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Ruth King

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RCP’s Samizdat Prize, Behind The Scenes Stories Of Censorship: Matt Taibbi, Jay Bhattacharya, And Miranda Devine

By on March 29th, 2024

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/03/25/rcps_samizdat_prize_matt_taibbi_jay_bhattacharya_and_miranda_devine_resisting_censorship.html

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” hosts a panel with the winners of the first RealClearPolitics Samizdat Prize — “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi, “Great Barrington Declaration” co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and NY Post reporter and “Laptop From Hell” author Miranda Devine.

The three were chosen for their bravery in resisting censorship. They discuss the cost of taking a stand as well as the future of free speech and online discourse.

Miranda Devine said if her story about Hunter Biden’s laptop had been able to spread widely before the 2020 election, the outcome might have been different:

MIRANDA DEVINE: At the New York Post, we had a little fraction of the truth, which was that [President Biden] was involved in this corrupt, influence-peddling operation with his family. We had a glimpse of that through Hunter Biden’s laptop. We published it, and I think if the story had not been censored by social media, Big Tech, the FBI pre-bunking our story, and the CIA’s 51 intelligence officials, we now know including serving CIA officers, had not lied about the story and said it was Russian disinformation, I think the outcome of the election might have been quite different.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, he thought the world had gone crazy:

DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA: I thought the world had gone crazy. I understood why a lot of people were scared — there’s a new disease floating around. But I’m an epidemiologist, I do public health policy. It was just a strange thing that I happened to be in the right place at the right time, so I did what I’ve always done and wrote scientific papers. What stunned me was the reaction to those papers by my colleagues and my university. It was a corruption of the basic scientific process. Attacking someone who is saying what the data shows.

It snowballed, it felt very lonely at the beginning, but people started to speak up at great personal cost. And I wondered the whole time, why it required any great personal cost at all. It’s a scientific question, it’s a policy question, we need a society where that kind of discussion doesn’t require courage… It shouldn’t be that when you have an emergency, that is when free speech is the most dangerous. You shouldn’t have some guru tell you what to do. It is exactly when there is an emergency that free speech is the most needed.

Matt Taibbi discusses what he found in “The Twitter Files.”

MATT TAIBBI: It was a lot like the journalistic version of the golden ticket in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” to look through the secret files of one of the world’s biggest corporations.

The first thing we were looking for actually had to do with Miranda’s story, and I thought because of a couple of interviews involving Mark Zuckerberg we would maybe find a few emails from the FBI about that one story. We knew that had been suppressed, and ironically we didn’t find a whole lot about Miranda’s story, but we did find within days a whole galaxy of things that said, “Flagged by FBI,” “Flagged by DHS,” “Flagged by HHS,” “Flagged By Treasury.” We realized there was this huge operation that spanned the entire federal government to pressure not just Twitter, but two dozen at least internet companies to suppress different kinds of information.

There’s a journalist here who writes for RealClear, Aaron Maté, where the FBI basically passed a request from the Ukrainian Secret Service to take this guy off Twitter. It was a whole long list of spreadsheets full of requests about all these different journalists, and the scale of it was mind-boggling. That is what unites all three of us, we were all caught up in this story of mass censorship that until very recently was hidden. This has to be out in the open more, people need to know more about it.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Brutal Murder of New York City Cop Jonathan Diller Andrew McCarthy

By on March 29th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-brutal-murder-of-new-york-city-cop-jonathan-diller/

NYPD officer Jonathan Diller was savagely murdered on Monday by a career criminal who was out on the street, with his career-criminal cohort, despite their combined 35 arrests.

Officer Diller was 31. He leaves behind his wife Stephanie and their one-year-old son.

A little before 6 p.m., Diller and his partner approached a Kia Soul that was illegally parked in front of a T-Mobile store near a bus stop in Far Rockaway. The car appears to have been parked there for about ten minutes, according to the New York Post’s sources, one of whom has seen police video.

Lindy Jones (a.k.a. “Killa”), 41, was behind the wheel. Guy Rivera was sitting in the passenger seat. It’s not certain what they were up to, but we can infer it wasn’t good. Rivera, who shot and killed Diller, also had a shiv hidden in his butt. And there turned out to be a second gun in the car. Police suspect the two sociopaths were planning a robbery.

Diller approached the passenger side of the car; his partner the driver side. Diller instructed the car’s occupants to roll down the windows. They refused. Rivera then ignored Diller’s direction that he remove his hands from the pocket of his sweatshirt. Finally, Jones unlocked the automatic door locks, but when Diller tried to open the passenger door, Rivera pulled back from the inside handle.

Diller again told Rivera to remove his hand from his sweatshirt pocket. It was then that Rivera fired his gun and shot the officer — one shot that pierced Diller’s abdomen under the bulletproof vest he was wearing.

Diller’s partner returned fire, wounding Rivera. He has been treated and will recover.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Moscow Massacre: Could it Happen Here? A troubling reflection on our open southern border – and on those who wish us harm. by Cal Thomas

By on March 29th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/moscow-massacre-could-it-happen-here/

A mass shooting at a concert hall in Moscow killed more than 130 people. With many others seriously or gravely wounded the number of dead is likely to rise.

The Islamic state released a statement claiming “credit” for the incident. Eleven suspects have been arrested. Early reports suggested the U.S. Embassy in Moscow had advance warning of the attack. The Daily Mail reported White House Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby said: “Right now we don’t know to what extent this warning [from the US Embassy in early March] and this attack are related. But we had some concerns about the possibility of a terrorist attack in and around Moscow earlier this month.”

The question that must be asked, as it has been suggested for some time, due to our open southern border, is this: Could it happen here? The answer must be an unequivocal yes. In fact, it has already happened here on Sept. 11, 2001.

Does anyone seriously think America’s enemies would not be encouraged by that previous attack and the Moscow atrocity to conduct a repeat operation in America? With such easy access to the country and with so many fanatical beliefs floating around the world, what would deter them?

The Cato Institute has noted that since 2017,”US Border Patrol has apprehended 342 border crossers who were on the Terrorist Screening Dataset, also known as the terror watchlist. Those numbers have shot up in recent years to 169 in FY2023 and 49 to date this fiscal year. Last month, The Daily Caller reported that Border Patrol apprehended an al Shabaab terrorist and released him into the United States in March 2023 after a mismatch on the watchlist. Later, the government discovered that he was on the watchlist, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him within 48 hours. The Daily Caller’s headline was “ICE Confirms It Finally Nabbed Terrorist Allowed To Roam Free For Almost A Year.”

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

‘One Life’ and ‘Nicky’s Family’ Two films depict the rescue of over six hundred children from Nazis. Danusha Goska

By on March 29th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/one-life-and-nickys-family/

The 2023 biopic One Life concludes with a very moving scene. An elderly man is surprised by a televised celebration of heroic deeds he performed when he was young. I could not resist the scene’s power. I cried. I made sniffling sounds. I didn’t even try to apply the emotional brakes.

If only the rest of the movie were as good as that final scene.

One Life dramatizes the life of Sir Nicholas George Winton MBE. When he was 29 years old, Winton participated in an effort to save Jewish children from oncoming Nazis. His heroism warrants an uplifting, inspirational, unforgettable film. I was worried when I saw that One Life would be released in the US on March 15. Early March is part of the “dump months” when movies that haven’t tested well are released.

One Life is not a bad movie. It’s just not good enough. I’d give it a six out of ten, but, given that the subject matter is so important and so appealing, I will nudge that up to a seven. Nicky Winton deserves an eleven out of ten.

As I left the theater, I asked, “Who was Nicholas Winton? Why did he perform these heroic acts? How did he perform them?” One Life didn’t answer those questions for me. I spent hours reading about Winton. I stumbled across a movie I’d never heard of before. Nicky’s Family is a 2011, English language, Czech and Slovak documentary. It is currently streaming for free. Nicky’s Family moved me deeply, answered my questions, and worked for me.

Nicholas Winton (1909 – 2015) was born in London. His parents were German Jewish immigrants named Wertheim. During World War I, they encountered anti-German prejudice. In an effort to assimilate, they converted to Christianity and changed their last name to Wortham. After the war, they changed back to Wertheim, but eventually switched to Winton. Nicholas was baptized in the Church of England. At the elite Stowe school, young Nicholas attended chapel regularly and chose to be confirmed as a Christian. Later he self-identified as an agnostic and a socialist.

Winton’s father was a successful banker. The three Winton children grew up in a twenty-room mansion in West Hampstead. At Stowe school, young Winton made connections that lasted for years, including with charismatic Stowe headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh. Roxburgh said that his goal, as an educator, was to produce young men who were “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” Winton fenced at Stowe and he would eventually be accepted to his nation’s Olympic team. He would never compete, though, as World War II canceled the games. After Stowe, Winton fenced at Salle Bertrand in London. There he fenced against British aristocrat, politician, and antisemite Oswald Mosley. Hitler attended Mosley’s second wedding.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The world is accustomed to terrorism against Israelis Moshe Phillips

By on March 29th, 2024

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-794069

A seemingly small detail in a news report caught my eye. The firebombs were “filled with nails,” a police spokesperson revealed. That was a new one for me, and I follow this kind of news closely.

A few days ago, Israeli police officers arrested two Palestinian Arab terrorists for throwing firebombs at Jewish homes in the mostly Arab Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina. Beit Hanina is not some remote area: it is just five miles from the Western Wall Plaza and less than three and a half miles from Hebrew University.

It’s alarming how quickly the public has become accustomed to such assaults. Imagine if two white supremacists tried to burn down the homes of African-Americans in Washington, D.C. There would be an outpouring of angry condemnations—and rightly so—from political leaders, civil rights groups, and American Jewish organizations. But not a word is heard when Palestinian Arab attackers try to burn Jews alive in Jerusalem.

A seemingly small detail in the news reports about the incident caught my eye. The firebombs were “filled with nails,” a police spokesperson revealed. That was a new one for me, and I follow this kind of news rather closely.

A terrorist is carefully filling a bottle with gasoline. He is just about to stuff a rag into the top, which he will light when he is ready to turn it into a firebomb. But before adding the rag, he and his comrade pause. “Wait a minute,” one must say to the other. “In addition to setting Jews on fire, this could fire nails at high speed when it explodes. Let’s put a bunch of nails in the bottle, so the Jews will both catch on fire and be stabbed by sharp, high-velocity pieces of metal!” 

It seems as if Palestinian Arab terrorists are constantly trying to invent new ways to inflict pain on Jews. Of course we saw unimaginably horrible new types of savagery on October 7. But before anybody thinks that such behavior is unique to Hamas, or to Gazans, let’s not forget that Palestinian Arab terrorists in Judea-Samaria, whether affiliated with Fatah, Hamas, or other organizations all use the same playbook.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Feminist Silence: Hamas’s Sexual Violence by Nils A. Haug

By on March 28th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20522/feminists-hamas-sexual-violence

In November 2023, it was reported that the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary, claimed the evidence against Hamas “was ‘not solid’ enough to warrant a statement” — to which London’s Victims’ Commissioner, Claire Waxman, replied: “How can we talk about eliminating violence against women and girls if we are tacitly saying its acceptable to rape Jewish ones?”

Alsalem, from Jordan, claims the charges against Israeli forces are “reasonably credible,” but refuses to divulge the source. In reality, no credible or proven instance of this behaviour by Israel’s forces in Gaza since October 7 has been publicly recorded.

“Organizations that fight for LGBT rights condemned the country that allows freedom, and marched for a terrorist organization that punishes gay people with death.” — Jared Kushner, townhall.com, March 7, 2024.

“Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.” — Paul Johnson, historian, thepublicdiscourse.com, January 23, 2023.

Early women’s liberation movements, forerunners to present feminist activism, were founded to proclaim women’s rights to social equality. Radical feminism, as a narrow expression of the original movement, fails spectacularly in exemplifying society’s moral and ethical precepts. Its advocates appear to prioritize narcissistic, egocentric identity ideologies over the sanctity, dignity, and ontological security of the individual woman.

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” — Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, December 10, 1986.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Lies To America, Tells the Truth To China by Daniel Greenfield

By on March 28th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20524/biden-lies-china

When the spy balloon was first detected, the initial response by the Biden administration had been to suppress news about it and then to deny that the administration had been aware of it…. But when a Montana resident’s footage of the spy balloon went viral, the Biden cover-up fell apart.

…[T]he Biden administration fully committed to covering up “difficult subjects”… One of those difficult subjects was China’s spy base in Cuba. After the Wall Street Journal reported that China had agreed to pay Cuba billions to build a spy base, the Biden administration denied it.

And then it had to admit it anyway.

The cover-ups, in the name of anti-racism or diplomacy, allowed the Communist regime a clear field for spying on the United States while suppressing the story, so Biden wouldn’t get blamed.

By the fall of last year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Chinese infiltrators trying to access American military bases “as many as 100 times in recent years”.

[T]here is every reason to believe that the situation may be worse than we realize.

Governments normally conceal information about enemy activities so as not to tip off foreign spies, but the Biden administration’s consistent pattern has been to hide the information from Americans rather than from Russia and China… China can trust the White House, but we can’t.

“When I was director of intelligence for the Indo-Pacific Command, for example, I watched as numerous requests to publicize Chinese malign activities were disapproved by Washington,” US Navy Rear Admiral Mike Studeman recently warned.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s digital fentanyl By Tiffany Meier

By on March 28th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/china_s_digital_fentanyl.html

While all eyes may be on TikTok right now as Congress debates the app’s future, this type of influence by the Chinese regime isn’t new. It goes back to the Chinese Communist Party’s goal of hegemony — to win without fighting. 

With the promise of massive profits in China, institutions like Hollywood started self-censoring for a piece of China’s market. For decades, the Chinese regime has used its soft power influence to shape perceptions in society, ultimately impacting politics. 

As French philosopher Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” James Scott, founder of the Center for Cyber-Influence Operations Studies wondered, “But who does one become when the thought is hijacked?”

TikTok takes that a step further, where the thought isn’t being hijacked, the thought is being planted. 

With over 170 million Americans on the app, stories of teens signing up for some laughs, but ending up dead doing challenges, have been making headlines. 

Is this just for entertainment, or is it, as some say “digital fentanyl” with deadly consequences?

That’s where soft power comes in. 

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Record High 10 Million Immigration Cases Completed in 2023 By Eric Lendrum

By on March 28th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/27/record-high-10-million-immigration-cases-completed-in-2023/

A new report reveals that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) completed a record-breaking 10 million immigration cases in fiscal year 2023, showcasing the staggering amount of illegal aliens flooding into the country on Joe Biden’s watch.

According to Just The News, the stunning amount of cases completed led to the USCIS reducing its backlog for the first time in over 10 years. The agency received 10.9 million filings overall in 2023, completing about 10 million pending cases and reducing its backlog by roughly 15%. As a result, the median processing time for naturalization applications decreased significantly, from 10.5 months to about 6.1 months.

“We’ve completed a record number of cases, responded to emerging crises around the globe with essential humanitarian relief, and applied innovative solutions to improve customer experience and reduce backlogs,” said USCIS Director Ur M. Jaddou.

The agency also administered the Oath of Allegiance to over 878,500 immigrants for their naturalization ceremonies, including about 12,000 members of the military, in fiscal year 2023.

USCIS also “continued to support Biden-Harris Administration efforts to establish lawful pathways that allow for the safe and orderly processing of individuals into the United States,” according to the report.

“USCIS is also a key partner in the Safe Mobility Office initiative, one of the many ways the United States is facilitating access to safe and lawful pathways in partner countries in Central and South America,” the report continues, detailing the numerous ways that illegal aliens can gain access to citizenship.

The numbers reveal the true extent of the mass migration crisis, and the Biden Administration’s desperation to naturalize as many illegals as possible ahead of the 2024 election, as most immigrants overwhelmingly vote Democratic in return for amnesty.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Gaza: Truths Behind All the Lies From civilian casualties, the use of disproportionate force, and international biases, the mainstream narrative of the Gaza conflict often obfuscates the truth behind lies. By Victor Davis Hanson *******

By on March 28th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/28/gaza-truths-behind-all-the-lies/

“Occupied Gaza.” Prior to October 7, there were roughly two million Arab citizens of Israel but no Jewish citizens in Gaza. Gazans in 2006 voted in Hamas to rule them. It summarily executed its Palestinian Authority rivals. Hamas cancelled all future scheduled elections. It established a dictatorship and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid to build a vast underground labyrinth of military installations.

So Gaza has been occupied by Hamas, not Israel, for two decades.

“Collateral Damage.” Hamas began the war by deliberately targeting civilians. It massacred them on October 7 when it invaded Israel during a time of peace and holidays. It sent more than 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities for the sole purpose of killing noncombatants. It has no vocabulary for the collateral damage of Israeli civilians, since it believes any Jewish death under any circumstances is cause for celebration.

Hamas places its terrorist centers beneath and inside hospitals, schools, and mosques. Why? Israel is assumed to have more reservations about collaterally hitting Gaza civilians than Hamas does exposing them as human shields.

“Disproportionate.” We are told Israel wrongly uses disproportionate force to retaliate in Gaza. But it does so because no nation can win a war without disproportionate violence that hurts the enemy more than it is hurt by the enemy.

The U.S. incinerated German and Japanese cities with disproportionate force to end a war both Axis powers started. The American military in Iraq nearly leveled Fallujah and Mosul by disproportional force to root out Islamic gunmen hiding among innocents. Hamas has objections to disproportionate violence—but only when it is achieved by Israel and not Hamas.

“Two-state solution.” Prior to October 7, there was a de facto three-state solution, given that Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza were all separate states ruled by their own governments, two of which were illegitimate without scheduled elections.

It was not Israel, but the people of Gaza and the West Bank who institutionalized the “from river to the sea” agenda of destroying its neighbor.

Israel would have been content to live next to an autonomous Arab Gaza and West Bank that did not seek to destroy Israel in their multigenerational efforts to form their own “one-state solution.”

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