RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, multiple major Internet corporations essentially cooperated to kick a hate site, The Daily Stormer, off the Internet. Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Google, and various other companies withdrew their services, and now one of the Internet’s most odious sites lives mainly on the “dark web,” largely inaccessible to the casual user.

This was an ominous development for free speech — and not because there is anything at all valuable about The Daily Stormer’s message. It’s an evil site. Its message is vile. Instead, The Daily Stormer’s demise is a reminder that a few major corporations now have far more power than the government to regulate and restrict free speech, and they’re hardly neutral or unbiased actors. They have a point of view, and they’re under immense pressure to use that point of view to influence public debate.

It’s a simple reality that the lines of Internet communication are in progressive political hands, these progressive corporations look to left-wing activists to define hate, and a large number of leftists believe to the core of their beings that “hateful” speech should be censored and suppressed whenever possible.

For example, just this week ProPublica, a respected journalism outlet, decided to study “how leading tech companies monetize hate.” The article begins by highlighting not the Klan or a white-supremacist militia but instead Jihadwatch.org. And how did it choose Jihad Watch? It relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that is notorious for supplementing its lists of white-supremacist hate groups with its own ideological enemies list, one that a university radical would love.

It singles out mainstream Christian organizations like the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom as hate groups because they defend and support orthodox Christian beliefs on marriage, sexuality, and gender identity. It challenges Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch because he argues that “traditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful.” That’s a highly debatable proposition (indeed, there are Muslims who agree with Spencer), but is it akin to white supremacy? After all, enormous numbers of people in the Muslim world believe in the death penalty for, among other things, blasphemy or apostasy. Those are mainstream Muslim views. Are those views “moderate?” Are those views “peaceful?”

The SPLC even calls American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray — Charles Murray — a “white nationalist.” Does that mean ProPublica is going to call out corporations that help AEI process its online donations? ProPublica does at least acknowledge the controversy over the SPLC’s rankings but then waves it away by arguing that the SPLC “documents its decision” about the Family Research Council by “citing the evangelical lobbying group’s promotion of discredited science and unsubstantiated attacks on gay and lesbian people.” But did ProPublica do its own research on the FRC? What about the many other mainstream groups the SPLC labels as hateful? From its story, it looked like ProPublica simply accepted the SPLC list and ran its analysis.

In fact, the SPLC’s language about the FRC is so inflammatory and one-sided that in 2012 it inspired a man named Floyd Lee Corkins to attempt to massacre as many FRC employees as he could and stuff Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their dead mouths. In 2016, the SPLC inspired a violent attack on Charles Murray when he tried to speak at Middlebury College. A number of the protesters reported that they hadn’t read Murray’s work. They relied entirely on the SPLC’s inaccurate summary of his views.

The New York Times is engaged in an ongoing effort to rehabilitate Communism. For some inscrutable reason, it has published a series of articles nostalgic for the Soviet Union’s Gulag-filled past, most recently explaining “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.”

So when I write that Lindy West — who did not author any of those articles — is becoming the craziest writer at the Times, I understand the gravity of the claim I am making.

A contributing opinion writer covering feminism and popular culture, West has written eight articles for the Times, including six since July. I think the best way to describe her is as the unrestrained id of the Democratic party. She is convinced, as if by impulse, that conservatives are terrible people, and will say so at every opportunity. I can see no evidence of any self-regulating mechanism in her work. No, the author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Women, lets it all out.

On Wednesday, West called Republicans every name in the book. She started off relatively mild: Republicans — aside from Trump — pretend to be “on the side of goodness and rationality and respect. Do not let them off the hook so easy,” she wrote. Apparently, we right-wingers are all on the side of badness, irrationality, and so forth.

For West, this was only the beginning. “Sure, pre-Trump Republicans traded more in dog-whistles and plausible deniability than overt Nazi sloganeering,” she wrote. “But the goal was the same: white men in charge, white women at their elbows. Systematically enforced poverty turning millionaires into billionaires. Bigots may have swapped subtext for the Jumbotron, but what is the substantive difference?”

In her eyes, there is no “substantive difference” between normal, pre-Trump Republican rhetoric and “overt Nazi sloganeering.” Further, what Republicans want, she claims, is to keep women and minorities down, and to perpetuate systemic poverty. That is the goal, she believes, of half the country. That is their vision of success in politics.

Unfortunately, the article would descend further into the mud. After pulling a Gore Vidal — all but calling Republicans crypto-Nazis — she doubled down, rebuking the conservatives who criticized Trump’s comments on Charlottesville. “It is easy to denounce Nazis. Republican lawmakers, if you truly repudiate this march and this violence, then repudiate . . . ,” she wrote, before launching into a list of 18 things that Republicans must disavow — including opposition to abortion, environmental regulations, gun control, reparations for African Americans, Obamacare, and transgender rights — in order to “truly” oppose Nazism.

You might suspect that this was just a one-off, over-the-top column from West in response to President Trump’s outrageous Charlottesville comments. That would be a charitable interpretation — something West has never once offered the Right — but a false one. Pick one of West’s articles at random, and you will almost always discover a clearly stated claim that conservatives are evil.

Just last week, West was criticized for writing, “Abortion is liberty” in the Times. She could have also been mocked for claiming that “contrary to what the pundit economy would have you believe,” the procedure is “not particularly controversial.” But this was just a sideshow to her real theme, sounded at every opportunity: Anyone who disagrees with her has bad intentions. “To legislatively oppose abortion is to be, at best, indifferent to the disenfranchisement, suffering and possibly even the death of women,” wrote West. “At worst it is to revel in those things, to believe them fundamental to the natural order.”

Something dramatic and important happened yesterday in Boston, but the mainstream provided a counternarrative to mask the shame of it all. The media violated the normal rules of the TV news game – if it bleeds it leads and find a victim — in order to protect the sacred resistance narrative’s presumptive good guys.

The real story of yesterday is that the Boston Police there advised a small crowd of free speech advocates – nary a white supremacist among the speakers – to stop the program early and [I paraphrase] “RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!” I am sure they said it a bit more diplomatically, that the group’s safety could not be guaranteed as a mob of 20,000 approached. The crowd had warmed up and psyched up by marching and chanting their way 2.4 miles from Roxbury Crossing. Antifa, with a record of violence was on hand. The police advised evacuation. To protect them from the throngs already assembled, they put them into police wagons and ferried them to safety.

The only violence and arrests (“dozens” according to ABC News) were on the left, including a disgusting attack on an elderly woman that pushed her and Old Glory to the ground.

Boston police were even attacked with bottles of urine and tweeted out a plea for “individuals” to stop it.

Absolutely no groups are ever to be associated with this vicious act, and none were in the major media that did manage to cover the attack, so far as I saw. But I am reasonably sure that none of the free speech crowd threw urine at the police as they were being sheltered from a hostile throng and given safe haven. But that sort of thing is best left to inference in the media’s view. You can find many of the bare facts in the narrative mentioned above and none of the finger pointing in the statement and answers to reporters made by Boston Police Commissioner William Evans. It is well worth the minute and half it takes. Hat tip: Jim Hoft.

For Mark Zuckerberg: Hamas are ok, neo-Nazis are not: Micah Avni

Attached is a link to the Hamas Media Office Facebook page. Hamas is a terrorist organization and is officially recognized as such by the United States government. Hamas has murdered more Americans, and more Jews, over the past twenty years, than all of the neo-Nazis on the planet together have since World War II. Significantly more.

After my father, Richard Lakin, was brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists almost two years ago, I began a campaign to pressure Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and the other social media giants to proactively remove materials that incite to hatred, violence and terror. I have written to Zuckerberg directly, published opinion pieces, spoken at conferences, appeared in the media, participated in movies, initiated legislation andfiled law suits.

Over the past year, Facebook and Zuckerberg have issued numerous corporate statements talking about how seriously they are taking the issue of terrorism. Unfortunately, those statements are fake news. Facebook has yet to take any significant action. The facts speak for themselves: the Hamas Media Office Facebook pageattached to this post is just one of many examples which include theHamas TV Facebook Page, and numerous private Facebook groups used by Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (the Hamas military branch) to communicate. Just type their name into Facebook in Arabic to see the long list:
كتائب الشهيد عز الدين القسام

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, Facebook took down a few neo-Nazi and white supremacist pages. Zuckerberg posted “There is no place for hate in our community…That’s why we’ve always taken down any post that promotes or celebrates hate crimes or acts of terrorism – including what happened in Charlottesville.”

Of course, I applaud Zuckerberg for acting against neo-Nazis. What I cannot accept is his refusal to take action against Hamas (a recognized terrorist organization) and other radical Islamic groups and leaders who openly and actively incite to hatred, violence and terror. Clearly, Zuckerberg has the ability to identify and take down these posts and pages; yet, for the most part, he refuses to do so.

Why? It’s big business. Facebook makes billions of dollars from traffic generated around hate speech and incitement to violence and terror. Not to mention fake news, cyberbullying, and lots of other unpleasant stuff.

Zuckerberg and Facebook have proven that they are not responsible enough to wield the massive power which they have amassed. It is time for governments to intervene and regulate social media.

An internal civil war is tearing at the fabric of Fox News. The events of the past week have brought the long-simmering conflict closer to the surface. The legitimacy and viability of President Trump are under constant assault in the mainstream media as never before – and that is saying something. Fox News Channel executives, staff, and on air talent are taking sides. The future direction of the right-of-center, fair and balanced Fox News approach to presenting the news may well be in serious doubt.

One week ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, a melee that involved Nazis, the alt-right, Antifa, and anarchists resulted in the death of one woman with at least 20 more people injured. The whole country seems to be taking sides or at least trying to understand what really happened that led to such a violent confrontation over the future of Civil War statues and monuments on public land. Most mainstream news organizations are siding with the left-wing narrative and blaming President Trump for his unconventional reaction to the events at Charlottesville. They are also largely absolving the anarchist and Antifa participants of any responsibility for the violence that took place.

Fox News still has its defenders of Trump. But they are increasingly being outnumbered by other hosts, contributors, and guests on the channel. Newsweek, an anti-Trump publication, put it this way in its August 17 story “Fox News Can’t Stop Literally Crying About Donald Trump’s Worst Week Yet:”

It’s been a bizarre week for the folks at Fox News…. For many of the network’s personalities, it’s been one of the most challenging weeks since Trump took office – and the tears have been steadily streaming on live television for its millions of viewers nationwide.

A Trail of Tears

On Thursday, August 17, during a live discussion of the Charlottesville rally five days earlier, Fox News anchor and host Melissa Francis, according to Newsweek, was having a hard time:

“I am so uncomfortable having this conversation,” Francis said, bursting into tears. “I know what’s in my heart, and I know that I don’t think anyone is different, better or worse based on the color of their skin. But I feel like there is nothing any of us can say right now without being judged.”

Melissa Francis

As Newsweek described the moment:

The tears arrived after Francis’s fellow anchors, Juan Williams and Marie Harf [Harf is in fact a contributor, not an anchor], both rejected her support for the president’s statements[.] . . Francis was then comforted by Harris Faulkner, a black female anchor for the network’s show Outnumbered, who said “there have been a lot of tears on our network, and across the country and around the world.”

There was more crying when Abby Huntsman, filling in as a Fox & Friends weekday co-host on Wednesday morning, was discussing the controversy over Confederate statues and the President’s reaction to Charlottesville with two black guests. Newsweek provided the transcript:

“It’s beyond a monument. This is about hatred. This is about white supremacy,” Democratic contributor Wendy Osefo said Wednesday.

“There are good people on both sides of this debate.…” Huntsman responded, seemingly attempting to pivot away from an emotional conversation.

But when she leaned on her Republican pundit Gianno Caldwell for support, she was met with more disdain for the president’s behavior – and more tears.

“I come today with a very heavy heart,” Caldwell said, wiping away tears. “Last night, I couldn’t sleep at all because president Trump, our president, has literally betrayed the conscience of our country.”

“No…” Huntsman interjected, trailing off.

http://www.speroforum.com/a/VWQZLMMUMI23/81499-Wolf-Blitzer-asks-if-Barcelona-attack-was-copycat-of-Charlottesville-incident?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=HYBUWYZPDJ23&utm_content

Veteran CNN anchorman Wolf Blitzer wondered out-loud on Thursday whether the terrorist attack Barcelona was somehow related to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a man drove a car into a crowd and killed a protester and injured several. Spanish police have arrested a Muslim man of North African origin in the hours after the attack, which claimed the lives of at least 13 persons and injured 50. In that case, the terrorist drove a truck at high speed down the famous Las Ramblas pedestrian mall in the Spanish city.

Blitzer said, “Yeah, there will be questions about copycats,” as part of his coverage of the attack in Spain. “There will be questions if what happened in Barcelona was at all — at all — a copycat version of what happened in Charlottesville, Va., even though there may be different characters, different political ambitions. They used the same killing device: A vehicle going at high speed into a group, a large group of pedestrians.”

Europe has seen at least six similar attacks this year, including the deadly attack on London Bridge. Thursday’s attack recalled the deadly violence of Bastille Day 2016 in which a Tunisian Muslim man mowed down tourists and locals celebrating the holiday in Nice.

In Charlottesville, a 20-year-old man is accused of driving a car into a group of people counter-protesting a so-called white supremacy rally. So far, there has been no evidence to support any linkage between the incident in Virginia and the terrorist attacks in Europe. So far this year, there have been six major terrorist attacks in Europe. ISIS has claimed responsibility for similar attacks in which pedestrians have been mowed down in vehicular attacks. Israel has seen similar attacks.

When a news organization reports an impending weather event based on forecasts from the National Weather Service, or warns of potential seismic activity anticipated by the U.S. Geological Survey, or alerts the public concerning an infectious-disease outbreak being tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no one questions the news organization’s motives, because the underlying information is factual and derived from a reliable, nonpartisan, and authoritative source.

CNN presents itself as a news organization, yet today it posted a dubious story titled “Here are all the active hate groups where you live,” based entirely on data from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC is not the equivalent of the National Weather Service, the USGS, or CDC, to put it mildly. It is risible for CNN to recite SPLC data uncritically, with no additional validation, as a credible list of “domestic hate groups,” let alone to describe SPLC’s data as “widely accepted.” As I recently chronicled in City Journal, the SPLC is far from a reliable, nonpartisan, and authoritative source.

The SPLC has been criticized from all points of the political spectrum for its incessant fundraising (resulting in the accumulation of a “surplus” exceeding $300 million, some of which is invested offshore in Cayman Island accounts), lavish executive salaries (some topping $400,000 annually), and a litigation program calculated to generate sensational headlines rather than tangible results alleviating “Southern poverty.” Morris Dees, one of SPLC’s co-founders, has used the SPLC to promote his political agenda—and enrich himself.

As for chronicling “hate groups,” the SPLC is principally focused on maintaining lists of individuals and groups with opposing politics, and subjectively labeling them “hate groups” or “extremists,” often without justification. SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok, who is in charge of maintaining the lists, has declared that “our aim in life is to destroy these groups, to completely destroy them.” Even Politico has called SPLC’s agenda into question, asking “Has a Civil Rights Stalwart Lost Its Way?” The writer of that story, Ben Schreckinger, noted the frequent charge that “the SPLC is overplaying its hand, becoming more of a partisan progressive hit operation than a civil rights watchdog.” Politico’s skeptical look at SPLC joined a torrent of criticism appearing in other publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, The Weekly Standard, Reason, The Federalist, and even The Progressive.

What exactly is a “hate group”? The FBI doesn’t keep track of such groups, but the SPLC purports to do so, using subjective criteria that do not include the use or threatened use of violence. Instead, SPLC labels groups based on their political views, designating as “hate groups” such diverse entities as magazines, websites, record labels, and even religious sects. In the popular perception, “hate group” is a label that appropriately describes the KKK, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, and similar groups—and the SPLC does in fact label them as such—but the SPLC misleadingly lumps these odious groups together with mainstream organizations with which it disagrees, solely because of their views regarding, among other issues, LGBT rights, immigration policy, and opposition to Sharia Law.

To nice, nerdy James Damore’s surprise, Google does not want to engage in a discussion of how their hiring discrimination against white and Asian males can be justified. Google’s corporate culture has been exposed as an Orwellian pig farm, where social justice warriors (SJWs) send daily missives on the correct way to think. Those who express contrary opinions are bullied, sent to HR for reprogramming, fired and – not punished enough – put on Silicon Valley blacklists to ruin their careers.

Several managers have openly admitted to keeping blacklists of the employees in question, and preventing them from seeking work at other companies. There have been numerous cases in which social justice activists coordinated attempts to sabotage other employees’ performance reviews for expressing a different opinion. These have been raised to the Senior VP level, with no action taken whatsoever.

This would just one more sorry tale of progressive bullying, but for one thing. This is the company that runs the largest search engine in the world. Political bullying is supported and instigated by top management. Groupthink is official HR policy. These SJW Marxists are not content with a reign of terror within the company. They are after your free speech on the Internet.

Our Brave New World is in Silicon Valley, and is coming to you right now, with growing Internet censorship of conservative viewpoints.

Allum Bokhari has a series of must-read Breitbart Rebels of Google interviews with whistleblowers who have had enough:

AB: Many people now fear that Google, Facebook, and other companies are moving to control and censor their content. Are these fears justified?

Hal: That is absolutely what Google is trying to do. The pro-censorship voices are very loud, and they have the management’s ear. The anti-censorship people are afraid of retaliation, and people are afraid to openly support them because everyone in their management chain is constantly signaling their allegiance to far-left ideology.

Google employees in the advertising department are trying to stop ads that support conservative websites. They are fiddling with search engines “to demote results” to web content that is anti-communist, anti-Islamist, or non-PC.

Think about Google blocking Internet content that is anti-communist. The progressive left is a euphemism for old left Marxists. They are the ideological and often literal grandchildren of Stalinists. (As are Obama, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod and Obama’s head of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, all red diaper babies). No wonder tyrannical behavior comes to naturally to them.

Damore is not alone. He is only the first casualty of Google’s war on free thought to make headlines. The company immersion in leftist politics and punishment of rebels reached critical proportions in Obama’s second term. Google is facing trial in November for an earlier complaint to the National Labor Relations Board.