David French: Yes, The Dispatch Takes Money To Help Leftists Keep The Internet Conservatism-Free By: Jordan Boyd

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/19/david-french-yes-the-dispatch-takes-money-to-help-leftists-keep-the-internet-conservatism-free/

David French, the “principled conservative” who argued drag queen story hours in libraries are “blessings of liberty,” publicly confirmed last week that he’s personally advised Big Tech platforms on how to suppress the speech of people who disagree with leftists.

“A few years ago I was invited to an off-the-record meeting with senior executives at a major social media company,” reads the Atlantic contributor and Dispatch senior editor’s first sentence. In 2020, The Dispatch became a paid censor to help Facebook suppress conservative ideas using the pretense of “factchecking.”

As a Facebook censor, The Dispatch has helped suppress true information in the service of leftist conversation control. This has included keeping accurate pro-life ads off Facebook in a way that protected the candidacy of Joe Biden and restricted nonviolent political speech. Dispatch CEO Steve Hayes also defended Facebook’s 2020 election interference in the form of throttling a true story about Hunter Biden’s corruption that may financially benefit his father.

Facebook launched its third-party fact-checking program in 2016. By 2020, more than 50 publications including French’s The Dispatch agreed to do Big Tech’s dirty censorship work. Throttlers like The Dispatch are tasked by Facebook “reduce the spread of misinformation and provide more reliable information to users.”

The Dispatch claims to be a center-right media organization. It called for Donald Trump’s impeachment, a position opposed by the vast majority of Republican voters.

What to Watch For In January 6 Report The omissions will be more telling about what really happened on January 6, 2021 than what’s actually in the report. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/19/what-to-watch-for-in-january-6-report/

After several delays, the January 6 select committee will belatedly release the full findings of its 18-month “investigation” into the Capitol protest on Wednesday. Controversy over the contents of the final report led to infighting among staff. Strong-arming by lame duck Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who wanted to focus almost exclusively on the conduct of Donald Trump and omit criticism of law enforcement, prompted some investigators to quit the committee in protest.

Family quarrels were set aside just in time for Christmas. Committee members will gift the Biden regime and news media with a stocking stuffed with all things January 6—shiny toys for all the naughty girls and boys desperate to sustain outrage over a four-hour political disturbance that took place nearly two years ago. Visions of perp walks now dance in their heads.

The public, however, should brace for a blizzard of false accusations, cherry-picked quotes, uncorroborated testimony, and twisted interpretations of the law to substantiate the claim that Trump engineered an “insurrection” in a vain attempt to remain in office. And contrary to the first narrative that gripped regime mouthpieces—that the president incited the crowd with his speech at the Ellipse that afternoon—Trump’s “attempted coup,” as the committee describes the events of January 6, is now said to have been months in the making.

But like the drunk uncle at Christmas dinner, committee members had to spoil their own surprise gift (to the extent any exists in the report) by holding their last performance Monday to announce criminal referrals against Trump for insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy, and perjury.

The Multifront War: Defending America From Political Islam, China, Russia, Pandemics, and Racial Strife Updated –by Kenneth Abramowitz

America is fighting a major international war, says the author. Yet, the country does not really know it. Moreover, the war is being waged on a multitude of distinct fronts—both internal and external. The United States is wholly unprepared to fight a unified battle. Threat analyst Kenneth Abramowitz carefully takes us through the first step—recognition. He then ushers readers into the bold realm of mounting a multifaceted defense that will save America as a Democracy with the capacity to continually improve and thrive.

The most damning Twitter File just dropped, highlighting FBI wrongdoing By Andrea Widburg

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

Michael Shellenberger has published the latest expose on Twitter, and this time, it’s not Twitter that looks corrupt; it’s the FBI, which knowingly lied to social media outlets about the Hunter Biden laptop. It’s impossible to believe that it did so for any other reason than to affect the outcome of the 2020 presidential election by hiding Joe Biden’s corruption.

Let’s get the most important point out first: The FBI knew at all relevant times that Hunter Biden’s hard drive was the real deal and that every bit of information on it—crooked dealings with foreign governments, money laundering for Joe, sexually obsessive videos, drug usage—was entirely legitimate. Nevertheless, the FBI aggressively worked with Twitter and other social media outlets to suppress this fact by falsely claiming that the hard drive was “Russian disinformation” or a hack.

Shellenberger’s Twitter thread exposing this manifest election interference is extremely long, so I’ll summarize the high points. The thread itself is at the end of this post.

1. FBI officials always knew that Biden’s hard drive was real.

2. The day before the NY Post wrote about the laptop, the FBI was reaching out to Yoel Roth on its special one-way FBITwitter line.

3. The NY Post publishes its completely accurate exposé, which Twitter and other social media companies immediately censor. What happened? The FBI.

4. Long before the NY Post story, when word was getting out about Hunter’s laptop and its intersection with Joe Biden, the FBI continuously told Twitter and Facebook to dismiss the information as a Russian “hack and leak” operation, even though the FBI conceded it had no information of hacks and leaks in 2020.

5. Twitter itself had almost no evidence of Russian intrusion on the site. The FBI, though, was so insistent about getting Twitter to share what little info it had that even Roth pushed back. Nevertheless, in Jul7 2020, the FBI gets temporary top secret clearances for Twitter executives to “share information” about election threats. The continuous pressure primed Roth to believe anything the FBI said about alleged “Russian disinformation.”

Glazov Gang: Ticking Time Bomb in the USA The dire consequences of Biden willfully bringing in unvetted Afghan refugees into America. by Glazov Gang

https://www.frontpagemag.com/glazov-gang-ticking-time-bomb-in-the-usa/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of 26 books – including many bestsellers. His new book is Who Lost Afghanistan?.

Robert discusses Ticking Time Bomb in the USA, revealing The dire consequences of Biden willfully bringing in unvetted Afghan refugees into America.

Don’t miss it!

The populist who gets things done With Ron DeSantis, we see American populism shifting from words to action.Sean Collins

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/12/17/the-populist-who-gets-things-done/

Ron DeSantis is the man of the moment in American politics. The Republican governor of Florida first gained a national profile in 2020 for defying Covid lockdown orthodoxy and later for his battles against woke. His smashing re-election victory in the Midterms this November – defeating his Democratic opponent by almost 20 percentage points – has propelled DeSantis to new heights. According to a recent poll, Republicans now prefer DeSantis over Trump to be the party’s presidential candidate in 2024 by a huge 23-point margin. The New York Post has declared him ‘DeFuture’. And he already leads Biden in one early election survey.

It is the breadth of DeSantis’s victory in November that has most excited Republicans. He turned a state that was recently considered ‘purple’ – that is, a toss-up between the Democrats and Republicans – into a deeply red state. He ‘rewrote the political map’, as he himself has put it, winning cities and suburbs across Florida, and support from a variety of demographic groups. His pick-ups included the formerly Democratic bastion of Miami-Dade County, which is 70 per cent Hispanic. The voters of Florida had a close-up view of DeSantis for four years and obviously liked what they saw.

In comparison to Trump, DeSantis just looks more dynamic. Virtually every one of Trump’s handpicked candidates was defeated in the Midterms, making Trump a big reason why a much-anticipated ‘red wave’ did not materialise. Trump also faces potential criminal charges for the ‘January 6’ attack on the Capitol and for the retention of confidential documents at his Florida home. The 76-year-old former president announced his candidacy for the 2024 election last month with a snoozer of a speech (some dubbed it ‘low energy’, referencing Trump’s jibe about Jeb Bush in 2016). His first post-announcement meeting was with an anti-Semitic celebrity (Kanye West) and an anti-Semitic nobody (Nick Fuentes).

DeSantis clearly gets under Trump’s skin. Trump’s nickname for him, ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’, is weak, given that he’s not remotely sanctimonious – another sign that Trump has lost his touch. In the past few weeks, Trump has launched unprovoked rants against DeSantis and has sulked about the Florida governor’s supposed disloyalty. In response, DeSantis has kept studiously quiet, which has only driven Trump more nuts.

The truth about Covid McCarthyism The elites’ blacklisting of lockdown dissenters was shameful and self-destructive. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/12/19/the-truth-about-covid-mccarthyism/

There were two viruses that the authorities wanted to control in 2020 and 2021. The first was the virus of Covid-19. The second was the virus of dissent. Throughout the pandemic, experts referred to lockdown scepticism and Covid misinformation as their own kind of disease, as a contagious malady that might sicken the masses’ minds as surely as Covid sickened their bodies. British politicians referred to a ‘pandemic of misinformation’. We must protect people both from ‘physical disease and the “disease of misinformation”’, scientists insisted. ‘False information has plagued the Covid response’, said one academic. Plagued – what a striking choice of verb. And if contrary ideas are an infection in the body politic, then it’s clear what the cure must be: censorship.

Nearly three years on from the start of the pandemic, it’s apparent that censorship was central to lockdown. It wasn’t only our everyday lives that were forcibly put on hold – so was our right to say certain things and even think certain things. In the US, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was fawned over by the liberal media for his handling of Covid, has been deposed in a lawsuit that accuses him and the Biden administration more broadly of colluding with Big Tech to undermine the American people’s speech rights during the pandemic. The lawsuit is brought by the attorney general of Missouri, Eric Schmitt. The transcript of the questioning of Fauci was released earlier this month. It’s a frustrating read. Fauci continually says he doesn’t recall or doesn’t know in response to questions about his alleged role in suppressing speech in the Covid era. But it seems clear that, informally at least, he helped to devise and enforce the parameters of acceptable thought during the pandemic.

Consider the Great Barrington Declaration. Fauci had high-ranking discussions about how to counteract this open letter that raised ‘grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental-health impacts of the prevailing Covid-19 policies’. Freedom-of-information requests show that Fauci was asked by officials to engage in a ‘quick and devastating takedown’ of the GBD. He hopped to it. He ‘jumped into action to smear and discredit the GBD in the media’, as one account describes it. This included writing off the GBD’s authors – Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya – as ‘fringe epidemiologists’ who were peddling ‘nonsense’. We know now that Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford, was subsequently shadow-banned on Twitter and even added to its McCarthyite ‘Trends Blacklist’, meaning his tweets would never make it into ‘trending topics’. The algorithm weaponised against a heretical professor who had been publicly denounced by Fauci.

White Students Are Prohibited From Applying to This UNC Fellowship: Aaron Sibarium

https://freebeacon.com/campus/white-students-are-prohibited-from-applying-to-this-unc-fellowship/

The public university dragged into court over its race-conscious admissions policy is now advertising a research fellowship that bars white applicants from applying.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—whose affirmative action program, along with that of Harvard University, is under review by the Supreme Court—sponsors the Fellowship for Exploring Research in Nutrition, which accepts applications exclusively from students who are “Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC),” according to the program’s website. Fellows earn thousands of dollars, live in on-campus apartments paid for by the university, and receive generous mentorship opportunities, including letters of recommendation.

“The field of nutrition is overwhelmingly comprised of white researchers,” an ad for the fellowship states. “Increased BIPOC representation in food policy research is critical for developing effective, equitable, comprehensive, and culturally competent policies that address nutrition-related health disparities.”

On Monday, the economist Mark Perry filed a complaint about the fellowship with the District of Columbia’s Office of Civil Rights. The complaint, which was reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, asks the office to investigate the university for “race-based discrimination.”

UNC Chapel Hill did not respond to a request for comment.

The program, which UNC Chapel Hill announced last week on its website, comes as UNC Chapel Hill and Harvard await a verdict from the Supreme Court over a lawsuit from Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit opposed to affirmative action. The group argues that both schools are violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans racial discrimination by the recipients of federal funds, and that UNC Chapel Hill, as a public university, is also violating the 14th Amendment, which bans racial discrimination by the government.

SBF: Virtue-Signaling Scammer The crypto king used high ideals to mask low motives: Matthew Continetti

https://freebeacon.com/columns/sbf-virtue-signaling-scammer/

The former head of crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, aka SBF, stands accused of many crimes. But no one has ever charged him with reticence.

Between 2019, when he first appeared on the scene, and December 12, 2022, when Bahamian police took him into custody—conveniently preventing him from testifying before Congress the next day—the 30-year-old MIT graduate and former billionaire would not shut up.

No audience was too small. No subject was beyond the pale. Given the opportunity, SBF would announce his veganism, discuss his fashionably liberal politics, and outline the tenets of his utilitarian worldview, his philosophy of “effective altruism.” His remarkable and short-lived career is a case study in high ideals serving as cover for low motives. It also illustrates the double-standard that liberals apply to business scandals.

Words poured from SBF’s disheveled self, faster than you can mint a bitcoin. Last year his net worth soared, reaching an estimated $20 billion. He ascended to the top rank of political donors, giving millions to Joe Biden in 2020 and contributing more money to Democratic candidates in 2022 than everyone but George Soros. Friendly media profiled “The Mysterious Cryptocurrency Magnate Who Became One of Biden’s Biggest Donors” and “A Crypto Emperor’s Vision: No Pants, His Rules.” “I have a lot of things to say,” he told New York magazine.

That’s for sure. SBF admitted to obsessive compulsion, to attention deficit disorder, to depression, and to playing Magic: The Gathering well into adulthood. He would jabber away on social media, during video game sessions, at investor conferences, and on television and podcasts. Rumors swirled about his love life, which may or may not have involved something called a “polycule.”

Elon Musk should remain Twitter CEO to keep up the free speech fight Twitter CEO Elon Musk has exposed how our law enforcement agencies worked with Twitter to censor free speech. He should not walk away now. Liz Peek

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/elon-musk-remain-twitter-ceo-keep-free-speech-fight

Elon Musk is a hero of our times. Risking his personal safety and fortune, he bought Twitter and pushed back against the Left’s repugnant effort to shut down Americans’ freedom of expression. In addition, he has exposed the dangerous collusion between our social media giants and the FBI, which appears to have subverted our elections.

Now Musk is threatening to call it quits. This must not happen.

In an online poll, Musk asked the Twitterverse whether he should “step down” as head of Twitter, and promised to abide by the outcome. He tweeted soon after the launch of the referendum: “As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it.”

The bad news for Musk fans is that 57% of the 17 million people who participated said he should indeed quit his post; 43% said he should not. 

Will the quixotic entrepreneur follow through, and abandon his $44 billion undertaking? Will he allow the Leftist thought police to resume their control of what Americans can see and read? 

We can only hope he changes course, or somehow accedes to the letter of his self-imposed plebiscite without actually abandoning the fight. Nothing could be more important.