No, this is not a senile moment. The man has done this for decades. He lies all the time — even on topics that can be easily debunked. It’s pathological.
My theory has been that it became second nature to him starting at a young age — once he decided to have a life in politics. https://t.co/ooArgUwRkx
Imagine if we had an honest media, or even just a less dishonest one, and the questions this guy and his press secretary, “historic” or not, would be peppered with. https://t.co/l99szUzePV
Did Congress give them that authority? If so can you cite the legislation? The FBI wasn't chartered to "engage with US Technology Companies" to monitor & sanction American Citizens practicing their right to free speech. Where exactly do they get that authority without warrants?
Oh so now that you’re desperate, it’s a mental illness, but when we point that out, it’s hate speech.
“First openly transgender woman set to be executed in the U.S. asks for mercy
Lawyers for Amber McLaughlin, 49, asked Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to spare her this week. McLaughlin was convicted of killing 45-year-old Beverly Guenther in 2003.”
“Adam Schiff popped up on CNN’s “State of The Union” show Sunday morning to issue barely veiled threats to Elon Musk for trying to restore free speech on Twitter.
Ostensibly, the lame duck chairman of the House Intelligence Committee joined Jake Tapper to crow about expected charges against Donald Trump Monday from his January 6 star chamber.
But Schiff moved on to complain about the “big problem right now with social media companies and their failure to moderate content and the explosion of hate on Twitter, the banning of journalists on Twitter.”
Then he suggested ominously that Twitter and social media companies may not continue to enjoy “immunity from responsibility and liability.”
In other words, keep policing free speech as an arm of the federal government or watch your business go up in smoke.
Schiff is a calculated propagandist, who lies under oath as easily as breathing, and knowingly peddles misinformation to Congress and to media outlets like CNN and MSNBC, whose gullible hosts keep bringing him back on their shows to mislead their audiences.
In the dying days of his powerful reign as overseer of the nation’s intelligence agencies, abusing his access to the nation’s secrets, Schiff’s final assignment is to preserve the censorship regime his side of politics entrenched across Big Tech.
‘Cascading failure’
On Tuesday he, and three other Dems he roped in, wrote a menacing letter “as part of our ongoing oversight efforts” to Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta (Facebook’s new name), warning that, if the company went down Twitter’s path of free speech, the consequences would be dire. “Dangerous and unfounded election denial content” must be kept off the platform.
It was what law professor Jonathan Turley characterized as a “hold-the-line warning . . . meant to stop a cascading failure in the once insurmountable wall of social-media censorship.”
“If Facebook were to restore free-speech protections, the control over social media could evaporate.”
The powerful are panicking, and so they should. Their secrets are leaking.
Ever since Musk authorized a group of independent journalists to release the Twitter Files three weeks ago, a steady drip of damning evidence has emerged, showing collusion between Twitter and the federal government, including the FBI, to censor Americans and suppress dissent, in violation of the First Amendment.
In particular we have seen how the FBI, in weekly meetings with Twitter, pre-bunked The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story on Oct. 14, 2020, persuading Twitter to suppress the story and lock down our account for more than two weeks.
As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in Twitter Files part 6, Twitter was acting as a “subsidiary” of the FBI, in a relationship he described as “master-canine.”
At least 80 FBI agents were engaged full time in flagging and analyzing user content, demanding user location information and requesting that Twitter take action against mainly “low-follower accounts belonging to ordinary Americans” — including ones that just cracked jokes.
FBI-Twitter communications were “constant and pervasive,” wrote Taibbi. “Instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists, the FBI has agents — lots of them — analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as a permanent, end-in-itself surveillance operation. People should not be okay with this.”
Sunday night, in a supplemental dump, Taibbi revealed more communications showing the FBI was “acting as conduit for the Intelligence Community.”
Half the public is still in the dark about this egregious assault on our liberties since, for some bizarre reason, the left-wing media seems to support censorship and want to censor mention of it.
But at some point, the land of the free and home of the brave will rebel.
The next Twitter Files dump promised as early as Monday, from independent journalist Michael Shellenberger, is another chink in the wall of social-media censorship.
He will reveal that on the evening of Oct. 13, 2020, the night before The Post’s Hunter Biden Laptop story was published — and censored — the FBI sent documents to Twitter through a special one-way channel at 9:22 p.m. ET.”
“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.
Was Fauci directly responsible for Twitter’s blacklisting of Bhattacharya? It’s not clear. There’s certainly no proof of Fauci putting in a phone call to Vijaya Gadde or any of the other authoritarians who were in charge of the censorious hellscape that was pre-Musk Twitter and demanding they silence this thoughtcriminal. But there does seem to have been a political trickle-down effect, as one writer describes it. Fauci issues a decree about what is true and what is false in relation to Covid and it swiftly becomes gospel among Big Tech overlords – that was the pattern. In this instance, Fauci engaged in a ‘systematic discrediting’ of expert dissenters on lockdown and it ‘trickled down to social media’ so that these people’s ideas were ‘labelled “Covid misinformation” and censored by content moderators’.
There are email trails that hint at a more causal relationship between Fauci’s hostility towards dissent and Big Tech’s censorship of such dissent. So during the deposition Fauci was shown emails suggesting that his own officials had tried to contact Google to set up a conversation about ‘misinformation’ in relation to the Covid vaccine. Shortly after, social-media sites started adding warning labels to posts about the vaccine and even suspended some accounts for pushing vax misinformation. It’s a big deal if these things are linked, because officials in the US are forbidden by the First Amendment from curtailing the speech rights of their citizens. If the state under Biden outsourced censorship to compliant companies, that’s still state censorship.
In some ways, the fact that there doesn’t seem to have been any need for a direct chain of command between the Biden administration and Big Tech in order for Covid censorship to occur is more chilling. It confirms how widespread Covid conformism was in the establishment, and how naturally it comes to the oligarchies of Silicon Valley to do the bidding of the Democratic elites. Elite consensus opinion is a powerful beast. Time and again, the government view on Covid became the only utterable view in the digital public square. So when officialdom was pro-masks, dissent on masks was ruthlessly censored: witness YouTube’s banning of a video featuring senator Rand Paul questioning the effectiveness of masks. When officialdom insisted that lockdown was the right and only way to tackle Covid, all intellectual bristling against lockdown ran the risk of being blacklisted, as the GBD folks and others discovered. And when it was Fauci’s belief that the lab-leak theory about Covid was a ridiculous conspiracy theory, ‘all views in conflict’ with that take risked censure online. Strikingly, it was only when the Biden administration said in May last year that it would look into the lab-leak theory that Facebook finally lifted its censure of the theory – proof that the government view ruled supreme on social media in the pandemic.
We need to talk about this. We live in supposedly free societies and yet anyone who dissented from the state view on Covid faced being blacklisted and silenced. It kind of doesn’t matter whether Fauci ‘colluded’ with Big Tech. It’s still the case that it was very difficult indeed for citizens in one of the few public spaces they could freely access during the pandemic – the internet – to dissent from the state’s view. Worse, there was a neo-imperial element to this online redaction of deviation from Fauci’s diktats. Social-media companies globalised the official US view on Covid so that even poor souls in London or Paris or Melbourne found themselves suspended – banished from the public square – for making a comment that holy Anthony Fauci might disapprove of.”
—
“It will take some time to measure the impact of this empire of Covid censorship on our societies. To my mind, it didn’t only prevent the expression of certain views, which is a grave enough offence in itself, arguably the gravest offence a society can commit. It also left us catastrophically unprepared for the post-lockdown era. The punishment of dissenting voices that wondered out loud if lockdown might lead to deadly backlogs in the health system, and to a decline in people’s mental health, and to a regression of children’s social skills, and to an economic downturn that might have severely negative consequences, meant we never properly talked about those things. Which means now that all those things are happening – it turns out some of the dissenters were right – our societies are startled, and clueless.
There’s a lesson here: censorship is an incredibly destructive force. The suppression of dissent is always, in every single situation, a bad idea. It reduces a society’s ability to explore angles, examine possibilities, imagine future scenarios. Going forward, we must never again allow experts to suppress whatever they decree to be anti-scientific or dangerous thought. On every issue, from pandemics to the climate to the economy, people’s freedom to think and speak and warn must reign.”
“The Iranian protesters who have gained the support of the entire world have pointed out more than once that the mullahs who run the repressive Islamic regime in Tehran spend more money on foreign jihad terrorists than on their own people. So in what may be another regime attempt to calm the protests, or simply an indication that the regime is strapped for cash, the Islamic Republic of Iran has stopped funding Palestinian jihad terror groups. Old Joe Biden’s handlers, however, are still forking over quite enough of your taxpayer cash to keep the terror groups going.
The Jerusalem Post reported Sunday that “Iran has stopped channeling funds to a number of Palestinian factions.” The Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds “quoted unnamed informed sources in Lebanon as saying that the factions are currently suffering from a financial crisis because of the Iranian move, which was taken three months ago.”
That report came exactly a week after Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke at a conference of J Street, a far-Left group that is viciously hostile to Israel. According to the Washington Free Beacon, Blinken “touted the Biden administration’s renewed engagement with the Palestinian government, which includes nearly $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer aid, and accused ‘Israeli settlers’ of perpetrating violence against Palestinians, a line that drew applause from J Street’s crowd.”
That nearly $1 billion in aid goes to the Palestinian Authority, but only the most naïve and blinkered assume that it is then spent only on humanitarian initiatives. The Taylor Force Act, which is still U.S. law although the Biden administration blithely ignores it, prevents taxpayer funds from being given to an entity that supports terrorism.
But the Palestinian Authority continues to pay imprisoned jihad terrorists and the families of dead terrorists who killed Israelis. As recently as May 2022, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reaffirmed that these payments would not stop: the Jerusalem Post reported that he said in a speech on “Nakba Day” that “the Palestinian Authority will continue to pay allowances to the families of Palestinian prisoners and those killed while carrying out attacks against Israel.”
Abbas has repeatedly vowed to keep paying terrorists. It’s one of the highest priorities of his regime, if not the very highest priority. In July 2018, according to Breitbart, he “vowed that his government will continue to pay salaries to terrorists and their families even if ‘we have only a penny left.’” Abbas added: “We will not accept a cut or cancellation of salaries to the families of martyrs and prisoners, as some are trying to bring about.”
The bulk of the prisoners who receive these payments are or were members of the terror groups Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, all of which have received funding from Iran and thus may be feeling the pinch because the mullahs have now cut them off. The Post reported that these groups claim they use the money from Iran to “pay salaries to their leaders and members and cover the costs of their ‘various activities.’” A bit more honestly, “in the past, Hamas and PIJ officials admitted that Iran has been supplying their groups with financial and military aid.”
Donald Trump had cut off the money to the Palestinian Authority in light of its ongoing support for jihad terrorism. Old Joe Biden immediately started the cash flowing again, which has now led to the absurd situation that the United States of America is funding terror groups that are dedicated to the destruction of its only reliable ally in the Middle East, and the only genuine democracy there.
The Biden administration’s continued funding of the Palestinian Authority despite its obvious, defiant and unapologetic financial support for jihad terrorism, and its continuing to fork over the cash when even the Islamic Republic of Iran has stopped, is yet another example of its resolute rejection of reality. Men can become women, a man who claims to be woman can become the first female four-star admiral, a cross-dressing luggage thief is an expert in nuclear waste disposal, and the Palestinian Authority is an upstanding, respectable “partner for peace.””
—–
Stop funding terrorists and those who enable them.
“Poll: 72% of Palestinians Favor Creating More Armed Terrorist Groups To Attack Israelis
Survey shows huge support for Islamic terrorist group Hamas in the West Bank. If elections held, Hamas chief set to defeat PLO’s Abbas”
“An overwhelming majority of Palestinians in the West Bank favor the formation of more terrorist groups to target Israel, a new poll shows.
“Seventy-two percent of Palestinians support the creation of additional armed groups in the West Bank akin to the Lion’s Den terror group that operates against Israel,” the Times of Israel reported Thursday citing an opinion poll conducted by the West Bank-based thinktank Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR).
The Lion’s Den, or Arin al-Usud, is the newest terrorist group to rear its ugly head in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank. In October, the Israeli military carried out a counterterrorism raid in the the West Bank town of Nablus, killing Lion’s Den’s top commander and several other terror operatives. The Lion’s Den terror outfit is made up of former members of the PLO-Fatah-affiliated Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other terrorist groups.
The survey also showed huge support for the Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas in the West Bank. If the choice was between the current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is affiliated with the PLO, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas candidate is expected to win overwhelmingly, the poll numbers indicate.
The Israeli TV channel i24News reported the findings of the survey:
According to a survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research published Tuesday, 72 percent of the Palestinian public said they favored forming armed groups. An example of one such group is the “Lions’ Den” – a Nablus-based group that does not take orders from the Palestinian Authority and is not part of the PA’s security services.
Meanwhile, 22 percent said they are against this and 59 percent said they were concerned that forming such armed groups could lead to further armed clashes with the PA’s security services. Conversely, 39 percent were not worried about such a scenario.”
“Let’s sum up the state of America’s military brass with one appalling comparison between how the admirals, generals, and civilian leaders chose to treat two different service members. One is a young naval officer, Lieutenant Ridge Alkonis, a family man who fell unconscious due to a medical condition while driving and accidentally killed two people in a tragic crash and was railroaded into a Japanese prison for three years. The other one is a creepy pervert who was an Army full colonel who put on puppy sex gear – yeah, that’s a thing – over his uniform in social media pics, and who maintained a litter of similarly bizarre subordinate soldiers/degenerate weirdos.
Now, which one of these do you think our current military leadership is still paying?
You get a medal if you guessed Colonel Kink. Or a Milkbone, as the case may be.
Yes, the young Navy lieutenant caught up in this outrageous injustice is not only going to miss out on three years of his little kids’ lives because the United States government was unable to convince the nation that our blood and treasure lets remain free to indulge in Pokémon, Godzilla movies, and anime tentacle porn, to have some compassion over this awful accident. No, our military leadership has decided to cut off his pay, leaving his family not only bereft of their father but in absolute poverty. They had to start a GoFundMe. Yet COL Rin Tin Sin is still cashing his check.
What a pathetic disgrace.
What a damn embarrassment.
What the hell are you people thinking?
You aren’t.
If you were thinking, we might have unequivocally won a major war in the last 30 years.
If you were thinking, you might not have to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for personnel by allowing in Category 4s, the class of recruit the drill sergeants need to remind to breathe.
If you were thinking, this disgusting backstab would never have happened.
And the consequences of this and similar misjudgments that tell our troops that they don’t matter are manifesting more and more in more and more screw-ups. Our military is a mess and getting worse. Do not fall for the brass’s sunny-day hype and hack clichés about how we are still “The Greatest Military Ever Was.” It’s crap, and they know it’s crap – or worse, they don’t know it.
It’s almost impossible to explain to a civilian just how horrible this betrayal is, how corrosive this kind of REMF policy is. The military is based on trust, trust of the leaders that their troops will follow their commands, and trust of the subordinates that their leaders will support them. This stunning decision undermines that essential dynamic. It is a disgraceful sell-out of an American warrior caught in a situation beyond his control. It’s bad enough that the US government was so impotent that it couldn’t turn to Japan and say “Let this guy out!” and have Japan say “Roger, here he is and we’ve also shined his shoes.” This is not some scumbag who raped a local – let that scuzz enjoy the fun that is Japan’s penal system. This is a guy caught up in a situation outside his control and our military is announcing “Hey troops if you need us to help, forget it. We’re screwing you and your family. So, how about re-upping for another hitch? Hello? Hey, where are you going?”
They not only let our guy be shafted but doubled down on their ineptitude by cutting off his family. It’s mind-boggling. You look at that choice and it’s crystal clear. You take care of your guy. But not this Administration. Not this Pentagon. Not these generals and admirals.
Too bad LT Alkonis isn’t Brittany Griner, an America-hating celebrity pronoun person whose great-grandfather came from an approved continent – something that should have been irrelevant but that Biden’s spokeshack made sure we knew was important. They left the Marines behind in the deal that sprung an international arms dealer. What a shock. The Pentagon’s priorities are clear to our troops, and they are not one of them.
Message to the Troops: You don’t matter. Trust us and you put not only yourself but your family at risk.
And the troops are receiving that transmission, Lima Charlie.
Right now, the military is unable to fill its ranks because it has completely alienated the traditional Americans who used to fill those ranks and were the backbone of the military. Why the hell would anyone join today’s military? To be taught that you are evil because of your skin color? To be told your traditional values are insurrectionist? To suffer prejudice in promotions, assignments, and everything else if you don’t check the right boxes? To serve under a commander who is living his adult-only version of “Pound Puppies?”
Our troops see that when they need the leadership behind them, it will be there to stick the knife in. And right now, military veterans are refusing to recommend that young people join. I will not recommend enlisting. None of my retired colleagues will. Why should we? The Pentagon can’t win a war, is obsessed with college faculty lounge woke nonsense, and tops it all off by letting troops in trouble twist in the wind. That’s a tragedy because we loved serving, but this situation has been brought on entirely by a military leadership that pulls this kind of bonehead maneuver.
Somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon, somebody made this decision and no leader in the chain had the stones to say “Wait a minute, what the hell is this?” I get delegating responsibility. I get supporting subordinate leaders. I was a junior officer about the same time most of the current crop of flag officers was, so we learned the same things in the same places, only I didn’t forget. You back your subordinate leaders until you see them screwing the troops, and then you step in. There’s no deference for decisions like that. You have the stars. Act like it.”
“Trans-rights activists at the University of Edinburgh managed to shut down a screening of a gender-critical documentary earlier this week. Student groups branded the film ‘transphobic’, claiming it would make trans students ‘unsafe’. A mob occupied the screening room and then blocked access to a lecture theatre when organisers tried to switch rooms. Eventually, security were called and the event had to be cancelled.
The film that so offended them is Adult Human Female – a documentary about how trans ideology took over British institutions and why this poses a danger to women’s rights. spiked caught up with its directors, Deirdre O’Neill and Michael Wayne, to discuss the controversy surrounding their film.
spiked: Did you expect Adult Human Female to provoke such a strong reaction?
Deirdre O’Neill: Obviously, we expected some kind of reaction, because we know how difficult it is for people to speak out about the trans issue. But the attempts to shut down the film have come as quite a surprise.
This week was actually the second time the film has been cancelled. It was cancelled in Nottingham in November, and that led to a surge of new followers and people becoming interested. And of course, after the other night, we have even more Twitter followers and people watching the film on YouTube or Vimeo. So the interesting thing is that the response has mainly been positive.
It’s also important to say that the film is not really that controversial. Five or 10 years ago it wouldn’t have been controversial to say that you cannot change your biological sex, which is the premise of the film.
spiked: Has the film managed to open up a debate?
Michael Wayne: So far, the people on the other side don’t want to watch the film or discuss it. They just want to shut it down. That’s how this belief system has achieved such purchase in all our institutions. It is a consensus based on fear and intimidation.
When activists managed to cancel the Nottingham screening in November, at that point the film wasn’t released online, and only about 200 people had seen it at a premiere in London. So we can say that none of the 80 protesters that got that screening shut down had seen the film. That’s not good-faith engagement. That shows an authoritarian mindset. At the event in Nottingham, someone went out into the car park where the protesters were and invited them in to see the film. But they didn’t want to.
The film brings together 15 women and one man, and in 92 minutes it explains the trans debate. It articulates the arguments to people who have probably heard something about it, but don’t know all the details. I think trans-rights activists are worried that people will watch the film and that the penny will drop. They’re worried that people will understand what the issue is and that it is reasonable to have concerns.
O’Neill: A lot of people who have watched the film are saying, thank you for setting this all out in accessible terms. Thank you for making it easy to understand the argument. Thank you for giving these articulate women a voice. We are being thanked for creating a space where women can talk about their concerns.
spiked: Why did you feel that now is the time to make a film about this issue?
O’Neill: It’s something that we’ve been discussing for quite a few years. The issue has become more and more apparent, especially working in the university sector. I have colleagues and students who are terrified of speaking out. It was just getting harder and harder to talk about. There is no debate anymore. The only acceptable position to have is ‘trans women are women, trans men are men, all genders are valid’.
The activists have appropriated the language of civil-rights movements. When they make it an issue of ‘rights’, no one wants to speak out against that. They’re using the language of a very left-wing, radical, progressive movement. But these ideas are incredibly regressive and are taking us backwards.
spiked: How can we start to push back against these ideas?
Wayne: I think we’ve got to break the silence. More people have to have the courage to step forward and say: we need to have this debate, I have these concerns, let’s talk about it.
Trans activists have waged a very clever campaign. They have captured the people at the top of the institutions. They captured the policymakers, and then the policies trickled down. But we need to open up the conversation to everyone else, because there has not been sufficient discussion about any of this. The people at the top of these institutions have to be made to realise that the trans stuff has been built on a false consensus. We need to reset and start this debate again.”
“The conclusion was never in doubt for the January 6th committee. Despite a year-plus of investigations and hearings that over-promised and underdelivered, Liz Cheney, Bennie Thompson, Adam Schiff, and crew will send criminal referrals targeting Donald Trump to the Department of Justice.
As Redstate reported previously, the details of the referrals were previously leaked, showing that the committee is going to charge Trump with insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Now, the vote has been completed and it is confirmed those referrals will go forward. The announcement will be made in dramatic fashion on Monday during the committee’s final hearing.”
Following an 18-month investigation, @NBCNews has learned that the House Jan. 6 committee plans to recommend criminal prosecution of former President Trump on several counts related to the attack on the Capitol. @GarrettHaake shares the details. pic.twitter.com/YOtj5tAJH1
“The press is absolutely giddy, as you can see from that Today Show hit. Call it a campaign contribution at this point because this is their Super Bowl. They want nothing more than to hang yet another albatross around the neck of Trump as he pursues another presidential run.
It won’t stay just an albatross, though. As I’ve said from the beginning, all of this is coordinated. The January 6th committee isn’t dropping these referrals into a vacuum. Rather, they’ve gone through all this pomp and circumstance knowing the DOJ is patiently waiting for the hook it needs to indict Trump. The illusion of political will has been created, even if the committee itself is full of nothing but bitter, anti-Trump partisans.
In this case, the lack of evidence for any of the charges being levied doesn’t matter. As I explained in my previous piece, the broadening out of the law needed to go after Trump for things like “insurrection” and “obstruction of an official proceeding” is ludicrous. How do you commit insurrection without organizing and executing an insurrection or without telling people to do so? Those are issues a fair justice system would tear apart.
We don’t have one of those, though. The DOJ knows it can indict a ham sandwich and secure convictions in the DC jurisdiction. The only question left is the timing. Will the new special counsel wait and see if Trump wins the GOP nomination before indicting him in an attempt to destroy Republican chances in the 2024 election? I wouldn’t even begin to put it past them. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s the plan.”
—–
And even clueless people on our side will fall for it, because Orange Man Bad.
(For those who missed the news or forgot: the reason Liz Cheney is leaving the House is her own constituents voted against her, in favor of her primary challenger, by more tha 35 points, one of the most humiliating defeats a House incumbent ever suffered in US history).
I’m also curious as to why a member of Congress would be encouraging people not to read something. If there’s nothing to it, you should be encouraging people to read that and discover it on their own.
Needless to say, it's a Democratic Congressman from California who has decided to undertake the role of most vehemently and forcefully defending the FBI, insisting they did nothing wrong, and instead relentlessly attacking the integrity of the reporter who exposes FBI's abuses: https://t.co/8xtj0dTaJE
Wandering Views 
It’s fine….
Everyone just pretend it’s fine….
“Biden Says After He Was Elected VP (In 2008) He Awarded Uncle (Who Died In 1999) A Purple Heart”
He’s a time traveler now too.
But now they stare at their feet and pretend it’s fine….
LikeLiked by 2 people
These are the politicians the corrupt FTX aided, as well as the PACs they bankrolled.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Dems continue to run interference for a corrupt FBI leadership.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Oh so now that you’re desperate, it’s a mental illness, but when we point that out, it’s hate speech.
“First openly transgender woman set to be executed in the U.S. asks for mercy
Lawyers for Amber McLaughlin, 49, asked Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to spare her this week. McLaughlin was convicted of killing 45-year-old Beverly Guenther in 2003.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/first-openly-transgender-woman-set-executed-us-asks-mercy-rcna61846
“The first openly transgender woman set to be executed in the U.S. is asking Missouri’s governor for mercy, citing mental health issues.
Lawyers for Amber McLaughlin, now 49, on Monday asked Republican Gov. Mike Parson to spare her.
McLaughlin was convicted of killing 45-year-old Beverly Guenther on Nov. 20, 2003. Guenther was raped and stabbed to death in St. Louis County.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
The idea that social media might become a level playing field scares them.
“Democrats like Adam Schiff are scrambling to save censorship”
https://nypost.com/2022/12/18/democrats-scramble-to-save-censorship/
“Adam Schiff popped up on CNN’s “State of The Union” show Sunday morning to issue barely veiled threats to Elon Musk for trying to restore free speech on Twitter.
Ostensibly, the lame duck chairman of the House Intelligence Committee joined Jake Tapper to crow about expected charges against Donald Trump Monday from his January 6 star chamber.
But Schiff moved on to complain about the “big problem right now with social media companies and their failure to moderate content and the explosion of hate on Twitter, the banning of journalists on Twitter.”
Then he suggested ominously that Twitter and social media companies may not continue to enjoy “immunity from responsibility and liability.”
In other words, keep policing free speech as an arm of the federal government or watch your business go up in smoke.
Schiff is a calculated propagandist, who lies under oath as easily as breathing, and knowingly peddles misinformation to Congress and to media outlets like CNN and MSNBC, whose gullible hosts keep bringing him back on their shows to mislead their audiences.
In the dying days of his powerful reign as overseer of the nation’s intelligence agencies, abusing his access to the nation’s secrets, Schiff’s final assignment is to preserve the censorship regime his side of politics entrenched across Big Tech.
‘Cascading failure’
On Tuesday he, and three other Dems he roped in, wrote a menacing letter “as part of our ongoing oversight efforts” to Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta (Facebook’s new name), warning that, if the company went down Twitter’s path of free speech, the consequences would be dire. “Dangerous and unfounded election denial content” must be kept off the platform.
It was what law professor Jonathan Turley characterized as a “hold-the-line warning . . . meant to stop a cascading failure in the once insurmountable wall of social-media censorship.”
“If Facebook were to restore free-speech protections, the control over social media could evaporate.”
The powerful are panicking, and so they should. Their secrets are leaking.
Ever since Musk authorized a group of independent journalists to release the Twitter Files three weeks ago, a steady drip of damning evidence has emerged, showing collusion between Twitter and the federal government, including the FBI, to censor Americans and suppress dissent, in violation of the First Amendment.
In particular we have seen how the FBI, in weekly meetings with Twitter, pre-bunked The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story on Oct. 14, 2020, persuading Twitter to suppress the story and lock down our account for more than two weeks.
As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in Twitter Files part 6, Twitter was acting as a “subsidiary” of the FBI, in a relationship he described as “master-canine.”
At least 80 FBI agents were engaged full time in flagging and analyzing user content, demanding user location information and requesting that Twitter take action against mainly “low-follower accounts belonging to ordinary Americans” — including ones that just cracked jokes.
FBI-Twitter communications were “constant and pervasive,” wrote Taibbi. “Instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists, the FBI has agents — lots of them — analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as a permanent, end-in-itself surveillance operation. People should not be okay with this.”
Sunday night, in a supplemental dump, Taibbi revealed more communications showing the FBI was “acting as conduit for the Intelligence Community.”
Half the public is still in the dark about this egregious assault on our liberties since, for some bizarre reason, the left-wing media seems to support censorship and want to censor mention of it.
But at some point, the land of the free and home of the brave will rebel.
The next Twitter Files dump promised as early as Monday, from independent journalist Michael Shellenberger, is another chink in the wall of social-media censorship.
He will reveal that on the evening of Oct. 13, 2020, the night before The Post’s Hunter Biden Laptop story was published — and censored — the FBI sent documents to Twitter through a special one-way channel at 9:22 p.m. ET.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
“The truth about Covid McCarthyism
The elites’ blacklisting of lockdown dissenters was shameful and self-destructive.”
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.
Was Fauci directly responsible for Twitter’s blacklisting of Bhattacharya? It’s not clear. There’s certainly no proof of Fauci putting in a phone call to Vijaya Gadde or any of the other authoritarians who were in charge of the censorious hellscape that was pre-Musk Twitter and demanding they silence this thoughtcriminal. But there does seem to have been a political trickle-down effect, as one writer describes it. Fauci issues a decree about what is true and what is false in relation to Covid and it swiftly becomes gospel among Big Tech overlords – that was the pattern. In this instance, Fauci engaged in a ‘systematic discrediting’ of expert dissenters on lockdown and it ‘trickled down to social media’ so that these people’s ideas were ‘labelled “Covid misinformation” and censored by content moderators’.
There are email trails that hint at a more causal relationship between Fauci’s hostility towards dissent and Big Tech’s censorship of such dissent. So during the deposition Fauci was shown emails suggesting that his own officials had tried to contact Google to set up a conversation about ‘misinformation’ in relation to the Covid vaccine. Shortly after, social-media sites started adding warning labels to posts about the vaccine and even suspended some accounts for pushing vax misinformation. It’s a big deal if these things are linked, because officials in the US are forbidden by the First Amendment from curtailing the speech rights of their citizens. If the state under Biden outsourced censorship to compliant companies, that’s still state censorship.
In some ways, the fact that there doesn’t seem to have been any need for a direct chain of command between the Biden administration and Big Tech in order for Covid censorship to occur is more chilling. It confirms how widespread Covid conformism was in the establishment, and how naturally it comes to the oligarchies of Silicon Valley to do the bidding of the Democratic elites. Elite consensus opinion is a powerful beast. Time and again, the government view on Covid became the only utterable view in the digital public square. So when officialdom was pro-masks, dissent on masks was ruthlessly censored: witness YouTube’s banning of a video featuring senator Rand Paul questioning the effectiveness of masks. When officialdom insisted that lockdown was the right and only way to tackle Covid, all intellectual bristling against lockdown ran the risk of being blacklisted, as the GBD folks and others discovered. And when it was Fauci’s belief that the lab-leak theory about Covid was a ridiculous conspiracy theory, ‘all views in conflict’ with that take risked censure online. Strikingly, it was only when the Biden administration said in May last year that it would look into the lab-leak theory that Facebook finally lifted its censure of the theory – proof that the government view ruled supreme on social media in the pandemic.
We need to talk about this. We live in supposedly free societies and yet anyone who dissented from the state view on Covid faced being blacklisted and silenced. It kind of doesn’t matter whether Fauci ‘colluded’ with Big Tech. It’s still the case that it was very difficult indeed for citizens in one of the few public spaces they could freely access during the pandemic – the internet – to dissent from the state’s view. Worse, there was a neo-imperial element to this online redaction of deviation from Fauci’s diktats. Social-media companies globalised the official US view on Covid so that even poor souls in London or Paris or Melbourne found themselves suspended – banished from the public square – for making a comment that holy Anthony Fauci might disapprove of.”
—
“It will take some time to measure the impact of this empire of Covid censorship on our societies. To my mind, it didn’t only prevent the expression of certain views, which is a grave enough offence in itself, arguably the gravest offence a society can commit. It also left us catastrophically unprepared for the post-lockdown era. The punishment of dissenting voices that wondered out loud if lockdown might lead to deadly backlogs in the health system, and to a decline in people’s mental health, and to a regression of children’s social skills, and to an economic downturn that might have severely negative consequences, meant we never properly talked about those things. Which means now that all those things are happening – it turns out some of the dissenters were right – our societies are startled, and clueless.
There’s a lesson here: censorship is an incredibly destructive force. The suppression of dissent is always, in every single situation, a bad idea. It reduces a society’s ability to explore angles, examine possibilities, imagine future scenarios. Going forward, we must never again allow experts to suppress whatever they decree to be anti-scientific or dangerous thought. On every issue, from pandemics to the climate to the economy, people’s freedom to think and speak and warn must reign.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Why does Biden continue to fund terrorist enablers and sympathizers?
“Iran Stops Paying Terrorists, But You Still Pay Them, Thanks to Joe Biden
A leftist administration keeps the cash flowing to the usual suspects.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/iran-stops-paying-terrorists-but-you-still-pay-them-thanks-to-joe-biden/
“The Iranian protesters who have gained the support of the entire world have pointed out more than once that the mullahs who run the repressive Islamic regime in Tehran spend more money on foreign jihad terrorists than on their own people. So in what may be another regime attempt to calm the protests, or simply an indication that the regime is strapped for cash, the Islamic Republic of Iran has stopped funding Palestinian jihad terror groups. Old Joe Biden’s handlers, however, are still forking over quite enough of your taxpayer cash to keep the terror groups going.
The Jerusalem Post reported Sunday that “Iran has stopped channeling funds to a number of Palestinian factions.” The Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds “quoted unnamed informed sources in Lebanon as saying that the factions are currently suffering from a financial crisis because of the Iranian move, which was taken three months ago.”
That report came exactly a week after Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke at a conference of J Street, a far-Left group that is viciously hostile to Israel. According to the Washington Free Beacon, Blinken “touted the Biden administration’s renewed engagement with the Palestinian government, which includes nearly $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer aid, and accused ‘Israeli settlers’ of perpetrating violence against Palestinians, a line that drew applause from J Street’s crowd.”
That nearly $1 billion in aid goes to the Palestinian Authority, but only the most naïve and blinkered assume that it is then spent only on humanitarian initiatives. The Taylor Force Act, which is still U.S. law although the Biden administration blithely ignores it, prevents taxpayer funds from being given to an entity that supports terrorism.
But the Palestinian Authority continues to pay imprisoned jihad terrorists and the families of dead terrorists who killed Israelis. As recently as May 2022, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reaffirmed that these payments would not stop: the Jerusalem Post reported that he said in a speech on “Nakba Day” that “the Palestinian Authority will continue to pay allowances to the families of Palestinian prisoners and those killed while carrying out attacks against Israel.”
Abbas has repeatedly vowed to keep paying terrorists. It’s one of the highest priorities of his regime, if not the very highest priority. In July 2018, according to Breitbart, he “vowed that his government will continue to pay salaries to terrorists and their families even if ‘we have only a penny left.’” Abbas added: “We will not accept a cut or cancellation of salaries to the families of martyrs and prisoners, as some are trying to bring about.”
The bulk of the prisoners who receive these payments are or were members of the terror groups Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, all of which have received funding from Iran and thus may be feeling the pinch because the mullahs have now cut them off. The Post reported that these groups claim they use the money from Iran to “pay salaries to their leaders and members and cover the costs of their ‘various activities.’” A bit more honestly, “in the past, Hamas and PIJ officials admitted that Iran has been supplying their groups with financial and military aid.”
Donald Trump had cut off the money to the Palestinian Authority in light of its ongoing support for jihad terrorism. Old Joe Biden immediately started the cash flowing again, which has now led to the absurd situation that the United States of America is funding terror groups that are dedicated to the destruction of its only reliable ally in the Middle East, and the only genuine democracy there.
The Biden administration’s continued funding of the Palestinian Authority despite its obvious, defiant and unapologetic financial support for jihad terrorism, and its continuing to fork over the cash when even the Islamic Republic of Iran has stopped, is yet another example of its resolute rejection of reality. Men can become women, a man who claims to be woman can become the first female four-star admiral, a cross-dressing luggage thief is an expert in nuclear waste disposal, and the Palestinian Authority is an upstanding, respectable “partner for peace.””
—–
Stop funding terrorists and those who enable them.
“Poll: 72% of Palestinians Favor Creating More Armed Terrorist Groups To Attack Israelis
Survey shows huge support for Islamic terrorist group Hamas in the West Bank. If elections held, Hamas chief set to defeat PLO’s Abbas”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/12/poll-72-of-palestinians-favor-creating-more-armed-terrorist-groups-to-attack-israelis/
“An overwhelming majority of Palestinians in the West Bank favor the formation of more terrorist groups to target Israel, a new poll shows.
“Seventy-two percent of Palestinians support the creation of additional armed groups in the West Bank akin to the Lion’s Den terror group that operates against Israel,” the Times of Israel reported Thursday citing an opinion poll conducted by the West Bank-based thinktank Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR).
The Lion’s Den, or Arin al-Usud, is the newest terrorist group to rear its ugly head in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank. In October, the Israeli military carried out a counterterrorism raid in the the West Bank town of Nablus, killing Lion’s Den’s top commander and several other terror operatives. The Lion’s Den terror outfit is made up of former members of the PLO-Fatah-affiliated Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other terrorist groups.
The survey also showed huge support for the Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas in the West Bank. If the choice was between the current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is affiliated with the PLO, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas candidate is expected to win overwhelmingly, the poll numbers indicate.
The Israeli TV channel i24News reported the findings of the survey:
According to a survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research published Tuesday, 72 percent of the Palestinian public said they favored forming armed groups. An example of one such group is the “Lions’ Den” – a Nablus-based group that does not take orders from the Palestinian Authority and is not part of the PA’s security services.
Meanwhile, 22 percent said they are against this and 59 percent said they were concerned that forming such armed groups could lead to further armed clashes with the PA’s security services. Conversely, 39 percent were not worried about such a scenario.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Woke idiots run the Pentagon now.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2022/12/19/the-pentagons-latest-leadership-failure-n2617279
“Let’s sum up the state of America’s military brass with one appalling comparison between how the admirals, generals, and civilian leaders chose to treat two different service members. One is a young naval officer, Lieutenant Ridge Alkonis, a family man who fell unconscious due to a medical condition while driving and accidentally killed two people in a tragic crash and was railroaded into a Japanese prison for three years. The other one is a creepy pervert who was an Army full colonel who put on puppy sex gear – yeah, that’s a thing – over his uniform in social media pics, and who maintained a litter of similarly bizarre subordinate soldiers/degenerate weirdos.
Now, which one of these do you think our current military leadership is still paying?
You get a medal if you guessed Colonel Kink. Or a Milkbone, as the case may be.
Yes, the young Navy lieutenant caught up in this outrageous injustice is not only going to miss out on three years of his little kids’ lives because the United States government was unable to convince the nation that our blood and treasure lets remain free to indulge in Pokémon, Godzilla movies, and anime tentacle porn, to have some compassion over this awful accident. No, our military leadership has decided to cut off his pay, leaving his family not only bereft of their father but in absolute poverty. They had to start a GoFundMe. Yet COL Rin Tin Sin is still cashing his check.
What a pathetic disgrace.
What a damn embarrassment.
What the hell are you people thinking?
You aren’t.
If you were thinking, we might have unequivocally won a major war in the last 30 years.
If you were thinking, you might not have to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for personnel by allowing in Category 4s, the class of recruit the drill sergeants need to remind to breathe.
If you were thinking, this disgusting backstab would never have happened.
And the consequences of this and similar misjudgments that tell our troops that they don’t matter are manifesting more and more in more and more screw-ups. Our military is a mess and getting worse. Do not fall for the brass’s sunny-day hype and hack clichés about how we are still “The Greatest Military Ever Was.” It’s crap, and they know it’s crap – or worse, they don’t know it.
It’s almost impossible to explain to a civilian just how horrible this betrayal is, how corrosive this kind of REMF policy is. The military is based on trust, trust of the leaders that their troops will follow their commands, and trust of the subordinates that their leaders will support them. This stunning decision undermines that essential dynamic. It is a disgraceful sell-out of an American warrior caught in a situation beyond his control. It’s bad enough that the US government was so impotent that it couldn’t turn to Japan and say “Let this guy out!” and have Japan say “Roger, here he is and we’ve also shined his shoes.” This is not some scumbag who raped a local – let that scuzz enjoy the fun that is Japan’s penal system. This is a guy caught up in a situation outside his control and our military is announcing “Hey troops if you need us to help, forget it. We’re screwing you and your family. So, how about re-upping for another hitch? Hello? Hey, where are you going?”
They not only let our guy be shafted but doubled down on their ineptitude by cutting off his family. It’s mind-boggling. You look at that choice and it’s crystal clear. You take care of your guy. But not this Administration. Not this Pentagon. Not these generals and admirals.
Too bad LT Alkonis isn’t Brittany Griner, an America-hating celebrity pronoun person whose great-grandfather came from an approved continent – something that should have been irrelevant but that Biden’s spokeshack made sure we knew was important. They left the Marines behind in the deal that sprung an international arms dealer. What a shock. The Pentagon’s priorities are clear to our troops, and they are not one of them.
Message to the Troops: You don’t matter. Trust us and you put not only yourself but your family at risk.
And the troops are receiving that transmission, Lima Charlie.
Right now, the military is unable to fill its ranks because it has completely alienated the traditional Americans who used to fill those ranks and were the backbone of the military. Why the hell would anyone join today’s military? To be taught that you are evil because of your skin color? To be told your traditional values are insurrectionist? To suffer prejudice in promotions, assignments, and everything else if you don’t check the right boxes? To serve under a commander who is living his adult-only version of “Pound Puppies?”
Our troops see that when they need the leadership behind them, it will be there to stick the knife in. And right now, military veterans are refusing to recommend that young people join. I will not recommend enlisting. None of my retired colleagues will. Why should we? The Pentagon can’t win a war, is obsessed with college faculty lounge woke nonsense, and tops it all off by letting troops in trouble twist in the wind. That’s a tragedy because we loved serving, but this situation has been brought on entirely by a military leadership that pulls this kind of bonehead maneuver.
Somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon, somebody made this decision and no leader in the chain had the stones to say “Wait a minute, what the hell is this?” I get delegating responsibility. I get supporting subordinate leaders. I was a junior officer about the same time most of the current crop of flag officers was, so we learned the same things in the same places, only I didn’t forget. You back your subordinate leaders until you see them screwing the troops, and then you step in. There’s no deference for decisions like that. You have the stars. Act like it.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yep.
“‘The trans movement is built on fear and intimidation’”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/12/18/the-trans-movement-is-built-on-fear-and-intimidation/
“Trans-rights activists at the University of Edinburgh managed to shut down a screening of a gender-critical documentary earlier this week. Student groups branded the film ‘transphobic’, claiming it would make trans students ‘unsafe’. A mob occupied the screening room and then blocked access to a lecture theatre when organisers tried to switch rooms. Eventually, security were called and the event had to be cancelled.
The film that so offended them is Adult Human Female – a documentary about how trans ideology took over British institutions and why this poses a danger to women’s rights. spiked caught up with its directors, Deirdre O’Neill and Michael Wayne, to discuss the controversy surrounding their film.
spiked: Did you expect Adult Human Female to provoke such a strong reaction?
Deirdre O’Neill: Obviously, we expected some kind of reaction, because we know how difficult it is for people to speak out about the trans issue. But the attempts to shut down the film have come as quite a surprise.
This week was actually the second time the film has been cancelled. It was cancelled in Nottingham in November, and that led to a surge of new followers and people becoming interested. And of course, after the other night, we have even more Twitter followers and people watching the film on YouTube or Vimeo. So the interesting thing is that the response has mainly been positive.
It’s also important to say that the film is not really that controversial. Five or 10 years ago it wouldn’t have been controversial to say that you cannot change your biological sex, which is the premise of the film.
spiked: Has the film managed to open up a debate?
Michael Wayne: So far, the people on the other side don’t want to watch the film or discuss it. They just want to shut it down. That’s how this belief system has achieved such purchase in all our institutions. It is a consensus based on fear and intimidation.
When activists managed to cancel the Nottingham screening in November, at that point the film wasn’t released online, and only about 200 people had seen it at a premiere in London. So we can say that none of the 80 protesters that got that screening shut down had seen the film. That’s not good-faith engagement. That shows an authoritarian mindset. At the event in Nottingham, someone went out into the car park where the protesters were and invited them in to see the film. But they didn’t want to.
The film brings together 15 women and one man, and in 92 minutes it explains the trans debate. It articulates the arguments to people who have probably heard something about it, but don’t know all the details. I think trans-rights activists are worried that people will watch the film and that the penny will drop. They’re worried that people will understand what the issue is and that it is reasonable to have concerns.
O’Neill: A lot of people who have watched the film are saying, thank you for setting this all out in accessible terms. Thank you for making it easy to understand the argument. Thank you for giving these articulate women a voice. We are being thanked for creating a space where women can talk about their concerns.
spiked: Why did you feel that now is the time to make a film about this issue?
O’Neill: It’s something that we’ve been discussing for quite a few years. The issue has become more and more apparent, especially working in the university sector. I have colleagues and students who are terrified of speaking out. It was just getting harder and harder to talk about. There is no debate anymore. The only acceptable position to have is ‘trans women are women, trans men are men, all genders are valid’.
The activists have appropriated the language of civil-rights movements. When they make it an issue of ‘rights’, no one wants to speak out against that. They’re using the language of a very left-wing, radical, progressive movement. But these ideas are incredibly regressive and are taking us backwards.
spiked: How can we start to push back against these ideas?
Wayne: I think we’ve got to break the silence. More people have to have the courage to step forward and say: we need to have this debate, I have these concerns, let’s talk about it.
Trans activists have waged a very clever campaign. They have captured the people at the top of the institutions. They captured the policymakers, and then the policies trickled down. But we need to open up the conversation to everyone else, because there has not been sufficient discussion about any of this. The people at the top of these institutions have to be made to realise that the trans stuff has been built on a false consensus. We need to reset and start this debate again.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Jumping the shark.
The Clown Committee is desperate, and no one cares.
“Confirmed: January 6th Committee Will Jump the Shark With Final Move Against Donald Trump”
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/12/19/confirmed-january-6th-committee-will-jump-the-shark-with-final-move-against-donald-trump-n675688
“The conclusion was never in doubt for the January 6th committee. Despite a year-plus of investigations and hearings that over-promised and underdelivered, Liz Cheney, Bennie Thompson, Adam Schiff, and crew will send criminal referrals targeting Donald Trump to the Department of Justice.
As Redstate reported previously, the details of the referrals were previously leaked, showing that the committee is going to charge Trump with insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Now, the vote has been completed and it is confirmed those referrals will go forward. The announcement will be made in dramatic fashion on Monday during the committee’s final hearing.”
“The press is absolutely giddy, as you can see from that Today Show hit. Call it a campaign contribution at this point because this is their Super Bowl. They want nothing more than to hang yet another albatross around the neck of Trump as he pursues another presidential run.
It won’t stay just an albatross, though. As I’ve said from the beginning, all of this is coordinated. The January 6th committee isn’t dropping these referrals into a vacuum. Rather, they’ve gone through all this pomp and circumstance knowing the DOJ is patiently waiting for the hook it needs to indict Trump. The illusion of political will has been created, even if the committee itself is full of nothing but bitter, anti-Trump partisans.
In this case, the lack of evidence for any of the charges being levied doesn’t matter. As I explained in my previous piece, the broadening out of the law needed to go after Trump for things like “insurrection” and “obstruction of an official proceeding” is ludicrous. How do you commit insurrection without organizing and executing an insurrection or without telling people to do so? Those are issues a fair justice system would tear apart.
We don’t have one of those, though. The DOJ knows it can indict a ham sandwich and secure convictions in the DC jurisdiction. The only question left is the timing. Will the new special counsel wait and see if Trump wins the GOP nomination before indicting him in an attempt to destroy Republican chances in the 2024 election? I wouldn’t even begin to put it past them. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s the plan.”
—–
And even clueless people on our side will fall for it, because Orange Man Bad.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Clowns gotta clown. 🙂
LikeLike
LikeLike