RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/two-cheers-for-the-first-amendment/

Americans who approve of government censorship and interference with social media in order to stop “fake news” and “misinformation,” should take a look at what’s going on in Europe. Recently Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, a social media and instant messaging service, was arrested by French judicial officials and charged with “complicity in distributing child pornography, illegal drugs and hacking software on the messaging app,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Those are serious crimes, and if Durov is proved guilty, worthy of condign punishment.

“But,” as the Journal pointed out in an editorial, “many suspect this [the charges] is merely a pretext because Europe is also imposing speech controls on other media platforms. France in 2020 sought to require sites to remove hate speech, though most of its law was blocked by the country’s top court. The European Parliament then stepped into the breach with its Digital Services Act, which compels platforms to curb harmful content, including so-called hate speech, disinformation and propaganda.”

Durov’s arrest comes not long after Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market, threatened Elon Musk just before his live interview with Donald Trump on X, which has already been subject to “formal proceedings for dissemination of illegal content and the effectiveness of the measures taken to combat disinformation.”

As the Journal noted, “This is thuggish stuff.” Apparently, the Biden administration isn’t concerned about allied foreign nations interfering in American presidential politics. But we shouldn’t be surprised, given his administration’s security and investigative agencies’ collusion with, or strong-arming of social media companies to monitor and censor their users’ content.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/05/biden-confesses-to-a-big-lie-and-nobody-notices-not-even-joe/

You’d never know any of this if you relied on the mainstream press for news.

In a 19-word post on X this past Sunday, President Joe Biden admitted that he has been lying to the public for years. It didn’t make news, partly because Biden is now irrelevant. But it should. Because Kamala Harris is now repeating the lie.

“Since I took office,” Biden posted, “we’ve recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic. And added over 6 million more.”

Why Biden, or whoever on his staff was running his X feed, decided to post this on a Sunday is anyone’s guess.

Whatever the reason, it went almost entirely overlooked. We came across it courtesy of RedState, which highlighted the post, along with a response from the Trump campaign, in a story about Biden’s appearance at a Harris rally.

But it is a distinction Biden had never made in public before. He always says that his administration “created” 16 million new jobs in his first term, usually followed by “the most of any president in history.”

In the New York Times, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Rita Koganzon explains how university tendencies to baby their students have bred unruly protests like the pro-Palestine encampments:

Universities don’t openly describe students as children, but that is how they treat them. This was highlighted in the spring, when so many pro-Palestinian student protesters — most of them legal adults — faced minimal consequences for even flagrant violations of their universities’ policies. (Some were arrested — but those charges were often dropped.) American universities’ relative generosity to their students may seem appealing, especially in contrast to the plight of our imaginary waiter, but it has a dark side, in the form of increased control of student life.

If universities today won’t hold students responsible for their bad behavior, they also won’t leave them alone when they do nothing wrong. Administrators send out position statements after major national and international political events to convey the approved response, micromanage campus parties and social events, dictate scripts for sexual interactions, extract allegiance to boutique theories of power and herd undergraduates into mandatory dormitories where their daily lives can be more comprehensively monitored and shaped. This is increasingly true across institutions — public and private, small and large — but the more elite the school, the more acute the problem.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-harris-cant-lead-emboldens-enemies

President Joe Biden, fresh off an 18-day vacation, says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not done enough to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. He appears to blame Netanyahu for the cold-blooded execution of six hostages, including a U.S. citizen, as much as the Hamas thugs who pulled the trigger. That figures. While the president once vowed that U.S. support for the Jewish state was “rock solid,” more recently that support has crumbled as Biden has pushed for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, damn the consequences. 

When told of the hostage deaths, Biden issued a statement saying: “Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.” We’ll see.  

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ faltering backing of Israel and pandering to the pro-Palestinian mob has hindered IDF’s aggressive hunt for the Hamas beasts who murdered some 1,200 innocents on October 7 and for the hostages held in Gaza.    

https://www.steynonline.com/14610/drifting-to-armageddon

Actually, it turns out I’ve gone full-on Bidenist, literally more submissive to his Delaware beach house than the Delaware beach house itself. As widely reported in Britain and Europe, “there is an American veto on Ukrainian use of Storm Shadow missiles to attack targets at depth in Russia, even though that will materially assist Ukraine.”

So what is still nominally the “Biden” Administration is restraining London and Paris from letting the Ukrainians strike Russia with their UK-provided Strike Shadows and French-provided SCALP missiles. The “Biden” Administration evidently feels nuclear Armageddon might not be helpful in, say, the tighter swing states such as Pennsylvania or Michigan, so would rather the next world war be postponed if possible until, oh, mid-November at the earliest.

Nevertheless, yesterday, Monday, a Ukrainian drone strike hit an oil refinery in south-eastern Moscow. The same day Polish aircraft were scrambled, and the country’s foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, told The Financial Times that “Poland has ‘duty’ to shoot down Russian missiles over Ukraine”.

It’s difficult to have a one-sided proxy war. At some point, the logic of the US, UK, France and Germany gifting Kiev with an arsenal they could never have accumulated on their own and then permitting Zelenskyy to lob his freebies deep into Russia will lead the Russkies to conclude that a state of war exists between them and Nato. What then? From The Guardian:

Russia will make changes to its doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons in response to what it regards as western escalation in the war in Ukraine, state media quoted deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying on Sunday.

The west’s insouciance – indeed, total indifference – to “escalation” with a country that has more nukes than anybody else on the planet stands in marked contrast to its urge to de-escalate certain other conflicts. Headline from the BBC:

Harris tells Netanyahu ‘it is time’ to end war in Gaza

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/take-that-biden-harris-doj-files-complaint-against-hamas-mass-murderers/

More a campaign document than a charging instrument . . . and a fundamentally unserious one.

Could it be more fitting that, in the criminal complaint against Hamas leaders unsealed in Manhattan federal court today, the lead defendant charged by the Justice Department is Ismael Haniyeh. Yes, if you were wondering, that would be the Ismael Haniyeh who was killed during a daring Israeli Defense Forces operation in Tehran about five weeks ago (on July 31).

If there was any doubt about it, “September 10 counterterrorism” is back.

The expression refers to the eight years between the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the destruction of that complex in the jihadist atrocities that killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. That is the period, spanning the Clinton administration, when our government decided to regard jihadist terrorism as a law-enforcement problem to be addressed foremost by courtroom prosecutions.

Merrick Garland, now the Biden-Harris administration attorney general, was a top lawyer in the Clinton Justice Department. The Clinton strategy was not the Justice Department’s doing; America’s counterterrorism strategy is the president’s call. But having been there at the time, I can attest that DOJ was the strategy’s most enthusiastic advocate.

I can further attest that the strategy was a national-security train wreck.

It makes sense, it should be needless to say, to conduct courtroom prosecutions of terrorists who are captured trying to carry out attacks in the United States during ostensible peacetime. There is an argument (I don’t subscribe to it, but it is commonly held nonetheless) that such prosecutions are required by the Constitution, especially if some of the terrorists happen to be American citizens (as was not uncommon in the Clinton-era terrorism prosecutions). It makes even more sense to prosecute material supporters of terrorism in order to choke off the funding and recruitment of foreign terrorist organizations — a significant improvement in American counterterrorism law enacted in the mid Nineties.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/stefanik-urges-probe-into-hochul-after-feds-bring-chinese-foreign-agent-charges-against-former-staffer/?utm_

Representative Elise Stefanik called for a probe into New York governor Kathy Hochul and her administration after the Justice Department indicted the governor’s former deputy chief of staff on Tuesday for allegedly working as an agent of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.

Linda Sun, a former staffer for Hochul and former governor Andrew Cuomo, was arrested today with her husband, Chris Hu. The charges relate to her work as an unregistered foreign agent for the Chinese government and money-laundering that Hu allegedly engaged in to hide the proceeds of Sun’s efforts.

Until today’s arrests, few members of Congress had commented on some New York government officials’ apparent ties to China’s consulate general in Manhattan and pro-Beijing community organizations. Stefanik (R., N.Y.) is the first to call for an investigation into Hochul and her administration.

“Failed Far Left Democrat Kathy Hochul allowed Communist Chinese spy Linda Sun unfettered access to the highest levels of New York State government,” Stefanik said in a statement to National Review this afternoon.

“From allowing Chinese police stations, to maintaining a sister city partnership between NYC and Beijing, this is another example of New York Democrats facilitating the influence campaign of Communist China. I am calling for a complete investigation into Kathy Hochul and her administration so that hardworking New York taxpayers receive the transparency we deserve.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/03/is-the-western-world-still-free/

The recent arrest of Telegram CEO, Pavel Durov, has been in the news. Anti-Russian westerners cheered these events on, even though Durov had fled Russia years ago in order to pursue his techno-libertarian dreams in peace. Adding to the intrigue, the arrest may have included an element of treachery, as some reports say he was invited to visit France by French President Emmanuel Macron, only to be arrested on the tarmac. Mon Dieu!

The ostensible basis for Durov’s arrest is criminal responsibility for various unsavory things that have happened on his Telegram platform. This kind of vicarious liability for hosting websites, particularly those involving user communications and forums, is not entirely new, but it is controversial and always applied very selectively.

No one has rounded up Mark Zuckerberg, even though snuff films, child pornography, and a great many other terrible things have happened on Facebook. On the other hand, after the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting in 2018, there was an outcry against the less regulated Gab website, which is a more freewheeling discussion app similar to Twitter. Similarly, the 8chan message board, on which a mass shooter in El Paso posted a mini-manifesto in 2019, faced hosting and other boycotts from service providers leading to a shutdown shortly after the public outcry.

Whether aimed at individual speakers or entire forums, censorship is on the rise, and it finds its roots in a changing set of values. There is less respect for the principles of free speech, especially among younger people. New principles like the evil of “platforming” bad actors and the importance of psychological “safety” prevail.

As these new values have risen in prominence, the internet’s early, libertarian ethos has mostly gone away.

Deep State Gets More “Bang for the Buck” When Pressuring Monopolies

NO POSTING UNTIL TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 3

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trumps-ridiculers-havent-learned-their-lesson/

The impulse to mock every word out of Trump’s mouth sometimes exposes his critics as the ignorant ones, as with recent reactions to his space-defense proposal.

Donald Trump has once again said something about space. And according to the former president’s reflexive critics, it is positively hilarious.

“One of my proudest achievements in my first term was to create Space Force, the first new branch of the armed forces in over 70 years; it’s a big deal,” Trump said in a Monday address to the National Guard Association conference in Detroit. With that legacy achievement in his pocket, Trump announced a plan to build on it. “I agree that the time has come to create a Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the U.S. Space Force,” he said. In addition, “We’re going to build a great Iron Dome for missile defense around our nation.”

Trump’s skeptics are enjoying a hearty guffaw over the former president’s latest proposal. “Trump’s campaign has earthly problems,” read Politico’s gratuitously impish headline, “but he’s focusing on outer space.” Trump “promises to waste BILLIONS of tax dollars,” the super PAC American Bridge remarked. Indeed, the former president backed the creation of a sixth branch of the armed forces devoted to low-earth orbit only “because he thought it sounded cool,” MSNBC’s Steve Benen posited. And what’s with the Iron Dome talk? “I have a hunch it’s because he likes the words ‘iron’ and ‘dome,’” he speculated.

This fits a pattern, but by now, Trump’s hecklers should have trained themselves out of exhibiting it. It was obvious from the moment it was proposed that a new branch of the armed forces devoted to exo-atmospheric operations was necessary, if only because space had already become a theater of war. Likewise, creating a “a Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the U.S. Space Force,” as Trump proposed, is a remedy to an unworkable proposal offered by Joe Biden.