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How House Weaponization Committee Republicans Can Get The Most From Their ‘Twitter Files’ Witnesses

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 08, 2023

Jim Jordan in committee hearing — Most committee hearings flounder because politicians waste time grandstanding, but lawmakers shouldn’t squander the chance to ask insightful questions of the ‘Twitter Files’ witnesses.

MARGOT CLEVELAND

Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testify on Thursday before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Little they say will be new, yet because corporate media have refused to cover the story, many Americans remain ignorant about the massive scandals Taibbi, Shellenberger, and the other independent journalists have revealed over the last three months in the “Twitter Files.”

Here’s what the House committee must do to break the cone of silence.

Introduce Taibbi and Shellenberger to Americans

Most Americans know little about Taibbi and Shellenberger, allowing the left to execute its go-to play when faced with inconvenient facts: call the messengers members of a right-wing conspiracy. The House’s weaponization committee should thus ensure the public knows neither Taibbi nor Shellenberger can be written off as conservative conspirators, much less “ultra MAGA.”

Hopefully, the two witnesses for the majority party will ensure their opening statements detail their non-conservative “credentials” — something Taibbi has attempted to do on Twitter, writing: “I’m pro-choice and didn’t vote for Trump,” and noting he is an independent.

Taibbi’s work covering politics for Rolling Stone and his “incisive, bilious takedowns of Wall Street,” as well as past appearances on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, and his work with Keith Olbermann, are the non-conservative credentials Americans need to hear.

Shellenberger’s biography likewise confirms he is no right-winger or Trump surrogate. Time Magazine named him “Hero of the Environment.” “In the 1990s, Shellenberger helped save California’s last unprotected ancient redwood forest, inspire Nike to improve factory conditions, and advocate for decriminalization and harm reduction policies,” his webpage reads — details helpful to highlight for the listening public.

If Taibbi and Shellenberger’s prepared testimony omits these and other details, Chair Jim Jordan should open the hearing by asking the witnesses to share with the country their political and policy perspectives and then push them on why all Americans should care about the “Twitter Files.”

Here, the committee and its witnesses need to remind Americans of the importance of free speech and that the silencing of speech harms the country, even when it is not the government acting as the censor. (In fact, I would argue it is precisely because our country has lost a sense of the importance of free speech that the government successfully outsourced censorship to Twitter.)

Guide Them So They Tell a Coherent Story

Next, the questioning will begin. Unfortunately, here’s where most committee hearings flounder because politicians prefer to pontificate than pose insightful questions to their witnesses. But in the case of the “Twitter Files,” Republicans can do both because the witnesses have already provided detailed answers to much of what the country needs to know in the nearly 20 installments they published over the last several months.

Thus the goal of the committee should be to provide a platform that allows the witnesses to tell the story of the scandals uncovered. Ideally, then, committee members will lead the witnesses through their testimony as if each question represents the opening paragraph of a chapter, with Taibbi and Shellenberger given the floor to provide the details.

Start at the Beginning, the Best Place to Start

Committee members will all want to focus on the most shocking discoveries, such as the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the government’s demands to silence unapproved Covid messages. But those events merely represent symptoms of the diseased state of free speech Taibbi and Shellenberger uncovered, and the latter represents the real threat to our country.

Democrats, independents, and apolitical Americans will also be inclined to immediately write off the hearings as political theater if Republicans immediately flip to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and Covid messaging. Both are important parts of the story, but Americans first need to understand the context.

Begin there: After Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he provided Taibbi, Shellenberger, and other independent journalists access to internal communications. What communications were accessible? What types of emails did the journalists review? How many? What else remains to explore?

Buckets of Scandals

The story will quickly progress from there, but how?

While the committee could walk Taibbi and Shellenberger through each of their individual “Twitter Files” reports, the better approach would be to bucket the scandals because each thread the journalists wrote included details that overlapped with earlier (and later) revelations.

Remember: The scandals are not merely the “events,” such as the blocking of the New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Rather, they go back to first principles — in this case, the value of free speech.

Twitter’s Huge Censorship Toolbox

Moving next to what Taibbi called Twitter’s “huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user,” the House committee should ask the witnesses to expand on those tools, which include “Search Blacklist,” “Trends Blacklist,” “Do Not Amplify” settings, limits on hashtag searches, and more.

What were those tools? How often were they used and why? Did complaints from the government or other organizations ever prompt Twitter to use those visibility filters? Were official government accounts ever subjected to the filters? If so, why?

Twitter-Government Coordination

The natural next chapter will focus on any coordination between Twitter and the government. Again, the “Twitter Files” exposed the breadth and depth of government interaction with the tech giant — from FBI offices all over the country contacting Twitter about problematic accounts to, as Taibbi wrote, Twitter “taking requests from every conceivable government agency, from state officials in Wyoming, Georgia, Minnesota, Connecticut, California, and others to the NSA, FBI, DHS, DOD, DOJ, and many others.”

Internal communications also showed the CIA — referred to under the euphemism “Other Government Agencies” in the emails — working closely with Twitter as well. Other emails showed Twitter allowed the Department of Defense to run covert propaganda operations, “whitelisting” Pentagon accounts to prevent the covert accounts from being banned. The multi-agency Global Engagement Center, housed in the Department of State, also played a large part in the government’s efforts to prompt the censorship of speech.

Both the Biden and Trump administrations reached out to Twitter as well, seeking the removal of various posts, as did other individual politicians, such as Rep. Adam Schiff and Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

To keep the conversation coherent, the committee should catalog the various government agencies, centers, and individuals revealed in the “Twitter Files” and ask the witnesses how these government-connected individuals or organizations communicated with Twitter, how they pressured Twitter, the types of requests they made, and their success.

The “Twitter Files” detailed censorship requests numbering in the tens of thousands from the government. Asking the witnesses to expand on those requests and how individual Americans responded when they learned they were supposedly Russian bots or Indian trolls will make the scandal more personal.

Non-Governmental Organizations

Questioning should then proceed to the non-governmental organizations connected to Twitter’s censorship efforts. Again, the committee should first provide a quick synopsis of the revelations from the “Twitter Files,” highlighting the involvement of various nonprofits and academic institutions in the “disinformation” project, including the Election Integrity Partnership, Alliance Securing Democracy (which hosted the Hamilton 68 platform), the Atlantic Council’s Center for Internet Security, and Clemson University.

What role did these organizations play? Have you reviewed all of the communications related to these groups? Were there other non-governmental organizations communicating with Twitter? How much influence did these groups have?

Disinformation About Disinformation

The story should continue next with testimony about the validity of the various disinformation claims peddled to Twitter. Internal communications showed Twitter insiders knew the Hamilton 68 dashboard’s methodology was flawed. Other emails indicated Twitter experts found the claims of Russian disinformation coming from Clemson, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, and the Global Engagement Center questionable.

Highlighting these facts and then asking the witnesses to elaborate on the revelations, organization by organization, will advance the story for the public.

Funding Sources

Next up should be the funding of those organizations, which came from government grants and often the same few private organizations. Here the Committee should ask Taibbi the status of his research on the financing of these organizations — something the journalist indicated last month he is delving into.

Taibbi also suggested the Global Engagement Center’s funding should be looked at in the next budget. Why? What should the House know before it makes future budget decisions?

Connecting the Censorship Complex Dots

After these details have been discussed, the committee should connect the dots as Taibbi did when he wrote: “What most people think of as the ‘deep state’ is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.”

Read that quote — and other powerful ones from either the emails or the journalists covering the story — to the witnesses. Hopefully, staffers already have the best quotes blown up and ready for tomorrow.

Can you explain what you mean, here, Mr. Taibbi? What “state agencies”? What NGOs? Mr. Shellenberger, do you agree? What governmental or non-governmental players did you see involved?

What Was the Media’s Role?

Asking the witnesses about the media’s involvement will then close the circle on the big picture, which is ironic given the press’s role in circular reporting — something even Twitter recognized. Hamilton 68 or the Global Engagement Center would announce Russian disinformation and peddle it to the press, Twitter, and politicians. Then when Twitter’s review found the accounts not concerning, politicians would rely on the press’s coverage to bolster the claims of disinformation and pressure Twitter to respond. And even when Twitter told the reporters (and politicians) the disinformation methodologies were lacking, the media persisted in regurgitating claims of Russian disinformation.

Can you explain how the press responded when Twitter told reporters to be cautious of the Hamilton 68 database? What precisely did Twitter say? Did you find similar warnings to the media about the Global Engagement Center’s data?

Specific Instances of Censorship

Then the committee should focus on specific instances of censorship, with the Hunter Biden laptop story and Covid debates deserving top billing.

While Republicans care most about the censorship of the laptop story, this committee hearing is not the place to put the Biden family’s pay-to-play scandals on trial. Rather, Americans need to understand four key takeaways: The laptop was real, the FBI knew it was real, the FBI’s warnings to Twitter and other tech giants prompted censorship of the Post’s reporting, and the legacy media were complicit in silencing the story. Having the witnesses explain why Twitter censored the story with the goal of conveying those points will be key.

However, highlighting the censorship of Covid debates offers a better opportunity to cross the political divide of the country and to convince Americans that the hand-in-glove relationship between media and government threatens everyone’s speech. Stressing that both the Trump and Biden administrations pushed Twitter to censor Covid-related speech will also bolster that point.

The committee should start by summarizing the various Covid topics considered verboten — the virus’ origins, vaccines, natural immunity, masking, school closings — and then stress that the science now indicates the speech silenced was correct. Highlighting specific tweets that were blocked and medical professionals who were axed from the platform, while asking the witnesses to explain how this happened, will show the public the real-world implications of a Censorship Complex governing debate in America.

Where Do We Go from Here?

The committee should close by giving Taibbi and Shellenberger the floor, asking: “Where do we go from here?”

The “Twitter Files” revealed that the government and its allies did not limit their efforts to Twitter but pushed censorship at other platforms, and also that a new “cottage industry” in disinformation has already launched. How do Americans know they are hearing the truth? How do we know the government is not manipulating or censoring the truth?

Furthermore, if the same Censorship Complex that limits speech on social media succeeds in canceling alternative news outlets, and if the legacy media won’t provide a check on the government, how do we preserve our constitutional republic?

That last question is not for tomorrow’s witnesses, however. It is for every American.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Whistleblower: FBI Targeted Innocent Rally-Goers Just for Being in D.C. On Jan. 6

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 07, 2023

man in D.C. on Jan. 6 holding a voter fraud sign and wearing a red maga hat — The FBI’s D.C. field office treated Americans exercising their right to free speech as suspected criminals, with no evidence to do so.

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

The FBI’s D.C. field office directed the Boston office to open investigations into more than 100 Americans who had attended the Jan. 6 rally despite having no evidence those individuals had committed any crime, according to whistleblower testimony reviewed by The Federalist. This represents the second attempt by the D.C. field office to sic the FBI on innocent Americans — in this case, people who were exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.

The D.C. field office pressured Boston’s FBI office to open criminal investigations into some 140 people who took buses from Massachusetts to D.C. on Jan. 6, according to testimony from George Hill, a whistleblower and recently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, reviewed by The Federalist. The D.C. field office applied this pressure, Hill said, even though it had no evidence that any of those travelers had entered restricted areas of the Capitol.

Hill, a military veteran and former longtime FBI and NSA analyst, had previously identified himself as one of several whistleblowers cooperating with House Judiciary Committee investigators when he spoke with Just the News’ John Solomon last month. The Federalist’s review of Hill’s testimony confirmed the details he told Solomon and exposed more troubling information.

According to Hill’s testimony, after rioters entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the D.C. field office, which was leading the investigation, presented the Boston office “definitive evidence” that two individuals within its jurisdiction had entered restricted areas of the Capitol. Boston opened investigations into those two individuals.

In his deposition testimony to congressional investigators, Hill explained that because those two people had arranged for buses to take rally-goers to Washington, the D.C. field office told the Boston office to open investigations into all 140 of the passengers.

According to the whistleblower, a Boston supervisory special agent, or SSA, told the D.C. field office, “Happy to do it. Show us where they were inside the Capitol, and we’ll look into it.”

But the D.C. field office said it couldn’t do that unless it knew the exact time and location in the Capitol where the individuals were located, according to Hill’s testimony. Then when Boston asked for access to the 11,000 hours of video to allow its own agents to review the footage themselves to assess whether to launch an investigation into any of the rally-goers, the D.C. field office refused to share the video, Hill’s testimony revealed. The bureau claimed the footage might reveal undercover agents or confidential human sources, according to the whistleblower.

Yet the D.C. field office persisted in its demand for Boston to open investigations into everyone on the bus, threatening to call the special agent in charge of the field office if the lower-level agent refused. The supervisory special agent remained firm, however. As Hill explained, the SSA told the D.C. field office that those 140 people “were going to a political rally, which is First Amendment protected activity.”

This move by the bureau represents its second such attempt — just from Hill’s testimony — to target innocent Americans. As The Federalist reported on Monday, Hill also told the House Judiciary Committee that the D.C. field office pressured local FBI field offices to open investigations on innocent, gun-owning Americans based on data mining that Bank of America voluntarily provided to the bureau.

According to The Federalist’s review of the testimony, Hill said the Bank of America list included people who used its credit or debit cards in D.C., or the surrounding Maryland and Virginia areas, on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021. Furthermore, people who had ever (through Jan. 6, 2021) used a Bank of America product to purchase a firearm were elevated to the top of the list.

In both instances, Boston’s special agent in charge, Joseph Bonavolonta, withstood the outside pressure — something Hill commended in his testimony.

While Bonavolonta and the Boston office refused to investigate Americans based solely on their First Amendment activities or credit card receipts placing them in the greater-D.C. area, it is unclear whether other field offices launched investigations based on the D.C. office’s pressure. A source familiar with Hill’s testimony confirmed that Hill did not know the answer to that question either.

Open-source reporting, however, reveals that in at least one instance, the FBI questioned an individual who organized buses for rally-goers — apparently without any evidence of potentially illegal conduct. In January of 2021, FBI agents appeared at Jim Worthington’s suburban Philadelphia home to quiz him about the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Worthington was not home at the time but later spoke with investigators over the course of two hours, confirming he had been in D.C. for the rally and had “helped bring busloads of people to the event,” but had “never went to the Capitol.”

Given that Worthington, who also led the People4Trump PAC, never entered the Capitol, one must wonder what legitimate basis the FBI claimed it had to target him.

Or had the D.C. field office pressured the Philadelphia field office to open an investigation into Worthington? And what about the some-200 people who traveled to D.C. on the buses Worthington arranged? Did the local field office open investigations into those people? And what about the other 50-plus field offices? Did they also target individuals based on their First Amendment-protected activities? With stories of buses from across America traveling to D.C. for the Jan. 6 rally, it is a definite possibility.

While it’s long been known that the House’s Jan. 6 Committee and the legacy media pushed a narrative that conflated the rally-goers and the rioters, the whistleblower’s allegations now suggest the FBI’s D.C. field office also treated Americans exercising their right to free speech as suspected criminals, without any evidentiary basis to do so.

Mollie Hemingway contributed to this report.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF MARCH 3, 2023

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Meet The Partisans Who Wove the Censorship Complex’s Vast and Tangled Web

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 28, 2023

Yoel Roth at congressional hearing — While federal funding is not solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the Censorship Complex, it is the most troubling because our government is using our money to censor our speech.

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

While the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s coverage of the Global Disinformation Index have revealed an expansive Censorship Complex that seeks to silence Americans for money, politics, ideology, and power, much still needs to be unraveled.

A search of government contracts and grants for the eight fiscal years from 2016 through today for the keywords “misinformation” or “disinformation” reveals 538 federal government grants and 36 contracts were awarded to a wide range of academic institutions and non-governmental organizations.

Mapping out the connections among the various award recipients, the government, and the pro-censorship left will require more work. But this simple snapshot confirms taxpayers’ money is funding the expansion of the Censorship Complex, as the prior eight fiscal years, from 2008 to 2015, reveal the federal government awarded only two federal contracts and seven federal grants for “disinformation” or “misinformation” research.

Likewise, an initial investigation into the nonprofits and academic institutions mentioned in the “Twitter Files” reveals government grants, donations from other liberal nonprofits, and money from leftist billionaires funded the expansion of the Censorship Complex. Research also shows the non-governmental organizations pushing the disinformation narrative are uniformly directed and run by former government employees, left-wing media types, and left-leaning or anti-Trump individuals.

Alliance Securing Democracy

Of the think tanks identified in Twitter communications, Alliance Securing Democracy (ASD) might be the most notorious thanks to Matt Taibbi’s exposé on ASD’s Hamilton 68 dashboard.

Devised by former FBI agent Clint Watts and launched in August of 2017, Hamilton 68 proclaimed its digital dashboard an aid to “help ordinary people, journalists, and other analysts identify Russian messaging themes and detect active disinformation or attack campaigns as soon as they begin.” Based on some 644 accounts that Hamilton 68 claimed it had “selected for their relationship to Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigns,” ASD maintained its dashboard allowed users to track online Russian influence.

The problem is, as Taibbi wrote: “The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham.”

Apparently unbeknownst to ASD, Twitter had reverse-engineered how Hamilton 68 supposedly tracked online Russian influence and found “No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.” The entire methodology was flawed.

Yet ASD played a key role in the push to censor speech as supposed “disinformation,” with the dashboard serving as “the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years” by “virtually every major news organization.” In addition to the media spreading disinformation about disinformation, Watts testified before Congress, telling senators that the Hamilton 68 dashboard provided the means for the U.S. government “to have an understanding of what Russia is doing in social media.”

Watts further revealed in his testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, that he “tried to provide to the U.S. government directly through multiple agencies” the Hamilton 68 information, telling the lawmakers they should “want to equip our intelligence agencies, our law enforcement agencies, and the Department of Defense with just an understanding … of what Russian active measures are doing around the world.”

Whether any of those “multiple agencies” relied on the inaccurate information included on the Hamilton 68 dashboard is unclear.

Members of the House and Senate did rely on Hamilton 68, however. As I reported earlier this month: “Rep. Adam Schiff and Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, and Sheldon Whitehouse, among others, not only pushed the unfounded claims that Russian bots were behind the trending hashtags, but they also demanded that Twitter and other tech companies investigate and stop such supposed interference.” Democrats pushed this false narrative even when Twitter executives warned staffers that the Russian-interference story didn’t stand.

In addition to Watts, the ASD advisory council includes a cornucopia of former government bigwigs from Democrat administrations: Michael McFaul, a former ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration; Michael Morell, former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama; John Podesta, former chair of Hillary for America and an official in the Clinton and Obama White Houses; and Jake Sullivan, former deputy chief of staff to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key adviser for both Clinton and Obama during their general elections.

Laura Thornton, who previously worked at the National Democratic Institute, a nonprofit loosely affiliated with the Democrat Party, currently oversees ASD. And Rachael Dean Wilson serves as the managing director for ASD. Wilson previously worked for the late Sen. John McCain for six years, serving as his communications director and adviser to his 2016 re-election campaign.

German Marshall Fund

According to its website, ASD is a project of the German Marshall Fund, which “is heavily funded by the American, German, and Swedish governments.” The fund has also received grants from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. The ASD likewise receives financing from left-leaning foundations, such as the Craigslist founder’s Craig Newmark Philanthropies.

The Election Integrity Partnership

Another prominent organization the “Twitter Files” revealed as pushing for censorship — including multiple censorship requests flowing through that group to the tech giant — is the Election Integrity Partnership, which is run out of Stanford’s Internet Observatory.

Stanford’s Internet Observatory launched on June 6, 2019, to “focus on the misuse of social media,” and within two years, the project grew from an initial team of three to a full-time team of 10 assisted by some 76 student research assistants. In 2020, Stanford announced the creation of the Election Integrity Partnership, which “brought together misinformation researchers” from across four organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

As a private institution, Stanford University is not funded directly with tax dollars, but it receives millions in government grants. Private grants also flow into the California university and directly fund the Election Integrity Partnership, including money from the same foundations that funded the nonprofit behind Hamilton 68, such as money from the Craigslist and eBay founders.

Atlantic Council Project

Further research on the other members of the Election Integrity Partnership reveals the Atlantic Council receives donations and federal grants, including from Facebook, Google, and the U.S. Department of State. And as will be shown shortly, the Atlantic Council is also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.

Graphika

Another member of the Election Integrity Partnership, Graphika, describes itself as a “network analysis company that examines how ideas and influence spread online.” Graphika’s chief innovation officer, Camille Francois “leads the company’s work to detect and mitigate disinformation, media manipulation and harassment.” Francois was previously the principal researcher at Google’s Jigsaw unit.

According to CNBC, one of Francois’ first projects at Graphika was a “secretive” assignment for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Working with a team of researchers from Oxford University, Graphika analyzed data provided by social media firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee to assess Russia’s exploitation of “the tools and platform of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to impact U.S. users” and influence elections.

As a private organization, Graphika’s funding details remain obscure, but in congressional testimony, Dr. Vlad Barash he “oversee[s] our work with DARPA and with our colleagues from leading academic institutions on developing and applying cutting edge methods and algorithms for detecting the manipulation of 21st Century networked communications.”

According to government data, Graphika — also known as Octant Data, LLC and Morningside Analytics — received numerous Department of Defense contracts. Additionally, Graphika received a $3 million grant from the DOD for a 2021-2022 research project related to “Research on Cross-Platform Detection to Counter Malign Influence.”

Graphika received a second nearly $2 million grant from the DOD for “research on Co-Citation Network Mapping.” The organization had previously researched “network mapping,” or the tracking of how Covid “disinformation” spreads through social media.

The Center for Internet Security

The “Twitter Files” also made mention of the Center for Internet Security. In 2018, that nonprofit launched the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), which “it claims supports the cybersecurity needs of election offices.” As part of those efforts, the Center for Internet Security crafted a one-page document for election officials, with directions for reporting misinformation or disinformation to the EI-ISAC. The federal U.S. Elections Commission would link to the CIS flyer on its government webpage.

The CIS flyer directed election workers to submit supposed “misinformation or disinformation” to the EI-ISAC, stating it would then “forward it to our partners at The Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).” CISA would then “submit it to the relevant social media platform(s) for review,” including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, TikTok, Nextdoor, and Snapchat.

CIS further said it would share reports of misinformation or disinformation with the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University. And from the “Twitter Files,” we see examples of the Election Integrity Partnership providing the Twitter team CIS’s reports of misinformation or disinformation, prompting the censorship of speech.

The Center for Internet Security is heavily funded by government grants. According to Influence Watch, the nonprofit “provides cyber-security consulting services to local, state, and federal governments,” and has been awarded $115 million in federal grants by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense since 2010. It has received $3.6 million in cybersecurity contracts from numerous federal agencies, according to its webpage, and a $290,000 grant from the eBay founder’s left-leaning Democracy Fund.

The president and CEO of the Center for Internet Security is another former high-level government adviser, John Gilligan. Gilligan “previously served in senior advisory positions in intelligence and security for the United States Airforce, Department of Energy, and White House Cyber Security Commission under the Obama administration.”

Clemson University

Other emails released as part of the “Twitter Files” reveal Clemson University’s role in the push for censorship at Twitter. And as was the case with Hamilton 68’s dashboard, Twitter’s team had concerns about Clemson’s disinformation research.

In one email, Twitter noted that Clemson’s center had asked the tech company to review its “findings regarding the latest list of accounts.” Internal communications show the Twitter team noting that while they saw “some inauthentic behaviors,” they “were unable to attribute the accounts to the IRA,” the Russian “troll” farm.

After noting that Twitter had already shared information with Clemson researchers, the tech giant’s head of safety, Yoel Roth, sent another email. “There is nothing new we’ll learn here, analytically,” Roth said. “We’re not going to attribute these accounts to Russia … absent some solid technical intel (which Clemson have not ever been able to provide).”

Defending Democracy Together

Clemson’s research was used by another group joining the “disinformation” trend, Defending Democracy Together (DDT). In 2018, DDT launched the RussiaTweets.com project to supposedly provide “the evidence of Russian interference in American politics.”

This evidence, according to DDT, came from a list of tweets “compiled and published by Professors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren,” which purportedly all came from the Russian troll factory, Internet Research Agency (IRA). Both Linvill and Warren hail from Clemson University, raising the question of whether it was the list they provided to Defending Democracy Together that Twitter executives “were unable to attribute” to the IRA.

Defending Democracy Together was founded in 2018, and its leadership consists of Never Trumpers, William “Bill” Kristol, Mona Charen, and Charlie Sykes, as well as DDT’s co-founder and director Sarah Longwell, who has promoted advertisements “to advocate against the policies of the Trump administration and to weaken public support for the Trump presidency.”

Funding for DDT, according to Influence Watch, includes money from left-wing mega-donor and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar through Democracy Fund Voice and from the Hopewell Fund, which is “part of a $600 million network of left-wing funding nonprofits managed by Arabella Advisors in Washington, D.C.” Additionally, OpenSecrets reported that DDT was “the biggest ‘dark money’ spender of 2020,” with DDT spending “$15.4 million in ‘dark money’ during the 2020 election cycle on supporting presidential candidate Joe Biden and opposing former President Donald Trump for reelection.”

Other Academic Institutes

While Stanford and Clemson were the two main universities identified in the “Twitter Files,” Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub webpage identifies members of its “Disinformation Working Group,” revealing academia’s involvement in the Censorship Complex spans much further. It includes: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Lab, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Duke University, Bowdoin College, the University of South Carolina, Vanderbilt University, Georgetown University, and Wilfrid Laurier, a Canadian University supported by a Facebook grant.

The University of Buffalo, Lehigh University, and Northeastern University are likewise involved in the disinformation project, with a Clemson News release revealing that faculty at those universities, along with researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, launched a project titled “Disinformation Range to Improve User Awareness and Resilience to Online Disinformation.” The government, through a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, is supporting those efforts.

The Aspen Institute

The Aspen Institute is also entwined in the Censorship Complex, having hosted in the fall of 2020 “a series of off-the-record briefings to help prepare every major US newsroom and tech platform for potential hack-and-leak operations and a contested post-election environment.” One of the briefings involved a tabletop exercise facilitated by Aspen’s Garrett Graff that posed a hack-and-leak October surprise involving Hunter Biden.

Twitter’s Yoel Roth attended that event just two weeks before the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. And soon after that story broke, Graff and his Aspen Institute colleague Vivian Schiller took to Twitter to frame the story as “crap” and “nonsense.” Schiller’s former jobs include CEO at NPR, head of news at Twitter, general manager at The New York Times, and chief digital officer at NBC News.

Soon after Graff and Schiller pushed the Hunter Biden story as misinformation, Twitter blocked the Post’s story and froze the conservative outlet’s account, even though internal communications revealed the Post had not violated Twitter’s terms of service. Despite its extensive coordination with the FBI to prepare to combat foreign election interference, Twitter didn’t ask the bureau if the scandal was Russian disinformation. Instead, Twitter representatives testified to Congress that the company “relied on the tweets of supposed experts, making the tech giant’s decision to censor the Post’s story even more outrageous.”

After the Post broke the Biden family pay-to-play scandal, several left-leaning “journalists” spent the day speaking of “misinformation,” while uniformly ignoring the substance of the story. One must wonder how many of those so-called journalists had attended Aspen’s training session.

Since then, Aspen has expanded its focus on disinformation and misinformation, launching a “Commission on Information Disorder” to develop what the institute calls “actionable public-private responses to the disinformation crisis.”

The Global Disinformation Index

Another nonprofit, the Global Disinformation Index, has already begun pushing an “actionable response to the disinformation crisis,” by pressuring advertisers to dump news outlets based on GDI’s view of their “disinformation risk.” However, as the Washington Examiner revealed in Gabe Kaminsky’s investigative series, the GDI’s December 2022 report, prepared in partnership with the University of Texas-Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab, brands only conservative outlets as the top “riskiest.” Conversely, the “least risky” outlets all lean left, other than The Wall Street Journal, and are also the same outlets that got the most significant news stories of the last decade wrong.

Like the “disinformation” nonprofits named in the “Twitter Files,” GDI has received federal grants and is connected to other left-leaning nonprofits and individuals seeking to censor speech. Its advisers likewise hew left, such as “journalist” Anne Applebaum, who said Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings were not interesting, and Finn Heinrich of the leftist George Soros’ Open Society group.

The composition of GDI’s “advisory panel” is also noteworthy because the same individuals guiding GDI’s mission to starve conservative sites of advertising dollars are connected to three of the organizations behind the Election Integrity Partnership’s push for censorship at Twitter. That fact would be difficult to discover today, though, as GDI scrubbed its “advisory panel” section of its homepage after the blacklist scandal broke.

According to the archived GDI homepage, advisory panel members include Ben Nimmo, the global lead at Meta; Franziska Roesner, a University of Washington professor; and Camille Francois of Niantic. Nimmo was a founding member of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and a senior fellow for that lab. He was also “the first director of investigations at Graphika.” Francois also serves as the chair of Graphika’s advisory board and is identified on Graphika’s webpage as its chief innovation officer. Roesner is a faculty member at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

Together then, three of the four organizations that partnered with Stanford to run the Election Integrity Partnership, which pushed Twitter to censor speech in advance of the 2020 election, were also connected to the Global Disinformation Index.

Global Engagement Center

A strong connection also exists between GDI and the U.S. government through an arm of the State Department, the Global Engagement Center, which has also made several appearances in the “Twitter Files.”

The Global Engagement Center, which proclaims itself “a data-driven body leading U.S. interagency efforts in proactively addressing foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine U.S. interests using disinformation and propaganda,” awarded the Global Disinformation Index a $100,000 grant as part of the U.S-Paris Tech Challenge. The State Department sponsored that “Tech Challenge” in “collaboration” with, among others, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Park Advisors, and Disinfo Cloud. According to a State Department spokesman, the Global Engagement Center began funding Disinfo Cloud in 2018 and also awarded approximately $300,000 to Park Advisors to manage Disinfo Coud to fight “disinformation, terrorism, violent extremism, hate speech.”

The “Twitter Files” revealed that, in addition to funding private organizations pushing for censorship, the State Department’s Global Disinformation Center attempted to insert itself into Twitter’s review and censorship process. When those efforts failed, the Global Disinformation Center pressed its unsupported claims of disinformation to the media.

Additional research is needed to understand the full scope of the Global Engagement Center’s role in the Censorship Complex, but what little is known now suggests the State Department provides load-bearing support for the project. A recent report from the Foundation for Freedom Online also exposes the National Science Foundation as a key funder in “the science of censorship.”

While federal funding is not solely responsible for the rapid expansion of the Censorship Complex, it is the most troubling because our government is using our money to censor our speech.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF FEBRUARY 24, 2023

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Biden Pentagon Orders Military Chaplains To Bless Putting Male Soldiers In Female Showers And Bedrooms

BY: ELAINE DONNELLY | FEBRUARY 24, 2023

women soldiers — **Why should a tank commander at Fort Hood have to deal with pronouns instead of training his troops to fight an enemy force?**

Author Elaine Donnelly profile

ELAINE DONNELLY

The nation is worried about serious national security threats, including Chinese spy aircraft, but the U.S. Department of Defense seems pre-occupied with misplaced priorities. “Woke” policies are taking leftist ideologies to extremes with enforced compliance, even if it hurts the institution.

Since January 2021, Defense Department officials have expanded woke transgender mandates in significant ways. A comprehensive policy analysis titled “Biden Pentagon Quietly Expands Woke Transgender Policies in the Military,” summarized here, compares Joe Biden and Lloyd Austin directives to the 2016 transgender policies of Barack Obama and Ashton Carter.

As in the Obama years, the Biden/Austin policy fully embraces the idea that individuals can change their “sex assigned at birth to a different gender role.” Department of Defense Instruction 1300.28, updated on Dec. 20, 2022, has changed the official vocabulary of this pseudo-science, using the phrase “self-identified gender” instead of “preferred gender” throughout.

WHY? Why is this SO important to the wacky Left? “Gender Dysphoria” is a condition of someone who is CONFUSED about their gender. Do we really need more CONFUSED people in our military? As a Vietnam Vet, I can testify that such people cannot be trusted in the trenches of war. Your confused about your gender? You have NO business in any aspect of military service.

The DOD Instruction stipulates that if a person “self-identifies” as a person of the opposite sex, and if the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) changes a person’s bureaucratic “gender marker,” a man claiming to be a woman must be treated as a woman, and vice versa.

Military commanders, doctors and nurses, chaplains, and military men and women at all levels must endorse and act on this ideological belief or suffer career penalties if they don’t. Alleged “biases against transgender individuals,” which are prohibited, could include anything from “misgendering” people with the wrong pronouns to expressions of concern about medically questionable hormone treatments or surgeries for adults or military-dependent children.

Individuals who are confused about gender identity deserve compassionate counseling, competent medical care, and complete information about the serious risks and irreversible consequences of “gender-affirming” treatments that do not change biological sex. Instead, a self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria permits only one course of treatment, pushing the service member toward life-changing, often-irreversible transgender “transition,” without an independent “second opinion.”

Commanders are directed to consult with designated “experts,” called Service Central Coordination Cells. The SCCCs have no responsibility for military operations or any obligation to put the needs of the patient first.

Biden’s regulations do not protect or even mention rights of religious liberty for chaplains and people of faith. Nor do they provide options for doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel who object to transgender ideology on moral or ethical grounds.

Once a military doctor approves, transgender transition can be deemed “complete” with or without surgical alteration of healthy body parts. At that point, as the DOD Instruction states several times: “[S]ervice members will use those berthing, bathroom, and shower facilities associated with their gender marker in DEERS.”

This policy denies human biological realities and violates minimal expectations of personal privacy and modesty between men and women. Human dilemmas are discussed in PowerPoint training slide “vignettes,” such as a “female to male” soldier announcing a pregnancy.

Vignette 8 portrays a soldier who transitioned from male to female, without “sex-reassignment surgery,” who wants to use female-designated showers. Another scenario describes a female soldier who is experiencing tension with a “transgender female” roommate.

This is a trick question, since both the discomforted female soldier and a commander who tries to find a solution likely would be accused of “biases against transgender individuals.” Why should a tank commander at Fort Hood have to deal with pronoun etiquette and sticky scenarios instead of training his troops to fight an enemy force?

The latest DOD Instruction admits that some service members who have “completed a gender transition” may not have “resolved the gender dysphoria.” Without any estimate of costs or consequences, additional medical procedures are authorized “If a return to their previous gender is medically required.”

Biden/Austin directives specifically involve the military service academies and Reserve Officer Training Corps (contract) programs, inviting controversies like those affecting civilian female athletes who have lost competitions against biological men.

Revised rules also permit cross-dressing and other “transitioning” behaviors while in “on-duty status.” Previously, time off for “real life experience” (RLE) living as a person of the opposite sex could only occur off-base and off-duty, often for weeks or months. Whether intended or not, the revised policy’s approval of on-base cross-dressing likely will increase “LGBT Pride” celebrations featuring drag queen performances and “family-friendly” story hours for children at military bases worldwide.

When problems ensue, how will we know? In 2018, then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis testified that problems with transgender policies were not being reported up the chain of command because they were considered “personal and private.” Doubling down in December 2022, the DOD released a new instruction, DODI 6400.11, which restricts (without high-level permission) the release of information about “sexual orientation,” “gender identity,” “transgender-related information,” and “incidents of harmful behaviors.”

Every year, the Pentagon releases non-personal statistics on sexual assaults, in excruciating detail. Why are officials restricting access to data on “incidents of harmful behaviors” and “transgender-related information”? Congress needs to find out.

A recent independent, high-tech survey on the politicization of the military done by the Heritage Foundation found that among active-duty respondents, 80 percent said the “changing of policy to allow unrestricted service by transgender individuals” has decreased their trust in the military. Sixty-eight percent of active-duty responses reported seeing a “growing politicization,” which is affecting their decision to encourage their children to join the military.

In view of current recruiting problems, the 118th Congress should renew previous demands for information on woke policies. Congress also should consider mandating that all Defense Department agencies and educational institutions return to recognizing scientific realities of biological sex, not “self-identified gender.” That idea and more are incorporated in legislation just proposed by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. James Banks, R-Ind., called the Ensuring Military Readiness Act of 2023.

Servicemen and women deserve reality-based health care programs, with protection for the rights of doctors and nurses whose medical ethics or religious convictions differ from transgender ideology. Women also deserve separate-sex athletic teams and reasonable privacy in female-only living facilities.

White House and Pentagon leaders who try to deny, dissemble, or withhold information on the existence or results of woke policies in the military are undermining their own credibility. Americans are awake and aware, and they will hold lawmakers accountable for woke-ism that weakens our military in an increasingly dangerous world.

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense.

Elaine Donnelly is President of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy organization that reports on and analyzes military and social issues.

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF FEBRUARY 17, 2023

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Georgia police officer who wrote ‘God designed marriage’ was forced out over Christian beliefs, attorneys say

By Ian M. Giatti, Christian Post Reporter | February 17, 2023

Former Port Wentworth Police Officer Jacob Kersey seen in this undated photo. | Courtesy photo

Attorneys representing a former Georgia police officer who expressed his Christian beliefs on social media say he was forced out of his job because of religious discrimination.

Port Wentworth Police Officer Jacob Kersey resigned in January after being told by his supervisors he could be terminated for sharing his religious views on marriage.

Kersey, 19, was placed on paid administrative leave following his refusal to take down a Facebook post from two days earlier in which he paraphrased the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus.

“God designed marriage. Marriage refers to Christ and the church. That’s why there is no such thing as homosexual marriage,” he wrote.

According to attorneys with First Liberty Institute in Plano, Texas, Kersey was given a letter of notification that warned him he could be fired if he posted any more “offensive” content on social media.

After further meetings with leadership, attorneys say he realized that he faced a choice between compromising his deeply held religious beliefs or continuing as a police officer with the department. He resigned on Jan. 17.

Prior to his resignation, Kersey had been a police officer with Port Wentworth PD since May 2022.

In a letter sent Monday to Port Wentworth Mayor Gary Norton and Assistant Police Chief Major Bradwick Lee Sherrod, attorneys accused Port Wentworth of “unconstitutionally forcing Mr. Kersey out of his job because of his deeply held religious beliefs.”

“The Department’s actions send a message to Christians who hold traditional biblical beliefs about marriage that they are unwelcome as police officers or city employees,” the letter stated.

According to attorneys, in a meeting on Jan. 4 with Norton and Sherrod, Kersey was told that his post about his religious beliefs was the “same thing as saying the N-word and F— all those homosexuals.”

He was also told, according to the letter, that his free speech was “limited due to his position as … a police officer” and that Kersey “could not post things like that.”

After being placed on leave, attorneys say Kersey received a letter of notification from Sherrod explaining that while there was not “sufficient evidence” to terminate him, Kersey could be terminated “for any post on any of his private social media accounts or any other statement or action that could be perceived as offensive.”

Sherrod noted that Kersey’s posts and podcasts are “likely offensive” to certain communities and urged him to “take this situation as a learning lesson.”

Forced to choose between his private religious speech and the job he loved, attorneys say Kersey had no choice but to resign.

Stephanie Taub, senior counsel for First Liberty Institute, said not only does the city owe Kersey an apology, but they also need to create policies that protect the First Amendment rights of city employees.

“It is a blatant violation of state and federal civil rights laws to discriminate against someone for expressing their religious beliefs,” Taub said in a statement. “The city owes Jacob a public apology. And it needs to adopt policies that recognize the free speech and free exercise rights of its employees.

“Forcing Jacob to choose to either censor his private religious speech or remain employed as a police officer is simply unconstitutional.”

In early February, just days after Kersey resigned, Port Wentworth Police Chief Matt Libby announced his retirement in a brief letter.

Speaking with The Christian Post earlier this month, Kersey said he believes Libby was forced to resign.

“The police chief was forced to resign after my story made national headlines,” he inferred, “America wants to know why.”

In addition to demanding a public apology from the other members of the Port Wentworth police command staff, Kersey also wants to know when the city is going to address the story.

“What happened to me should never happen again — not in America and certainly not in Georgia,” he said.

Ian M. Giatti is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ian.giatti@christianpost.com.

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF FEBRUARY 9, 2023

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WEEKEND SPECIAL EDITION OF POLITICALLY INCORRECT CARTOONS

Saturday, February 4, 2023

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF FEBRUARY 3, 2023

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF JANUARY 27, 2023

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF JANUARY 20, 2023

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF JANUARY 13, 2023

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Richard D. Land Op-ed: Free speech and the state of American culture

Richard D. Land, Christian Post Executive Editor | Friday, January 13, 2023

In just the past few days I have been bombarded, as I am sure many of you have, by negative reports and studies about the state of American society. There are clearly causes for great concern for our nation’s future.

We have legions of college students who have evidently drunk the woke Kool-Aid and believe that any opinion that does not coincide with their liberal, “woke” agenda is hate speech and is a legitimate target for being censored, silenced, or shut down by woke mobs exercising a “heckler’s veto.”

There is nothing “liberal” about such philosophies or the behaviors they generate. In fact, they are far more similar to, and reminiscent of, fascist mobs and McCarthyite red-scare tactics.

As I have read these reports and watched them online, I have become increasingly resolved that we must exercise our freedom of speech despite the possible consequences, or we will lose the right to that very freedom of speech.

For example, two publications I have been reading since the age of 12 (Decision, a publication of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association) and the age of 18 (The New York Times) presented me with information that both thoroughly alarmed me and helped to explain our current cultural malaise at the same time.

First, the New York Times informs us that “Most Teenagers Have Seen Online Porn, Report Says.” The report explained how social media transformed adolescents’ access to hard-core pornography.

Seventy-five percent of America’s teenagers had now viewed pornography online “by the age of 17 with the average of first exposure at age 12, according to the report by Common Cause Media.” Many of the young people surveyed did not seek out pornography, it sought them out on the internet. Many of them reported that they were at first disturbed by the images they viewed although less than 50% had discussed the issue with a parent or trusted adult. One measure of the growth of this cancer on society is the fact that in 2012 the porn business was earning $5 billion a year and today it is estimated to be a $15 billion a year blight on society.

Why such a rapid increase? The moral laxity of the culture brought on by the decline in moral clarity and intestinal fortitude of the American pulpit is one leading contributor.

This became more clear to me as I read my copy of Decision magazine, which I first remember reading as a boy of 12 when it came to our home on a regular basis (my father had been saved at a Billy Graham Crusade in Houston in 1952 when I was 6 years old).

The issue which arrived in my mailbox earlier this week (the January 2023 issue) contained an article, “What’s Wrong with America’s Pulpits?” by Lee Weeks.

The article was based on “The American Worldview Inventory, 2022,” researched and published by George Barna, the director of research with the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. Barna and his team surveyed and analyzed bedrock doctrines of the Christian faith to measure the doctrinal orthodoxy of America’s Protestant Clergy, as well as the general population.

The result of Barna’s research makes for devastating reading for Americans who are traditionally orthodox Christians. For example, Barna’s seven bedrock biblical beliefs constituting a biblical worldview were:

God is the eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and just Creator.
Humans are sinful by nature.
Jesus Christ grants forgiveness of sin and eternal life when sinners repent and profess their faith in Him alone.
The Bible is true, reliable, and always relevant.
Absolute moral truth exists.
Success is defined as consistent obedience to God.
Life’s purpose is to know, love, and serve God with all one’s heart, mind, strength, and soul.

When Barna had sifted through the results, the portrait that emerged was chilling, and this was nowhere more true than among the clergy — the shepherds of the flock.

According to Barna’s results, only 37% of pastors of churches of all Protestant denominations have a biblical worldview. If the pastors, the shepherds of the flock, have sub-biblical doctrinal beliefs, who is going to lead the people and “teach them all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:16-180.)

Barna’s research reveals that among Evangelical pastors 30% reject salvation by faith alone and 39% reject belief in absolute truth (some things are always right and some things are always wrong). If people are not hearing a sure, certain, and uncompromising word from the pulpits, where will they find truth in this increasingly secular milieu in which Americans live and breath. When the pulpits are sounding forth an uncertain sound, the people are increasingly at the mercy of the roving packs of spiritual wolves on the prowl for new sheep to apostatize.

I have experienced this doctrinal confusion and spiritual apostasy in my own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). I have had perhaps a half dozen former seminary classmates and ministry brethren who have said to me in one form or another, “I’ve decided that God permits monogamous, same-sex relationships” or “I believe a loving God won’t send anyone to hell.”

My response has been, and will continue to be, “You’ve decided! When did you become God?”

In His Holy Word. God has answered these questions! In the Gospel of John Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me.” (John 14::6). In the original Greek the article the is implied or assumed. When it appears it is for emphasis as it is here in the Greek New Testament text.

Similarly, in Romans (11:24-28) and 1 Corinthians (6:9-11) God made it clear that a same-sex sexual lifestyle was rejected utterly.

As Evangelical Christians, we must face the unpleasant fact that while there has been an Evangelical revival in the last half of the 20th and the first fifth of the 21st centuries, the secularizing society has influenced Evangelicals more than the other way around. Instead of being salt and light (Mtt. 5:13-16), we have been salted and lit by society at large.

For America to experience the great spiritual awakening we must have, we will need a deep and lasting spiritual recommitment to the eternal truths of the Gospel.

As George Barna himself puts it,

“to see American culture transformed will require a time of Christians and
pastors devoted to repentance and the Scriptures unlike anything we have
seen in more than a century.”

May God give us the strength, devotion, and wisdom to commence that journey and to never flag or surrender until we have let God make us the salt and light Jesus commanded each of us to be.

Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.

Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Violence Is Silence

A.F. BRANCO | on January 10, 2023 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-violence-is-silence/

Big Government is using Big Tech to silence conservative speech and Fauci Opposition.

Big Government and Big Tech — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF DECEMBER 29, 2022

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One Power Republicans Don’t Fully Grasp

By: Lawrence Johnson | December 22, 2022

Joy, Reid, Kevin Jackson, black, white — **Image credit: NY Post**

“Sometimes when you win, you really lose, and sometimes when you lose, you really win, and sometimes when you win or lose, you actually tie, and sometimes when you tie, you actually win or lose. Winning or losing is all one organic mechanism, from which one extracts what one needs.”

That quote from the 1992 film “White Men Can’t Jump” reminds us all that while everything is subject to interpretation, or personal exegesis, does not change its original intent or meaning.

There has been much said about the word speech. It, along with the prefixes “free” and “hate” rule most news and social media cycles, especially in recent years. More specifically, since the election of America’s 45th president. So, what exactly does it mean?

Defining Terms

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary describes speech as the following: “the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words.” Simply put, words are only words, speech is only speech, regardless of your personal issues.

According to an article in Business Standard, there has been a reported 500% rise in hate-speech cases in the last seven years; again ironically, since around 2017. Another article, this time in the American Library Association, states: “In the United States, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment.

Courts extend this protection on the grounds that the First Amendment requires the government to strictly protect robust debate on matters of public concern even when such debate devolves into distasteful, offensive, or hateful speech that causes others to feel grief, anger, or fear.” It also offers that, “There is no legal definition of “hate speech” under U.S. law, just as there is no legal definition for evil ideas, rudeness, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn. Generally, however, hate speech is any form of expression
through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin color sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin.”

Speech, much like crime, has been nitro-fueled by many adding their own levels of toxicity personal biases. While sticks and stones can indeed break your bones and words alone can never hurt you, in the proper context words can be very powerful. Unfortunately, many of those on the right don’t realize the power of words.

Unrecognized Powers

As talk-show host and journalist Tucker Carlson once reminded his audience, “only the Left understands the importance of language.” Unfortunately, we have arrived at a time where if something is said that you’re uncomfortable with, it need not break any laws or statutes for the ‘accused offenders’ sentence to be carried out. The only requirement to fulfill my animus- filled retribution is to add “hate” as a prefix.

The organization Rights for Peace posts this on their website:

“Upholding free speech is hugely important to open societies that respect human rights. Human Rights Treaties outlaw offensive speech when it poses a risk or threat to others. Speech that is simply offensive but poses no risk to others is generally NOT considered a human rights violation.

Hate Speech becomes a human rights violation if it incites discrimination, hostility or violence towards a person or a group defined by their race, religion, ethnicity, or other factors.”

So, who determines the line between ‘speech’ and ‘hate-speech? Good question. One of the best examples of apparent purveyors of grief is of course, former president Donald Trump, who offers a never-ending supply of this type of “speech.”

In one example of such ‘speech,’ Trump tweeted this during the George Floyd riots: “Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right. These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen.”

Were those that attempted to level and burn Minneapolis to the ground not thugs? Another example considered inciteful was the following (in the same Tweet): “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

Inserting Common Sense

Was that hateful or incendiary? Doesn’t the shooting usually follow the looting? Regardless of never having crossed any lines or expressed guidelines, including during in his January 6th address, his Twitter account was permanently locked.

Despite the constant barrage of hate speech claims, two things irrepressibly come to mind. First, such claims have no legally defined perimeters, because making offensive, disparaging statements- regardless of the wording, crosses no legal or ethical boundaries; only moral and/or personal ones. Secondly, anti-white, and other racially
degrading statements by Blacks (regardless of context) against ANY race including Blacks are strangely ignored on both mainstream and social media platforms.

In 2021, 22-year-old Gabby Petito’s body was found in Wyoming after she was missing for several weeks. In response to the horrific discovery, Joy Reid stated the following on her MSNBC show, “The Reid Out” concerning the missing hiker: “the way the [Petito] story has captivated the nation has many wondering why not the same media attention when people of color go missing (keep in mind that Reid, as part of the media herself ignored such stories)?

Double Standards at Play

Well, the answer actually has a name: “missing white woman syndrome,” determined by the late and great Gwen Eiffel to describe the media in public fascination with missing white women like Lacey Peterson & Natalie Holloway, while ignoring cases involving missing people of color.” On yet another episode she opined, “In America, there’s a thing about both white vigilantism and white tears,” Reid said. “Particularly male, white tears. Really white tears in general, because that’s what Karens are, right? They can Karen-out and then as soon as they get caught, bring waterworks.”

Regardless of having crossed many lines and expressed guidelines, including several anti-gay statements, her
Twitter account was never locked. There are clearly double standards, especially where color and political affiliations are concerned. Truth be told, words are still merely words; speech is still merely speech- regardless of content. Like the old saying concerning “sticks and stones,” if you allow words to hurt you- it is a choice you make.

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF DECEMBER 23, 2022

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Breach

A.F. BRANCO | on December 20, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-breach/

Elon Musk exposed Twitter files reveal the FBI breached the 1st Amendment by pushing censorship on conservatives and interfering with the election.

Twitter FBI Intelligence agentcy — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF DECEMBER 16, 2022

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Leftists Call Free Speech ‘Violence’ To Mute Critics of Barbaric Transgender Surgeries for Kids

BY: CHAD FELIX GREENE | DECEMBER 16, 2022

van outside Boston Children's Hospital — **We simply cannot allow the left to keep bullying critics of their agenda by accusing us of causing violence.**

CHAD FELIX GREENE

VISIT ON TWITTER@CHADFELIXG

The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT advocacy organization, has targeted conservative commentator Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire; the person who runs the Libs of TikTok Twitter account; and Seth Dillon, CEO of the satire site The Babylon Bee, accusing them of causing violence in a new report titled “Online Harassment, Offline Violence.”

The report argues, “Anti-equality, online extremists are leading a proactive and coordinated campaign of hate against hospitals and medical providers who offer gender-affirming care for transgender, non-binary and questioning youth.”

The report states it consists of “an informal exploration across Facebook and Twitter” that identifies “24 different hospitals and providers, across 21 states, who were directly attacked online following harassing, inflammatory and misleading posts from Libs of TikTok, Matt Walsh, and other right-wing accounts.”

Relying on misleading allegations of “lies” and “misinformation,” the report draws a line of causation from Libs of TikTok posting a video from a particular hospital detailing its own practices to inevitable online outrage resulting in angry tweets, emails, and phone calls from individuals, causing the hospital to stop youth-oriented transgender advocacy and/or practices and ultimately resulting in legislative efforts to ban the practices in the first place. The report gives examples of hospitals and doctors receiving hostile or angry communications, threats, and specifically, the false bomb threats against Boston Children’s Hospital.

The report insists, “What occurred in Boston is just one example of coordinated campaigns of hate, violence, and harassment being waged both online and offline against health care providers and children’s hospitals simply for providing age-appropriate, best practice, medically necessary medical care to transgender youth.” However, its claim of offline violence remains abstract and assumed. It provides no examples of actual violence.

Accusations of Hate Speech

Detailing what it argues is a coordinated campaign to target pro-LGBT organizations, the report notes: “hate speech accounts such as Libs of TikTok or Matt Walsh, a known transphobe at the alt-right news site The Daily Wire, post an inflammatory message full of disinformation about gender affirming care and call out a specific hospital or doctor by name.” The alleged campaign continues with “right-wing politicians looking to rile up the most extreme members of their base join in spreading the same transphobic rhetoric from their platforms, in some cases going so far as to introduce legislation to regulate children’s hospitals and gender affirming care providers.”

The final “stage” of these campaigns involves hospitals discontinuing transition practices for minors or legislative efforts that heavily regulate or ban said practices. The report concludes by placing responsibility on social media companies, arguing, “Social media companies have a responsibility to act and to not be bystanders while angry mobs intimidate LGBTQ+ people and our allies into silence.” Continuing, “Without intervention from social media companies, this will just lead to more hate speech, more threats, and more violence.”

Again, without citing any actual examples of violence, the report’s implication is that all negative interactions, from tweets to illegal activity like bomb threats, are essentially equal. The report’s authors then go further by arguing direct causation between the posting of information and the dangerous response. Their conclusion is that authorities must prevent or punish those posting the original information, which allegedly “caused” the violence.

Attempt to Silence Criticism

While obviously any form of violence or threats against an individual or organization is wrong and should be handled by the authorities, the popular left-wing argument that responsibility falls to commentators is absurd — even more so as the targets of their anger quite literally share the information left-wing activists post themselves. What the Human Rights Campaign and other LGBT activists stubbornly refuse to consider is that the outrage and anger are perfectly justifiable. Despite activists’ best efforts, many people reasonably view transgender surgeries on minors as barbaric and destructive.

What these organizations are attempting to do is stigmatize anyone who participates in such criticism by accusing them of contributing to any potential violence that may occur. More to the point, they want to intimidate conservative commentators to prevent them from discussing or sharing provocative LGBT activism, often in their own words, in a way that will result in criticism or outrage. So convinced they are morally justified, they view the natural result of the public viewing this information with outrage and legislative pushback as inherently violent and hateful.

In truth, what we see is the very nature of the democracy they champion in action. A children’s hospital boasts of performing elective double-mastectomies on teenagers as young as 15, as the Boston Children’s Hospital does on its website, and the public is rationally outraged. They express their outrage to the hospital and to their elected representatives, who introduce legislation. The left typically champions public protest and the targeting of organizations with phone calls, tweets, and emails when they disagree with a policy or product decision. Such action only appears to become “violence” and “hate” when the left supports what an organization is doing.

In terms of “causing” things like fake bomb threats or threatening voicemails, the idea that illegal behavior from one individual is the fault of a completely unrelated individual is dangerous and irrational. Libs of TikTok sharing a video produced by a children’s hospital is not a direct link to an unstable person calling in a bomb threat later on. Only the person making the call is responsible. Whatever motivated them to do so is entirely within their control. We simply cannot allow the left to continue bullying critics of their agenda by accusing us of causing violence by doing so.

Chad Felix Greene is a senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of “Surviving Gender: My Journey Through Gender Dysphoria,” and is a social writer focusing on truth in media, conservative ideas and goals, and true equality under the law. You can follow him on Twitter @chadfelixg.

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The Twitter Files Illustrate How Intelligence Agencies Can Rig Politics

BY: JOY PULLMANN | DECEMBER 14, 2022

Twitter icon close-up on black phone screen — **Perhaps the most important outcome of these releases is the broadening recognition that Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., are part of government propaganda operations.**

JOY PULLMANN

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOYPULLMANN

It’s not clear whether Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is hostile.

Musk could be motivated by deeply personal reasons to battle Big Tech’s enforcement of Marxist identity politics. Or he could be attempting to do damage control for the regime by duping people who have reason to distrust the regime into believing Twitter is now more trustworthy. There are many other possibilities, too, and it’s impossible for outsiders to know which is true.

After all, the Twitter Files haven’t so far released that much new information. We already knew Big Tech was colluding with federal officials to deny Americans free speech and therefore self-government. We already knew the internet’s dominant infrastructure is completely rigged. We already knew Donald Trump’s Twitter defenestration was based on Twitter employees’ personal animus against him, not any objective reading of company policy.

We already knew Joe Biden is likely owned by foreign oligarchs who pay his son Hunter for access and influence, and that the Hunter Biden laptop story’s suppression was a deep state influence operation that tipped the 2020 election.

Whatever is going on behind the release of the Twitter Files, good things can come of it. This wormhole likely goes very deep, and even what we’re seeing now, quite close to the surface, is alarming and indicative enough. Perhaps the most important outcome of these releases is the broadening recognition that Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., are part of government propaganda operations.

This is very likely why we’ve been hearing increasing alarms about “protecting democracy.” The existence and prevalence of this chant online is itself a strong indicator that democracy, or the concept of self-rule through free and fair elections, as the basic bloke thinks of it, doesn’t really exist anymore. At least, that’s certainly the case if Big Tech, in collusion with unelected officials who are almost as far-left as Twitter’s employees, selects what information voters may receive.

Twitter censorship directly or indirectly is what led to the horrendously regressive COVID policies, Biden's presidential victory, and why we got the record inflation, energy, crime, illegal immigration and Fentanyl crises.
We are here today because of what Twitter did.
— Rising serpent 🇺🇸 (@rising_serpent) December 13, 2022

This Twitter-capade reveals further details about Big Tech’s function as an arm of U.S. “national security” and “intelligence” agencies. Decades ago, these agencies started going rogue on the formerly inalienable constitutional rights of American citizens, with tacit acquiescence from Congress through repeat authorizations and increased funding. These agencies and the entities they’ve colonized now treat the American people like occupied foreign territory, subject to psychological manipulation and institutional infiltration in a manner reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Party.

In fact, this whole affair emits more than merely a whiff of totalitarian collectivism, both communist and fascist. For one thing, the Twitter Files details about the revolving door between U.S. intelligence agency employees and Twitter — and surely also Google and Facebook — recall that Germany’s infamous National Socialists embedded party operatives on “private” company boards. So does today’s Chinese Communist Party.

One must also consider the possibility, if not absolute likelihood, that many of these “former” U.S. military and intelligence agents working at Twitter and Co. are not actually former, but covert government agents. I hear the practice is called “sheep dipping.” Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker certainly fits that description. So does Vijaya Gadde.

Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @BariWeiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.”
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 6, 2022

It’s also noteworthy that a number of these types, including Baker and big fat lying former CIA Director John Brennan, seem to be laundered through CNN and MSNBC stints as “security analysts.” I.e. to use TV to spread regime-desired disinformation, such as to help quash the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.

"…multiple episodes suggesting that Twitter had been penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies and/or was complicit in threats to democratic governance" pic.twitter.com/6Nm4ds0rtk
— Matt Beebe (@TheMattBeebe) December 11, 2022

So, twitter employees were working with the FBI and foreign intelligence. And the higher ups were warned and were totally cool with it to the point they fired the whistle blower to silence the story. Just amazing. https://t.co/FxUsK8wajF
— The Dank Knight 🦇 (@capeandcowell) December 12, 2022

This use of spycraft against American citizens seems to be an increasingly recurring and increasingly visible aspect of our post-2016 dystopia. Recall that it appears to have been a feature of the Jan. 6, 2021 “insurrection,” the 2020 Michigan tyrant “kidnapping” false flag operation, the Spygate operation, the attempted FBI entrapment of Sen. Ron Johnson, and many more.

While the vast majority of Americans don’t use Twitter, it has a massive, outsized influence on every American’s everyday life. We saw that in real-time with the consent spiral manufactured, possibly by national security agencies, to impose unprecedented lockdowns in 2020.

Twitter has a fraction of the users of every other major online network, yet it controls the political conversation because of who uses it and how they use it. It’s helpful, even if not literally true, to think of Twitter as an influence operation targeted at Congress, the executive agencies, the corporate media that control the ruling Democrat Party, and other members of the ruling class. That’s who its users overwhelmingly are, especially the most active.

Twitter is where people go to link up to the woke hive mind. That’s why it’s poison to everyone, but especially Republican officeholders.

This is why Republican politicians make some of their stupidest decisions when framed by what they see on Twitter, because the Twitter “consensus” reflects the opposite of their constituents’ views. (This disconnect is a major reason The Federalist exists.) It’s simply a pressure tool for the leftist mob. That’s also why big business leaders are idiots to respond to Twitter mobs — the majority of their customers don’t pay any attention to Twitter.

This information asymmetry has been highly destructive to the American republic but highly useful to the nefarious actors who run our deeply corrupt federal agencies. For one thing, it has allowed the veiled imposition of a vast information iron curtain across Western countries where many people believe themselves to be free citizens. Twitter is the tip of the spear for this growing censorship regime now consisting of a shadowy web between federal officials, social media-sponsored “fact checking” censorship hacks, Big Tech, corporate media, intelligence agencies, and who knows what other entities.

Twitter has been the typical initiator of bans on a person, organization, idea, or conversation from an online voice — and sometimes from basic life necessities such as banking. Then Facebook, Apple, Google, and others follow suit. The other colluding entities get Twitter to do the heavy lifting of canceling a dissenting person, political movement, conversation, or idea, then just file behind and copy Twitter so they avoid blowback.

We now have more evidence to add to the growing pile establishing that Twitter wasn’t just functioning this way because almost all of its employees were far-left Democrat activists. It also has been rigging public conversation, and therefore public life and elections themselves, at the behest of elected and unelected Democrats using their public positions for deeply partisan gain.

The Biden administration admitted it was flagging specific posts for Twitter to take down. It called for Big Tech to inflict “consequences” on those who disagreed with Democrats, and attempted to publicly formalize its evisceration of this vital tool of democracy — free speech — with a “Disinformation Governance Board.” The Biden administration’s national security apparatus openly declared that anyone who doesn’t agree with Democrat politicians could be investigated as a potential “domestic terrorist”!

These government-entwined monopoly platforms obviously exist to disseminate coordinated information operations and kill competing information. They are staffed with de facto or actual intelligence agents at levels high enough to disappear key internal records. Anyone who claims these are simply “private companies” is either not intellectually competent, in denial, or part of the ongoing psy-op to deny Americans the right to make their own political decisions based on genuinely free and open public discussions.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Here’s her printable household organizer for faith-centered holidays. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is the author of several books, including “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. Joy is also a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF DECEMBER 9, 2022

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Kirk Cameron Can’t Read His Children’s Book to Kids Unless He Dresses Like a Prostitute and Gyrates for Their Singles

BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | DECEMBER 08, 2022

Kirk Cameron side by side with drag queen — **How does it go again? …Something, something ‘blessings of liberty’?**

Author Kylee Griswold profile

KYLEE GRISWOLD

VISIT ON TWITTER@KYLEEZEMPEL

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, and self-control. But the fruit of public libraries is faux diversity, drag queens, and rejection of the sexes — which is why the taxpayer-funded cesspools are “not interested” in giving Kirk Cameron a storytime slot to read his new children’s book on the fruit of the Spirit to kids.

The actor, writer, and producer “has not gotten a single ‘yes’ from the 50-plus public libraries his publisher has contacted so far,” Fox News reported in a Wednesday exclusive. According to Cameron’s publisher and Fox’s scouring of the libraries’ websites, “Many of the same libraries that won’t give Cameron a slot … are actively offering ‘drag queen’ story hours or similar programs for kids and young people.”

It’s not only drag queen story hours, where adult men derive pleasure from strapping on prosthetic breasts, painting theatrical contour all over their masculine faces, and sporting fishnet tights for an audience of children. These libraries reportedly host queer book clubs, a series called “Every Month Is Pride Month,” and so-called “get free help” events where attorneys and other volunteers help patrons fill out legal paperwork to change their names, record themselves as the opposite sex (or sexless entirely), and alter birth certificates, Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, IDs, and passports. But if you want to read to kids about gentleness, goodness, and kindness, it’s a hard no.

How does it go again? … Something, something “blessings of liberty”?

The self-important and self-appointed “principled conservatives” have expended much energy lecturing right-wing culture warriors who resist this debauchery. When conservatives took offense at libraries using their tax dollars to sponsor sexualized events that spit in the face of their deeply held religious beliefs, The Principled Conservatives™ were there with a finger wag and a condescending, First Amendment! Tsk! Viewpoint neutrality!

Drag queens reading to innocents is just one of those great “blessings of liberty,” went the spiel, and the right couldn’t possibly ban provocative cross-dressers from reading to kiddos in public spaces or else Christians would soon be banished from those same spaces.

Here’s a snippet from The New Yorker summarizing such an exchange from the debate between Sohrab Amari and David French (Mr. “Blessings of Liberty” himself):

Ahmari kept returning to the extremist complaint that Drag Queen Story Hours are being staged for children in public libraries. To him, these were a sign of “a five-alarm cultural fire.” … The same First Amendment principle that allows drag queens to read to children in public libraries had also allowed Christian groups to flourish, French said, by permitting them to organize in universities and other public spaces. “So, you would undermine viewpoint neutrality in First Amendment jurisprudence?” French asked. “Yeah, I would,” Ahmari said. French raised his arms in exasperation. “That’s a disaster, y’all!”

By “viewpoint neutrality,” French means the First Amendment’s right to free speech or freedom of religion applies evenly to different groups regardless of the viewpoints they espouse. But the idea that the American founders meant for the First Amendment to allow people to advocate for civilization-destroying behaviors is obscenely false. Nobody is morally obligated to be neutral about the gross immorality of discussing sex with other people’s kids, and the law should not be either, in theory or in practice.

Barring people from doing sex shows for kids in publicly funded venues is not against the Constitution, and it’s specious to argue that if you insist there are constitutional limits on speech and this is precisely one, that you’re somehow a proponent of “big government” or “against the free market.” There is no free market for children. And there are ways to establish reasonable and constitutional limits on speech — such as withholding government funding from events and venues that peddle books and activities about sex for children — something many conservatives are striving to do even if the self-described principled wing is too lazy or too cowardly to do that intellectual and ground-game work.

Furthermore, several years have now passed since the aforementioned “principled” prognosis, and the five-alarm cultural fire has consumed the public square; LGBT ideologues who have never cared about viewpoint neutrality dominate every government institution. If you haven’t noticed, drag queen story hours are only getting stronger, and Christians are still being barred from the public square.

Case in point: When Cameron’s publisher asked the Indianapolis Public Library about hosting a story hour with the author, a library employee replied that those types of events are “coordinated through our departments. We really have a push. We have a strategic plan in place, so we are really looking at authors who are diverse. Authors of color. That’s really been our focus.” And when the publisher countered that Cameron’s perspective contributes to a diversity of ideas, the library reportedly replied, “Well, we are focusing on racial equity.” In other words, the activists who staff government libraries work together to impose their cultural narratives and exclude those that are too white, too male, too straight, or too Christian.

At this point, the only way Cameron stands a chance of equal access to public libraries across the country is if he dresses up like a prostitute, gyrates around a reading room, and prods children to shove singles in his underwear.

The thing people like Cameron — or Jack Phillips or Barronelle Stutzman or Lorie Smith — understand but many establishment Republicans and “principled conservatives” don’t is that the left hates us and all the values we claim to be conserving. They don’t care about playing by a certain set of rules because their method is lawlessness (see: unpunished Black Lives Matter riots, brazen election meddling, illegal student loan bailouts, or unconstitutional vaccine mandates, to name a few). They scoff at viewpoint diversity because their aim is groupthink (consider: Big Tech suspensions for dissenters on a number of topics, or mass firings of health-care professionals who held unfavorable opinions about the jab). And they laugh at appeals to the First Amendment because they abandoned it long ago.

That’s why real conservatives groan when spineless Republican lawmakers drone about “robust” religious liberty protections in a tyrannical anti-speech bill promoting same-sex marriage. And it’s why they can’t bear to hear one more so-called conservative defend state-sponsored depravity with some appeal to “liberty.”

It should go without saying that conservatives should and do care more about the Constitution and other norms than their leftist counterparts, but there are indeed limits on the First Amendment. The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

And the reality is that “The same First Amendment principle that allows drag queens to read to children in public libraries” is not “allow[ing] Christian groups to flourish,” as the Frenches of the world claim. It is not “permitting them to organize in universities and other public spaces.” After asking more than 50 libraries across the country to permit his Christian views, not a single one accommodated celebrity Kirk Cameron.

As my colleague John Daniel Davidson recently wrote in these pages, “[A]ccommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips. The left will only stop when conservatives stop them.”

Standing athwart history, yelling “stop” — or “viewpoint neutrality” or “free speech” — might have been enough to preserve liberty in the ’50s, but it’s almost 2023. If you want to know how well it’s working today, ask Kirk Cameron.

Buy Kirk Cameron’s book “As You Grow” here.

Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF DECEMBER 2, 2022

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Rotten Apple

A.F. BRANCO | on December 2, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-rotten-apple/

Apple Inc is working with the Communist Government in China to silence its citizens.

Protest in China — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF NOVEMBER 25, 2022

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF NOVEMBER 18, 2022

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF NOVEMBER 11, 2022

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – One Man’s Treasure

A.F. BRANCO | on November 3, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-one-mans-treasure/

Biden Demonizes Republicans, saying they will destroy the progress the left’s policies have made.

Biden Demonizes Conservatives — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Like A Rock

A.F. BRANCO | on November 4, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-like-a-rock/

Free speech is like Kryptonite to Biden and the Democrats because interferes with their ability to Fool Americans.

Biden and Democrats Hate Free Speech — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

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A POLITICALLY INCORRECT DEPICTION

November 2, 2022

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SUMMING UP THE WEEK OF OCTOBER 28, 2022

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Leftist militants attack conservative students and use terror tactics to shut down Turning Point USA event at UC Davis

By JOSEPH MACKINNON | October 27, 2022

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A Turning Point USA event was shut down Tuesday evening after multiple attacks by leftist militants on attendees were answered, not by the UC Davis police, who were kept from intervening, but by a handful of counter-protesters ready for a fight.

The UC Davis student chapter of Turning Point USA organized an event for Oct. 25, set to feature conservative speaker Stephen Davis, the host of the podcast “SMASH with MAGA Hulk.”

The chapter vice president of UC Davis TPUSA, Luke Shalz, noted that Stephen Davis is “an African-American gentleman who does not believe in systemic racism.”

In advance of the event featuring a black conservative speaker, flyers were distributed on campus accusing TPUSA of being “racist, homophobic, transphobic, and anti-immigrant” and of celebrating violence. The flyers also defamed Kyle Rittenhouse, who spoke at a TPUSA event, as a “racist murder [sic].” The flyers called on “anyone who opposes racism and bigotry to stand together and make it known that TPUSA is not welcome on our campus.”

Don’t miss out on content from Dave Rubin free of big tech censorship. Listen to The Rubin Report now.

SPOTTED at UC DAVIS. All of our flyers for our Stephen Davis event next week have been ripped down and replaced with these @charliekirk11 @TPUSA pic.twitter.com/5nhLlCKPuT
— Amber Kleinke (@realamber_k96) October 19, 2022

Similar posts were circulated online accusing Stephen Davis of being a fascist for “denying systemic racism.”

COMMUNITY ALERT! Turning Point USA is bringing Stephen Davis (aka "Maga Hulk") to UCD on Oct. 25th for an event denying systemic racism. Show up and make it clear that these fascists aren't welcome on our campus. Tues 10/25 @ 6pm on Vanderhoef Quad (near the Mondavi Center). pic.twitter.com/48quq60MG4
— UC Davis #CopsOffCampus 🇵🇸 (@UCDavis_COC) October 20, 2022

Notwithstanding calls for censorship ahead of the event, the university claimed that it was “committed to the First Amendment, and … required to uphold it. We affirm the right of our students — in this instance, Turning Point USA at UC Davis — to invite speakers to our campus, just as we affirm the right of others to protest speakers whose views they find upsetting or offensive.”

The university also reportedly informed the TPUSA campus chapter that UC Davis police would be present at the event and that they would intervene if protests turned violent. However, when leftist protesters began using barriers as battering rams and pepper-spraying young women, the campus police — said to have been on site — did not take action or deploy into the crowd.

The university told KCRA3 that officers had been on standby when the fighting broke out, but did not act because “the situation de-escalated on its own, eliminating the need for the police to engage.”

The brawl that ensued allegedly involved 100 people and began, according to TPUSA’s field team, when Antifa began provoking people trying to enter the venue. In a statement, UC Davis noted there had been reports of Antifa supporters involved in the fighting and pepper-spraying and that members of the pugnacious men’s group Proud Boys may have also been on the scene.

One young female conservative was pepper-sprayed by leftist agitators.

Young college girl attacked and maced at #TurningPointUSA event @UC Davis #Magahulk #StephenDavis youtu.be

UC Davis also indicated that some “in the crowd used barricades to beat on the glass of the UC Davis Conference Center, where about 30 people were inside waiting for the event to begin.”

Student Affairs staff reportedly determined that the chaos outside presented sufficient danger to warrant shutting down the event.

The UC Davis TPUSA chapter ultimately agreed, later stating, “Rather than risk any further escalation of violence, our TPUSA chapter leadership decided to cancel the event when it became apparent campus PD was unable to disperse the violent agitators outside while also keeping our students safe inside.”

Rather than risk any further escalation of violence, our TPUSA chapter leadership decided to cancel the event when it became apparent campus PD was unable to disperse the violent agitators outside while also keeping our students safe inside.
— Turning Point USA (@TPUSA) October 26, 2022

“This is a great loss for free speech, our speaker Stephen Davis, and for the students at UC Davis. TPUSA condemns all violence and refuses to be cowed by those who use threats and intimidation to stop conservatives on campus,” TPUSA tweeted.

On Thursday, former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell called out UC Davis chancellor Gary May, suggesting he had failed up to stand up for true diversity on campus after Davis, a black speaker, had been shut down by “radical lefties.”

Catherine Brinkley, a UC Davis professor, celebrated the silencing of a black conservative and the leftist attacks on unarmed students, stating she was “really proud of our students, faculty, staff and community who showed up to counter-rally a planned speaking event at UC Davis. Thank you for putting your bodies on the line.”

\u201cI am really proud of our students, faculty, staff and community who showed up to counter-rally a planned speaking event at UC Davis. \n\nThank you for putting your bodies on the line.\u201d

— Catherine Brinkley, VMD-PhD (@Catherine Brinkley, VMD-PhD) 1666812802

It is unclear whether the event will be rescheduled.

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‘I hope you f***ing die!’ Penn State rioters resort to violence, even spitting to intimidate right-wing speakers, prompting school to cancel comedy event

By CORTNEY WEIL | October 25, 2022

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Right-leaning comedians Alex Stein, a BlazeTV contributor, and Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys, were recently invited to Penn State University to speak at an event billed as a “provocative comedy night” on campus. However, the event was canceled before it ever really began when hundreds of angry protesters quickly resorted to violence to prevent Stein and McInnes from speaking.

On Monday, Stein and McInnes arrived in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, to appear at the event arranged by a PSU student group and sponsored by Uncensored America, a “non-partisan organization dedicated to fighting for freedom of speech,” according to its website.

However, a mob of angry protesters awaited their appearance and immediately began hurling invectives, insults, and, in one case, even projectile saliva to prevent the event from proceeding.

Ever the provocateur, Stein entered the heated fray and began mocking and insulting protesters to their faces, a move that prompted even more hostility.

Don’t miss out on content from Dave Rubin free of big tech censorship. Listen to The Rubin Report now.

https://twitter.com/KateTalksTruth/status/1584694338163859456?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1584694338163859456%7Ctwgr%5E6c897c4d588f10a96a7d4e42839626667c763dc7%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theblaze.com%2Fnews%2Fpenn-state-riotors-violence-cancels-event

When Stein zeroed in on one particular female protester, she lashed out harshly.

“I f***ing hate you!” the unnamed woman repeated as she gave him the middle finger. “I hope you f***ing die!”

When Stein then filmed himself with her and insisted he “loved” her because she was “a very nice woman,” she responded by spitting substantively on his suit jacket.

New York Post video

Stein himself tweeted another video of the incident. The spitting moment occurs at about the 1:40 mark:

Absolute Mayhem & Chaos at Penn State University with the most Mentally Insane College Students in America! pic.twitter.com/jskjRi2cz8
— Alex Stein #99 (@alexstein99) October 25, 2022

Police on horseback attempted to quell the unrest but were ultimately unsuccessful. People began using pepper spray on one another and at police, prompting the school to cancel the event.

Police on horseback push back leftist protesters at Penn State in response to right-wing comedian Alex Stein appearing on campus.

Credit: oldrowswig (Telegram) pic.twitter.com/VBdeA5ciRA
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) October 25, 2022

Both the school and the university president issued statements that condemned Stein and McInnes for “hateful” and “abhorrent” opinions, but that also lamented that student protests had devolved into violence.

“From the start, Penn State’s administration firmly denounced the two speakers,” university president Neeli Bendapudi reminded students in her statement.

However, Bendapudi continued, PSU administrators also “support the fundamental constitutional right of free speech and free expression of all members of our community.”

She then blamed both sides — Stein and McInnes for contributing “to the very violence that compromised their ability to speak,” the rioters for restricting “speech by escalating protest to violence” — and then expressed gratitude that no one had been seriously hurt.

In its statement to cancel the event, the school reiterated many of Bendapudi’s sentiments.

“The University has been clear that the views and speech of the two speakers at tonight’s student-organization-hosted event are abhorrent and do not align with the values of Penn State. We have encouraged peaceful protest, and, while protest is an acceptable means of expression, it becomes unacceptable when it obstructs the basic exchange of ideas. Such obstruction is a form of censorship, no matter who initiates it or for what reasons. The University expects that people engaging in expressive activity will demonstrate civility, concern for the safety of persons and property, respect for University activities and for those who may disagree with their message, and will comply with University rules.

“The climate in our nation has been polarized for quite some time. On campuses across the country, violence is proliferating, and individuals are being intimidated and even harmed. This must stop.”

**THEY REALLY DO BELIEVE THAT WE ARE THAT STUPID!**

The event was scheduled to begin by 8 p.m. but had been formally canceled by 7:15. It is unclear whether there had been any arrests or whether any of the students will face repercussions from the school for participating in the disturbance.

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To Stop Totalitarianism, We Must Understand How It Weaponizes Loneliness

BY: STELLA MORABITO | OCTOBER 12, 2022

Weaponization of Loneliness — **Victory in the war against tyranny depends more than anything else on understanding how imposed loneliness works on our psyches.**

STELLA MORABITO

VISIT ON TWITTER@STELLA_MORABITO

The following is an excerpt from the author’s new book, “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Terror of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” (Bombardier Books, Post Hill Press.)

Revolutionary elites who push utopias are always a small minority. In order to get all of society on board, they must enlist mobs to promote the illusion of compliance with their visions. Mobs enforce the narrative, often through violence. They help censor any competing views through intimidation and various forms of book burning.

We ought to study how radical utopian revolutions got a foothold in the past in order to better understand the 21st-century incarnation. Mob action was a major catalyst for the French Revolution, accelerating Maximilien Robespierre’s brutal dechristianization campaign and Jacobin revisions of history. Private life came under direct attack after Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution. Those attacks reached terrifying new heights during Stalin’s Reign of Terror.

Identity politics and pseudoscience played out to a gruesome degree during Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, causing intense hostilities in the society. And American immigrants from communist China can recall the cruel legacy of mob-led struggle sessions during Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Some have publicly expressed alarm at seeing similar dynamics develop in their adopted homeland.

But many who sense the brewing of a totalitarian revolution in the 21st century are puzzled because it doesn’t appear to have a central operator. Yes, there remain many dictators on the world stage, as always. But there is no single figure like Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Robespierre, or even Oliver Cromwell, who has been at the center driving all the changes. There has been no single nation-state leading the charge. No specific revolutionary party. No one corporation giving directives to all.

Rather, it all seems more hydra-headed, coming from all directions and from many different sources with seemingly different interests. Indeed, Big Tech selectively bans political speech on social media platforms like Facebook. Twitter even suspended the account of a sitting U.S. president. Big Media is a mammoth propaganda operation with little actual news reported. Financial institutions became more apt to regulate the donations of their customers, some eager to freeze bank accounts of citizens they deem politically incorrect.

Then there’s the World Economic Forum, whose founder Klaus Schwab has incessantly spoken and written about a “Great Reset,” which would lead to a more centrally controlled social order of the entire world. Over the years Schwab groomed a coterie of young leaders, including Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau and Prime Minister of France Emanuel Macron, who cooperate to establish such an order.

The 2020s also opened with more federal judges blatantly legislating from the bench, more military officers requiring recruits to be indoctrinated in woke ideologies, medical organizations promoting vaccine mandates, and more pediatricians endorsing hormone regimens and genital surgeries on children without parental consent. Meanwhile, academia continued its war on freedom of expression, and K–12 educrats grew increasingly hostile to the parents of the children they supposedly teach.

People felt gut-punched by so many unexpected invasions of privacy and attacks against free speech in a nation trusted to protect it. How did so much sudden disregard for due process arise, so little regard for reason and reality? And from so many different places?

It’s All Tied Together by the Machinery of Loneliness

Although all these developments have come at us from different directions, they have a machinery in common. The common denominator of such revolutions past, present, and future is the weaponization of loneliness. All its features pit people against one another. All were at work in various ways in past revolutions of modern history. And all result in our further atomization, our further separation from one another.

The most critical features are the forces of identity politics, political correctness, and mobs. Identity politics is clearly meant to divide us into hostile groups, such as oppressor and victim, based on race or sex or any other demographic grouping. Political correctness induces us to self-censor, which means we drive ourselves into further isolation by limiting our exchanges with others to avoid the risk of social rejection. Mobs then serve as agitation forces that push propaganda into action. They intimidate others into silence and compliance and finally can cause any agenda—no matter how fringy—to become policy.

Another way to think about the machinery is as a combustion engine that can’t operate without ignited fuel. The fuel is our conformity impulse, and the spark is our fear. Without them, the machinery of loneliness simply can’t operate. So if we cannot shake off our conformity impulse and fear of isolation, we will remain self-silenced, isolated, and obedient to the mob. We will end up lonelier, more exhausted, and conditioned to repeat the cycle.

There Is Hope

The good news is that there is a wealth of neglected research on these matters of social psychology. We need to make that research common knowledge by discussing it often. In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted experiments on the conformity impulse. Later, Asch’s student Stanley Milgram studied the pattern of obedience to malevolent authorities.

In 1960, acclaimed Nobel laureate Elias Canetti produced his classic study on the behavior of mobs, “Crowds and Power.” In 1957, Vance Packard published his explosive bestseller “The Hidden Persuaders,” which explored the uses of depth psychology by advertisers to manipulate people’s desires and fears.

Eminent psychiatrists like Margaret Thaler Singer and Robert Jay Lifton investigated the practice of coercive thought reform. Singer analyzed cult dynamics that led nearly a thousand people in Jonestown, Guyana, to commit “revolutionary suicide” at the order of Jim Jones in 1978. The term “Stockholm syndrome” had already come into circulation to describe the phenomenon of captives bonding with their captors.

Even earlier, however, scholars were reflecting on the dynamics of mobs, including Gustave LeBon, who in 1895 published “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.” And early in the 20th century, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci theorized that the power of culture, especially as expressed through modern communications, shaped social attitudes far more effectively than any appeal to economic interests.

In the 1930s, the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School accepted and applied Gramsci’s theory. We can see it in today’s aggressive media campaigns, the shift to “social justice” action in academia, and Big Tech’s censorship of dissenting views.

The key ingredient of groupthink has always been the fear of social isolation, which leads us to be swept up by propaganda. It’s a fear so pervasive that—like fish in water—we are rarely aware of the effect it has on us.

We can see how this phenomenon worked in totalitarian societies like Stalin’s Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, where people betrayed neighbors and even family members to avoid becoming “nonpersons” in society. The great irony here is that by breaking bonds of family and friendship, people only dig themselves in deeper. They cement their dependency on the state while also helping the state destroy the private sphere of life, which is their only path to escape and resistance.

Hence, totalitarians have always targeted the private sphere of life for destruction. The rallying cry “Abolish the family!” comes straight from “The Communist Manifesto.” Nothing could be more alienating to a human being than to be deprived of healthy familial bonds. The ramifications are vast because strong communities depend upon strong families.

Tyrannical systems also seek to abolish traditional religions and the fellowship of the faithful. Opportunities for such societal breakdown today have accelerated as never before. In the extremist reaction against the Dobbs decision, we saw how state and corporate actors supported by media propaganda can promote an antifamily ethos that produces atomization.

How Tech Tears Us Apart

The machinery of loneliness is running in high gear due to the revolution in communications technologies. This revolution handed us each a “device” that draws us into the web of the internet, often in literally hypnotic fashion. The seduction is so powerful that one can reasonably ask if the endgame is a vast hive mind.

The technological media constantly distract us, prod us, probe us, and flood us with suggestions. We each end up knowing a whole lot less about a whole lot more. At the same time, we become increasingly disconnected from real life among our flesh-and-blood brethren.

Communications professor Marshall McLuhan famously warned in 1964 that electronic media acts within each of us as an extension of our central nervous system. We may think we are gleaning the medium for content, but any content is incidental to the real message. The real message, he insisted, is in the medium itself, which rewires us neurologically. As we allow our devices to pull us into the cyberworld, we become isolated by detaching ourselves from the real world.

When we delve into the internet or connect to our devices, we are not consumers. Rather, we are products—raw material for advertisers— as we let the whole world know what we like and what we don’t like, who we know, where we are located, our habits, our dreams, our desires.

We may offer such data in a quest to be connected with others. But we don’t realize how that information is also pure gold for developers of artificial intelligence who can use it to develop algorithms that predict and modify our behaviors, and even program behaviors into us that actually isolate us further. No medieval wizard or alchemist could have imagined such a boon for his designs or such an infrastructure to empower him.

People are now more easily separated through social pressures that involve shunning and vilification, often magnified through propaganda that is exponentially amplified through Big Tech and Big Media. In the meantime, all these drivers of social decay result in institutional decay, which further contributes to a dangerous state of atomization. The subversion of education is key because education is upstream from all the other institutions, including our legislatures, courts, media, the arts, the corporate world, finance, medicine, and even the military.

Once that “march through the institutions” is complete, then the primordial institutions that shelter our private lives—family, faith, and community—are set to come under direct attack. So if our isolation continues unchecked, it easily becomes a tool to dismantle freedom, no matter the intentions of those who act to dismantle it. Nothing is left but the vast mass state directing the lives of individuals, all virtually separated from one another.

Victory in the war against tyranny depends more than anything else on understanding how imposed loneliness works on our psyches and how it is an indispensable tool of totalitarianism. Once comprehended, we can begin to neutralize its effects and defend ourselves against its inherent machinery.

Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. She is author of “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” Her essays have appeared in various publications, including the Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Townhall, Public Discourse, and The Human Life Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, Morabito focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. Follow Stella on Twitter.

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Today’s THREE Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Jaw Breaker

A.F. BRANCO | on September 17, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-jaw-breaker/

It’s almost like some Republicans are not doing their best to win congress in the 2022 election, McConnell?

Snatching Defeat from Victory — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Wrong Direction

A.F. BRANCO | on September 18, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-wrong-direction-2/

Omar is for defunding police, illegal Immigration, and no bail. all in the wrong direction for the country.

Omar of Minnesota — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Pillow Talk (Revised)

A.F. BRANCO | on September 19, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-pillow-talk-revised/

Here is the updated revised version of the cartoon “Pillow Talk” big Government and big Tech attack on free speech.

My Pillow attacked — **Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

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Prosecuting Paivi Rasanen for Quoting the Bible Is Making Her an International Star

BY: JOY PULLMANN | AUGUST 15, 2022

Paivi Rasanen speaking at the Issues Etc. conference

Author Joy Pullmann profile

JOY PULLMANN

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Paivi Rasanen must make God laugh. The 27-year member of Finland’s Parliament on trial for tweeting a Bible verse confounds so many pagan slogans.

She’s a mother of five children and grandmother of 10 who didn’t need abortion to simultaneously pull off two demanding careers: medicine and politics. An empathetic woman who eagerly shows pictures of grandbabies on her phone and expresses concern for strangers’ travel plans, Paivi (pie-EE-vee) also refuses to subjugate her reason to emotional manipulation.

She holds fast to Christian teachings about sex as reserved exclusively for lifelong marriage between one man and one woman, for which she’s been prosecuted and investigated now for three years and will be in court again this November. Her case could affect international law and is a foreboding example of where identity politics policies are quickly heading across the world.

“If we break the gender system and if we break the natural marriage system between one man and one woman, then we have dangerous consequences, especially to children,” Paivi told The Federalist in person this summer in Chicago.

This woman of science also firmly believes in supernatural revelation. In her pamphlet on Christian marriage that Finland’s top prosecutor is seeking to ban as “hate speech,” Paivi writes that “Jesus’s death and resurrection is the core of the entire Christian faith. On this the Bible stands or falls. If one does not believe it, there is nothing left of Christianity. And … if I believe this, it follows logically that I must believe everything else Christ teaches in the Bible through the Apostles and Prophets.”

Paivi speaking to a sold-out audience of Christians in Chicago, Illinois, this summer. (Joy Pullmann / The Federalist)

Persecution Spreads the Gospel

As it has often in history, persecution has created global opportunities for Paivi to spread Christian theology: about sex, its design for lasting human happiness, and Christianity’s warm welcome to those struggling with every kind of sin from the God “who hates nothing He has made.” The 2004 booklet “Male and Female He Created Them,” which prosecutors want to ban entirely and fine Paivi for writing, has gone from a few copies in a few conservative Lutheran churches to translated into half a dozen languages and read all over the world.

Rasanen’s 2004 booklet, printed from the online PDF and in its new second edition distributed worldwide.

Paivi and her husband Niilo (nee-loh) spoke this June in Budapest alongside megastar Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and his wife. Paivi said she’s seen especially strong support from Eastern European countries because many there still remember the Communists interrogating people about the Bible, as Finnish police did to Paivi three times for a total of 13 hours.

The Rasanens flew to Chicago right after Budapest so Paivi could speak at the sold-out Christian “Issues, Etc.” conference on June 25. In pearls, a flowered dress, and silvered golden hair, the petite 62-year-old asked the American crowd to pray that her case would “allow for more chances to preach the gospel in public.”

Rasanen’s case is on appeal in Finland and may end up in the European Court of Human Rights, developing precedents that could affect the world. If she loses in court, Paivi told a Christian outlet last year, “It will also affect religious freedom in other Western countries. LGBT groups have a very good network across national borders. They will try to achieve the same in other countries in Europe.”

In Q&A after her talk, Paivi said Finnish Prosecutor General Raija Toiviainen is expected to push the case as far as possible because Toiviainen has said identity politics is her top priority. Paivi’s legal help from Alliance Defending Freedom International has told The Federalist they are also prepared to appeal her case as far as possible should she lose.

Persecution Amplifies Word of God’s Mercy for Sinners

Toiviainen claims agreeing with the Bible that sodomy is a sin is a criminal expression of hatred toward homosexuals. Paivi and her legal team have pointed out that if the court interprets the law this way, it will effectively outlaw Christianity and free speech in Finland.

Rather than rejecting homosexuals, as she’s been accused in court, Paivi glows with happiness when relating that gay people have disclosed her “Bible trial” has brought them to faith. In speeches and court testimony, Paivi has emphasized she not only bears no animosity toward homosexuals or transsexuals, she earnestly desires them to join her Christian family by receiving the eternal life that Jesus Christ offers freely to every person.

Paivi has been dragged into European courts and smeared in the press for years as a spewer of “hate speech.” Yet while battling severe jet lag that her husband said often gives her migraines, Paivi expressed not even a flicker of animosity toward her persecutors in Chicago.

Instead, when The Federalist asked if her three-year-and-counting prosecution might be orchestrated by political enemies, she seemed stumped. She conferred with her husband and finally suggested she was simply an easy target as a well-known figure in Finland.

“In all my career I have been known as a Christian and as a biblical Christian who doesn’t accept abortion and homosexual acts and so on,” Paivi told The Federalist. “And that’s why I think that perhaps it is the reason why the prosecutor has targeted just me.”

Family Unites to Fight for Other Families

Acknowledging the Biblical directive that only men serve as pastors has never tied Paivi to the kitchen — although perhaps she’d like to retire there given the suffering her political career has inflicted. Niilo prodded Paivi into running for office nearly three decades ago to try to stop Finland from forcing doctors like her to perform abortions, they told The Federalist.

Niilo Rasanen is a pastor and theology professor at a Lutheran Bible college. Niilo’s widowed mother lived with the couple while their children were young, and Paivi’s parents moved nearby and “helped a lot,” Paivi said. That, with Niilo’s flexibility while earning his doctorate, allowed Paivi to enter public service without sacrificing their children’s needs, they said.

During the five years when Niilo was writing his dissertation, “he was always at home when the children came home” from school, Paivi noted. Paivi and Niilo occasionally pulled out their phones to translate Finnish words into English or check they were using the right words, but Finns learn at least two foreign languages in school, Swedish and English.

Niilo and Paivi Rasanen in Chicago, Illinois, in June 2022. (Joy Pullmann / The Federalist)

In response to a question from the Chicago audience, Paivi revealed threats against her family. When she campaigned against child pornography, she said, a convicted pedophile entered their front yard and threatened their children: “It was quite a difficult time because we had to keep safe our children and they were a little bit afraid many years after that.” The most violent of the recent threats include a rape threat against her son, she said.

These external threats may have helped strengthen family bonds. Paivi and Niilo’s faces light up when they talk about their now-grown children, whom the Rasanens say are a great joy and regularly text their parents Bible verses and prayers.

“The task is communal, we do it together,” Niilo said of their marriage and family. “It has been so busy and hard time in this politic area — very, very busy, very long days. If you are not doing it together, it will not work.”

“I think what has been a great power in our life is that we have felt that these callings and tasks that we have, that they are common,” Paivi added.

From Church Only at Christmas to Global Witness

Born in 1959, Paivi grew up in a remote area near Finland’s border with Sweden, in the village of Konnunsuo. Her father was the agricultural director for a prison there. He oversaw the prisoners raising vegetables and animals to feed and support themselves. Paivi remembers as a girl watching piglets being born.

Her parents went to church only at Christmas, she said, but she learned the Bible from Sunday School and at prison church services. Her family also hosted missionaries to the prison, and they explained Christianity to Paivi and her two younger siblings.

A skilled student, especially in mathematics, young Paivi read all the books in her tiny village library that was open only two hours per week, she said. An adult biography of Nobel Prize-winning Polish scientist Marie Curie particularly inspired Paivi: “I admired her. I thought that I would like to be like her, to do something great.”

At the University of Helsinki, she studied both mathematics and medicine for a half year, but it was too much. So Paivi decided to focus on medicine because “I wanted to work with people.”

Organizing up to 70 Christian students for five years of weekly door-to-door evangelism in university deepened her faith, Paivi told The Federalist: “It was a very important time for me because there were students from different faculties and I had to defend my views, and I had to know [the] Bible because they asked difficult questions.”

She met Niilo doing summer missionary work among immigrants in London, and they married in February 1985, a year after Paivi started working as a doctor. They welcomed their children in 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1996.

Because Paivi kept organizing debates and speakers about abortion among fellow medical students and doctors, the Christian Democrat political party asked her to run for office. The Christian Democrats are a small party that focuses on faith and family. From 2011 to 2015, Paivi served as Finland’s Minister of the Interior as part of a coalition government.

She Fights Like a Woman

Paivi has fought steadfastly not by disposition, but by compunction. She and Niilo chuckled quietly when noting that in university, she flatly refused all public speaking offers and leadership positions.

In person, the two Finns are true to type and their “Minnesota nice” American cousins: polite, soft-spoken, and deferential. In Chicago, Paivi and Niilo attempted for some 15 minutes to get the Uber app to work on their Finnish cell phones before they could be prevailed upon by this journalist to accept a ride.

She would have walked the mile to the conference, Paivi assured, as they had the day before, but that morning’s rain would bedraggle her hair and dress right before her speech. After a bit of emotional discomfort at allegedly imposing, followed by a quick, rain-unaffected arrival, Paivi laughed softly, expressed thanks, and commented that this would be a good anecdote for The Federalist profile.

Paivi Rasanen during audience Q&A in Chicago. Because English is a second language for Paivi, she was given the written questions in advance.

Although she’s a public figure who regularly appears on TV, including a variety show that dressed her in a bear costume to sing to her grandchildren (she showed photographic evidence), Paivi habitually asks for others’ thoughts rather than discussing her own. It’s yet another contradiction to women’s mag-celebrated attributes: expressing her femininity not only doesn’t abrade Paivi’s character, it complements it.

Paivi doesn’t assert herself as a “girl boss” who assumes masculine prosthetics, despite years of public leadership that could have taught her to do so. Her apparent emotional security in being the woman God made her bestows its own authority and charm.

Only Men and Women Fit Perfectly Together

That acceptance of one’s sex as a gift from God is also a foundation of the theological booklet that helped land Paivi in court indefinitely. Cultural Marxism foments a war between the sexes, but the Bible teaches that love means total self-giving: Husbands sacrifice everything to love their wives, and wives submit to their husbands as they do to God. The true war is not between the sexes, but against them, and in war clear chains of command are necessary to protect everyone.

The 1960s feminist war fomented between the sexes has now expanded into a war on sex itself. Now even recognizing the differences between men and women and the exclusive fertility of natural marriage is heading toward being criminalized across the West, and with it the Christianity that protects and celebrates these natural realities.

When she wrote the booklet, Paivi was already well-known as a Christian member of Parliament representing Hame, a rural Finnish province about an hour north of Helsinki. Pastor Juhana Pohjola, elected bishop of Finland’s non-state Lutheran church in 2021, had asked Rasanen to respond to proposals for government licensing of homosexual relationships. Here was a government endorsement of severing natural biological bonds between parents and children that raised both political and theological concerns.

Rasanen’s resulting 24-page booklet is a succinct summary of Christian sexual ethics. “People who submit themselves to God’s guidance in the Bible are repeatedly amazed at how the very Bible teachings hardest to understand contain God’s deep wisdoms,” Rasanen writes in the English translation.

“No choice of policies is ethically neutral,” she notes. “…In actuality, the acceptance of homosexual partnerships meant a more profound change in values than was willingly acknowledged at the time.” For example, she notes, in Finland, those proposing a homosexual partnerships act promised it would affect adults only. Yet immediately after the act passed, the proponents moved to make taxpayers pay for lesbians to be artificially inseminated and for homosexual couples to adopt children who could never know either a father or mother.

The act’s proponents also promised that Finland’s state church could maintain Christianity’s historic teachings if state recognition of homosexual couples passed. Paivi’s trial today, under a law passed seven years after the booklet was published, directly refutes that claim. It also highlights how impossible it is to reconcile the hard-won natural law framework that protects everyone equally with the identity politics that provides special rights to only government-favored groups.

Seeking an Internet Interdiction

Writing the booklet is one of three charges Toiviainen has filed against Paivi. It forms the sole count against Pohjola, the pastor who published the booklet. The two other counts against Paivi relate to her tweet of a Bible verse at the nominally Lutheran state church for sponsoring a homosexual pride parade and comments in a public radio debate she participated in years ago.

How can the #church ’s doctrinal foundation, the #bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of #pride ?” #lgbt #helsinkipride2019
Finnish Christian MP under hate crime investigation for quoting scripture – Premier

How can the #church ’s doctrinal foundation, the #bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of #pride ?" #lgbt #helsinkipride2019
Finnish Christian MP under hate crime investigation for quoting scripture – Premier https://t.co/0GEJ5tZEb6
— Päivi Räsänen (@PaiviRasanen) September 3, 2019

In 2019, several Finns lodged complaints against Paivi’s tweet. Police investigated, interrogating Paivi about her beliefs three times. Although the police ultimately recommended against prosecuting Paivi, prosecutors sifted through her three-decade public record. They dug up the three alleged hate crimes and charged her.

The charges against Paivi fall under the legal category of “war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The prosecutors have asked for Paivi’s writings and audio clips to be completely banned from the internet and for her, Pohjola, and his church to be fined up to a third of their annual incomes, but courts could put Paivi in prison for up to six years if she’s found guilty. Pohjola could be imprisoned for up to two years.

During Paivi and Pohjola’s trial in early 2022, thousands of Finnish supporters gathered in Helsinki outside the court. Free speech supporters in other countries rallied at Finnish embassies. The American Family Research Council sent Pastor Andrew Brunson, whom Turkey detained for two years for preaching Christianity, to give Paivi a pledge of prayers from Christians around the world. U.S. members of Congress, international human rights groups, and coalitions of religious believers have also petitioned the Finnish government to stop prosecuting Rasanen and Pohjola’s human rights to free speech and religious exercise.

“It is important that we have the freedom of speech and freedom of religion,” Paivi told The Federalist in Chicago. “Freedom of speech because it is important for everyone. It is important for every minority and majority. For Christians, it is crucial because we have the commandments of Jesus to tell the good gospel to all people…”

“Also I think that it is important to respect in society also everyone’s right to speak and argue and oppose you,” she continued. “So this is [a] fundamental issue.”

For more on this case, read this profile of Bishop Pohjola, who spoke to The Federalist in person in November 2021.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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Posts tagged ‘Free Speech’

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 08, 2023

Introduce Taibbi and Shellenberger to Americans

Guide Them So They Tell a Coherent Story

Start at the Beginning, the Best Place to Start

Buckets of Scandals

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Funding Sources

Connecting the Censorship Complex Dots

What Was the Media’s Role?

Specific Instances of Censorship

Where Do We Go from Here?

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 07, 2023

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 28, 2023

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BY: ELAINE DONNELLY | FEBRUARY 24, 2023

Biden’s regulations do not protect or even mention rights of religious liberty for chaplains and people of faith. Nor do they provide options for doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel who object to transgender ideology on moral or ethical grounds.

Elaine Donnelly is President of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy organization that reports on and analyzes military and social issues.

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By Ian M. Giatti, Christian Post Reporter | February 17, 2023

Ian M. Giatti is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ian.giatti@christianpost.com.

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Richard D. Land, Christian Post Executive Editor | Friday, January 13, 2023

Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Violence Is Silence

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By: Lawrence Johnson | December 22, 2022

“Sometimes when you win, you really lose, and sometimes when you lose, you really win, and sometimes when you win or lose, you actually tie, and sometimes when you tie, you actually win or lose. Winning or losing is all one organic mechanism, from which one extracts what one needs.”

Defining Terms

Unrecognized Powers

Inserting Common Sense

Double Standards at Play

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Breach

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BY: CHAD FELIX GREENE | DECEMBER 16, 2022

The report argues, “Anti-equality, online extremists are leading a proactive and coordinated campaign of hate against hospitals and medical providers who offer gender-affirming care for transgender, non-binary and questioning youth.”

Accusations of Hate Speech

Attempt to Silence Criticism

Chad Felix Greene is a senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of “Surviving Gender: My Journey Through Gender Dysphoria,” and is a social writer focusing on truth in media, conservative ideas and goals, and true equality under the law. You can follow him on Twitter @chadfelixg.

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BY: JOY PULLMANN | DECEMBER 14, 2022

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BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | DECEMBER 08, 2022

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Rotten Apple

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