[FoxNews] Revelations that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created "disinformation" groups at Stanford University and the University of Washington to censor political speech leading up to the 2020 election should outrage and alarm every American. Free exchange of ideas is the lifeblood of a democracy and the unholy alliance between the government and higher education institutions must be fully exposed and broken up to preserve our Constitutional Republic.
Under this partnership, higher education institutions acted as conduits between the government and Big Tech to remove speech that government officials found unacceptable to achieve their political ends. Researchers would review ’misinformation’ reports submitted by federal officials, compile lists of offending posts, and then submit them to social media companies with specific recommendations. These recommendations reduced the post's discoverability and led to shadow bans and even suspension of accounts. Approximately 35 percent of the content they flagged was removed from social media platforms.
The effort targeted those who held opinions that went contrary to prevailing narratives, especially regarding corruption allegations against Biden, the integrity of the 2020 election, and COVID mask and vaccine policies. Countless Americans were censored, silenced, and shadow-banned during the 2020 election cycle. It was part of a concerted effort to exert control over our behavior and dictate what We the People are allowed to say, see, and hear. And it worked.
The House Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and the Twitter Files have exposed the far-reaching impact of the Election Integrity Partnership between the government, Stanford, and the University of Washington. The 2020 election could have been much different if factual information wasn’t covered up. Just consider how one in six Biden voters surveyed stated that they would not have voted or changed their vote if they had known about the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and the Joe The Big Guy Biden ...46th president of the U.S. ‘This Is A Man ThatDoes Not Seem Demented’... corruption allegations.
#1
No. Bureaucracy consisting of brain-washed college graduates that is not really accountable to the elected politicians - and hence not accountable to the electorate, is.
[Jpost] "When it comes to antisemitism, there is no room for equivocation. There is no fence-sitting. It is our duty to address and tackle it," Lachlan Murdoch said.
Responding to a staggering 482% increase in antisemitic incidents following the October 7 Hamas massacres in Israel, over 600 Australian leaders from diverse sectors signed a public statement denouncing hatred and discrimination on Tuesday.
This large-scale, unprecedented movement has been extensively reported on by The Australian Financial Review and involves both Jewish and non-Jewish leaders, highlighting the significant rise in antisemitism amid the escalating conflict in Gaza. AFR’s front page on Tuesday was dedicated to this initiative, with a lead story titled “Not the Australia I know.”
The statement, which was published in major Australian newspapers, identified a “482% rise in antisemitic incidents [that] has swept Australia’s shores,” calling attention to the offensive language, vandalism, and harassment happening in public places like the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station.
AUSTRALIAN MINORITIES SPEAK OUT
The signatories unequivocally stated, “Racism in all its forms is deplorable and abhorrent.”
Diane Smith-Gander, a prominent Australian business leader and advocate for inclusion, stated, “I never imagined an Australia where there would be a need for 600 business and community leaders to call out ugly ideas that are dangerous to our way of life.”
Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of Newscorp, an influential global media company, reiterated these sentiments :“When it comes to antisemitism, there is no room for equivocation. There is no fence-sitting. It is our duty to address and tackle it.”
Jamie Garis, managing director of Luminis Partners, emphasized, “Racism is abhorrent in any form but at this time, with an alarming increase in antisemitism, it’s important to call that out specifically as something that cannot and should not be tolerated.”
Peter Yates, chairman of AIA Australia, reflected on his personal experiences with discrimination, underscoring that “racial intolerance is completely unacceptable.”
Georgina Downer, director of the Menzies Institute, expressed her concerns about the spread of antisemitism, “As Australians who benefit from a tolerant and multicultural society, we must wholeheartedly reject antisemitism in all its forms.”
The movement also addresses educational settings, with Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll issuing a warning against state school teachers participating in pro-Palestine advocacy, emphasizing the importance of political neutrality in educational institutions.
[Washington Examiner] George Orwell, call your office. That’s my initial and slightly out-of-date response to news stories about the Biden administration’s efforts to stamp out "misinformation." It’s an interesting irony that covert censorship should be undertaken enthusiastically by those who call themselves "liberal" or "progressive" and who claim the opposition would threaten the survival of liberal democracy.
But Democrats seem unembarrassed by his reelection campaign’s program for blocking "misinformation" on outfits like Facebook and Google. It’s being run, as my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York points out, by the same folks who systematically pressured social media "to curb the spread of misinformation" during the COVID pandemic.
Some of that pushback is designed to improve Biden’s dreadful job rating on the economy, and many in media are happy to help. As radio talk host Erick Erickson writes, "Every major news organization except Fox News has done multiple stories on how great the economy is."
But as numbers cruncher Nate Silver points out, citing an egregious Washington Post story co-authored by reliable liberal cheerleader Taylor Lorenz using an apples-and-oranges comparison of McDonald’s, the administration line is contradicted by voters' own eyes and government statistics: inflation is up 16% and personal consumption expenditures up 25% since Biden took office. No American under 60 has experienced such inflation in their adult lifetimes, and they reasonably conclude that Biden’s gusher of government spending is at fault.
One reason is people have had some experience with the administration’s suppression of "misinformation" on COVID. Health officials Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, for example, set about suppressing the theory that the pandemic resulted from a COVID virus leak from the lab in Wuhan, China, that their organizations had lavishly funded.
For a while, that suppression worked. The lab leak explanation was labeled a "conspiracy theory," and no one went back to examine Fauci’s support of Wuhan’s virus-strengthening "gain-of-function" research. Only in the past year have intelligence agencies and some science reporters determined that the lab leak is the likely, though not proven, source of the pandemic.
The government also clamped down hard on "misinformation" about mandatory masking and extended lockdowns initiated in this country. Once again, inconvenient truths were suppressed.
Thus, in February 2023, a leading research institution, Britain’s Cochrane Library, released a study of 78 randomized control trials with 610,000 participants that concluded, as the lead researcher put it, "there is just no evidence" that masking "made any difference" in the transmission of COVID.
Similarly, "there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic," as Joseph Nocera and Bethany McLean write in New York magazine, in an excerpt from their new book The Big Fail.
Lockdowns originated in China (whose captive media reported them as successful) and were imposed after hospitals were swamped with elderly patients in Bergamo, Italy. Initially designed to prevent hospital overcrowding, they soon got extended indefinitely.
[Red State] In the wake of the anti-Israel protests that have been fracturing the Democrat base, the expected collapse of Democrat support for Israel is beginning.
As Ed wrote earlier today, the Biden Administration is signaling that its support for Israel is waning, although they insist that it isn’t. They have walked back their tweet that suggested Israel was committing atrocities and that a "permanent" cease-fire should be on the table.
"To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek." To my ears, this sounds like Biden is saying that Israel is engaged in terror, violence, killing, and war.
Whether you read it that way or not, it was clear that Biden was suggesting that the war had to stop prior to the elimination of Hamas. While the White House has walked this back, other Democrats are clearly pushing in this direction.
The latest example comes from more than a dozen Democrat Senators who met with Biden at the White House to express their reservations about the level of US support for Israel.
[Dawn] Empty restaurants or products being taken off shelves should not be seen as the end goal of boycotts.
Recently, McDonalds Pakistain found itself in the line of fire when the fast food chain’s Israeli franchise announced it was giving away thousands of free meals to the Israeli army, stirring debate on whether certain brands are culpable for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gazoo ...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with an iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... The BDS — Boycott, Divest, and Sanction — movement is inherently a non-violent mostly peaceful movement that calls for the boycott of corporations "complicit in the oppression of Paleostinians." One such example is that of Hewlett-Packard (HP), which has been accused of aiding Israel’s surveillance of dissidents and Paleostinians in general through a biometric ID system. The BDS is a tactic more so than an organization and "works to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Paleostinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law".
Continued on Page 49
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...46th president of the U.S. ‘This Is A Man ThatDoes Not Seem Demented’...
[Jpost] "When it comes to antisemitism, there is no room for equivocation. There is no fence-sitting. It is our duty to address and tackle it," Lachlan Murdoch said.
[Red State] In the wake of the anti-Israel protests that have been fracturing the Democrat base, the expected collapse of Democrat support for Israel is beginning.
