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Saturday, April 30, 2022

Which useful idiot thought such a clearly partisan hack should be Biden’s ‘disinformation czar’?

 

Insane as it is that the Department of Homeland Security has created a Disinformation Governance Board, it’s utter madness that the woman running it is Nina Jankowicz, who’s a veteran disinfo spreader.

She embraced and promoted the bogus Clinton-campaign-created Trump-Russia dossier. And she waged war on The Post’s true and accurate reporting of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

As our first laptop stories ran, The Associated Press reported: “Disinformation experts say there are multiple red flags that raise doubts about their authenticity, including questions about whether the laptop actually belongs to Hunter Biden, said Nina Jankowicz.”

She also told the AP: “We should view it as a Trump campaign product.”

Jankowicz soon shared another report “casting yet more doubt on the provenance of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story.” And she tweeted that same day, “The emails don’t need to be altered to be part of an influence campaign. Voters deserve that context, not a [fairy] tale about a laptop repair shop.”

 Look: She’s a career left-wing partisan, from her days working at the National Democratic Institute to her Fulbright-Clinton fellowship to her gig at the left-leaning Wilson Center where she routinely did media hits with NPR, CNN, PBS and so on while placing New York Times and Washington Post opeds. Hiring her for this job just shows how detached from reality and broad American society the entire Biden team has become.

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Don’t pretend that high prices and American suffering are a ‘bug’ for the establishment — it’s a historic feature

 

Well, the establishment is doing it again. As author Julia Song tweeted: “Sh*t is so fake that the minute an outsider took office we got cheap gas, cheap food, became energy independent, no wars and focused on our country’s own issues. Establishment hacks get back in and we have inflation, medical tyranny, world war 3, need to take a mortgage for gas.”

Food Shortage - By Design

 Given the recent past, you can't be paranoid enough!


How many US Presidents in modern history have announced 'food shortages' before they occurred? The answer is only President Biden. 


Read the whole thing.

Dear Corporations: This ‘Pride Month,’ LEAVE US ALONE

 June — or as woke culture warriors call it, “Pride Month” — is just around the corner. Corporations, associations, and non-profits alike are well into planning their marketing, engagement, and fundraising for the upcoming rainbow festivities. But before they spend any more time or budget on glorifying the LGBTQ movement, I have some advice for them: don’t.

Every year, as summer rolls around and an entire month is commandeered by groomy Leftists to shove their values (to use that word charitably) down everyone’s throat, normal people are driven to someplace on the spectrum between annoyance and anger.

And year after year, the normals react with polite silence. The bravest surreptitiously pass around a meme or two, like this perennial favorite:

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Saturday, April 23, 2022

PRINCIPLES ARE A GRAND THING – A GUEST POST – BY JOHN RINGO

 Nobody has been afraid of the Republicans in my LIFETIME. Lois Lerner can laugh at a congressional committee the Republicans are running and gets away with it. Strosz can smirk and preen. Bureaucrats and businessmen flat out lie to Republican leadership and nothing happens.

But they don’t do that to Democrats. Why?

Because if you do, the Left will kill you. They will f’ing DESTROY YOU.

See Joe the Plumber or any number of other examples of ‘nobodies’ that were destroyed for questioning the Left.

So why doesn’t the Right (metaphorically) kill people who disrespect their leadership? Why do the bureaucrats and businesses think they can screw over the Right but not the Left?

PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

The PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! crowd has been a Conservative Surrender Chorus for as long as I can remember.

You can’t attack a bureaucracy that is treating Republicans like something under their shoe! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

You can’t cut funding to academia just because they’re tweeting #KillAllRepublicans. PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

You can’t smack down a company that involves itself, overtly and partisanly, in politics! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

....

Take the high road.’ ‘If you get into the mud with a pig you get covered in mud and only the pig enjoys it.’

If you take the high road, you’re silhouetting yourself and you’re just going to get shot.

If you don’t get in the mud with the pig, it takes you out at the knees and gores nine kinds of stuff out of you.

But PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

Which got us to here. Teachers are openly grooming kids and convincing them they’re… something they are not. Children are being permanently chemically castrated for kicks and money. Two weeks to flatten the curve turned into two years of random medical tyranny. The sitting President that most represented the Right, far more than the eGOP, was investigated over a hoax THAT THE FBI KNEW WAS A HOAX.

The list goes on and on.

We’re in the bunkers, being pounded by artillery. Every time some leader on the Right tries to break out, tries to rally the troops, they get bombarded by fire from every direction.

Reagan was constantly bombarded. Newt to the point he was destroyed. Tea Party was taken out by investigations and the IRS refusing to process their paperwork. Then the leadership was audited to death.

We could fight that. We could rally round a flag. But the worst part. The part that is absolutely INFURIATING, is the Surrender Chorus.

YOU CAN’T FIGHT BACK! THAT’S ICKY! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

Stay in the bunker. Learn to cope. The dinner parties are loverly.

I’m sick to death of the principles crowd. David French, leader of the Conservative Surrender Chorus, once tweeted “If I supported Trump, I’d never be invited to another dinner party.”

If your politics is based on whether you get invites to dinner parties, you don’t have ‘Principles’. You have the opposite.

...

But the worst part. The absolute worst. Is the TrueConservatives that every time we start to take a position quite frankly stab us in the back shouting PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

If you’re more worried about PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! than @libsoftiktok being doxed, if you’re more worried about PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! than a mulit-billion dollar supposedly ‘family friendly’ corporation with loads of largesse given to it by the taxpayers coming out, very publicly, in favor of chemical castration of children…

Then you can take those principles and shove them where the sun don’t shine.

Obama's partisan 'disinformation' campaign

 Obama weighs in on tech censorship.  Like all dictators, he wants his views to prevail; his "truth" to rule.

Byron York:

In what way? Nearing the end of his speech, Obama gave an extraordinarily telling example of how his plan might work. "It is possible to broaden our perspectives," he said. To illustrate that, he cited a recent study by researchers who paid a group of regular Fox News watchers to watch CNN instead for a month. "These were not swing voters," Obama said. "These were hardcore Hannity-Carlson fans. And what the researchers found was that at the end of the month, people's views on certain issues, like whether voting by mail should be allowed or whether electing Joe Biden would lead to more violence against police — on some of these issues, their views had changed by 5, 8, 10 points. These people didn't suddenly turn into liberals — I'm sure they still don't like me — but at the margins, they had reshaped their perspectives in meaningful ways."

There it is. Perhaps social media companies could do something similar. Perhaps they could play the role of the good guys, CNN, in changing the views of people who watch the bad guys, Fox News. Or, to be more open about it, perhaps they could play the role of Democrats in changing the views of Republicans. And for those who believe that is precisely what social media companies are already trying to do — well, perhaps they could do even more. That is Obama's vision. "Now is the time to pick a side," he said. "We have a choice right now: Do we allow our democracy to wither, or do we make it better? That is the choice we face."



Friday, April 22, 2022

Selling Censorship: Could the Twitter Board Trigger Shareholder Lawsuits Over ESG and Anti-Free Speech Policies?

 The Washington Post’s Max Boot declared that “for democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.”

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich went full Orwellian in explaining why freedom is tyranny. Reich insisted that “every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron” pushed free speech to oppress people and that, while good for Musk, “for the  rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.”

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has maintained that he wants to steer the company beyond free speech and that the issue is not who can speak but “who can be heard.” The question, however, is whether shareholders will be heard by a Board that has decided to make censorship (or “content modification”) a critical goal of the company.

Orwellian.  Freedom is slavery. 

Trickle-Down Racist Antiracism

 This reactionary and neo-Confederate return to racial stigmatization and hatred is not going to end well. 


 Regressing to the Color of Our Skin

Until about 2008, it was generally believed America had made great strides in rendering race incidental rather than essential to our characters. We were moving away from the racial collective of our past to the individual. That was the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., who emphasized content of character over color of skin.

Barack Obama’s presidency, however, resurrected tribal identity politics. He rebooted the banal word “diversity” and made it synonymous with anyone and anything “nonwhite.” ...

As a result, rich Punjabi immigrants, Korean-American orthodontists, Obama himself, or Oprah Winfrey (the victim, supposedly, of being denied a look at a $38,000 crocodile skin bag) all supposedly shared some sort of oppressed solidarity by virtue of not being completely white. 

But if the well-off mysteriously could become victims, stranger still, millions of the poor could be reinvented as white victimizers.

In this new fixation on “white rage,” “white supremacy,” and “white privilege,” a white Mark Zuckerberg, Jane Fonda, a long-haul truck-driver, or an Alabama janitor all can be jumbled together as the oppressors of the likes of Jussie Smollett, LeBron James, Sonya Sotomayor, or Elizabeth Warren—whose power, money, or influence did not negate their claims of being not fully white.

And:

So why wouldn’t a known racist firebrand like Brooks or Frank James, the racist subway shooter, believe that he was only acting out the thoughts of elites who were bragging about either shunning non-improved whites or playing at beheading them?

Read the whole thing.

Thursday, April 21, 2022

New Democrat Line: Democracy is a Threat to Democracy

 Kurt Schlichter takes the next logical step in the Democrats' war on reality:

The ruling caste knows it maintains its sinecure not by persuasion but by power; if they can’t silence and subdue us, they’ll be trampled in the stampede to those who actually can adequately perform the job of running society. That’s why suddenly free speech has morphed into a threat to democracy. And, of course, democracy is also a threat to democracy.

But his main point is that billionaires will not save us from the radical Left.  Individuals have their quirks and those quirks are going to lead to disappointment when the chips are down.

 Money can be extremely helpful even though it is not a substitute for political leadership. The Elon Musks and the Peter Thiels and the rest of the not-left rich guys can be useful at times, but they are not conservative ideologues like us. It is not that they do not have a comprehensive political vision. It is that, except for Trump and maybe Ross Perot, they are not positioned to become the avatar of one out there in the electorate that existing pols have failed to claim and harness.

For that reason, to lean on the Crassus contingent, is to court consistent disappointment. Remember the Koch Brothers? They gave the libs fits, but they were not America First nationalists. They were quirky libertarians who, for every three good policy positions, held one that we reject, like freeing criminals or sending a bong to every high school grad. The last one is probably not a thing, but only because they didn’t think of it before fading away.

The oligarchs don't have the normal people's problems.  They have different problems, not the ones that trouble normal people. 

 The main issue today is culture, as in who gets to run it – us or the woke groomer mutants? And that issue is the one that the rebel oligarchs are least likely to rebel over. They don’t have kids in public schools. Little JOmNerf#$, or whatever bizarre name Musk laid on his last kid, is not going to come home and say “Daddy, my teacher told me I am privileged and also that my penis has nothing to do with my sex.” This is a problem that we less enormously wealthy people face. ...

. What fighting these battles takes is really a hundred thousand outraged moms showing up at school board meetings and yelling and running themselves if they can’t scare the incumbents into doing their jobs instead of submitting to Big Woke.

Saturday, April 16, 2022

Twitter's Chickens Come Home to Roost

 Matt Taibbi:

Elon Musk has reportedly attempted to purchase Twitter, and I have no idea whether his influence on the company would be positive or not.

I do know, however, what other media figures think Musk’s influence on Twitter will be. They think it will be bad — very bad, bad! How none of them see what a self-own this is is beyond me. After spending the last six years practically turgid with joy as other unaccountable billionaires tweaked the speech landscape in their favor, they’re suddenly howling over the mere rumor that a less censorious fat cat might get to sit in one of the big chairs. O the inhumanity!

A few of the more prominent Musk critics are claiming merely to be upset at the prospect of wealthy individuals controlling speech. As more than one person has pointed out, this is a bizarre thing to be worrying about all of the sudden, since it’s been the absolute reality in America for a while.

as someone who isn't a fan of Elon Musk, I still find it darkly funny that billionaire-owned media is suddenly having a moral panic about a billionaire possibly buying Twitter

Probably the funniest effort along those lines was this passage:

We need regulation… to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.

That was Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, railing against Musk in the pages of… the Washington Post!

The Other Fednapping Plot

 If you’re looking for an actual insurrection, it occurred within the FBI and the political class generally, who abused their power specifically to get rid of a democratically elected president in order to install one who was manifestly unqualified for the job.


The same FBI operation that ginned up the phony kidnapping plot in Michigan also tried to coax a Virginia man to participate in a similar scheme against Governor Ralph Northam.

A Michigan jury acquitted two defendants last week and could not reach a verdict on two other defendants in what the government considered one of the largest domestic terrorism investigations ever. (The Justice Department just announced it will retry Adam Fox and Barry Croft, Jr., who remain in jail.)

Defense attorneys successfully argued that multiple FBI agents and informants attempted to induce the men to commit the crimes and blasted the government in closing arguments. 

“That’s unacceptable in America,” Fox’s attorney, Christopher Gibbons, told the jury on April 1. “That’s not how it works. They don’t make terrorists so we can arrest them.”

But the government not only attempted to manufacture “terrorists” in the Whitmer kidnapping hoax—the same FBI operation also tried to coax a man in Virginia to participate in the same sort of plot against Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. That scheme didn’t fully materialize, but the FBI’s attempt to pull off a similar stunt in Virginia reveals just how far agents were willing to go to bolster FBI Director Christopher Wray’s false warning that domestic extremists planned to “kill and assassinate” public officials.

Thursday, April 14, 2022

These 18 Corporations Gave Money to Radical Black Lives Matter Group

 Did you hear about the $6 million dollar mansion BLM bought in Malibu and the $90 million they raised?  No one seems to know how got it and how it was spent.

There are lots of fake "fact-checkers" that tell us that big corporations like Bank of America didn't give to BLM when it pledged $1 billion to "fight racial inequality" at a time when BLM was marching in the streets; marches that turned to violent riots after the sun went down.  

They will all tell you that the $1 billion gifts to BLM were "not correct." But they don't tell us what's not correct.  The dollar amount?  Who it went to ?  Did they give it to third parties who gave it to BLM?  Are we supposed to be gullible enough after the lies we have been fed over the last few years that "not correct" is a categorical denial?

Well here are a number of big companies that boasted about giving to BLM:

Here are some of the corporate donors.

1. DoorDash

2. Deckers

3. Amazon

4. Gatorade

5. Microsoft

6. Glossier

7. 23andMe

8.  Airbnb

9.  Unilever

10. Bungie

11. Nabisco

12. Dropbox

13. Fitbit

14. Devolver Digital

15. Skillshare

 16. Square Enix

17. Thatgamecompany

18. Tinder

A number of companies were more ambiguous including Cisco, Intel, Atlantic Records, Warner Records, and others. For details, click on the LINK

David Mamet: American Occupation

 

lived for very many years in rural Vermont. I’d bought a long-abandoned, post-and-beam farmhouse on a third-class dirt road. The realtor was a German immigrant who’d come to Vermont with his wife and infant children just after the war. He suggested that I call a local builder, Bob, to inspect the house, which was superficially in dreadful shape, but the farm and basement were sound. Bob said he’d be glad to put it right, and he and his brother-in-law restored it to its 1805 perfection.

Bob’s family had lived through the war in Germany, and through the famine afterward, and through relocation in America, ignorant of the language. Bob taught himself carpentry and all the building trades, and became a much-respected member of the small town, where all of his contemporary men had fought against the Axis in World War II. His brother-in-law, Eric, had been in the Hitler Youth, and Bob was a glider commando in the Luftwaffe—the equivalent, today, of Delta Force, or the Navy Seals.

My family became friends with Bob, and his wife, Ilse, became a surrogate grandmother—or better, great-aunt—to my kids. His family was my first encounter with the German national character—hard working, honest, and uncomplaining.

Friday, April 08, 2022

Government Health Policy in one video