NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FBI Gaslights America Over Twitter Files Ben Weingarten

Posted By on December 27th, 2022

https://www.newsweek.com/fbi-gaslights-america-over-twitter-files-opinion-1769352

The FBI is gaslighting the American people over the stunning—if unsurprising—evidence that it engaged in a conspiracy with Big Tech to silence wrongthinkers in violation of the First Amendment, as the Twitter Files have revealed.

Meanwhile, in attacking those who refuse to be gaslit, the bureau is also telegraphing that it would respond to Congress investigating its hyper-politicization and weaponization with relentless information warfare.

The gaslighting comes in the preeminent law enforcement agency’s “move along, nothing to see here” response to the Twitter Files. It stated that “correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements.” The FBI, it says, “provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”

Here is the kind of conduct the FBI wants you to believe is completely normal:

Grooming Twitter executives for months in advance of the release of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story to compel them to kill the story.
Referring myriad tweets concerning inherently political matters to Twitter’s censorship team for purging—so many tweets, in fact, that during one such bulk censorship request, a Twitter employee described the review of the “possible violative content” as a “monumental undertaking.”
Flagging specific Twitter accounts for the platform to take action against—up to and including suspension—apparently for engaging in thoughtcrime of promoting “civic misinformation” by making jokes related to the 2020 election.
Paying Twitter $3.4 million for its time and effort censoring Americans.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China sends 71 warplanes, 7 ships toward Taiwan in 24 hours

Posted By on December 27th, 2022

https://apnews.com/article/taiwan-politics-china-7ca84c323b8ed15253c9cb5c04789805?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=TopNews&utm_campaign=position_04

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China’s military sent 71 planes and seven ships toward Taiwan in a 24-hour display of force directed at the self-ruled island, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said Monday, after China expressed anger at Taiwan-related provisions i n a U.S. annual defense spending bill.

China’s military harassment of Taiwan, which it claims is its own territory, has intensified in recent years, and the Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army has sent planes or ships toward the island on a near-daily basis.

Between 6 a.m. Sunday and 6 a.m. Monday, 47 of the Chinese planes crossed the median of the Taiwan Strait, an unofficial boundary once tacitly accepted by both sides, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.

Among the planes China sent towards Taiwan were 18 J-16 fighter jets, 11 J-1 fighters, 6 Su-30 fighters and drones.

Taiwan said it monitored the Chinese moves through its land-based missile systems, as well as on its own navy vessels.

“This is a firm response to the current U.S.-Taiwan escalation and provocation,” said Shi Yi, the spokesman for the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command, in a statement on Sunday night. It announced that the PLA was holding joint combat patrols and joint strike drills in the waters around Taiwan.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

2022: A year of victories for election integrity Yet there is still more work to be done J.Christian Adams

Posted By on December 27th, 2022

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/dec/26/2022-year-of-victories-for-election-integrity/

The 2022 elections are over, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief that they largely followed the rule of law. Compared with the COVID-19-infected 2020 elections, 2022 was a breeze. Americans woke up to the vulnerabilities in election administration and sought improvements.

After 2020, smart states passed reforms to strengthen election security. Court victories also bolstered the rule of law in elections.

A big win for the rule of law occurred in Delaware. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am president, blocked the Department of Elections from enforcing mail voting and same-day voter registration.

Mail-in voting and same-day registration conflicted with the Delaware Constitution. The state constitution allows absentee voting only in certain enumerated circumstances, such as being ill. The Delaware Constitution also provides reasonable registration procedures, not walk-up no-verification voting on Election Day.

In legislative debate, Delaware Speaker of the House Peter Schwartzkopf quipped, “I don’t know whether [the law’s] constitutional or not constitutional, and neither do you guys or anybody else in here.” No kidding.

He went further: “The best way to get this thing done is to hear this bill, move forward, and let a challenge go to the courts and let them decide it.”

Decide they did.

Days before ballots were mailed, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that both laws were unconstitutional. This ruling effectively stopped a lawless election in Delaware.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate The platform suppressed true information from doctors and public-health experts that was at odds with U.S. government policy. David Zweig

Posted By on December 27th, 2022

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

By the time reporter David Zweig got to the 10th floor conference room at Twitter Headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco, the story of the Twitter Files was already international news. Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Leighton Woodhouse, Abigail Shrier, Lee Fang and I had revealed evidence of hidden blacklists of Twitter users; the way Twitter acted as a kind of FBI subsidiary; and how company executives rewrote the platform’s policies on the fly to accommodate political bias and pressure.

What we had yet to crack was the story of Covid.

David has spent three years reporting on Covid—specifically the underlying science, or lack thereof, behind many of our nation’s policies. For years he had noticed and criticized a bias not only in the mainstream media’s coverage of the pandemic, but also in the way it was presented on platforms like Twitter. 

We couldn’t think of anyone better to tackle this story. — BW

I had always thought a primary job of the press was to be skeptical of power—especially the power of the government. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, I and so many others found that the legacy media had shown itself to largely operate as a messaging platform for our public health institutions. Those institutions operated in near total lockstep, in part by purging internal dissidents and discrediting outside experts.

Twitter became an essential alternative. It was a place where those with public health expertise and perspectives at odds with official policy could air their views—and where curious citizens could find such information. This often included other countries’ responses to Covid that differed dramatically from our own.

But it quickly became clear that Twitter also seemed to promote content that reinforced the establishment narrative, and to suppress views and even scientific evidence that ran to the contrary. 

Was I imagining things? Was the pattern I and others witnessed proof of purposeful intent? An algorithm gone rogue? Or something else? In other words: When it came to Covid, and the information shared on a service used by hundreds of millions of people, what exactly was being amplified? And what was being banned or censored?

So when The Free Press asked if I would go to Twitter to peek behind the curtain, I took the first flight out of New York. 

Here’s what I found.

The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic. Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A federal judge essentially says parents have no rights over their children By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on December 26th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/a_federal_judge_essentially_says_parents_have_no_rights_over_their_children.html

Lenin is reputed to have said, “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seeds I have planted will never be uprooted.” Every parent knows this is true: Children are sponges, learning things incredibly quickly. These things then stick, for they are buried in the very deepest recesses of our brains. Today’s leftists are attempting to reinstitute this specific type of Leninism in America. They want your children, and your efforts to protest will be unavailing. A Massachusetts federal judge confirmed this last week, saying that it didn’t “shock the conscience” that a school secretly indoctrinated two children into transgenderism.

From the Daily Wire:

A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit from Massachusetts parents who accused public school officials of hiding their children’s gender transitions from them.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark Mastroianni, an Obama appointee, criticized Ludlow Public Schools officials for allegedly hiding the pair of siblings’ gender transitions from their parents, but he said the officials’ actions do not “shock the conscience.”

“While the court is apprehensive about the alleged policy and actions of the Ludlow Public Schools with regard to parental notification, it cannot conclude the decision to withhold information” about the children from their parents meets the conscience-shocking legal standard in Massachusetts, the judge wrote in his December 14 ruling.

The case revolves around the fact that the school deliberately made the decision to keep from the parents the demands that they be treated as members of the opposite sex in junior high school:

The 11-year-old girl allegedly emailed school staff in February 2021 and announced that she wanted to go by a cluster of new pronouns.

“I am genderqueer. … My new name will be R**** … If you deadname me or use any pronouns I am uncomfortable with I will politely tell you … A list of pronouns you can use are: she/her he/him they/them fae/faerae/aer ve/ver xe/xem ze/zir. … Please only use the ones I have listed and not the other ones. I do not like them,” the girl wrote, her parents said in court documents.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Death of Christianity in Bethlehem by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on December 26th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19239/bethlehem-christianity-death

“The systematic persecution of Christian Arabs living in Palestinian areas is being met with nearly total silence by the international community, human rights activists, the media and NGOs.” — Justus Reid Weiner, International Christian Embassy, Jerusalem, Israel, August 20, 2013.

“There are incidents happening constantly… Most times, it is a case of the Muslim community overpowering the minority, which is the Christian community.” — Christian Arab, quoted on condition of anonymity, Israel365News, November 21, 2022.

“[T]he leaders of the Christian community in the West Bank are reluctant to hold the Palestinian Authority and their Muslim neighbors responsible for the attacks. They are afraid of retribution and prefer to toe the official line of holding Israel solely responsible for the misery of the Christian minority.” — Khaled Abu Toameh, October 31, 2022.

“The only thing that interests the PA is that events of this kind not be leaked to the media. Fatah regularly exerts heavy pressure on Christians not to report the acts of violence and vandalism from which they frequently suffer, as such publicity could damage the PA’s image as an actor capable of protecting the lives and property of the Christian minority under its rule. Even less does the PA want to be depicted as a radical entity that persecutes religious minorities. That image could have negative repercussions for the massive international, and particularly European, aid the PA receives.” — Dr Edy Cohen, “The Persecution of Christians in the Palestinian Authority,” BESA Center, May 27, 2019.

“The fact that the Palestinian Authority continues to make sure that there is a Christian mayor in Bethlehem is only window dressing… It’s a show used to convince the world that Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christianity is still a Christian town. It is not Christian. It is Muslim in every regard.” — Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation, November 21, 2022.

This Christmas, it is important to remember that, due to ongoing but silenced persecution, Christianity is on the verge of disappearing in the place of its birth — Bethlehem, the scene of the Nativity. It is a silence that gives the Christmas song “Silent Night,” an ominous meaning.

After noting that there “has been a marked uptick in religiously motivated attacks by Palestinian Muslims on Christians in Bethlehem,” a report from November 21 offers these examples:

“Just over two weeks ago, a Muslim man was accused of harassing young Christian women at a Forefathers Orthodox Church in Beit Sahour near the city of Bethlehem. Soon after, the church was attacked by a large mob of Palestinian men who hurled rocks at the building while congregants cowered inside. Several of the congregants were injured in the attack.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

US Military’s Failing Deterrence Against China ‘They Are Putting Capability in the Field Faster Than We Are’ by Judith Bergman

Posted By on December 26th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19259/us-china-failing-deterrence

In just two years since 2020, when the Pentagon wrongly estimated that it would take China a decade to double its nuclear stockpile at the time of approximately 200 nuclear warheads, China has already doubled its stockpile.

“As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking, It is sinking slowly, but it is sinking, as fundamentally they are putting capability in the field faster than we are. As those curves keep going, it isn’t going to matter how good our [operating plan] is or how good our commanders are, or how good our forces are – we’re not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem.” — Admiral Charles Richard, defense.gov, November 3, 2022.

Unfortunately, the US is facing China with a lot of outdated military hardware.

Instead of doing all in its power to counter those adversaries, however, the Department of Defense has been focusing precious time on extremism, diversity, equity and inclusion, and climate change within the military….

In July, the Senate Armed Services Committee called on the Pentagon to stop its programs to prevent and root out extremism within the military, most notably Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s “stand-down” directive, which the military spent 5.4 million hours on implementing, at a cost of more than $500,000.

Overall, since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, at a time when every effort should have been geared towards countering top military threats, the Department of Defense spent nearly six million hours on extremism, diversity, equity and inclusion training, and climate change.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin gave a stern warning about US competition with China earlier this month at the Reagan National Defense Forum:

“These next few years will set the terms of our competition with the People’s Republic of China. And they will determine whether our children and grandchildren inherit an open world of rules and rights — or whether they face emboldened autocrats who seek to dominate by force and fear…

“The PRC is the only country with both the will and, increasingly, the power to reshape its region and the international order to suit its authoritarian preferences.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ukraine: A Recipe for Appeasement by Amir Taheri

Posted By on December 26th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19258/ukraine-appeasement

Kissinger is reluctant or afraid to say what he really demands, which is appeasing Russia.

The grand old man of American diplomacy claims that the mumbo-jumbo he has just spewed would somehow create “a new structure towards achieving peace through negotiation.” Later, however, he reduces “peace” to a “peace process” like the one he launched in the Middle East almost 50 years ago and which is supposed to be still going on fast to nowhere.

This war isn’t about territory.

Russia has more “territory” than any other nation on the planet. Some claim that annexing Crimea was necessary to maintain Russia’s naval presence in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. But that claim too could be dismissed as an excuse for aggression.

With his policy of détente during the Nixon and Ford administrations, Kissinger arguably helped prolong the life of the Soviet Empire by treating it as an equal partner, playing a leading role in the Helsinki Accords, and providing it with access to global capital markets among other favors bestowed.

If he skims through the Kremlin media, Kissinger would see that Putin won’t be satisfied with just a chunk of Ukraine, as he has said many times, and has already set the theme for “protecting our kith-and-kin” in Moldova and Estonia, with less direct musings about a pan-Slav empire that could include Poland, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro.

If implemented, Kissinger’s “peace plan” could become a prelude to endless war, cold, lukewarm and hot, in Europe, and the most disastrous attempt at appeasement since the Chamberlain-Daladier duo went to Munich.

Russian military lore is full of references to the cold months ahead in that part of Europe as “General Winter”. So, it is no surprise that President Vladimir Putin, disappointed in the performance of his generals, is looking at “General Winter” to help him snatch victory from the jaws of defeat as it had helped Kutuzov against Napoleon.

Putin’s reading of history, however, is slanted in favor of his illusions. In the Napoleonic war, “General Winter” was on the side of the defender, not the aggressor. With “General Winter” unlikely to work for Putin, he may have to look at another grand old man, this time a diplomat, to help him out of the hole he has dug for Russia.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What Will the FBI Not Do? Who watches the watchers? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 26th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/25/what-will-the-fbi-not-do/

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. 

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” 

Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.” 

Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda. 

The FBI did not merely engage in “correspondence” with Twitter to protect the company and its “customers.” Instead, it effectively hired Twitter to suppress the free expression of some of its users, as well as news stories deemed unhelpful to the Biden campaign and administration—to the degree that the bureau’s requests sometimes even exceeded those of Twitter’s own left-wing censors.

The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves [sic],” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”

The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Stanford’s Naughty and Nice List Like recent formulations of cannabis, Stanford’s latest folly is more concentrated, more toxic, than the academic street drugs of yesteryear.  By Roger Kimball

Posted By on December 26th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/24/stanfords-naughty-and-nice-list/

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. 

It’s not clear what the origin is of that admonitory observation, though one plausible source is Sophocles’ Antigone, in which the chorus observes that the gods muddle the minds of those to whom evil seems good. 

We usually think of this stricture applying mostly to individuals. But as I look around our culture today, I wonder whether it might apply equally to institutions. 

Investigating that possibility with anything like thoroughness would take many pages. But let me offer what Kierkegaard described as a “preliminary expectoration” by noting what prompted the thought that this connection between madness and destruction might have an institutional as well as an individual application. 

For anyone attuned to the cultural static of our times, it will come as no surprise to learn that the bulletin came from that pullulating golden midden, the university, and from the highest reaches thereof. Elsewhere I have written about Harvard’s decision to go full blackface by appointing Claudine Gay, an activist intellectual nonentity, to be its next president. 

As the commentator Francis Menton noted in an excellent piece on Gay’s appointment, she has long been “the enforcer-in-chief of [wokeist] orthodoxy at Harvard.” She helped destroy the career of the brilliant economist Roland Fryer because he came to the “wrong” conclusions about whether the police displayed racial bias in their use of force (they don’t), while overlooking alleged data fabrication by Ryan Enos, another Harvard professor, because his studies had come to the right (i.e., left-progressive) conclusion about race and public housing. 

Gay’s appointment was just another example of how the obsession with race is destroying the academy in this country. Would she have been appointed had she not been black? Of course not. But no sooner had I filed that piece than Stanford University beclowned itself even more dramatically. As the Wall Street Journal reported, administrators at this gilded elite bastion of politically correct attitudinizing (endowment as of June: $40.1 billion) recently published guidelines for its “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative,” “a multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford.”

It gets worse, much worse, but for now all you need to know is that the “EHLI” is “one of the actions prioritized in the Statement of Solidarity and Commitment to Action, which was published by the Stanford CIO Council (CIOC) and People of Color in Technology (POC-IT).” If you have some Dramamine or an air sickness bag handy, check out the emetic verbiage at the links. 

It’s all part and parcel of our culture’s process of inversion, reversal, or—to give it a more familiar name—suicide. The EHLI website is . . . special. Early on, prospective readers are warned: 

CONTENT WARNING: THIS WEBSITE CONTAINS LANGUAGE THAT IS OFFENSIVE OR HARMFUL. PLEASE ENGAGE WITH THIS WEBSITE AT YOUR OWN PACE.