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The New York Times Keeps Imitating A Chinese Propaganda Outlet By Ben Weingarten

Posted By on January 12th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/12/the-new-york-times-keeps-imitating-a-chinese-propaganda-outlet/

It’s gross that the Times and other outlets effectively carry out Chinese information operations. But maybe we should appreciate the inadvertent candor.

After the Capitol riots of Jan. 6 and the aftermath, you’d be forgiven if you missed the latest egregious example of The New York Times shilling for Communist China. Yet, on Jan. 4, that’s exactly what we got — the Times ran as straight news Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agitprop fit for the pages of The People’s Daily.

Imagine, that during the height of Stalinism, as millions died from a Communism-induced famine, an American publication ran headlines like “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving?”

Imagine, that during the height of Nazism, as Adolf Hitler worked to exterminate the Jewish people, an American publication consciously downplayed and buried coverage of the Holocaust?

The New York Times did precisely these things. Now, it appears it wants to complete the trifecta of effectively shilling for the world’s most monstrous regimes by glorifying that of Communist China as it seeks to supplant the United States as the world’s preeminent power.

“The [coronavirus] pandemic has upended many perceptions, including ideas about freedom,” wrote columnist Li Yuan in the Jan. 4 article. While Chinese citizens “don’t have freedom of speech, freedom of worship or freedom from fear — three of the four freedoms articulated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt,” she continued, unironically, “they have the freedom to move around and lead a normal day-to-day life.”

The idea that the Chinese people have the “freedom to…lead a normal day-to-day life” might be news to the Uighurs laboring in Xinjiang’s modern-day gulags, the Falun Gong practitioners facing forced organ harvesting, and the Christians seeing the Bible “Sinicized” while their churches are demolished and their pastors are detained. It might be news even to prominent CCP members like Jack Ma.

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Who does the Twitter CEO think he is, a college president? Peter Wood

Posted By on January 12th, 2021

https://spectator.us/jack-dorsey-twitter-giant/

Where is Jack? You know, Jack-the-Giant-Killer? The little fellow who caught the giant Cormaran in a deadfall and dispatched him with a pick-ax? Who strangled the giant Blunderbore and his brother? And who tricked the double-nobbed giant Two-Heads into stabbing himself?  

I realize that today’s children’s books are less sanguinary, and some readers may need a refresher in the exploits of the Cornish boy who set things right back in a time when giants were in the habit of abusing their monopoly on size and strength. Jack made up in ingenuity and quick thinking what he lacked in brawn. And we could use his help right now.

For once again, we have a plague of giants. Giant Twitter. Giant Apple. Giant Facebook. Giant Google. As Jack knew, it is best to take on one giant at a time, and Giant Twitter right now has earned pride of place by canceling President Trump’s Twitter account and thereby denying him his most direct access to his legions of supporters.

Critics of the other Jack — Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey — have harrumphed that he ought to let the users of his social media service decide whether they can stand to read Trump’s opinions on ‘covfefe’ and other topics of the day. Dorsey, weighing the situation from a beach somewhere in French Polynesia, decided the dangers of such free speech on his platform were too great to endure. He would rescue us from ourselves by silencing our loquacious president — and others who wandered into the vicinity of agreeing with his now unmentionable sin, which consists of saying something that sounds like ‘correction prod’.  We cannot hear about correction prod because the words possess a dark magic that turns people into lawless beasts.

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Shame on Arnold Schwarzenegger see note please

Posted By on January 12th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/shame-on-arnold-schwarzenegger/

 Arnold Schwarzenegger was a great admirer and defender of Kurt Waldheim,  was the fourth Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981, and President of Austria from 1986 to 1992. In 1987, the United States D.O.J.  in an investigation conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) had established a prima facie case that Waldheim participated in Nazi-sponsored persecution……rsk

Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger received a lot of ill-deserved praise this week for his response to the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill.

In a seven-and-a-half-minute video clip that he posted on social media, not only did the body builder-turned-movie star-turned-Republican politician compare last week’s events in Washington D.C. to Kristallnacht, but did so with the self-assured “authority” of someone born and raised in Austria in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”) was the Nazi pogrom against Germany’s Jews on Nov. 9-10, 1938, which involved the smashing of storefronts, synagogues, schools and hospitals. Right off the bat, Schwarzenegger describes this as “a night of rampage against the Jews carried out … by the Nazi equivalent of the Proud Boys.”
This would be laughable if it weren’t such an egregious distortion. The Nazis were not “equivalent” to a gang of American and Canadian extremists who cropped up in 2016. If anything, it’s the other way around, and even that’s an immoral stretch of the imagination.

Schwarzenegger goes on to explain that, in some ways, the siege on the meeting place of the U.S. Congress was worse because “the mob did not just shatter the windows of the Capitol; they shattered the ideas we took for granted. They did not just break down the doors of the building that housed American democracy; they trampled the very principles on which our country was founded.”

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The Great Social Silencing By Kalev Leetaru

Posted By on January 12th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/01/12/the_great_social_silencing_145014.html

Last week Silicon Valley silenced the president. In unison, the social media giants, with an assist from Amazon and Apple, also eliminated their most popular conservative competitor and announced that their own moderation policies would now extend to other companies. Meanwhile, CNN openly called for Fox News to be banned from cable, while a major talk radio network issued new speech rules to its hosts, extending tech’s moderation policies to the offline world. Beyond all this, Congress and the European Union called for powerful new regulation of online speech.

As a handful of unelected billionaires declare sovereignty over digital speech, where might the coming months take us?

Twitter once touted itself as “the free speech wing of the free speech party” and rebuked Congress’ calls for it to ban terrorists, proclaiming that “the ability of users to share freely their views — including views that many people may disagree with or find abhorrent” — was its mission. Indeed, most of the early social platforms emphasized unfettered speech above all other considerations. Over the years, this utopian dream has given way to an emphasis on “healthy conversation” and ever-changing enforcement.

Yet for most of their existence, social media platforms have largely avoided censoring elected officials in the U.S. even as they have deleted the accounts of foreign leaders. That all changed last year as Silicon Valley for the first time began labeling President Trump’s tweets as “disputed” and “false.” As progressive segments of the public embraced this new censorship, platforms moved from merely fact-checking posts to deleting them entirely and threatening to ban some lawmakers.

The courts have repeatedly ruled that Trump’s Twitter account is an official government outlet and thus he is prohibited from blocking users with whom he disagrees. How then is a private company able to establish “acceptable speech” rules for a government publication or silence it entirely? 

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The Morning Briefing: Andrew Cuomo Reminds Us That He’s the Worst Ever By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on January 12th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/01/12/the-morning-briefing-andrew-cuomo-reminds-us-that-hes-the-worst-ever-n1331886

EXCERPT

Andrew Cuomo — Fredo the Elder — crawled out of the cave where he spends his days pulling wings off of flies and smelts participation trophies for his handling of the pandemic in his state to remind us that he is perhaps the worst governor in America.

I only said “perhaps” because who knows what Gavin Newsom will do this week?

Of all of the strange drama that has played out since the Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu descended upon this great land perhaps none has been stranger than the random amnesia that Andrew Cuomo has been exhibiting before our eyes. This piece of work racked up a massive body count in record time because he so mishandled the early days of the pandemic. He’s made countless blunders in the months since then but is still convinced that he’s the Boy Wonder of pandemic state executives.

One thing you have to give Cuomo — he’s consistently the worse at dealing with the plague. At present, Cuomo is utterly cocking up his state’s vaccine administration plan.

Stacey wrote a post yesterday chronicling Cuomo’s incompetence:

More recently, he has led what might be the most botched vaccine rollout in the country. Originally he had set strict rules about who would have priority to receive the vaccine, and threatened to levy fines of up to $1 million if a healthcare provider gave it outside of his specified hierarchy. When doses, which have a short shelf life, expired, they were thrown in the trash.

Meanwhile, businesses are dying in the state, especially in New York City. As of August, the New York Times reported that up to one-third of the state’s small businesses were closing for good. In-person schooling has been an on-and-off affair thanks to the teachers’ unions insisting on a ridiculous 3% positivity rate to trigger closings. By way of example, Georgia’s students have been in school with a statewide test positivity rate of 25%, and Florida schools have stayed open with a positivity rate of nearly 13%.

What’s particularly galling is that Cuomo has been patting himself on the back throughout all of his monumental failure.

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Media: Israel Must Be Denigrated for Its World-Beating Vaccination Programme by Richard Kemp

Posted By on January 12th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16930/israel-vaccination-programme

The same negative policy [by the press and many purported human rights groups] extends to other major benefits that Israel has brought to the world, including scientific innovation, medical technology and life-saving intelligence. It goes against editorial agendas to report on the Jewish state in a positive light unless they can somehow twist a good story to turn it bad.

Under the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians in the 1990s, which created the Palestinian Authority (PA), it alone and not Israel, is responsible for their health care, including vaccinations. Nearly 150 UN members recognise “Palestine” as a state, yet these media and human rights bodies, displaying deplorably predictable bias, cannot bring themselves to allow it agency.

Contradicting allegations of a racist or “apartheid” policy, Israel has been vaccinating its Arab citizens since the programme began. Given some reluctance to be vaccinated among these communities, the Israeli government, in conjunction with Arab community leaders, have been making concerted efforts to encourage them, including a visit by Prime Minister Netanyahu to two Arab towns in the last few days for this purpose.

The same approach can be seen over the Abraham Accords of 2020, historic achievements in a hitherto elusive peace between Israel and the Arabs. These have often been received with callous cynicism in the media as well as among veteran peace processors, whose own prescriptions have repeatedly failed.

[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is the driving force behind the Abraham Accords, whose origins date back to his speech to a joint session of Congress in 2015, when he made a stand against Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Netanyahu’s solitary stance was seized on by Arab leaders, who began to realise they had common cause with the State of Israel, which could lead to a brighter future for them than one encumbered with unnecessary animosity.

Prejudice against the Jewish state is so intense in the Western media that praiseworthy actions guaranteed to hit the headlines if attributable to any other country are frequently ignored, diminished or denigrated when it comes to Israel. When there is a disaster anywhere in the world, for example, Israel is often the first, or among the first, to offer assistance and send in relief workers. Most recently, last month the Israel Defence Forces dispatched a team to Honduras following the devastation of category 4 hurricanes Eta and Iota which left thousands homeless.

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US Defenses Against Chinese Cyber Offenses by Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on January 12th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16936/chinese-cyber-offenses

[M]uch of the world is organizing to roadblock China’s march to dominance in 5G telecommunications. That is, to get China’s spying out of our system – although we are far from done, there is a lot of 2020 to build on in 2021.

Early in 2020, Huawei announced it had 91 commercial 5G contracts outside of China, including 47 in Europe and 20 in Asia.

China’s goal was threefold: to broaden its capabilities in domestic spying, to broaden its worldwide ability to steal Western technology — and, in particular, to infiltrate Western defense capabilities

Beijing inserted itself, often illegally, into American research institutions. And inserted spyware – hardware and software – into computers made in China and exported to the West. In the case of Super Micro Computers, providing services to Amazon, investigators discovered that extra microchips were implanted on boards in Chinese factories by operatives of the People’s Liberation Army.

As the year ended, 26 of 27 EU member countries had joined the Clean Network initiative, along with 180 telecom companies and such important tech players as Israel, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, India – and Taiwan, which is building a 5 nanometer chip production facility in Arizona. Partners in South America include Brazil, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic.

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Tucker Carlson’s frightening summation of what’s happening in America By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 12th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/tucker_carlsons_frightening_summation_of_whats_happening_in_america.html

On Monday’s Fox News, Tucker Carlson spelled out what America’s corporate overlords are doing in America. Essentially, they are “de-personing” anyone who dares to question what happened in America on November 3-8 or who even supports Trump. In a world run on computers, they are unplugging everyone who does not tow their party line.

I will not link to the video on YouTube because that site is one of the major tech monopolists silencing all who dissent from their political beliefs. I also can’t embed Fox videos here. However, you can see Tucker’s entire monologue here.

The usually ebullient Tucker is manifestly upset, even angry at what’s happening in America. As we all must now, to protect ourselves, he opens by stating that his show immediately and repeatedly denounced the violence at the Capitol (true) because his show is completely opposed to political violence and supports law and order.

He then castigated the new selective enforcement of laws, which means they’re not laws or justice at all. They are merely tyrannical whims. What’s happening now is collective punishment, attacking Americans who had nothing to do with events at the Capitol.

One after another, Tucker details the corporate attacks on people who dared attend or listen to the Trump rally – people who had nothing to do with what happened at the Capitol. (We here at American Thinker also condemn strongly the small number of people who engaged in violent and manifestly illegal activity. We believe absolutely in the Constitution and the rule of law. That doesn’t mean, though, that we don’t believe that there were Antifa and other provocateurs in D.C. intentionally inflaming people and inducing them to act illegally.)

EDUCATION, ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Terror U: Who is Suppressing Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities? Terrorism against Israel is not only promoted within the university walls; it is celebrated publicly. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on January 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/terror-u-who-suppressing-academic-freedom-richard-l-cravatts/

In January of 2019, the Academic Freedom Committee of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) wrote a letter to Benyamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, and several other ministers and officials. In that condemnatory letter, MESA, an organization that has been obsessively and chronically anti-Israel, chastened Israel, with the purpose of the complaint “. . . to urge a halt to the Israeli army and security forces conducting arbitrary arrests at and incursions into Palestinian universities, assaulting students, faculty, and staff and obstructing the education of thousands of students.” 

Of specific concern to MESA was the 2018 arrest of Yehya Rabie, the President of Birzeit University’s Student Council by the IDF and a similar arrest of Omar al-Kiswani, the previous President of Birzeit University’s Student Council. “While the Israeli army accused Rabie and al-Kiswani of ‘suspected involvement in terror activity,’” the letter flippantly stated, “both men remain in detention without trial. These arbitrary arrests and detentions without trial are not the exception but the rule” and such arrests, it was claimed, “follow a pattern of Israeli forces’ aggression on Palestinian campuses.” 

For an organization of coddled, safely-ensconced professors in American universities it is easy, of course, to castigate Israel for its behavior in insuring the safety of its citizenry, particularly since in discussing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, MESA has reliably expected no rational or reasonable behavior from the perennially-oppressed Palestinians and has singularly blamed Israel for its alleged brute treatment of the Palestinians, including these specific arrests which, it contended, “follow a pattern of Israeli forces’ aggression on Palestinian campuses,” and the “attacks, assaults, and detentions described above are grave violations of basic rights to education and academic freedom.”

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Video: Peter Collier on Vietnam and the Rise of the New Left A decade of transformation for America and the seeds of our current crisis.

Posted By on January 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/video-peter-collier-vietnam-and-rise-new-left-frontpage-editors/

Peter Collier, the late author of Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties and collaborator with David Horowitz on many books, gives a brilliant lecture at Hillsdale College in this video on the 1960s, a decade of transformation in American politics and culture, and a much-neglected history of what’s behind our current crisis: the Vietnam War and the rise of the New Left. Check it out .