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Should we be alarmed by Biden’s new Disinformation Governance Board? By Rajan Laad

Posted By on April 30th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/should_we_be_alarmed_by_bidens_new_disinformation_governance_board.html

” Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board — the strongest argument against its existence is that no government has the authority to sit in judgment on the First Amendment rights of its own citizens. The Democrats are getting more brazen with every passing day.It is now up to the GOP to aggressively challenge the Democrats and prove to the voters that they are worthy of their trust and votes in November.”

Ever since Elon Musk announced his intentions to buy Twitter, the reaction from liberals has been nothing short of a meltdown.

When Musk actually clinched a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, the meltdown morphed into a full-scale implosion.

The primary cause of the outrage was Musk’s pledge to defend free speech:

Most of the anger emanated from the Washington Democrat establishment and spread like wildfire elsewhere.

Musk recently added a caveat to his assertion about free speech, saying it has to be within the realm of the law.

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Biden’s Ministry of Truth By David Harsanyi

Posted By on April 30th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/bidens-ministry-of-truth/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=third

A federal speech czar? Just as the Founders imagined it, no doubt.

Earlier this week, Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress that his agency is creating a “Disinformation Governance Board” to combat “misinformation” coming from Russia as we near this year’s midterm elections. The Biden administration’s new Committee on Public Information will be led by Nina Jankowicz, “a disinformation fellow” who, perfectly enough, comes to the administration from a think tank named after Woodrow Wilson. Like Wilson, Mayorkas, himself a font of untruths, does not explain under what constitutional power he proposes to oversee speech.

It gets tedious to point this out, but you can vividly imagine the thermonuclear meltdown the country would be (rightly) subjected to if a Republican president assembled a government panel tasked with weeding out “disinformation.” To our technocrats’ dismay, this isn’t Europe, where the state can dictate allowable speech and sometimes arrests those who don’t abide. Here, citizens are the ones who call out the state for peddling misinformation, not the other way around.

The pro-censorship Left, which is to say the vast majority of contemporary Democrats, now have Barack Obama on board as well. The one-time neoliberal champion of free speech — a freedom he employed aggressively to mislead the American people when it served his partisan interests — alleged during a recent Stanford University speech that “people are dying” from misinformation. And, you know, if censorship can save one life . . .

Indeed, these arbiters of truth not only happen to be some of the same people who ran around repeating ludicrous conspiracies about foreign interference for five years; they’re also the same people who used the menace of “Russian disinformation” to lie and suppress news that undermined their electoral prospects, as they did with the Hunter Biden laptop story. (That crew, you’ll be surprised to learn, includes Czarina Jankowicz.)

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FBI Conducted Millions of Warrantless Searches of Americans’ Data in 2021: Report By Arjun Singh

Posted By on April 30th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-conducted-3-4-million-data-record-searches-in-2021-according-to-report/

The FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of data in the U.S. without a warrant over the year 2021, according to a new government report.

The Annual Statistical Transparency Report, was published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Thursday and focuses on the intelligence community’s use of national security authorities for surveillance under U.S. law.

The information was previously gathered by the National Security Agency, the U.S. military’s signals intelligence agency, but was transferred to the civilian-led FBI per the U.S.A. FREEDOM Act, passed in 2015.

The figure represented a 260 percent increase from the previous coverage year, 2020, where the FBI had conducted around 1.3 million searches.

According to analysis by the Wall Street Journal, more than half the data searches – 1.9 million – pertained to the FBI’s investigations of attempts by Russian hackers to infiltrate and sabotage critical U.S. infrastructure. This included the investigation of the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline, a 5,500-mile pipeline from Texas to New York, which was shut down by Russian hacking group “DarkSide” in exchange for ransom in May of 2021.

The shutdown briefly prompted emergency fuel rationing measures by the Department of Energy across the northeastern United States.

Though a version of the same report has been published every year since 2014, this marks the first time that an accounting of the number of data acquisitions by the FBI has been undertaken. At a press briefing in Washington on Friday, an FBI official admitted that “3.4 million is certainly a large number. I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t.”

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Team Biden finally admits there’s a war on cops — which it’s inflaming By Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on April 30th, 2022

https://nypost.com/2022/04/28/team-biden-finally-admits-theres-a-war-on-cops/

The Biden Justice Department is finally acknowledging the war on cops: FBI Director Christopher Wray denounced the 59% increase in cop murders in 2021.

An officer is murdered nearly once every five days, yet violence against law enforcement “doesn’t get enough attention,” Wray said Sunday on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

That is an understatement. Wray’s bosses — Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Joe Biden — have instead focused almost exclusively on alleged white-supremacist criminality, which they claim is the biggest domestic threat facing the country today.

That charge is preposterous. It is violent street crime — drive-by shootings, sadistic robberies, carjackings — that has been destroying lives at an increasing rate since the George Floyd race riots. White-supremacist violence played no role in the record-breaking 29% national homicide increase in 2020 or in the ongoing crime surge since then.

As startling as that 2020 homicide increase was, cop murders rose at twice that rate in 2021. A significant portion of those fatalities were ambushes, which were up 91% by mid-2021. Through April 26 of this year, gun murders of cops are up another 13% over the same period in 2021. Shootings of officers, lethal and nonlethal, were up 43% by early April.

These cop killings emerge from a national rhetoric of cop hatred and racial animosity. The Floyd riots and their long aftermath featured the graffiti tag ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) sprayed across public buildings from New York City to Seattle.

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Biden’s new ‘misinformation czar’ is a Hunter laptop denier Fox guarding the henhouse much?Stephen L. Miller

Posted By on April 30th, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/hunter-laptop-denier-jankowicz-biden-disinformation-board/

The Biden team is following in Barack Obama’s footsteps by launching a Disinformation Governance Board. And the current administration is even one-upping the former president by employing the Department of Homeland Security to combat what it calls “misinformation.”

Obama created a website in 2011 called “Attack Watch” to counter what his 2012 campaign would label as smears and lies. In 2013, his surrogate Stephanie Cutter was appointed head of his Organizing for Action “Truth Team.” Just last week, Obama waded back into the debate about “disinformation” without any sense of self-awareness or irony.

Biden’s disinformation board is, however, less forthcoming with its own information. Will the department have cabinet members? Must its directors be approved by Congress? Who knows? The Biden administration sure isn’t saying.

The Disinformation Governance Board already has a director. Politico reports that Nina Jankowicz has been tapped to help the Biden White House counter what it calls “misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.”

The problem is that Jankowicz has her own history of trafficking disinformation. In October 2020, for instance, she tweeted:

In the same month, she again tweeted about Hunter’s laptop, writing:

It’s been confirmed, of course, not only by the New York Post, which broke the original story, but also by the Washington Post and New York Times, that Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails are real and not a product of Russian misinformation.

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Ignorance And Apathy: Cal Thomas

Posted By on April 30th, 2022

https://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2022/04/28/ignorance-and-apathy-n2606424

There’s an old joke about a fictitious poll taker who asked people what they thought about ignorance and apathy when it comes to politics and elections. One respondent said, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

I thought of that joke after seeing a recent YouGov poll. It shows a vast gap between what people believe to be true and what is verifiably true.

Here are a few examples. According to the poll, transgender individuals make up just 1 percent of the U.S. population, yet people believe the estimated proportion is 21 percent. Only about 1 percent of U.S. households earn more than $500,000 a year, but the survey shows respondents believe 26 percent earn more than that amount.

Three percent of the U.S. population identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, but the survey shows people think the figure is 30 percent. The Black population of the country is 12 percent, but people surveyed think it is 41 percent. Hispanic? The actual number is 17 percent, while the perception is 39 percent. It is the same for atheists: 3 percent (actual) vs. 33 percent (perception).

What accounts for this vast disparity between perception and reality? It can only be the news and entertainment media and what they choose to highlight, as well as the bias they bring to subjects and issues they seek to promote, denigrate, or ignore.

As James Freeman recently noted in The Wall Street Journal: “The current custom in journalism holds that legislation sponsored by Democrats carries the title preferred by Democrats, while a Republican-sponsored bill carries the title preferred by Democrats.” He cites President Biden’s “Build Back Better” proposal, which is about raising taxes and increased spending. The media call the measure by his preferred label. Compare that to “Florida’s new law shielding 7-year-olds from state-sponsored gender identity,” which the media and activists insist on labeling the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

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A post-Holocaust question: Why does the war against the Jews continue? Those who support Palestinianism want something very simple—another Holocaust. Moshe Dann

Posted By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/writers/moshe-dann/

The defeat of the Nazis in World War II ended the Holocaust, but the war against the Jews continued. Muslims and the British administration in Palestine sought to prevent Israel’s establishment, and in 1948, five Arab armies invaded the newly established Jewish state with the intention of wiping it out. Egypt, Syria and other countries planned to attack again in 1967, but were stopped when Israel launched a preemptive strike. The war against the Jews still went on, however, led by the PLO and, more recently, Hamas and other terrorist organizations.

Although the Nazis were defeated and condemned, their anti-Jewish ideology was adopted by Palestinian leaders, institutions and terrorists. It is explicit in the PLO Covenant and the Hamas Charter, broadcast daily by Palestinian media and taught in Palestinian schools.

Most people, however, don’t understand what Palestinianism is. They think it’s about the desire of a group of people for a homeland, a state and self-determination. It’s not. It’s about destroying Israel. Attempts to satisfy Palestinian demands and efforts to engage in a “peace process” inevitably fail when they confront this reality.

Palestinianism is based on the Palestinian narrative that Israel has no right to exist and that the Jews stole their homeland. In doing so, goes the narrative, the Jews expelled Palestinian Arabs during the war of 1948, most of whom moved to neighboring countries. These refugees have been cared for ever since as “refugees” by the U.N. agency UNRWA in order to perpetuate the Palestinian concept of the “the Nakba” (catastrophe)—that is, Israel’s existence. Over the ensuing decades, Arabs and their supporters have demanded that Israel withdraw to the 1949 Armistice lines, evacuate Jews from areas which the IDF acquired in 1967 and allow all Arabs who are considered refugees—and their descendants—to return to Israel and reclaim their property in what is called “the right of return.”

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In groundbreaking step, Muslim delegation participates in 2022 March of the Living “This is crazy what we’re doing. We’re in Auschwitz, a delegation of Arabs and Israelis. I hope that in 10 to 20 years’ time, this won’t be news,” said Rawan Osman. By David Isaac

Posted By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/in-groundbreaking-step-muslim-delegation-participates-in-2022-march-of-the-living/

A Muslim group including participants from across the Arab world took part for the first time in the International March of the Living, the annual 1.9-mile walk from the concentration camp at Auschwitz to the extermination camp of Birkenau in Poland to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. The precedent-setting move was the brainchild of Sharaka, an organization of young Israeli and Gulf State leaders formed in the wake of the Abraham Accords.

The 18-member delegation, including social influencers, professors and journalists, came from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey and Israel, said Amit Deri, founder and CEO of Sharaka.

Deri said the idea to participate in the March of the Living, which takes place annually on Israel’s Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, came to fruition gradually, starting with a trip in December 2020 for young Arab influencers to Israel, in which they visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the Holocaust.

“After that visit, they said they wanted to listen to a Holocaust survivor, who would tell them the story. So last year, we held a Zoom event with more than 250 people from all over the Arab world. It was during COVID-19, and we couldn’t come here,” Deri told JNS on the grounds of Auschwitz.

“We promised that the next time it would be possible to be here on Holocaust Remembrance Day, we would come,” he said.

Deri attributes the timing of the visit to the Abraham Accords agreements signed between Israel and several Muslim states in the fall of 2020. “It has allowed people to express themselves. They feel more comfortable than they did three or four years ago,” he said, adding that the Muslim participants are “definitely” taking a risk and could face backlash in their home countries. “They’re brave to do it, and we appreciate them for doing so.”

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McConnell’s ‘Exhilarating’ Insurrection When it comes to January 6, there are no coincidences.  By Julie Kelly

Posted By on April 29th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/28/mcconnells-exhilarating-insurrection/

A dirty little secret about January 6—one of many—is that Democrats and establishment Republicans, not Trump supporters, wanted to shut down the official proceedings of that day.

Just as the first wave of protesters breached the building shortly after 2 p.m., congressional Republicans were poised to present evidence of rampant voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Ten incumbent and four newly-elected Republican senators planned to work with their House colleagues to demand the formation of an audit commission to investigate election “irregularities” in the 2020 election. Absent an audit, the group of senators, including Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) pledged to reject the Electoral College results from the disputed states.

The Hail Mary effort was doomed to fail; yet the American people would have heard hours of debate related to provable election fraud over the course of the day.

And no one opposed the effort more than ex-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). 

During a conference call on December 31, 2020, McConnell urged his Republican Senate colleagues to abandon plans to object to the certification, insisting his vote to certify the 2020 election results would be “the most consequential I have ever cast” in his 36-year Senate career.

From the Senate floor on the afternoon of January 6, McConnell gave a dramatic speech warning of the dire consequences to the country should Republicans succeed in delaying the vote. He downplayed examples of voting fraud and even mocked the fact that Trump-appointed judges rejected election lawsuits. 

“The voters, the courts, and the States have all spoken,” McConnell insisted. “If we overrule them, it would damage our Republic forever. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”

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Putin’s Genocide on Holocaust Memorial Day by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18474/putin-genocide-on-holocaust-memorial-day

If there are aliens who have taken a road trip to our remote part of the Milky Way they must be deeply appalled at what they continue to find here – most recently the calculated campaign by Putin’s Russian Army to murder civilians in Ukraine.

If those aliens have conquered time and space they would have found that their periodic visits have witnessed one form of genocide or another through virtually every century of human “civilization” on this globe.

Before going any further, it would be wise to define the term. Wikipedia says “Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people — usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group — in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944,[1][2] combining the Greek word γένος (genos, “race, people”) with the Latin suffix -caedo (“act of killing”).[3]”

Historians suggest that they can chronicle the first act of genocide, Rome’s march against Carthage, with Marcus Cato quoted as justifying the coming massacre by asking his fellow Roman Senators, “Who are the ones who have waged war most cruelly? … Who are the ones who have ravaged Italy? The Carthaginians.”

In the Roman Legion siege that followed, historians say that at least 150,000 Carthaginians perished, many of them civilians, with one Roman remarking that “the number of deaths was incredibly high…”

The tyrants that followed throughout history would probably describe that butcher’s bill as just one day’s worth of work: there would be much worse to follow. Historians say we still do not appreciate the ruthless brutality of Genghis Khan.