a pair and admitted that Twitter didn’t prioritize this issue and remove child sexual abuse material at scale. And you owe John Doe # 1 and # 2 a formal apology.”

Earlier that day, three members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council announced their resignations, complaining that under Musk, “the safety and wellbeing of Twitter’s users are on the decline.”

Among those resigning was Lesley Podesta, niece of John Podesta, former campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton.

The tweet garnered immediate backlash.

“You all belong in jail,” wrote conservative commentator Mike Cernovich.

He posted a link to a New York Post article on a lawsuit accusing Twitter of leaving up child porn material after finding it did not violate the platform’s policies.

The plaintiff, John Doe, discovered explicit underage sexual videos of himself posted on Twitter in 2019. He and his mother filed complaints with Twitter asking that it be removed.

Twitter responded a week later, after the child pornography had been viewed more than 167,000 times and retweeted 2,223 times: “We’ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time.”

Doe wrote back in shock:

What do you mean you don’t see a problem? We both are minors right now and were minors at the time these videos were taken. We both were 13 years of age. We were baited, harassed, and threatened to take these videos that are now being posted without our permission. We did not authorize these videos AT ALL and they need to be taken down.

It was only after the Department of Homeland Security ordered Twitter to remove the illegal material that it complied.

“He was 13 years old and being extorted. What the hell is Twitter doing?” asked Professor Hany Farid, who helped develop PhotoDNA technology used to help stop the spread of child porn online.

A number of victims’ advocacy groups are backing the lawsuit, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children; Child USA; the Canadian Centre for Child Protection; and the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, among others.

Access to DMs

The Child Porn report revealed, “Direct messages (DMs) are still the preferred communication choice” for those trading illegal content.

On Thursday it was revealed that Twitter staff have access to users’ direct messages, leading to criticism that the platform had ample opportunity to catch the offending material but failed to do so.

“If Twitter could see your DMs as detailed in the #TwitterFiles / #TwitterFiles2 drop, doesn’t this mean they had countless exchanges of Child Pornographic Materials through DMs on their radar and just sat on it despite having tools to stop, report, and suppress it?” asked political commentator Malcolm Flex.

The news comes one day after journalist Bari Weiss released the second set of Twitter files exposing Twitter’s practice of blacklisting, shadowbanning and suppressing conservative political speech.

The evidence directly contradicts claims by Dorsey and former Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde, who insisted Twitter did not shadowban accounts based on political viewpoint. They also made these claims before Congress.

Have a news tip? Submit news to our tip line.

AUTHOR

Christine Niles

RELATED ARTICLE: The FBI likely ran nearly half the child porn sites on the dark web in 2016

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Kari Lake Files Election Challenge in Arizona Court

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“We have put forward evidence that unquestionably shows that this election was stolen with illegal votes and likely fraudulent votes.” — Attorney Kurt Olsen.

Kari Lake files election challenge in Arizona court

The former conservative media personality warned throughout her gubernatorial bid that the state’s election system was mired in voter fraud.

By Ben Whedon, Just The News, December 9, 2022 – 10:01pm

Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake on Friday announced that she had filed an election challenge, alleging that the total number of illegal votes was greater than her opponent’s margin of victory.

Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs was certified as the winner of the state’s gubernatorial contest earlier this month. State law requires that election results be first certified before a candidate may file a challenge.

Lake announced the suit via Twitter in the Maricopa County Superior Court with a screenshot of the filing being placed at the court’s petition drop off location.

In the filing, Lake asserts that “[t]he number of illegal votes cast in Arizona’s general election on November 8, 2022 far exceeds the 17,117 vote margin.”

She further contends that “thousands of Republican voters were disenfranchised as a result of Maricopa County election officials’ misconduct in connection with the widespread tabulator or printer failures at 59% of the 223 vote centers in Maricopa County.”

Lake’s claims echo those of Arizona Republican Attorney General candidate Abe Hamadeh, who filed a separate challenge on similar grounds Friday afternoon. Hamadeh’s race was much closer, with his Democratic opponent leading by a mere 511 votes, the closest statewide race in Arizona history. A recount is in progress in that race.

The former conservative media personality has long asserted that the state’s election system is mired in voter fraud and that it had handed the 2020 presidential contest to President Joe Biden.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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Biden Regime Denies Gov. DeSantis’ Request for Emergency Funds for Hurricane Ian Victims

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Slippery Slope’: Internal Docs Show Just One Twitter Employee Raising ‘Serious’ Free-Speech Concerns Over Trump Ban

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  • In the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, a junior staffer at Twitter was the only employee that appeared to express “serious” concerns about the effect that banning then-President Donald Trump might have on users’ speech, according to author Michael Shellenberger Friday, citing internal documents provided by CEO Elon Musk.
  • The unnamed staffer’s comments stood in contrast to other employees, who, according to former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth, were not “happy” with Twitter’s position on Trump following the riots, Shellenberger reported.
  • “This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world – which seems unsustainable,” the staffer wrote, Shellenberger reported.

As Twitter executives sought a justification to ban then-President Donald Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots, only one employee appears to have expressed “serious” concerns about the potential impact the move might have on users’ speech, author Michael Shellenberger tweeted Friday, citing internal Twitter documents provided by new CEO Elon Musk.

The employee, a junior staffer, posted a message in a lower-level channel on the company’s internal Slack messaging system, questioning the “one off” nature of the decision, which did not appear to match with Twitter’s public policies, according to Shellenberger. Twitter employees usually considered moderation decisions to be “one off” events when they were made at the discretion of Twitter employees, as opposed to following a particular policy, Shellenberger reported.

“This might be an unpopular opinion but one off ad hoc decisions like this that don’t appear rooted in policy are [in my opinion] a slippery slope and reflect an alternatively equally dictatorial problem,” the unnamed staffer wrote, according to Shellenberger. “This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world – which seems unsustainable.”

Roughly 40 minutes after the junior staffer posted their initial concerns, they sent a follow-up message, citing an article by The Washington Post’s Will Oremus, then a writer for tech publication OneZero, which noted that Facebook’s decision to indefinitely ban Trump “lacks a clear basis in any of Facebook’s previously stated policies, highlights for the millionth time that the dominant platforms are quite literally making up the rules of online speech as they go along,” Shellenberger reported.

“My concern is specifically surrounding the unarticulated logic of the decision by FB,” the staffer wrote, according to Shellenberger. “That space fills with the idea (conspiracy theory?) that all … internet moguls … sit around like kings casually deciding what people can and cannot see.”

While Twitter employees debated the decision to ban Trump, then-CEO Jack Dorsey was on vacation in French Polynesia, ultimately delegating a significant amount of the company’s actions during the crisis to former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth and former head of Legal, Policy and Trust Vijaya Gadde, Shellenberger reported. Dorsey sent staffers an email on Jan. 7 telling employees that the company needs to maintain consistent moderation policies, according to Shellenberger. (RELATED: Twitter’s Chief Censor Met Weekly With US Intelligence Officials While Trump Was In Office, Internal Comms Reveal)

“Jack’s emails have been _fine_… but ultimately, I think people want to hear from Vijaya, or Del, or someone closer to the specifics of this who can reassure them that the people who care about this are thinking deeply about these problems and aren’t happy with where we are,” Roth messaged an unidentified employee, according to Shellenberger. “A few engineers have reached out to me directly about it, and I’m chatting with them… but it’s so clear that they just want to know that _someone_ is doing something about this, and it’s not that we’re ignoring the issues here.”

The unnamed employee responded, arguing that some employees might not understand that “while it seems obvious and simple that we ‘should’ [permanently ban] his personal account,” the company would have to wrangle with the possibility of banning Trump’s official government account as well, a decision that required “thinking things through,” Shellenberger reported.

While the company had faced pressure to block or ban Trump in the past, it typically resisted those calls; the company’s Public Policy team posted a tweet in 2018 which argued banning world leaders for “controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” and would limit discussion of that leader without meaningfully silencing them, Shellenberger reported.

Twitter did not immediately respond to request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: CAUGHT IN LIES: Latest Twitter Files Release Reveals Feds and Twitter Both Caught Lying, Hiding Evidence in Major Lawsuit; Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt Calls Them Onto the Carpet

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Lawsuit Depositions and Twitter Files Tell the Tale

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There’s an old saying: Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want reported on the front page of the newspaper.  So many stunning revelations have been reported in the last couple days from the release of the Twitter files and the Missouri versus Biden Big Tech censorship case, there’s no room on the front page left.

An FBI agent testified in a deposition in the censorship case that FBI headquarters put its “stamp of approval” on requests to social media companies to block specific information before the 2020 elections.  Requests would get routed through FBI field offices around the country, federal prosecutors, FBI and Justice Department lawyers, and FBI headquarters before being sent to the agent’s “command post” in San Francisco for action.  The agent further testified social media platforms frequently complied with FBI requests to take down posts.

A State Department official testified during his deposition that the State Department has been funding online fact checkers.  He named the Poynter Institute which operates Politifact, a notoriously left-wing fact checker.  You might recall Facebook admitted in a lawsuit these so-called ‘fact checkers’ are really just “opinion”, left-wing opinion your State Department is only too happy to pay for.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk released a first set of files showing how former Twitter executives decided to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Twitter suppressed the story under its policy against “hacked” information, but there was no evidence the information was hacked.

In a second set of files released just yesterday, it was revealed the platform used several means to silence conservatives, including blacklists and shadow-banning, techniques which former Twitter executives had denied using and dismissed as conspiracy theory.  The targets included a well-known opponent of the Covid lockdowns and two conservative radio talk show hosts.  As one Twitter engineer put it, “we control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do.”  Twitter was taking down posts or limiting visibility as many as 200 times a day.

The head of the team was Jeff Carlton, a former U.S. Naval Intelligence officer who had previously worked for the FBI counterintelligence division and CIA.  I told you earlier this week Twitter’s deputy general counsel who had advised the company to block the Hunter Biden laptop story had previously worked for the FBI.  Elon Musk fired counsel James Baker this week for suppressing information and for giving an “unconvincing” explanation for why he reviewed the new Twitter files before they were published.

So we have more than just proof of concerted action between the Biden administration and Twitter executives to support the theory Twitter had become an extension of the government to suppress speech.  We have a revolving door that placed former intelligence agency and FBI officials inside Twitter at critical junctures, adding weight to the case Twitter had become a state actor.  Personnel is policy, as they say.

The Missouri Attorney General – now Senator-elect Eric Schmitt who brought the censorship case said:

This is a story of the federal government with all of its vast power and authority colluding with some of the biggest companies in the history of the world to censor Americans to put their thumb on the scale for what’s out there that people can actually read about before an election. It ought to scare the bejesus out of every American, I don’t care about your political stripe.

They suppressed speech and silenced conservatives, but they got caught.  Moral of the Story:  If you can’t do the time on the front page of the newspaper, don’t do the crime.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

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Twitter Used ‘Vast Array Of Tools’ To Throttle Trump’s Account Even Before Jan. 6, Docs Reveal

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  • Twitter took advantage of a “vast array of tools” to suppress the reach of former President Donald Trump, even prior to the company’s decision to ban him in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, journalist Matt Taibbi reported Friday.
  • The platform’s executives debated rolling out “L3 deamplification,” a label that limited users’ ability share offending tweets, in response to Trump posting a series of tweets on Dec. 10, 2020, questioning the results of the 2020 election, but ultimately decided to wait until the program’s “official” launch on Dec. 11, Taibbi reported.
  • “The significance is that it shows that Twitter, in 2020 at least, was deploying a vast range of visible and invisible tools to rein in Trump’s engagement, long before J6,” Taibbi tweeted.

Twitter deployed a “vast array of tools” to limit the impact of former President Donald Trump on the platform, even before the company decided to ban him following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, according to journalist Matt Taibbi, citing internal Twitter documents Friday.

The decision to ban Trump was made not solely due to his actions or the actions of his supporters on or around Jan. 6, 2021, but “over the course of the election and frankly the last 4+ years,”  one Twitter executive — whose name was redacted by Taibbi — wrote in an internal message, according to Taibbi. While Twitter had several teams to limit the visibility of users’ tweets, the majority were either automatic and rules-based or handled by high-ranking executives on a subjective, case-by-case basis, but those executives met with more and more federal officials as time went on, particularly before the 2020 election, Taibbi reported.

Twitter “had a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, most all of which were thrown at Trump (and others) pre-J6,” Taibbi tweeted.

Following Jan. 6, 2021, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth said in an internal Slack message that he lacked sufficient “generic enough” meetings to fill his calendar and hide his “very interesting” meetings from view, according to Taibbi.

“DEFINITELY NOT meeting with the FBI I SWEAR,” reads one of Roth’s messages following Jan. 6, Taibbi reported. Another Twitter employee, whose name and profile picture on Slack were censored by Taibbi, simply responded “lmao.”

On Oct. 8, 2020, Twitter executives opened a Slack channel dedicated to election-related account removals, with a particular focus on “Very Important Tweeters” or “VITs,” according to Taibbi. There was some level of friction between Safety Operations, a larger department within Twitter with a more rules-oriented approach to content moderation, and high-ranking executives like Roth and then-head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde, as the latter group often made moderation decisions “only the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President,” Taibbi reported.

In response to a member of Twitter’s marketing team asking if they can say Twitter detects misinformation through “partnerships with outside experts,” Policy Director Nick Pickles asked for the unidentified employee to simply say “partnerships,” according to Taibbi.

“Can we just say ‘partnerships’ … not sure we’d describe the FBI/DHS as experts or some [Non Governmental Organizations] that aren’t academic,” Pickles replied, according to Taibbi.

On Dec. 10, 2020, Twitter executive Patrick Conlon, announced internally that Twitter would be launching a new mode of suppression known as “L3 deamplification,” according to Taibbi. This mode, which was announced the same day Trump tweeted or retweeted roughly 20 posts challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, was a label that came with an automatic “deamplification” of the tweet in question, limiting its ability to be shared, Taibbi reported.

While some team members asked whether to deploy the new tool right away, Conlon opted to wait until the following day, when the policy was slated to officially go live, according to Taibbi. The team had also applied several “bots” to Trump’s account, monitoring both his claims and the claims of connected entities, such as right-wing news outlet Breitbart, Taibbi reported.

“The significance is that it shows that Twitter, in 2020 at least, was deploying a vast range of visible and invisible tools to rein in Trump’s engagement, long before J6,” according to Taibbi. “The ban will come after other avenues are exhausted.”

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

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FBI Agent Testifies About Bureau’s Involvement in Social Media Censorship

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RELATED TWEET:

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

PODCAST: What do all Communist Globalists have in common? They LIE!

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Until we recognize that the Globalists are our enemy, that they are in both parties, and unless we call them our enemy, we lose. These people are NOT true Americans. They want the destruction of America. For the past 60 years, they have taught our kids that America is the enemy. Where are these kids today? In government, media, and wall street. Who is their enemy? Americans.

Slowly these globalists have turned America’s bureaucratic agencies into the private military operation Barack Obama wanted.

Help Wanted: “Candidate must CARRY A FIREARM AND BE WILLING TO USE DEADLY FORCE.”

A new ad for police? NO! for the IRS!

Who is at risk from armed IRS agents? Why Americans, of course. After all, Americans, MAGA, are the enemy.

What do they think of us?

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” – Club of Rome, a premier environmental think-tank, consultants to the United Nations.

What do Globalists believe: “Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.” – Professor Maurice King, Agenda 21.

Americans are the enemy. They are too rich, have too many luxuries, and must be cut down to the rest of the world. They want us controlled, impoverished, enslaved, or dead. They will stop at nothing to maintain power. So they merged agencies and armed them while taking away Americans’ means of protection.

All policies in the Green Broke Deal can be found in UN Agenda 21. This document is over 300 pages, 40 chapters of total control over the means of production and distribution of all means of human activity. Today this document goes by many names, i.e.:

  • Great Reset,
  • Green New Deal,
  • Build Back Better,
  • Agenda 2030,
  • Sustainable Development,
  • Resilient Cities.

But remember, a name change is not a content change. They all lead to one place, the destruction of America and western civilization.

Who are these Globalists? Where did they get their ideas? Remember, as I said before, these people are not Americans. They want the destruction of America and will do whatever it takes to make that happen. Globalists follow their leaders. The original elite was educated in the Frankfort School; today, the Aspen Institute, UN, and WEF carry the agenda. Sadly, Globalists take the worst from each ideology, and merge them together into an illogical, incoherent, overly expensive policy designed to destroy American values and culture.

Here are a few of the founders of the Marxist DNC and RINOs and what they promote:

John Maynard Keynes – Keynesian economics 1883-1946 – Keynes stated that if Investment exceeds saving, there will be inflation. If saving exceeds Investment, there will be a recession. “For the engine which drives Enterprise is not Thrift, but Profit.” businesses and people tighten their belts and spend less money. Lower spending results in demand falling further, and a vicious circle ensues of job losses and further falls in spending. Keynes’s solution to the problem was that governments should borrow money and boost demand by pushing the money into the economy. Once the economy recovered, and was expanding again, governments should pay back the loans. Keynes’s view that governments should play a major role in economic management is marked.

Karl Marx – 1883  Communism, Das Kapital – While many equate Karl Marx with socialism, his work on understanding capitalism as a social and economic system remains a valid critique in the modern era. In Das Kapital (Capital in English), Marx argues that society is composed of two main classes: Capitalists are the business owners who organize the process of production and who own the means of production such as factories, tools, and raw material, and who are also entitled to any and all profits.

The other, much larger class comprises labor (which Marx termed the “proletariat”). Laborers do not own or have any claim to the means of production, the finished products they work on, or any of the profits generated from sales of those products. Rather, labor works only in return for a money wage. Marx argued that because of this uneven arrangement, capitalists exploit workers.

Fabian – 1884

Fabianism became prominent in British socialist theory in the 1880s. The early Fabians rejected the revolutionary doctrines of Marxism, recommending instead a gradual transition to a socialist society. When Fabianism emerged in the United Kingdom during the 1880s, collectivism was widely considered necessary for human flourishing. believed that substantial state intervention would be necessary if ordinary individuals were to prosper. That dominant position also involved  collective responsibility for children’s education and nutrition, housing, and employment, along with support for care of the sick and aged.

Thomas Robert Malthus – 1766-1834 best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction. This thinking is commonly referred to as Malthusianism. The population will always expand to the limit of subsistence. Only “vice” (including “the commission of war”), “misery” (including  famine or want of food and ill health), and “moral restraint” (i.e., abstinence) could check this excessive growth.

Machiavellianism – named after the political philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli,  In the field of personality psychology, Machiavellianism is a personality trait centered on manipulativeness, callousness, and indifference to morality. The political philosophy is that “the ends justify the means.” Those who follow this political concept are likelier to have a high level of deceitfulness and an unempathetic temperament.

Hegelian Dialectic – The ruling elite creates the crisis. They let the crisis fester until it becomes normalized. Something other than the real cause is blamed. Once the crisis escalates, the people demand a solution. The solution is offered by the same elite who created the problem.  This process is repeated over and over and simultaneously until the desired elite agenda is achieved.

World Economic Forum WEF – Klaus Schwab “You will own nothing and be happy.” The first thing to go is your personal car.

WEF Dr. Harari: Just give the humans drugs and video games, and they will be happy.

FBI terror list: https://republicbrief.com/fbis-cheat-sheet-for-dangerous-militia-symbols-includes-betsy-ross-flag/

‘Extremist’ symbols on the leaked FBI list include the so-called ‘Betsy Ross’ flag from 1777, The ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ Gadsden flag, the ‘2A’ abbreviation for the Second Amendment, and the ‘Tree of Liberty.’

Globalists believe that humans are nothing more than animals and should be corralled into cities where they will be easier to control. The government will control electricity, energy, food, healthcare mobility, housing, employment, and education. They do not care about the damage they do to the people because the people are the enemy. After they have destroyed MAGA, they will find another group to vilify.

As the late, great George Carlin said, “They have a club, and we ain’t in it.” As long as the Globalists are living la vida loca, they do not care. We can rot. You can see their indifference and disdain for the illegals sent to Martha’s Vinyard. Thanks to Obama’s parting gift of executive order 12333,

Expanding Surveillance Powers to spy on Americans, all agencies are merging information and are now armed to fight Americans. New rules issued by the Obama administration under Executive Order 12333 will let the NSA — which collects information under that authority with little oversight, transparency, or privacy concern — share the raw streams of communications it intercepts directly with agencies, including the FBI, the DEA, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a New York Times report.

How do they want us to live?

Sustainable Development means control. Humans will be forced off rural lands and forced into cities so rural land can go back to the animals and humans can be controlled. They can’t get me, you say. Have a smart meter? The globalists control the power in your house. Find out more.

The Globalists know:

  1. Everything in America today is connected.
  2. There are no coincidences or random acts.
  3. Everything has a plan.
  4. All plans are based on lies.

Money, Power, and Control are their mantra. The Next time you hear about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), switch the words around and say Diversity, Inclusion, Equity to DIE. That is what they want us to do, and you will make them nuts.

Is America worth saving?

©Karen Schoen. All rights reserved.

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